Authored by, Master Himala Pahadi
Druids, they say, pepper the myths of Britain's primeval days. The tale speaks of Figol, a Druid of legend, who boasted of setting his adversaries alight and barring the men and their mounts from relief. Promised them a bitter torment of bodies bloated with withheld waters. Fanciful, of course, by the light of our modern knowing. Yet, many an account of these Druids, they're tangled up in the unseen, the unexplainable - steeped in the aura of the uncanny.
Druid. A title, its roots in obscurity. Yet many lean toward 'doire', an Irish-Gaelic whisper that breathes of the oak tree. The tree, a beacon of knowledge; the word, a sigh of wisdom. These Druids, they courted the world, raw and untamed. Revered the trees, especially the oak, as holy.
One might frame Druidism as a shaman's path, steeped in the spectral plane and ancient remedies. Healers or inflictors of maladies, whisperers to madness, seers of fates foretold. Perhaps their understanding of the earth and the cosmos was a legacy of megalithic epochs.
Our grasp of the Druids' true past is but a shadow-dance. Our scant records, mere fragments in the fog of antiquity. Druidism, it seems, flowed in the veins of the Celtic and Gaulish peoples of Europe. First set to parchment by classical pens in the century before Christ's second.
Much like the priests of our time, the Druids sought to bind the people to their gods, yet their purpose was manifold. They were educators, savants, arbiters, and thinkers. Their sway was formidable, their respect, immense. They could cast out a man for shattering the sacred laws, even stand betwixt two war-bound hosts to stave off bloodshed. They were free from the burdens of tax and warfare. Women of the Druid path, in a time when the scales often tipped towards men, found themselves equal in many ways. They could taste the bitterness of war, and even dismiss their husbands, a rare liberty for the era.
One of our earliest glimpses of the Druids comes penned by the hand of Julius Caesar between 59 and 51 BC. Penned in Gaul, where men of prestige found themselves either among the Druids or the nobility. Most of what history tells us of the Druids, we owe to the Romans. The Druids, like the Greeks and Romans, worshipped a pantheon, complete with goddesses and venerated figures. Their roaming, untamed society was perceived as crude by the Greeks and Romans, fostering a sense of superiority. This might have led to exaggerated accounts of the Druids' ways, casting a veil of uncertainty over historical truths. Reports of human sacrifices by the Druids exist, but hard evidence is elusive.
Within the tapestry of the Druid caste, it's thought that there were divisions, each donned in distinctive hues. The Arch-druid, the oldest or the wisest, draped in gold. The white-robed were the regular Druids, the intermediaries to the gods. Those in red were the Sacrificers, warriors in their own right. The Bards, blue-cloaked, were the artistic souls. The greenhorns of Druidism, tasked with lesser duties and held in lower regard, wore brown or black.
Druidism, in all its facets, bore the mark of structure, of order. From the ranks within the Druid caste to their rhythm of life echoing the pulse of the natural world. They traced the waxing and waning of the moon, the sun's path, the ebb and flow of seasons. They worshipped in tune with these cosmic beats, marking eight holy days of particular reverence.
New Year dawned with Samhain, the day we now know as Halloween, on the final eve of October. It marked the season's last harvest, a day brimming with the uncanny, the mystical. The veil between the living and the departed thinned, closer to lifting than any other day.
Yule, the winter solstice, found Druids atop earthen mounds, as at New Grange in Ireland, braving the long night, awaiting the first breath of dawn. They believed in their own rebirth with the sun's rise.
Imbolc, the second day of February, celebrated motherhood, symbolised by the milk of ewes. Ostara marked the spring equinox, while Beltane, on the 30th of April, was a feast of fertility. Litha, the summer solstice, heralded the reign of the 'holly king', succeeding the 'oak king' of Yule. Lughnasa, on the 2nd of August, was the first harvest, and Mabon signalled the autumn equinox. And so, the holy cycle would recommence, mirroring the cycles of nature, of the celestial bodies, and of life itself, as the Druids espoused reincarnation. They held firm the belief that transgressions of a past life could be atoned for in the life to follow.
Their sanctuaries, the so-called 'Temples of the Druids,' were found in hushed corners of the world - clearings cradled by woods and forests, circles hewn in stone. Perhaps Britain's most famed stone circle is Stonehenge, an age-old megalithic sentinel from around 2500 BC. The common image of Druids, one might surmise, is of them gathered around Stonehenge, voicing their arcane rites. There's a notion that this was indeed a sacred site for them, a place of worship, as it remains for pagans and neo-druids today. But consensus wavers on whether the Druids had a hand in Stonehenge's creation. The timeline of the Druids' arrival in Britain remains murky, but it's plausible they came after Stonehenge was already standing.
Places such as the Isle of Ynys Mon, Anglesey, and Wistman's Wood in Dartmoor are thought to have been Druidic grounds. Anglesey, in particular, was believed to have been a cradle of Druidic teaching. Mastery of their lore took roughly two decades, given its intricacy and the necessity to commit it all to memory, as they seldom committed their words to parchment. This is part of why our knowledge of them remains scant. The Gauls had a primitive written language, etched in Greek characters, which shifted to Latin under Caesar's rule, and old records were lost. Some of the legends we have of the Druids must be sifted with care, for they may have been colored by Christian influence or embellishment over the ages.
Come the 1st century AD, the Druids found themselves under the Roman heel. Tiberius, deeming the purported human sacrifices intolerable, outlawed Druidism. By the 2nd century, the ways of the Druids seemed to have vanished. Two theories propose to shed light on this eclipse. One suggests that, as was the fate of many an ancient society, they may have succumbed to disease, hunger, or the ravages of war. The other points to the arrival of Christianity, pondering whether the Druids may have been swayed by the new faith. Yet, in the 1700s, the embers of Druidism were kindled anew in England and Wales, a revival in which even the esteemed William Blake, an Arch-druid himself, partook.
Echoes of Druidry can be heard in certain religions today, like Christianity and Wicca. The number three held a special place in Druidic wisdom, a significance shared by these faiths. The Triskele, a symbol of three converging lines forming a circle, is a testament to this. Circles were woven into the fabric of Druidic beliefs - the circle of life, the wheel of the seasons, the dance of light and dark.
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