Celtic Paganism

The evidence is overwhelmingly local. Of the several hundred divine names recorded in Gaul, the large majority occur a single time, usually on an altar set up at a spring, a river or a hill by one person. A handful travel. Lugus may lie behind the many Lugudunum place-names, Lyon among them, and is generally connected with the Irish Lugh. Epona, the horse goddess, was taken up by Roman cavalry and worshipped as far as the Danube. Belenus appears across the Alps and northern Italy. The antlered figure conventionally called Cernunnos carries that name exactly once, on the Pillar of the Boatmen in Paris.

Offerings were commonly destroyed or made unrecoverable. Weapons, cauldrons, torcs and human remains were placed in lakes, rivers and bogs across Europe: at La Tene in Switzerland, at Llyn Cerrig Bach on Anglesey, in the Thames. Enclosed sanctuaries in northern Gaul such as Gournay-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre held large deposits of deliberately broken weapons and of human bone, some of it arranged. Severed heads appear in sculpture and in practice often enough that classical writers remarked on it.

Calendar evidence is thin but real. The Coligny calendar, a bronze plaque from Roman Gaul inscribed in Gaulish using Roman letters, sets out a lunisolar cycle of sixty-two months and marks days as favourable or not. The four festivals often presented as the Celtic year, Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, are attested in medieval Irish sources; there is no evidence continental Celts kept them, and the eight-festival scheme used by modern Pagans is a twentieth-century construction.

Everything written about the druids in their own time was written by outsiders, most of them Greeks and Romans and several of them at war with the people they were describing.

Julius Caesar gives the fullest account. He says the druids were one of two honoured classes in Gaul, that they judged disputes, controlled sacrifice, were exempt from tax and military service, trained pupils for as long as twenty years, refused to commit their teaching to writing although they used Greek letters for other purposes, taught that souls pass from one body to another, and presided at human sacrifices including the burning of victims inside a giant wicker figure. Pliny the Elder describes a white-robed druid cutting mistletoe from an oak with a golden sickle. Strabo, Diodorus and Lucan add divination read from the death throes of victims.

These reports are not disinterested. Caesar was justifying a war of conquest to a Roman readership, and later imperial policy treated druidry as a political threat to be suppressed. Much of the material may descend at second hand from Posidonius, and parts of it repeat standing Greek and Roman tropes about barbarians in general. Against that, archaeology has produced evidence consistent with ritual killing: the Lindow bog body from Cheshire, killed by several methods at once, and the weapon and bone deposits at the Gaulish sanctuaries.

Scholars therefore divide. Some treat the classical accounts as broadly usable where they agree with each other and with the ground; others treat them as literature about barbarians that happens to be set in Gaul. The defensible position is that druids existed and held a substantial social role, and that the content of what they taught cannot now be recovered.

Three later layers sit on top of the ancient material and are frequently mistaken for it.

The first is antiquarian. John Aubrey in the seventeenth century and William Stukeley in the eighteenth attributed Stonehenge and Avebury to the druids. They were wrong by a wide margin. The main phases of Stonehenge were built between roughly 3000 and 1500 BCE, over a thousand years before any druid is attested anywhere, and no ancient source connects druids with the monument at all. The association nonetheless survives in popular imagination and in modern ceremony held there.

The second is forgery. Iolo Morganwg, the Welsh poet Edward Williams, staged the first Gorsedd of Bards on Primrose Hill in 1792 and produced manuscripts purporting to preserve an unbroken Welsh druidic tradition. After his death much of that material was shown to be his own composition. Some of it, including the Gorsedd ceremonies now part of the National Eisteddfod of Wales, remains in living use and is valued on its own terms.

The third is deliberate reconstruction. Contemporary Druidry and Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism are separate projects. The first grew out of the eighteenth-century revival and is mostly not attempting historical accuracy; the second works from the Irish and Welsh texts and from archaeology and is. Neither claims descent from the ancient druids.

The pre-Christian religions themselves ended. What exists now is scholarship, folklore, and reconstruction by people who for the most part say so plainly.