Modern Druidry's Eighteenth-Century Revival

Modern Druidry emerged substantially as an eighteenth-century Romantic revival movement rather than as an unbroken continuation of the ancient Celtic druids described in Greek and Roman sources such as Julius Caesar and Pliny the Elder, whose own accounts are themselves external, sometimes hostile, and archaeologically underdetermined descriptions of a pre-literate religious tradition that left no surviving texts of its own. Welsh scholar and, as later research established, sometimes outright forger Edward Williams, better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, played a particularly significant and complicated role in this revival, producing influential ceremonial and literary material, including much of the Gorsedd bardic ceremony still used at Welsh cultural events today, that he presented as recovered ancient tradition but that modern scholarship has established was substantially his own invention, a fact revival Druidry has had to reckon with directly regarding its own foundational sources.

Early modern Druid revival organizations, including the Ancient Order of Druids founded in London in 1781, initially functioned partly as fraternal and friendly societies in a pattern resembling Freemasonry, only gradually developing the more explicitly religious and spiritual character associated with contemporary Druidry from the twentieth century onward.