Druids, Caesar, and What Was Built on Them

The druids are the most famous and the least securely known feature of Gaulish religion. The classical accounts describe a learned class of priests, judges and teachers who committed their doctrine to memory rather than to writing, taught that the soul does not perish, and presided over sacrifice. Ronald Hutton's studies show how thin, how second hand and how politically shaped that testimony is. Caesar was justifying a conquest, and later Roman writers were repeating and elaborating him.

The wicker figure filled with victims, the single most repeated image of druidic religion, rests on one passage in Caesar and one in Strabo, and no archaeological trace of the practice has been found. Human sacrifice in Iron Age Europe is attested by bog bodies and by deposits at some sanctuaries; the specific Caesarian picture is not.

Rome suppressed the order in the first century of the common era, and it disappears from the record entirely thereafter. Everything called druidry since is a modern construction. Hutton traces the line from eighteenth century antiquarians, through William Stukeley's association of the druids with Stonehenge, which they did not build, to the fraternal and then religious orders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern Druidry is a real contemporary religion. It is not a survival, and the better of its own writers say so plainly.