Caesar's Account of a Fearless Warrior

Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico includes, in its sixth book, a lengthy ethnographic digression on the Gauls and their religious institutions, and within it a specific claim about Druidic teaching on the soul. Caesar states plainly that the principal doctrine the Druids sought to instill was that souls do not perish at death but pass into other bodies, and he adds his own explanation for why this belief mattered practically: removing the fear of death, he argues, was understood to make warriors notably braver in combat, since a soldier convinced his soul would simply continue in another body had far less reason to hold back from danger.

Caesar situates this teaching within a wider portrait of the Druids as a learned, privileged class who also taught astronomy, the movements of the stars, the size of the earth and the natural world, and the power and might of the immortal gods, presenting Druidic religious authority as resting on a substantial and organized body of knowledge rather than simple folk custom. He further notes that this whole body of teaching was transmitted only orally, through a training period he says could run as long as twenty years, this religion's Practice "Oral Transmission of Druidic Teaching" describing that discipline directly.