Gauls

Gaulish religion is known mainly through Roman eyes and Roman habits of translation. Caesar reported that the Gauls worshipped Mercury above all, then Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva, and that practice of naming a foreign god by the nearest Roman equivalent is why so many dedications from Gaul carry a double name: Mercurius Dumias, Mars Lenus, Apollo Grannus. Miranda Green's work on the wheel symbol traces one of the emblems that does not translate, carried by a sky god the Romans assimilated to Jupiter.

The inscriptions themselves, catalogued in John Koch's encyclopedia, name hundreds of deities, most of them attached to one spring, one grove or one people. Epona, the horse goddess, is the exception that travelled, taken up by Roman cavalry and honoured as far as Rome itself. The mother goddesses, the Matres, appear in threes across Gaul, Britain and the Rhineland.

The archaeology shows sanctuaries with enclosures and deposits of weapons and animal bone, as at Gournay-sur-Aronde, and votive offerings placed in rivers, springs and bogs. The wooden figures left at the source of the Seine were models of the parts of the body a petitioner wanted healed, which is one of the few places in the record where the intention behind an offering can be read directly rather than inferred.

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.