Druid characters

Celtic history
Celtic culture started around 1200BC in central Europe and spread to Britain around 500BC, finally conquered by Romans from around 100BC to the invasion of Britain in 43AD. Pushing Celts back into the unconquered Scotland and Ireland. Finally, they were wiped out with the invasion of the pagan Angles and Saxons and the introduction of Christianity in the fifth century AD.

While druids may have practised here, at Stonehenge, there is little archaeological evidence. Indeed, as they’re thought to be more deeply connected to the earth, its natural spaces, that springs and forests would be a more logical temple. Besides, Stonehenge began, perhaps in 8000BC with wooden posts, in the old car park. 3100BC with the ditch. The last known structural activity was 1600BC, around the same time as the Minoan volcanic eruption, all some 1,000 years before the Celts arrived in Britain.

Celtic druids
Druids were a high ranking class of Celts, second only to nobles. They had such power that if they stepped between two armies, they could stop the battle.

They were priests, judges, storytellers, doctors, political advisors, philosophers. Sacrificers, sorcerers, seers, oak-knowers, astrologers, naturalists. They were subdivided into bards: poets and singers, Ovates: diviners and naturalists. Druids: moral philosophy.

The only records of them are from contemporary Greeks and Romans. The earliest reference was in the 4th century BC. And the most detailed, by Julius Caesar around 50BC. That they would preform human sacrifices may well be imperialist Roman propaganda, though such stories also come from ancient Greek scholars.

An 18th-century illustration of a wicker man, with caged sacrifices at a pagan ceremony, with a Christian priest
Druid sacrifice
Sacrifices were through burning in a wicker man.

Their instruction was secret, hence no written records, and took place in caves and forests and Caesar wrote it took twenty years to instruct the Druidic laws. Foremost in these was the indoctrination of the immortality of the soul. Reincarnation robs death of all its terrors and can the highest form of human courage.

Modern times

After disappearance
In the Middle Ages, after Christianity arrives, their reputation develops more into the magical realms and as prophets. Around 1500, German humanist Conrad Celtis had begun to propagate the image of the druids as having been bearded, wise old men, wearing white robes.

A British druid from Stonehenge a Temple Restor'd to the British Druids, By William Stukeley
Stukeley’s druid
Druidry and Stonehenge, starts here
The first wide audience for the connection of druids to Stonehenge and other megaliths were readers of William Stukeley‘s book, Stonehenge, A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids, in 1740AD, and he proclaimed himself to be a “druid.” Soon after several other people and groups stated self-described themselves as druids: in Anglesey in 1772, in Cardigan in 1779, short-lived and footnotes. But, in London, 1781 the Ancient Order of Druids formed and still remains the world’s oldest and regular Druidic’s order. Its motto is Justice, Philanthropy and Brotherly Love. It has little to do with Druidry, bar the iconography, being a fraternal organisation.

Now Stonehenge becomes a druid temple
Druidry had taken on an explicitly religious formation by the 1840s with Welshman, Iolo Morganwg, holding services on Primrose Hill, London. William Price would become the most prominent of proponents of the Neo-Druidic movement toward the end of the 19th century and began holding ceremonies at Stonehenge.

Stonehenge and druid’s legitimacy
From this time onwards, many druid groups, start, split off and change names. They practice at Stonehenge before it is closed off to public access and in 1992 after much campaigning by druids, druids and the public are once more granted access on four days of the year, equinoxes, and solstices. The early 1990s are boom years for British Druidry. And they and paganism spread throughout Europe.

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