The Real History Of The Druids

For the past year, I have been reading two books by Ronald Hutton (not non-stop): "Blood and Mistletoe - The History of The Druids in Britain" and "Stations of the Sun". I wanted to pull out some choice quotes specifically from "Blood and Mistletoe" to emphasize one thing -- our understanding of the Druids is a lot less solid than many understand. I particularly have in mind the writers of Armstrong splinter-churches' published material and the many definitive claims they make therein. Because of course I do.

I am going to try to not make this one of my long and drawn out posts. The entire point is to illustrate how claims about Druids are not as solid as they might appear. This includes certain holiday traditions. They are speculations at best.

It's worse than you might suspect. Our understanding of the ancient Celts is so shaky that Hutton wonders if there even were Druids as we have come to know them.

"There is a real possibility that a thorough study of the material evidence for ritual in the Iron Age will produce conclusions regarding the nature of the Druids - or whether the whole category of 'Druids' should be discarded by specialists in the period - that can be sustained or generally accepted. Furthermore, it is true that only an archaeologist - or team of archaeologists - can undertake this task. To date, however, it has not been achieved."
(p. 73)

Of course, Hutton is not seriously denying there was a priestly caste among the Celts. His point is, the entire case for Druids is built upon a very small number of records left by the Romans and Greeks, and those records are questionable. Only two of those sources could possibly have been eye witnesses to Druids: Julius Caesar and Cicero. Both of whom were known to write whatever suited their needs at the time. It was the Romans and Greeks who called them Druids, and the word Druid itself seems to come from a Latin base word. What if that isn't even the right name? It was the Romans and Greeks who told us what Druids do, versus for example the Bards. What if that was wrong? We have nothing else at all from the Druids. Archaeology has given us nothing truly uncontested besides the Coligny Calendar. We might have been using the wrong name this whole time and saying the wrong things about what they did this whole time. But then again it might right. Without records from the ones we call Druids, there is no way to know for certain.

The only other material we have are the Irish and Welsh folklore. (Scottish folklore about Druids is taken from Irish, which effectively makes it Irish, and the British didn't care for writing about the Druids until about 1490.) They mention Druids quite a lot. One might wonder, what of them?

"...Irish and Welsh texts have always been considered less trustworthy, as the surviving versions were all produced centuries after the conversion of the peoples concerned to Christianity, a process usually presumed to involve the abandonment of Druidry. As such they represent retrospective accounts of a long-vanished culture..."
(p. 74)

The folklore, if understood correctly, is no better than speculation and guesses by a different culture hundreds of years after the fact. It might contain bits of truth, it's possible, but which bits are the truth and which are not? We do not know. Maybe none of it is. Anything is possible in the game of speculation.

One of the odd things about Irish and Welsh medieval folklore is that they don't agree with each other. Just for one example, in Welsh folklore the festival at the start of winter is not called Samhain at all. How can they both be accurate when they don't agree? It requires two separate yet related traditions.

Hutton speaks of how, until the 1980s, Irish and Welsh folklore was presumed to be based on stories that originated in pre-Christian times and preserved in an oral tradition. That was called into question by textual criticism and archaeology.

"During the 1980s these attitudes [that folklore survived from pagan times] began to wane among specialists, under the impact of the two main scholarly tools that could elucidate the matter: textual analysis and archaeology. The former drew attention to the fact that the medieval Irish epics showed none of the familiar features of orally transmitted stories, so apparent in other works from early literature such as the poems of Homer. The Irish works are mostly in prose, not verse, and lack a formulaic structure, or the repetition of key phrases, or alliteration, rhyme, metre, assonance and other devices used to commit works to memory. They bear, in fact, every sign of works that had been composed as literature from the beginning. Archaeologists discovered that the royal centres that featured in the stories had indeed existed in pagan times, but not as the residential halls confidently portrayed by the medieval writers. They had instead been complex ceremonial centres, often open to the sky. The later authors either knew of their former importance because of a lingering tradition that had not preserved an accurate record of their form or purpose, or else were simply making guesses based on the sight of ruins in the landscape. ...
This begs the question of why medieval Christian Irish writers would have tried to recreate the stories of a pagan and prehistoric world; but it is one which has now been effectively solved. It is clear that by the seventh century Irish monasteries had already become some of the powerhouses of Western civilization, outdoing the inhabitants of Britain in their knowledge of Greek and Latin texts and production of manuscripts. They were familiar not only with the Bible and other important early Christian writings but with some of the most celebrated works of pagan Greece and Rome. During the succeeding half millennium they worked hard both to produce a great literature of their own and to locate themselves within the broad framework of European history as established by classical writers. In this wholly successful venture, they drew on ideas and images from the Bible and other Christian texts and from classical Greek and Latin works, mixing them up with a great deal of native tradition. We have no real idea, however, of how much of this tradition was genuine and how much was invented for lack of anything better. ...
The passages referring to Druids - which are more numerous than those in the classical texts - all fall into this category of data that may be either authentically remembered or the product of medieval fantasy."
(pp. 75-78)

So, the Irish and to a much lesser degree Welsh folklore, which so many Armstrongist writers believe tells us accurately about the Druids, is not really so solid after all. They were written by Christians, for Christians. Some parts may be accurate, which parts is not known, but there is good reason to doubt everything the folklore says about Druids.

What you and I as casual readers get from the learned experts depends on what author you read, and what that author wanted to get from it in the first place.

"So this is how an Iron Age Druid is fashioned: from selected parts of Greek, Roman, Irish or Welsh texts usually mixed with archaeological data. The process of selection made to compose the result is more or less an arbitrary one, determined by the instincts, attitudes, context and loyalties of the person engaged in it. Virtually none of the ingredients employed have the status of solid material, judged by any objective standards of textual or material evidence, and the little that has that status is not sufficient to produce a detailed or finished result. This is the case today, as has been suggested by the survey made above of recent publications, but it has been equally true ever since the inhabitants of Britain began wanting to have Druids in their thought-world again about half a millennium ago [around 1490]. The manner in which these ancient and medieval images of them have been put to use is therefore a perfect case study of the way in which the modern British have liked to think and feel: about humanity, nationhood, morality and the cosmos. The raw materials for the construction of ancient Druids, so frustrating for a prehistorian or ancient historian, have resulted in a wonderful subject for a student of modernity."
(p. 106)

In England, savage Druids is what they wanted and so that's what they got. In Wales, noble Druids is what they wanted and so that's what they got. In the German History of Religions School, what authors like James Frazer and Franz Cumont wanted was Christianity copying from paganism and so that's what they got - and that's what you get reading Armstrongist literature. This is what Hutton means by "a wonderful subject for a student of modernity". What people mold the Druids into tells us far more about them than the Druids. And that is usually the point when people bring up Druids in the first place. It often has far less to do with the ancient Celts themselves and far more to do with how can they be employed to better grasp or even try to change what is happening in our own time, for better or worse.

All of this goes a long way to explain how we got epic failures like the old claims that Samhain was the name of a Celtic demon-god, now solidly abandoned, to mention but one of many wild and unsubstantiated claims that "everyone should knows is true". It's because the historical record is spotty, and authors have given us what those authors wanted to find in the first place.

"This means that, when later ages took an interest in Druids, there existed no single, authentic and authoritative portrait of them. Instead there were a number of competing options, between which modern people could choose according to their own tastes, needs, purposes and prejudices. As a result to an extreme extent, Druids have always been a contested subject. Anybody who has sought to write about them, whether to dismiss them, disparage them, abhor them, admire them or imitate them, has had to do so despite some feature of the evidence. The fact that the traditional literary sources have been so few, so well known and (from quite and early date) so readily available, has made this appropriation and disputation al the more widespread and intense. The many-faced and controversial nature of the sources has provided easy opportunities for people to employ Druids for the wide range of purposes discussed above. At the same time they render any such employment open to challenge, provoking further debate and redeployment in a seemingly limitless process."
(p. 765)

I think Hutton is quite right about this. He makes a solid case which I see playing out before us in Armstrongist literature to this day, even though Armstrongist authors are not really experts and are just borrowing the bits they want from any source that suits them.

I want to emphasize again, Hutton never denies there were ancient Celts, or that they had an entire society including priests, or that they warred with the Romans and etc etc etc. He isn't even dismissing popular claims outright just because the case is weak. A running theme throughout the book is (and I paraphrase here), "It could be true but it could be false, we aren't sure". Hutton isn't trying to build a specific Druid. He is more interested in what evidence we have. The book is about the evidence itself - what it is, where did it come from, who wrote it, how did we find it, and etc. And he is bluntly honest about it. (I think that's why I like him so much.)
So, if what you read here today makes you think Hutton is denying the evidence, that is a misunderstanding of what I am saying to you. He simply tells us the truth about the strength of the evidence - some things are definitely true and many things are definitely false, but we aren't sure about the rest of it.

What is the real history of the Druids? We don't know. We could already have it ...or not. This is going to have to wait until archaeology can settle things definitively.

Remember that the next time you read a post like "Is the Occult Influencing Your Family?" by Mr. Jim Tuck of the United Church of God, or "The Plain Truth About Christmas" by Herbert Armstrong, or any number of other publications with strong claims about the Druids. The case is not nearly as open and shut as they might want it to appear.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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