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Christian Ireland and Pictland. In the present state of knowledge it is difficult to assess the
interrelation of druidic paganism.
Gaul. - The earliest mention of druids is reported by Diogenes Laertius (Vitae, intro., I and 5)
and was found in a lost work by a Greek, Sotion of Alexandria, written about 200 B.C., a date
when the greater part of Gaul had been Celtic for more than two centuries and the Greek
colonies had been even longer established on the south coast.
The Gallic druids which were subsequently described by Caesar were an ancient order of
religious officials, for when Sotion wrote they already possessed a reputation as philosophers
in the outside world. Caesar's account, however, is the mainspring of present information, and
it is an especially valuable document as Caesar's confidante and friend, the Aeduan noble
Divitiacus, was himself a druid. Caesar's description of the druids (Commentarii de Bello
Gallico, VI) emphasizes their political and judicial functions.
Although they officiated at sacrifices and taught the philosophy of their religion, they were
more than priests; thus at the annual assembly of the order near Chartres, it was not to worship
nor to sacrifice that the people came from afar, but to present their disputes for lawful trial.
Moreover, it was not only minor quarrels that the druids decided, for their functions included the
investigation of the gravest criminal charges and even intertribal disputes.
This, together with the fact that they acknowledged the authority of an archdruid invested with
supreme power, shows that their system was conceived on a national basis and was
independent of ordinary intertribal jealousy; and if to this political advantage is added their
influence over educated public opinion as the chief instructors of the young, and, finally, the
formidable religious sanction behind their decrees, it is evident that before the clash with Rome
the druids must very largely have controlled the civil administration of Gaul.
Of druidism itself, little is said except that the druids taught the immortality of the human soul,
maintaining that it passed into other bodies after death. This belief was identified by later the
writers, such as Diodorus Siculus, with the Pythagorean doctrine, but probably incorrectly, for
there is no evidence that the druidic belief included the notion of a chain of successive lives as
a means of ethical purification, or that it was governed by a doctrine of moral retribution having
the liberation of the soul as the ultimate hope, and this seems to reduce the druidic creed to the
level of ordinary religious speculation.
Of the theology of druidism, Caesar tells us that the Gauls, following the druidic teaching,
claimed descent from a god corresponding with Dis in the Latin pantheon, and it is possible that
they regarded him as a Supreme Being; he also adds that they worshipped Mercury, Apollo,
Mars, Jupiter and Minerva, and had much the same notion about these deities as the rest of the
world. In short, Caesar's remarks imply that there was nothing in the druidic creed, apart from
the doctriny of immortality that made their faith extraordinary, so that it may be assumed that
druidism professed all the known tenets of ancient Celtic religion and that the gods of the
druids were the familiar and multifarious deities of the Celtic pantheon.
The philosophy of druidism does not seem to have survived the test of Roman acquaintance,
and was doubtless a mixture of astrology and mythical cosmogony. Cicero (De Divin., I, xli, 90)
says that Divitiacus boasted a knowledge of physiología, but Pliny decided eventually (Natural
History, xxx, 13) that the lore of the druids was little else than a bundle of superstitions. Of the
religious rites themselves. Pliny (N.H., xvi, 249) has given and impressive account of the
ceremony of culling the mistletoe, and Diodorus Siculus (Hist., v, 31, 2-5) describes their
divinations by means of the slaughter of a human victim. Caesar having already mentioned the
burning alive of men in wicker cages. It is likely that these victims were malefactors, and it is
accordingly possible that such sacrifices were rather occasional national purgings than the
common practice of the druids.
The advent of the Romans quickly led to the downfall of the druidic order. The rebellion of
Vercingetorix must have ended their intertribal organization, since some of the thrives held
aloof from the conflict or took the Roman side; furthermore, at the beginning of the Christian
era their cruel practices brought the druids into direct conflict with Rome, and led, finally, to
their official suppression.
At the end of the 1st century their status had sunk to that of mere magicians, and in the 2nd
century there is no reference to them. A poem of Ausonius, however, shows that in the 4th
century there were still people in Gaul who boasted of druidic descent.
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