The Mistery of Belicena Villca druidic creed , apart from the doctrine 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 multifariours deities of the Celtic pantheon ”.
Here the English author of the article crossed the line . Nowhere , before this last paragraph , he had said or suggested that the Druids were something different from the Celts , except " that they formed an official Order of Priests ". But now , clearly , he implied that he was truly ignorant of the beliefs of the Druids and supposed that they were the same ones that the ancient Celts held . So who were the Druids , if they weren ' t Celts ? And why did the Celts would have changed their Religion after the , now very likely , arrival of the Druids ? Questions without answer . Questions for Konrad Tarstein .
" 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 physiologia , 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 ”.
Was I wrong , or was the Encyclopedia trying , with a subjective argument , to leave the Druid assassins on their feet ? Because it is one thing to be an executioner , unpleasant but socially necessary task , and quite another to be a Priest sacrificer of human victims : executioners can be justified by man , since the executed person is guilty of breaking the law ; killing the one who breaks the common law is commonly comprehensible : simply eliminates the one who is incapable of living in community ; but the Priests kill to appease a God of the which they are his representatives , and propitiate a human sacrifice that is commonly incomprehensible ; only They present it as necessary and only The God can justify them . I realized then that it was a great favor that the English were doing them by presenting the crimes of such sinister Priests as natural acts of justice .
“ The advent of the Romans quickly led to the downfall of the druidic order . The rebelion of Vercingetorix must have ended their intertribal organization , since some of the trives held aloof from the conflict or took the Roman side ; furthermore , at the beginning of the Christian era their cruel practices brougth the Druids into direct conflict with Rome , and led , finally , to the official suppression of Druidism ”.
And the contradictions continued . A legalistic people like the Roman , how did it not understand that the ritual murders of the Druids were positive acts of justice , according to the conviction that the writer expressed lines further back ? Or perhaps the editor , a connoisseur of history , struggled between his duty to present the true facts and an order from the Directors of the Encyclopedia , or from other persons of singular influence , by which he was forced to exalt the good of Druidism , very little indeed , and to hide the bad , that was too much , or to sweeten the undeniable ? As you will see , neffe , this was Konrad Tarstein ' s theory .
“ 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 ”.
“ British Isles : There is one mention of Druids in Great Britain as contemporaries of the Gallic clergy , and that is the reference to them by Tacitus ( Annals , xiv , 30 ) from which it is learned that there were elders of that name in Anglesey in A . D . 61 ; but there is no mention of the Druids in the whole of the history of Roman England , and it may be questions whether there ever were any Druids in the eastern provinces that had been subjected , before the Roman invasion , to German influence ”.
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