The secret life of Druids

Fernando Kaskais

Aug 30

The Druids – Bringing in the Mistletoe (1890) by George Henry and E A Hornel. Courtesy Glasgow Museums

The Greeks and Romans portrayed these elusive priests as bogeymen who bathed in their victims' blood. Who were they really?

Miranda Aldhouse-Green is emeritus professor of archeology at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. Her books include The Celtic Myths (1990), Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mystery (2015), and Sacred Britannia: The Gods and Rituals of Roman Britain (Thames & Hudson, 2023).

Gaius Verius Sedatus was a respectable citizen of the community of Chartres in the early 2nd century CE. He was a member of his local town council (a sort of mini-senate), where he and his colleagues presided over its laws and management, under the aegis of Roman law. Gaul had been conquered by Julius Caesar a century earlier and was now administered by trusted locals such as Sedatus, overseen by distant Roman officials.

But Sedatus lived a double life. In the evening, he donned the mantle of a magician-priest and descended to his underground temple in the small cellar of his house. There he kept a group of four large incense-burners, placed symmetrically at the points of a square. He filled these vessels with aromatic, perhaps hallucinogenic herbs, and lit fires beneath them. When the drug-laden smoke was sufficiently dense for his needs, he and his followers began to summon the spirits by chanting their names and demanding that they provide him with guidance in the dark arts.

Who were these spirits, who had to be contacted so secretly in a small space, dimly lit with oil lamps and flickering candles? Fortunately, one of the incense-burners is complete enough to study closely. The vessel is inscribed, telling us who Sedatus was: a Roman citizen (because of his triple name) and the presiding ritualist who summoned the spirits. Beneath this statement is a long list of spirit names, almost all of which are unknown to archaeologists. But one stands out: 'Dru'. If we are right in assuming this is an abbreviation of 'Druid' (and what else could it be?) then it is the only direct archaeological evidence for the existence of the Druids.

The Druids have long allured. A great many Greek and Roman writers mentioned them, with a mixture of awe, fear, disgust and respect. A thorn in the side of Rome because they exerted sufficient influence in ancient Britain and Gaul to threaten the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Druids were a shadowy class of priests, religious leaders, even freedom-fighters. They whipped up resistance and sedition that the Roman army found hard to fight. The Druids had no literate footprint of their own, and so their reputation continues to rely on Greek and Roman 'spin' that painted these elusive priests as bogeymen who bathed in the blood of human sacrificial victims, calling down terrifying spirits from the dark otherworld to shrivel their enemies. But who were they really? And how do we know?

More than 30 Greek and Roman writers from around 200 BCE to the 4th century CE were fascinated by this enigmatic group of ritualists. There has been a lot of controversy concerning the veracity of these ancient authors and their plagiarism or recycling of 'facts' about the Druids. However, I do have faith in one: Julius Caesar. He was in Gaul for nearly 10 years in the 50s BCE, leading the war of Roman conquest and so he knew the region personally rather than relying on secondhand information. And, because he was writing his chronicle for scrutiny by the Senate in Rome, it is doubtful whether he would have got away with fanciful imaginings because they could have been contradicted by his fellow officers.

Caesar seems to have had quite intimate knowledge of Druidism, gained – at least in part – from his close friendship with a Druid named Diviciacus, who was also the ruler of a prominent Gallic tribe in eastern Gaul, the Aedui, an ally of Rome. We know of Diviciacus from another contemporary source, a comment by the orator Cicero who had met Diviciacus in Rome, and spoke warmly of the Gallic Druid as particularly skilled in the art of divination. So, while many ancient authors painted negative pictures of the Druids, condemning them as blood-soaked savages lurking in sinister forests, Caesar respected them for their erudition as natural scientists, teachers, healers and their specialism in liaising with the denizens of the otherworld. It is this last skill that appears to have left intriguing archaeological traces, including the rite of human sacrifice...

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https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-archaeology-tell-us-about-the-druids-dark-arts