Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries by Brian Haughton (beginner reading books for adults txt) 📕

body to another." Many ancient writers took this to mean that the Druids had been influenced by the teachings of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras on the immortality of the soul, though this seems unlikely. Caesar also mentions the Druids having knowledge of the motion of the stars and the size of the Earth, and being familiar with philosophy.

It is difficult to ascertain even roughly when the Druid priesthood originated. The earliest known reference to them is from the early first century B.C. Greek philosopher, astronomer, and geographer, Posidonius. Unfortunately his work only survives in fragments from later writers such as Greek historian and geographer Strabo (c. 63 B.C.-A.D. 24) and Posidonius' pupil, the Roman orator and statesman, Cicero (106 B.C.-3 B.C.). Cicero comments that he actually knew a Druid named Divitiacus, of a Gaulish tribe known as the Aedui, and he describes this Divitiacus as a kind of astrologer or soothsayer who was acquainted with "natural philosophy." Strabo's writings again feature the giant wicker man sacrifices referred to by Caesar, and also another type of human sacrifice supervised by the Druids. He writes: "Some men they would shoot dead with arrows and impale in the temples." While there is practically no evidence that the Celts used bows and arrows at all, intriguingly, the body of a man found in the outer ditch at Stonehenge proved to have been killed at close quarters by three arrows in his back. As the date for this possible human sacrifice at Stonehenge is between 2398 and 2144 B.C., there is obviously no direct connection between his ritual murder and the Late Iron Age Druids, unless of course the Druids practiced rituals that had been part of the traditions of the British Isles for millennia, and had been handed down to them.

In the writings of Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23- A.D. 79) the Druids are called magicians, and he describes them venerating mistletoe and the oak tree from which it grows. Pliny mentions that the Druids never performed any of their rituals unless there was an oak branch present, and that they gathered mistletoe in a solemn ceremony on the sixth day of the moon. This ceremony involved a priest clad in white robes climbing the oak tree and cutting the mistletoe with a golden sickle; the falling mistletoe was then caught in a white cloth. The Druids afterwards sacrificed two white bulls to their gods. According to Pliny, the sixth day of the moon was the day from which the Druids began their months, their years, and their 30 year cycle. Some support for the idea that the Druids relied heavily on the phases of the moon in their calendar was provided by the discovery of the Coligny Calendar in Coligny, France, in 1897. This calendar, probably dating to the second century A.D., was engraved on a bronze tablet, and functioned as a solar/lunar ritual calendar, each month always begining with the same moon phase.

Two druids. Roman period bas-relief, found at Autun in Burgundy, France.

Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, writing in A.D. 43, is the first to mention that the teachings of the Druids were secret. He describes the Druids of Gaul as "masters of wisdom" who carrried out their teaching "in a cave, or in inaccessible woods." Perhaps the best known account of the Druids is that by Roman orator, lawyer, and senator, Tacitus (A.D. 56-A.D. 117). In his Annals, he describes an attack, in A.D. 61, by the Roman army commanded by the Governor of Britain Suetonius Paulinus, on the island of Mona (modern Angelsey), off the northwest coast of Wales. Mona (Ynys Mon in Welsh) was the last stronghold of the Druids

and was contributing significantly to resistence in Wales against the Roman invasion. As the Romans approached the opposite shore and looked over to the island, they saw the Britons lined up on Menai Bay, ready to defend their island. As they crossed by boat onto Mona, the soldiers noticed women (presumably Druidesses) "running through the ranks in wild disorder; their apparel funeral; their hair loose to the wind, in their hands flaming torches, and their whole appearance resembling the frantic rage of the Furies." They also saw the male Druids, standing together in a band, their hands uplifted to the sky, and their voices invoking the gods and calling down terrible curses on the Romans. At first, Suetonius Paulinus and his troops were awestruck at this weird and disturbing sight, and were unsure of what to do. Eventually, according to Tacitus, the natural courage of the Romans overcame their fears, and they made a furious charge into the manic group of women and priests and mowed them down mercilessly. The Druid's sacred groves were burned to the ground and their shrines, still stained with the blood of sacrificial victims (according to Tacitus) destroyed. While Suetonius was laying waste to Mona, he received news of a revolt in the southeast of Britain, led by queen Boudica of the Iceni tribe, and returned to gain an eventual bloody victory over the rebelling Britons.

Archaeological evidence which may have a connection with this final stand of the Druids on Mona was discovered in 1943, deposited in a lake on the island known as Llyn Cerrig Bach. The remarkable cache of 150 objects included iron and bronze weapons, chariots and cauldrons, and has been dated to between the second century B.c. and the first century A.D. The items seem to have been deliberately thrown into the lake as some kind of offering. Scholars have hypothesized that this deliberate offering of precious metalwork may have been made by the surviving Druids of Mona, to propitiate their gods in response to the wholesale desecration of Druidic shrines carried out by the Romans on the island.

Following the massacre on Mona, Druidism seems to have been outlawed by Rome, which probably meant the end of an organized priesthood, although Druids certainly did not disappear completely (especially in Scotland, Ireland, and perhaps parts of