Free Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) by James MacKillop

continental Celts is more ambiguous. In an oft-cited passage in Tacitus’
Annals
(first century AD ), the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus was greeted on the island of Anglesey in northwest Wales by druids and also by black-robed women with dishevelled hair like furies, who stood beside but apparently separate from the druids. Several scholars have recently argued convincingly that although classical sources do not name female druids, the presence of women as magicians, warriors and commanders in battle (see Chapter 4 ) implies the likelihood of women as druids in ancient times.
    Put another way, even the most reliable of classical sources were still subject to their own prejudices and may be interpreted with reference to knowledge come to light in the last century. The oldest text referring to the druids comes from an anonymous Greek from
c
.200 BC who spoke of certain ‘philosophers’ among the barbarian Celts. Julius Caesar’s seven-volume
Gallic War
(first century BC ) has long been the most frequently cited source, although we recognize today that many of his observations are taken from subordinates as well as from the stoic philosopher Posidonius (
c
.135–
c
.51 BC ). In Caesar’s disdainful view, druids were one of two groups of men who held honour among the Gauls, the other being the nobles (
equites
). In contrast to the nobles, the druids were a highly organized inter-tribal brotherhood. If anyone were to disobey their decrees, the druids would give him the severest of punishments: to be barred from sacrifices. One druid was to be made chief over the others, and upon his death another would be appointed. If there were several candidates of equal merit, an assembly of druids would vote for the successor. This was not always orderly, as armed conflict was known to break out among disappointed candidates and their supporters. Once each year the druids would assemble at a sacred place in the land of the Carnutes, between the Seine and Loire Rivers, thought to be the centre of all Gaul, at which time druids would rule on all the disputes of the preceding year.
Caesar speaks of a druidical religious belief that human souls do not cease at the death of the body but are reborn in different forms. In classical times such a belief would be known as a variation of metempsychosis, a doctrine espoused by sixth-century BC mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. Today we are more likely to speak of it as reincarnation, an idea found in Eastern religion and advanced by any number of modern mystics and prophets. Thus many informed commentators see the druids as Celtic counterparts of the Roman
flāmines
or the brahmins of India. There is no reliable documentation, however, to support the speculation that the druid was a Celtic equivalent of the shaman of north Asia and among native North Americans. The shaman is a healer with magical powers who serves as a medium to the spiritual world to bring about good or evil; the shaman becomes a medium in an ecstatic trance, sometimes assisted by natural hallucinogens. The only shard of evidence for a link with shamanism is the pierced antler, perhaps used as a headdress, found at a fourth-century AD Roman bath-site in what is now Hertfordshire.
    Augmenting Caesar’s view of druidical religion is the description of a ceremony in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
(first century AD ). During a festival of the sixth day of the moon, white-robed druids climb an oak tree, cut with a golden sickle the mistletoe growing there, and sacrifice two white bulls as part of a fertility rite. European mistletoe, unlike its North American counterpart, grows in nest-like balls, a parasite high on the limbs of trees such as the oak and the apple. What is implied by this procedure has been the subject of enormous commentary, including that in Sir James Frazer’s
Golden
Bough
, whose title is a translation of Virgil’s name for mistletoe. Informed opinion today asserts that the druids felt mistletoe