Druidism and Celtic Spirituality: The Sacred Grove, the Ancestors, and the Living Land
In the forests of ancient Gaul and Britain, in sacred groves that Roman soldiers sometimes dared to enter only with their eyes closed, a priesthood performed ceremonies that combined astronomy, natural magic, philosophy, law, medicine, and the arts of memory. They were called Druids — the name likely derives from the Proto-Celtic dru-wid- , combining dru (oak or strong) and wid (to see, to know): the "strong-seers," the "oak-knowers," those who could see what others could not. The Druids were annihilated by the Roman conquests of Gaul and Britain in the first and second centuries CE, their oral traditions deliberately suppressed along with Celtic tribal independence. What we know of them comes primarily from their enemies (Roman historians like Julius Caesar, Pliny, and Strabo — none of them friendly witnesses) and from later Irish literature written after Christianization, which preserves fragments of older oral tradition in mythologized form. This makes Druid...