Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. T. Rice Holmes
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began; and it has been supposed that the conquerors found Druidism flourishing there, and made it known in the land from which they had set out. But the Belgae were not the first Celtic conquerors of Britain; and it is reasonable to suppose that if Druidism was of British origin, it would have been imported into Gaul long before. The common view is that on both sides of the Channel it originated among the neolithic population; and Caesar’s words are sometimes explained in the sense that in his time it was more vigorous in Britain than in Gaul, and that Gallic Druids therefore travelled to Britain in order to be initiated into its mysteries. At all events it is not unreasonable to believe that the Celts learned it from some non-Aryan people; for there is nothing to show that the Gauls whom the Romans first encountered had ever heard of it. The Germans, with whom the Celts were long in contact in Central Europe and to whom they were ethnically akin, had no Druids;1231 and although it may be true that the intense devotion to religious observances which Caesar remarked among the mixed population of Gaul1232 did not exceed that of other barbarians,1233 it appeared to him to contrast sharply with the temper of the peoples beyond the Rhine.1234 This spirit led them to connect religion with every act of life: in the chase,1235 in all the operations of war, after victory or defeat, before undertaking an expedition, in selecting the site of a town, the gods were regularly invoked:1236 there was no distinction between the sacred and the profane; or rather, nothing was profane. The contrast which Caesar observed supports the theory of the non-Aryan origin of Druidism.
But was Druidism in Britain universal? The leading Celtic scholar of this country insists that there is no evidence that Druidism was ever the religion of any Brythonic people;1237 and since he assigns almost the whole of Britain south of the firths of Forth and Clyde to the Brythons, he appears to restrict the area of Druidism to a narrow western fringe. This hardly accords with Caesar’s statement that Britain was the stronghold of Druidism. Moreover, when Caesar tells us that the Druids were the religious aristocracy of the Gauls, he plainly gives us to understand that Druidism was common to all the peoples who lived between the Seine and the Garonne; and it is certain that among many if not most of these peoples the Gallo-Brythonic element was predominant. Indeed, although it is commonly assumed that the Belgae had no Druids, there is absolutely no ground for the assumption. Caesar often used the word Galli in a wider sense, including the Belgae; and it is not improbable that when he was describing the manners and customs of the Gauls and Druidism, which was their most remarkable institution, he intended his description to apply to the Belgae as well.1238 Moreover, the very writer who denies that the Brythons had Druids tells us that Druidism was the religion of the British aborigines and was borrowed from them by the British Goidels; and it is certain that both the aborigines and the Goidels (if they had already reached Britain) survived in considerable numbers in the territory which the Brythons conquered.1239 It is clear therefore that Druidism persisted within the Brythonic area; and that the Brythons held aloof from it is a groundless guess.1240
But concerning Druidism as it existed in Britain we have no special information, except the passage in which Tacitus1241 speaks of the cruel rites practised by the Druids of Anglesey. Caesar described Druidism once for all;1242 and since he says that British Druidism was the model and the standard of the Gallic Druids, we can only infer that his description applied in many respects to Britain as well as to Gaul. There the Druids formed a corporation, admission to which was eagerly sought: they jealously guarded the secrecy of their lore; and full membership was only obtainable after a long novitiate. They were ruled by a pope, who held office for life; and sometimes the succession to this dignity was disputed by force of arms. They were exempt from taxation and from service in war. They had, as the priests of a rude society always have, a monopoly of learning. The ignorance and superstition of the populace, their own organization and submission to one head, gave them a tremendous power. The doctrine which they most strenuously inculcated (if Caesar was not misinformed) was the transmigration of souls. ‘This doctrine,’ he said, ‘they regard as the most potent incentive to valour, because it inspires a contempt for death.’1243 They claimed the right of deciding questions of peace and war. Among the Aedui, if not among other peoples, at all events in certain circumstances, they exercised the right of appointing the chief magistrate.1244 They laid hands on criminals and, in their default, even on the innocent, imprisoned them in monstrous idols of wickerwork, and burned them alive as an offering to the gods. They immolated captives in order to discover the divine will in the flow of their blood or their palpitating entrails;1245 they lent their ministrations to men prostrated by sickness or going forth to battle, who trusted that heaven would spare their lives if human victims were offered in their stead; and one form of human sacrifice which they appear to have countenanced—the slaughter of a child at the foundation of a monument, a fortress, or a bridge—has left many traces in European folk-lore and been practised in Africa, Asia, and Polynesia in modern times.1246 They practically monopolized both the civil and the criminal jurisdiction;1247 and if this jurisdiction was irregular, if they had no legal power of enforcing their judgements, they were none the less obeyed. Primitive states did not originally take cognizance of offences committed against individuals, which were avenged by their kin; and when they began to intervene they did so at the request of the injured party or his surviving relatives. What was peculiar to the Celts was that this intervention was exercised by the priests;1248 and doubtless the outlaws who, as Caesar says,1249 abounded in Gaul were criminals whom they had banished. Every year they met to dispense civil justice in the great plain above which now soar the spires of Chartres cathedral.1250 Those who disregarded their decrees were excommunicated; and excommunication meant exclusion from the civil community as well as from communion in religious rites.
Did the Druids owe their conception of immortality, as Diodorus Siculus1251 and Timagenes1252 imply, to the influence of Pythagoras? The testimony of these writers has been contemptuously rejected:1253 but it seems not improbable that Druidism may have absorbed tenets of Pythagorean origin through the medium of the Greeks of Massilia;1254 and this conjecture gains some support from numismatic evidence. A British uninscribed gold coin, found at Reculver, bears on its reverse side the figure, formed by five interlacing lines, which is known as the pentagram and was a well-known Pythagorean symbol.1255 It would seem, however, that if metempsychosis was really a Druidical doctrine, it had no firm hold upon the Celts in general; and their sepulchral customs were not consistent with it. Their notion of a future life, like that of the Bronze Age, was a form of the ‘Continuance Theory’, which has had so many adherents both in primitive and modern tribes.1256 They believed that there was an Elysium somewhere in the west, where they were to live again, feasting, carousing, and duelling, a life like that which they had lived before, but free from care.1257 If the Druids, as Caesar said, taught that souls passed ‘from one person to another’, they meant perhaps that after death the soul entered a new body—the ethereal counterpart of that which it had left behind. The immortality of the soul was an idea, more or less vague, common to many peoples: for the Celts the Druids made it an article of faith. Nor indeed are we precluded from supposing that some of them may have conceived or borrowed from a classic source the doctrine of future retribution. But what that theory was which, as Caesar says1258, the Druids inculcated in regard to the origin of the universe and the nature and motion of the heavenly bodies, it is useless to inquire1259. We only know that, as they traced the descent of the Gauls back to Dis Pater, they regarded night as older than day, and reckoned time by nights; and that, in common with all the peoples of antiquity, they computed their years by the revolutions of the moon1260. The statements of Caesar and Pliny are supplemented by a calendar, engraved on bronze, which was discovered towards the end of the last century at Coligny in the department of the Ain1261. It has its lucky and unlucky days; certain days would be regarded as suitable for sacrifices as well as for other functions1262; and the regulation of these important matters would certainly have been retained by the Druids. It has been said, perhaps in reliance upon a mistranslation of the word dryas or druias, that Druidesses taught side by side with Druids1263: at all events Boadicea sought to divine the issue of her campaign by observing the movements of a hare, besought the gods to bless her enterprise, and after her success offered female captives to Andate, the goddess of victory;1264 and her joint exercise of royal and priestly functions seems to give colour to the suggestion that in primitive times Celtic kings may also have been priests.1265 Cicero1266 indeed relates that the Galatian King, Deiotarus, was the most skilful augur of his country. But the facts of historical import which stand out as certain are these. Like the Brahmans, who,