Hello boys and girl, #hive a good day, Today in these article we are going to talk a bit about who the druids are.
Without further due, Let's get start
Who were The Druids ?
edited by canva
Most of our representations of druids nowadays are in fantasy books and games, World of warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, and others present druids as magical nature wizards. Well, that's all very fun, we all know intuitively that that's not an accurate representation of historical druids.
When most people think of historical druids if they think of them at all, have one of two images in their head.
First, a wise man, with a white beard, and white robe worshiping and being in harmony with nature - doing some ancient ceremony at stonehenge or a much darker image one of dangerous human sacrifice of heathenus barbarism and blood and gore. Well, which of these is correct. #moreyouknow
So, first off we need some historical context.
According to wikipedia, this region here is the land of the celts pre-roman invasion. The celts were an ethno-linguistic group who during the classical period lived mostly in gaul modern-day france and the british isles. Celtic people still exist today of course, residing mostly in wales scotland and Ireland. The druids were the religious leaders of these celtic peoples.
Now the celts were in the heyday of druidism a seemingly illiterate people, at the very least we have no writings about druids by druids or their followers. This raises an obvious problem, all of the historical accounts of druids come from outside sources mostly from greeks and romans.
And later medieval irish Christians, now this doesn't mean that all the information given to us by these non-druids should be overlooked.
If we did that we'd have virtually no information at all and plenty of these ancient writings can be trusted, at least as much as any other ancient writing. Also we now have plenty of archaeological evidence that sheds light on the lives of these celts and presumably the druids as well so modern scholars are able to match the information given in the greco-roman accounts and scrutinize them against the archaeological evidence.
So, now that's out of the way who were the druids.
The Druids
The druids were a social class of educated people both men and women who held a very respected place in pre-roman celtic society.
They had a number of roles and responsibilities, first and foremost they were the religious leaders of the celts.
Druids understood the spiritual beliefs andreligious practices of the celts andwere the only ones believed to have thepower to communicate with The Gods. They also acted as judges settling legal matters within the tribes and as advisers to different celtic lords.
Druids were said to be well-versed in law ethics, medicine, and philosophy.
Their powers were so far-reaching that a celtic lord would not go to war unlesspermitted by the local druid and thereare multiple accounts of druids putting a stop to battles they thought were morally wrong.
The druids were one of three non-noble groups honored in celtic society. The other two were the Vates whose job was to perform religious sacrifices as well as to give prophecy.
The Bards who were poets musicians and satirists.
Today we'll be focusing on the druids that being said the roles of the vates, druids, and bards often overlapped, and in some sources there seemed to have been no distinction between them at all.
With the druids performing all three functions ,whether this was because the writers of those sources like Julius Caesar were ignorant of the complexities from celtic religious life or because in some places and times the roles were just simpler is not known.