A druid was a member of the high-ranking professional class in ancient Celtic cultures. While perhaps best remembered as religious leaders, they were also legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals and political advisors. While the druids are reported to have been literate, they are believed to have been prevented by doctrine from recording their knowledge in written form, thus they left no written accounts of themselves. They are however attested in some detail by their contemporaries from other cultures, such as the Romans and the Greeks.
The earliest known references to the druids date to the fourth century BCE and the oldest detailed description comes from Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico (50s BCE). They were also described by later Greco-Roman writers such as Cicero,[2] Tacitus[3] and Pliny the Elder.[4] Following the Roman invasion of Gaul, the druid orders were suppressed by the Roman government under the 1st century CE emperors Tiberius and Claudius, and had disappeared from the written record by the 2nd century.
Julius Caesar's description of the druids, in De Bello Gallico:
“The Druids usually hold aloof from war, and do not pay war‑taxes with the rest; they are excused from military service and exempt from all liabilities. Tempted by these great rewards, many young men assemble of their own motion to receive their training; many are sent by parents and relatives. Report says that in the schools of the Druids they learn by heart a great number of verses, and therefore some persons remain twenty years under training. And they do not think it proper to commit these utterances to writing, although in almost all other matters, and in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters. I believe that they have adopted the practice for two reasons — that they do not wish the rule to become common property, nor those who learn the rule to rely on writing and so neglect the cultivation of the memory; and, in fact, it does usually happen that the assistance of writing tends to relax the diligence of the student and the action of the memory. The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold to be the greatest incentive to valour. Besides this, they have many discussions as touching the stars and their movement, the size of the universe and of the earth, the order of nature, the strength and the powers of the immortal gods, and hand down their lore to the young men.”
“It is believed that their rule of life was discovered in Britain and transferred thence to Gaul; and to‑day those who would study the subject more accurately journey, as a rule, to Britain to learn it.”
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...c_War/6B*.html
Description of the druids by Pomponius Mela (c.43 AD):
"They profess to know the size and shape of the earth and the universe, the motion of the sky and the stars, and what the gods want"
The Ancient Paths (Graham Robb, 2013)
One of the few things that both the Greco-Roman and the vernacular Irish sources agree on about the druids is that they played an important part in pagan Celtic society. In his description, Julius Caesar claimed that they were one of the two most important social groups in the region (alongside the equites, or nobles) and were responsible for organizing worship and sacrifices, divination, and judicial procedure in Gaulish, British and Irish society.[19] He also claimed that they were exempt from military service and from the payment of taxes, and had the power to excommunicate people from religious festivals, making them social outcasts.[19] Two other classical writers, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, also wrote about the role of druids in Gallic society, claiming that the druids were held in such respect that if they intervened between two armies they could stop the battle.[20]
The earliest record of the druids comes from two Greek texts of c. 300 BCE: one, a history of philosophy written by Sotion of Alexandria, and the other a study of magic widely attributed to Aristotle. Both texts are now lost, but were quoted in the 2nd century CE work Vitae by Diogenes Laertius [55]:
"Some say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi, and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldaei, among the Indians the Gymnosophistae, and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called druids and semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on magic, and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession of Philosophers."
(Diogenes Laertius, Vitae, Introduction, Section 1[56])
Another classical writer to take up describing the druids was Diodorus Siculus, who published this description in his Bibliotheca historicae in 36 BCE. Alongside the druids, or as he called them, drouidas, whom he viewed as philosophers and theologians, he also remarked how there were poets and singers in Celtic society whom he called bardous, or bards.[29] Such an idea was expanded on by Strabo, writing in the 20s CE, who declared that amongst the Gauls, there were three types of honoured figures: the poets and singers known as bardoi, the diviners and specialists in the natural world known as o'vateis, and those who studied "moral philosophy", the druidai.[67]
Pythagorean philosophy
Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor (d. 36 BC) referred to the druids as philosophers and called their doctrine of the immortality of the soul and reincarnation or metempsychosis "Pythagorean":"The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Gauls' teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a fixed number of years they will enter into another body."
Diodorus Siculus, writing in 36 BCE, described how the druids followed "the Pythagorean doctrine", that human souls "are immortal and after a prescribed number of years they commence a new life in a new body."[29]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid
"The Celtic Druids investigated to the very highest point the Pythagorean philosophy', said Hippolytus of Rome; they practice divination 'from calculations and numbers by the Pythagorean art'. [...] Celtic art was a scientific attempt to decipher the secrets of creation, 'for offerings should be rendered to the gods by philosophers who are experienced in the nature of the divine and who speak, as it were, the same language as the gods' (Diodorus Siculus). In order to learn that language, they 'conducted investigations and attempted to explain the system of interrelations [or, in a variant text, 'the inner laws'] and the highest secrets of nature' (Timagenes)."
The Ancient Paths(Graham Robb, 2013)
Druidic schools
"Some remarkably early evidence of a school has survived. It was in the Aeduan town of Augustodunum (Autun), between the oppida of Cabillonum (Chalon-sur-Saone) and Bibracte (Mont Beuvray). An analysis of the roads around Autun has shown that the durum was already an important hub before the Romans named it after Augustus. It was there,in AD 21, that 'the noblest of the Gauls devoted themselves to a liberal education'. Tacitus mentions this in passing in his account of the Gaulish revolt of that year. Since the Druids were considered a subversive political force and were subsequently outlawed by imperial decrees, it can hardly be a coincidence that the revolt began in a town where the 'noblest progeny of the Gauls' were receiving a liberal education.
The university at Augustodunum, founded more than twelve centuries before the Sorbonne, was still a famous seat of learning in the fourth century AD, when the porticoes of its schools were adorned with one of the lost treasures of ancient Gaul - a scale map of the world showing seas, rivers and towns and the distances between them. By then, the university was already a venerable institution. Professors who proudly called themselves sons of Druids (presumably in private) were teaching at Bayeux and Bordeaux. They represented a scholastic tradition older than Ausgutodunum itself. When Diviciacus qualified as a Druid in the early first century BC, he would have received his robes, not at Augustodunum, but at the oppidum of Bibracte, which was the capital of the Aedui before the Gallic War."
The Ancient Paths(Graham Robb, 2013)
Gallizenae priestesses
According to classical authors, the Gallizenae (or Gallisenae) were virgin priestesses of the Île de Sein off Pointe du Raz, Finistère, western Brittany.[46] Their existence was first mentioned by the Greek geographer Artemidorus Ephesius and later by the Greek historian Strabo, who wrote that their island was forbidden to men, but the women came to the mainland to meet their husbands. Which deities they honored is unknown.[47] According to Pomponius Mela, the Gallizenae acted as both councilors and practitioners of the healing arts:
"Sena, in the Britannic Sea, opposite the coast of the Osismi, is famous for its oracle of a Gaulish god, whose priestesses, living in the holiness of perpetual virginity, are said to be nine in number. They call them Gallizenae, and they believe them to be endowed with extraordinary gifts to rouse the sea and the wind by their incantations, to turn themselves into whatsoever animal form they may choose, to cure diseases which among others are incurable, to know what is to come and to foretell it. They are, however; devoted to the service of voyagers only who have set out on no other errand than to consult them."[48][49][50]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid
Diviciacus the Druid
Diviciacus or Divitiacus of the Aedui is the only druid from antiquity whose existence is attested by name. His date of birth is not known, but he was an adult during the late 60s BC, at which time he was described by Julius Caesar as a "senator" of the Aedui. In Caesar's The Gallic War the word "senator" is used to refer to Gallic aristocrats who took part in their clans' decision-making. He supported the Aedui's preexisting alliance with Rome.
In 63 BC, at the age of 32, he survived the Battle of Magetobriga, where forces of the Sequani and Arverni, together with Germanic troops under the Suebi King Ariovistus, massacred the Aedui.[2] Thereafter, the Aedui became tributary to the Sequani. Following the Aedui's defeat at Magetobriga, Diviciacus traveled to Rome and spoke before the Roman Senate to ask for military aid. While in Rome, he was a guest of Cicero, who spoke of his knowledge of divination, astronomy and natural philosophy, and names him as a druid.[3] Julius Caesar, who knew him well, noted his particular skills as a diplomat without calling him a druid.
Following Caesar's victory over the Helvetii, Diviciacus went as a prominent member of the Gallic delegation to Caesar, and was appointed as their chief spokesman. He brought the Gallic people's concerns to Caesar over Ariovistus, who had taken much of the Sequani lands and taken hostages.[4][5] The Gaul's request provided the catalyst for the next phase of Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, when Caesar went on to confront and defeat Ariovistus.
In addition to holding the religious office of druid, Diviciacus may have been the Uergobretos, the annually elected political leader or chief magistrate[6] of the Aedui, one of the most powerful nations in Gaul. If true, his combination of military and religious office responsibilities in Aedua paralleled Caesar's duties among the Romans. For in Rome, Caesar was Pontifex Maximus in addition to being a magistrate and general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diviciacus_(Aedui)
Mathematics and Astronomy
The Bibracte Basin
“Some phrases of the god’s language can be deciphered in the pink-granite basin of Bibracte (first century BC). […] The basin is the geometrical result of two circles, overlapping at one-fifth of their diameters. Lines drawn from the centre of the oval to the centre of one of the circles and to a point of intersection form a Pythagorean triangle - a right-angled triangle with lengths that are a Pythagorean triad: 3, 4 and 5. [..]
The Pythagorean triangle has two angles of 53.13º. This was, to within four-fifths of a degree, the angle of the solstice sun at Bibracte. Accuracy of this order in the measurement of angles is often thought to have been unattainable without theodolites, but here, in one of the clearest utterances of the gods - two intersecting circles and a Pythagorean triangle - is proof that solar pathways could be measured quite simply. The fact that this solstice angle happens to be the angle produced by the sacred Pythagorean triad of 3, 4 and 5 must have struck the Druid mathematicians of Bibracte as a particularly auspicious coincidence.”
The Ancient Paths (Graham Robb, 2013)
The Coligny Calendar
The Gaulish Coligny calendar (c.50 AD) is made up of bronze fragments, in a single huge plate. It is inscribed in Gaulish with Latin characters and uses Roman numerals.
The Coligny Calendar is an attempt to reconcile the cycles of the moon and sun, as is the modern Gregorian calendar. However, the Coligny calendar considers the phases of the moon to be important, and each month always begins with the same moon phase. The calendar uses a mathematical arrangement to keep a normal 12-month calendar in sync with the moon and keeps the whole system in sync by adding an intercalary month every 2 1⁄2 years. The Coligny calendar registers a five-year cycle of 62 lunar months, divided into a "bright" and a "dark" fortnight (or half a moon cycle) each. The months were possibly taken to begin on the new moon, and a 13th intercalary month was added every two and a half years to align the lunations with the solar year.
The astronomical format of the calendar year that the Coligny calendar represents may well be far older, as calendars are usually even more conservative than rites and cults. The date of its inception is unknown, but correspondences of Insular Celtic and Continental Celtic calendars suggest that some early form may date to Proto-Celtic times, roughly 800 BC. The Coligny calendar achieves a complex synchronisation of the solar and lunar months. Whether it does this for philosophical or practical reasons, it points to considerable degree of sophistication.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_calendar
“Steinrücken (2012) has proposed that Pliny's statement that the Celtic month begins on the sixth day of the month[14] may be taken as evidence for the age of this [Coligny calendar] system: assuming that the month was originally aligned with lunations, a shift of five days corresponds to a period of 975 years, suggesting a starting date in the 10th century BC.[15] Omsted (1992) in a similar argument proposes an origin around "850 ± 300 BC".[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coligny_calendar
“The calendar of Coligny is based on a uniform time with changing time units, which correspond to the duration of lunar rule and leap years. The calendrical use of lunar control and leap years presupposes that the binding of the lunar year to the solar year was known by switching to a 13th lunation.
[…] the Celts' chronology was within a luni-solar tradition whose roots probably date back to the time of the circular trench [i.e. neolithic henge] installations.”
http://weltwunder-himmelsscheibe.de/...20%20I-VII.pdf
Solar Maps
"Roman roads were actually built by the Celts, a new book claims. The findings of Graham Robb, a biographer and historian, bring into question two
millennia of thinking about Iron Age Britain and Europe. The Druids, the Celt’s scientific and spiritual leaders, were some of the most intellectually advanced thinkers of their age, it is said, who developed the straight roads in the 4th Century BC, hundreds of years before the Roman army marched across the continent.
“They had their own road system on which the Romans later based theirs,” Mr Robb said, adding that the roads were built in Britain from around the 1st Century BC. “It has often been wondered how the Romans managed to build the Fosse Way, which goes from Exeter to Lincoln. They must have known what the finishing point would be, but they didn’t conquer that part of Britain until decades later. How did they manage to do that if they didn’t follow the Celtic road?”
Mr Robb, former fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, first came up with the theory when he planned to cycle the Via Heraklea, an ancient route that runs a thousand miles in a straight line from the tip of the Iberian Peninsula to the Alps, and realised that it was plotted along the solstice lines through several Celtic settlements. He mapped the positioning of hundreds of other towns and cities in France, Britain and Ireland and found that the Celt’s had organised them to mirror the paths of their Sun God, created a network straight of tracks following the solstice lines across swathes of the continent. The Ancient Paths, released tomorrow, suggests that the Druids possessed map-making skills that historians believed were discovered centuries later and created the “earliest accurate map of the world”.”
“After examining satellite imaging (difficult for the private scholar even a decade ago) and making several more research trips, [historian Graham Robb] bumped up against two extraordinary discoveries. First, the entire Via Heraklea runs as straight as an arrow along the angle of the rising and setting sun at the solstices. Second, plotting lines through the Celtic Mediolanum settlements results in lines that map on to sections of Roman road, which themselves point not to Roman towns but at Celtic oppida farther along. [...]
Piece by piece, there emerges a map of the ancient world constructed along precise celestial lines: a huge network of meridians and solar axes that served as the blueprint for the Celtic colonisation of Europe, dictated the placement of its settlements and places of worship, and was then almost wholly wiped from history. […]
Building on meridians and equinoctial lines, the Druids used their maps of the heavens to create a map that criss-crossed a continent, providing a plan of sufficient latitudinal and longitudinal accuracy to guide the Celtic diaspora as it pushed eastward across Europe.
The swirls and patterns in Celtic art turn out, Robb surmises, to be arranged along rigorous mathematical principles, and may even encode the navigational and cartographic secrets that the Druids so laboriously developed.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...pe-review.html
“Robb's real argument is not that the pre-Roman inhabitants of Celtic Europe were skilled engineers, but that they were skilled surveyors and astronomers, laying out a great network of roads, town centres and sacred places, still discoverable on the map.
“what they [the druids] laid out was a gridwork of astronomically derived lines, the "ancient paths" of Robb's title. These include solstice lines, oriented both on summer solstice and winter solstice sunrise. […]
Part of Robb's argument is that his ancient scientists could not only draw ellipses, and plot the path of the sun, but understood how to calculate bearings, and even the value of pi, on not impossibly difficult Pythagorean principles. Engineers they may not have been, but mathematicians, yes.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...am-robb-review
Geometric Art
"The geometrical basis of early Celtic art was recognised only recently, and much of the work remains to be done. For the time being, a hypothetical Druidic design manual could begin almost anywhere - with a face in the British Museum, for instance, on the handle mounts of a ‘bucket’ or funerary urn that was placed in the grave of a Kentish Briton at about the time of Caesar’s invasion. The secrets of this emaciated, alien face has remained intact. But a Druid would have known that just as the stars and planets were regulated by an invisible system of circles and ellipses, the face was the visible witness of a complex pattern. Once the pattern has been deduced, its deeper meaning emerges: the mouth, the source of eloquence and prophetic utterance, forming the lowest extremity of the figure, turns out to be the true centre of the design. It also occupies the centre of four Pythagorean triangles, which means that this face that watched over the cremated remains of a man or woman of Cantium contained the fragments of a compass by which mortals could find their way on Earth and in the world beyond.”
The Ancient Paths (Graham Robb, 2013)
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