Druids
Althought since Christian times druids have been identified
as wizards and soothsayers, in pre-Christian Celtic society
they formed an intellectual class comprising philosophers,
judges, educators, historians, doctors, seers, astronomers
and astrologers.
The surviving classical references to Druids date back
to the 2th century B.C.E. and the word Druidae is of Celtic
origin. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius
Secundus, 23/24 -79 C.E) belived it to be a cognate with
the Greek work drus, meaning "an oak". Dru-wid
combines the word roots "oak" and "knowledge".
Wid means "to know" or "to see" as in
the Sanskrift vid.
The oak, together with the rowan and hazel, was an important
sacred tree to the Druids.
In the Celtic social system, Druid was a title given to
learned men and women possessing "oak knowledge"
or "oak wisdom".
Some scholars have argued that druids originally belonged
to a pre-Celtic population in Britain and Ireland (from
where they spread to Gaul), noting that there is no trace
of druidism among Celts elsewhere, in Cisalpine Italy, Spain
or Galatia Intelligensia.
With the revival of interests in druids in later times,
the question of what they look like has been largely a matter
of imagination. Early representations tended to show them
dressed in vaguely classical garb. Aylett Sammes, in his
Britannia Antiqua (1676), shows a druid barefoot dressed
in a knee-length tunic and a hooded cloak. He holds a staff
in one hand and in the other a book and a sprig of mistletoe.
A bag of scrip hangs from his belt. Besides observing that
the name "druid" is derived from "oak"
it was Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia (XVI,
95), who associated the druids with mistletoe and oak groves:
"The druids hold nothing more sacred than the mistletoe
and the tree on which it grows provided it is an oak. They
choose the oak to form groves, and they do not perform any
religious rites without its foliage…"
Pliny also describes how the druids used a "gold pruning
hook" or "sickle" to gather the mistletoe.
The ancient Irish had women druids also, like their relatives
the gauls. A druidess was called a ban-drui [ban-dree],
i.e. a "woman druid" and many individual druidesses
figure in the ancient writings. Among the dangers that St.
Patrick (in his Hymn) asks God to protect him from are "the
spells of women, and smiths, and druids" where the
women are evidently druidesses.
