Blood and Mistletoe, The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton
Submitted by coldrum on Sunday, 21 June 2009 Page Views: 2218
Other ArchaeologyIt has been said that the Druids, who in recent years held rituals at Stonehenge in the dawn of the summer solstice, were guilty of a vast and wilful anachronism. The trilithons were raised thousands of years before the original Druids began their ministry. But prehistorical matters are not as simple as that.There have always been priests and seers in England. The Druids, whoever they were, may in any case have simply redeployed the ancient stones for their own purposes. This book is a study of their influence in succeeding centuries.
That they bequeathed no account of their beliefs or practices, and that there are no surviving material artefacts of their religious culture, means that they remain elusive, if not for all practical purposes invisible. Yet their mysteriousness is a clue to their survival. They have been adopted, or adapted, by various generations of scholars to suit various social and cultural theories.
The fullest account comes from Julius Caesar who, in De Bello Gallico, reports that the Druids were priests and law-givers; they engaged in ritual ceremonial but they also presided over territorial disputes. They were partakers in human sacrifice, too, particularly with the building of “wicker men” in which victims were burnt to death. There are, however, problems with Caesar's account, which reads in part like a Roman fantasy of “savage” life.
That has been the situation ever since, in which various interpretations have been placed on the statements of Classical authors that may or may not bear the weight placed upon them. The inconsistent and contradictory conclusions that have been drawn about the Druids in fact serve only to emphasise that accurate knowledge of the distant past is in certain respects impossible.
If this is an uncomfortable matter for prehistorians, it is a source of much interest to the more mundane historians of sensibility. The image of the Druid becomes, in short, an image of the society that projects it. That is why the Druid priests came back to life in the 15th century, having been neglected in the medieval centuries as uninteresting or insignificant personages. The Germans were the first to reinvent them as proof that the Germanic people had a worthy spiritual and cultural ancestry. Then a French writer discovered “lost” manuscripts, which had in fact never been written in the first place, purporting to give a history of Gallic Druidry. In England Druids were praised as the original founders of the University of Cambridge. Edward Coke, at a later date, also discovered that they were the founders of English common law. By this stage they could be enlisted in any cause whatsoever.
Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton
Yale, £30; 492 pp
Read the full review in The Times
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