A Brief History of the Druids [antikvár]

IntroductionIdentifying the DruidsIf this were an academic dissertation, I would probably choose the subtitle 'An introductory argument'. The French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, once said: 'There are no final truths. The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.' In no field is it more necessary to ask the right questions than when attempting to discover the Druids. The simple truth is that one person's Druid is another person's fantasy. The Druids have been conjured in a wide variety of perceptions, as to who they were, what they believed and what they taught, since the sixteenth century. The basic problem is that no Druid, nor sympathetic contemporary observer, ever committed to writing the necessary unequivocal information for our latter-day understanding. We have to search diligently among many sources to come up with our answers and, as Lévi-Strauss implies, the result of the search depends on what questions we ask.In spite of several references to Druids in Greek and Latin writings and in spite of the traditions recorded in the native Celtic literatures, we are still far from being absolutely knowledgeable.It is true that we possess a few respectful Greek sources; but the bulk of the 'Classical' observations consist of the anti-Celtic propaganda of the Roman Empire. There has been a tendency for scholars to accept these sources as giving us facts writ in stone which are not to be questioned. By the time the Celts themselves came to commit their knowledge to writing, they had become Christianized and, not surprisingly, the Druids continued to get 'a bad Press'. Their portrayal remains an extremely biased one. And when some of the 'gendemen antiquarians' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries felt that they could see the Druids in a more sympathetic light, they romanticized them out of all recognidon to what their rőle in Celtic society originally was.Most people these days would be able to make some response if