www.stonehenge-druids.org
It is an absolute article of faith among archaeologists and pre historians that the Druids had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge. Any suggestion that they were once connected with the monument is invariably attributed to the antiquarian William Stukeley, who published a book in 1740 with the unambiguous title of Stonehenge, a Temple Restored to the British Druids.
In later years, Stukeley’s assertions that Stonehenge was associated with the Druids have been ridiculed. He suggested a date of 481 BC for the building of Stonehenge, which is patently wrong, but otherwise, I find myself in a minority of one amongst archaeologists as far as the contentious subject of Stonehenge and the Druids is concerned.
It is not difficult to find apparently authoritative statements scoffing at the idea that the Druids had anything to do with Stonehenge. Indeed, this notion of denial has become almost a mantra and it is hard to find a serious book or web site that does not contain at least a few lines summarily rejecting any connection between the Druids and Stonehenge.
The subject clearly evokes either weary dismissal or else heated passions from the archaeological profession, but I don’t believe that the matter has ever been explored to its fullest extent, despite decades of argument about the subject.
The objections to the Druids being linked to Stonehenge are:
The Druids were an Iron Age cult, while the stone part of Stonehenge was built during the Neolithic and Bronze Age, around 2,000 years before the Druids appeared.
The Druids worshipped in groves, not in stone temples from a previous age.
There is no archaeological evidence for any Druidic activity at Stonehenge.
There is no written or historical evidence for any connection between the Druids and Stonehenge.
At first glance, perhaps, the contention that the Druids were an Iron Age cult seems straightforward enough, but when we begin to subject it to serious scrutiny, it becomes slightly less clear-cut. The Druids were recorded by classical authors as being in existence during the time of Britain’s Iron Age, but there are no known descriptions of Britain dating from the earlier Bronze Age. However, just because there was no outside observer around in an earlier British Bronze Age, it does not automatically follow that the Druids did not exist at that time.
When exactly was this Iron Age in Britain? There’s a unanimous consensus that it ended in 43 AD with the Roman invasion, but estimates of when it started range from 800 BC to 600 BC or thereabouts. This means that if the Druids came into being closer to 800 BC than 600 BC, then by the definitions of many archaeologists, the Druids were an earlier Bronze Age cult as well as an Iron Age one.
The subject is so complicated that it virtually defies description or analysis, but certain authorities equate the Iron Age with the coming of the Celts to Britain at some point during the first millennium BC. As the Druids are defined as an Iron Age institution, this carries the clear implication that the Celts introduced Druidism to Britain, but Julius Caesar was unambiguous on this subject when he wrote, “The Druidic doctrine is believed to have been found existing in Britain and thence imported into Gaul; even today those who want to make a profound study of it generally go to Britain for the purpose.”
In other words, if the Celts were responsible for ushering in the Iron Age to Britain, the Druids were already there in what must by definition have been the Bronze Age. If there’s a more than reasonable chance that the cult was in existence in the Bronze Age, then it’s not completely out of the question that it originated even earlier in the Neolithic period, when Stonehenge was being built.
There is a suggestion of this in Pliny’s Natural History, as he speaks of a plant named selago that the Druids used as a charm against evil, while its smoke was thought to be particularly effective in curing diseases of the eye. Pliny writes that the Druids believed that this plant should be gathered “without using iron”, so we are left with two main options to consider. Magical lore of all ages and from all corners is full of prohibitions on the use of various metals, gems or other physical objects during the performance of any given ritual, so there is nothing unusual about not using iron to gather a plant, especially if it is one with magical properties.
Be that as it may, we are left to wonder if one particular Druid dreamed up the entire concept of “not using iron to gather selago” right in the middle of the Iron Age or whenever it was that the cult was thought to have come into existence. Iron was a relative newcomer to the thinking of these people and traditions have to start somewhere, but a belief that a plant possessed certain medical or magical properties is likely to predate the idea that the same plant shouldn’t be gathered with an iron implement, especially if the technology to produce iron was a relatively recent innovation. In other words, the belief in the plant’s efficacy against evil and diseases of the eye is likely to have originated in the Bronze Age or earlier, which in turn implies that the Druids were the people to have discovered these properties.
Pliny also mentions that the Druids used a golden sickle to cut mistletoe and the earliest gold so far discovered in Britain was found in the grave of the man now known to us as the Amesbury Archer or King of Stonehenge. This gold, reliably dated to 2,470 BC, was discovered along with the earliest known copper implements in Britain, which means that they were forged before the later Bronze Age. Just because the Druids were recorded as using a metal whose use predated the Bronze Age in Britain does not in and of itself place their origin that far back, but when we also bear in mind one prohibition that we know of against using iron to gather a particular plant, it does suggest that at least some of their rites or beliefs predated the poorly-defined Iron Age, during which time they were supposed to have come into being.
As Doctor Joseph Bell advised, it is as well to pay close attention to “the vast importance of little distinctions and the endless significance of trifles.”
Is there anything else in the historical record to suggest that the Druidic cult could have already been extremely ancient when Caesar described it in 55 BC and that it might predate our definition of an Iron Age? Caesar wrote, “The Gauls claim all to be descended from Father Dis, declaring that this is the tradition preserved by the Druids. For this reason they measure periods of time not by days but by nights - and in celebrating birthdays, the first of the month, and New Year’s Day, they go on the principle that the day begins at night.”
Father Dis or Dis Pater was, by the time that Caesar was writing, a Roman god associated with death and with the underworld, although he was originally conceived of as a deity of fertility and underground riches. It seems that the name of the Celtic god whom Caesar equated with Dis Pater is now lost to us, but there’s no question that Caesar was writing about a god of death or the underworld because he goes on to specify that the Gauls’ system for measuring time was based on of periods of darkness.
We shall come to it soon enough, but after the recent discoveries by the Stonehenge Riverside Project, there seems little doubt that Stonehenge was closely linked with death and the afterlife. As it was a unique structure in a highly accessible location, then it seems reasonable to suppose that if an ancient God of Death, the Afterlife or the Underworld were worshipped anywhere in Britain, then it was at Stonehenge. The blunt truth is that no archaeologist can do more than hazard a very wild guess as to when the Druids came into existence other than to say it was at some unknown point during a vaguely-defined Iron Age, but the evidence seems to show that the inception of the Druid religion was earlier rather than later.
In support of this notion is Caesar’s other observation about the extensive body of lore that students of Druidism were required to memorise. He wrote, “…many present themselves of their own accord to become students of Druidism, and others are sent by their parents or relatives. It is said that these pupils have to memorize a great number of verses - so many, that some of them spend twenty years at their studies.” Now, it is impossible to establish just how much information could have been committed to memory in twenty years, but it’s likely to have been a very considerable amount.
Caesar goes on to say:
“The Druids believe that their religion forbids them to commit their teachings to writing, although for most other purposes, such as public and private accounts, the Gauls use the Greek alphabet. But I imagine that this rule was originally established for other reasons - because they did not want their doctrine to become public property, and in order to prevent their pupils from relying on the written word and neglecting to train their memories; for it is usually found that when people have the help of texts, they are less diligent in learning by heart, and let their memories rust.”
There are plentiful examples from our own time of people capable of prodigious feats of recall such as memorising the entire Koran, while the verses of the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally committed to memory and recited long before they were written down. It’s reasonable to assume that people such as the Druids with a longstanding oral tradition were generally capable of more impressive feats than can be accomplished today, so twenty years’ worth of Druidic verse probably constituted at least the equivalent of the entire Iliad and the Odyssey and probably a lot more besides.
So, are we to suppose that there was some kind of Year Zero, well within the confines of the British Iron Age, which was the absolute starting point for this vast body of lore? We’ve already ascertained that Druidism began in Britain, while from Caesar’s description “The Druidic doctrine is believed to have been found existing in Britain and thence imported into Gaul…” it seems that Druidism predated the arrival in Britain of the Celts. Unless the originators of Druidism took severe pains to create their own entirely original canon of verse and knowledge, then logic suggests that parts of it had been handed down to them from an earlier age.
Even if we take the earliest suggested starting point for the Iron Age - 800 BC - and assume that this was when the Druids came into being, then that leaves roughly 760 years between the genesis of the cult and the time when Caesar began to write about them. As many as twenty years were required to memorise the accumulated wisdom, so that works out at roughly one whole year of memorising for every thirty-eight years the Druids had been in existence. Given the capacity of the ancients to commit long tracts to memory, someone somewhere must have been creating a prodigious amount of original verse and accompanying wisdom to require such a long period of memorising by later generations.
I’ve seen estimates, or more accurately wild guesses, that the Druids came into being as late as 300 or even 200 BC, so if we accept these figures, then the ratio of wisdom and verse creation to memorising must have been truly phenomenal. In this scenario, some Druid visionary must have churning out completely new verse and wisdom on an industrial scale to require others in Caesar’s time to need to spend up to twenty years committing it to memory.
Simple common sense suggests that whatever knowledge the Druids were privy to came into their possession at an earlier date in a gradual and cumulative fashion, rather than at a later one where great swathes of it apparently appeared out of nowhere.
To the best of our knowledge, not a single line of a solitary Druidic verse survives, but we still have a very good idea of the subject matter of their lore because it was spelled out for us over two thousand years ago. Caesar wrote “A lesson which they (the Druids) take particular pains to inculcate is that the soul does not perish, but after death passes from one body to another; they think that this is the best incentive to bravery, because it teaches men to disregard the terrors of death. They also hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements, the size of the universe and of the earth, the physical constitution of the world, and the power and properties of the gods; and they instruct the young men in all these subjects.”
The precise wording of what the Druids laboured so hard to memorise may be lost to us, but the subject matter is no secret. They were primarily concerned with studying death and the survival of the soul, as well as the movements of the sun, moon and stars.
The article below is written by the respected archaeologist Dennis Price, kindly reproduced here with his permission from www.eternalidol.com
Stonehenge, a Temple Restored to the British Druids