Druid Mysteries: Ancient Wisdom for the 21st Century

It was only one of their duties to record the lore, laws and genealogy of the tribe.

Some saw the Druids as evil and primitive human sacrificers, while others saw them as peace-making sages and philosophers – presiding over a body of teachings as dignified as that of the Greeks or the Brahmins.

And Philostratus of Tyana in the second century noted that the Celts believed that to be born in this world, we have to die in the Otherworld, and conversely, that when we die here, our birth into the Otherworld should be celebrated.

Caesar tells us that Druidry originated in Britain, and that students were sent from Gaul to Britain for training.

Often when the combatants are ranged face to face, and swords are drawn and spears bristling, these men come between the armies and stay the battle, just as wild beasts are sometimes held spellbound. Thus even among the most savage barbarians anger yields to wisdom, and Mars is shamed before the Muses. (Diodorus Siculus Histories, circa 8 BC)

The seasons are clearly cyclical – one following the other inexorably.

While the Druid Revival began in the seventeenth century, with interest in the megalithic monuments of Britain and the rediscovered classical texts, it gained momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and resulted in the development of three separate, though related, manifestations of Druidism.

William Stukeley. Born in 1687, Stukeley, a young Lincolnshire doctor, had found himself drawn to Stonehenge after seeing engravings of the site.

Celebrating life, the body and its pleasures, as this story shows, does not mean sinking into a purely materialistic and hedonist lifestyle.