The Celtic and Druidic revival

What it is

Modern Druidry: a family of religious and cultural movements claiming inspiration from the druids of pre-Roman Britain, Ireland and Gaul.

It ranges from explicitly religious orders through cultural and bardic bodies to environmental and philosophical groupings, and it has legal standing — The Druid Network was accepted as a religious charity in England and Wales in 2010.

Where it came from

Almost nothing is known about the ancient druids, and this needs saying without hedging.

Everything comes from classical authors — Caesar, Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus — writing as outsiders, often as enemies, about a people they were conquering. Caesar reports that the druids considered it improper to commit their learning to writing, which if true means there is no internal source and never was. Archaeology gives ritual deposits and structures that cannot be securely attached to a priesthood.

We do not know what they believed, how they were organised, what they did, or whether the classical accounts of human sacrifice are reportage or propaganda. The honest scholarly position is close to blank.

The revival began in antiquarian error. John Aubrey and then William Stukeley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries connected Stonehenge with the druids. This is wrong by a very wide margin — Stonehenge was built between roughly 3000 and 1500 BCE, more than a thousand years before anything recognisably Celtic in Britain. The association is entirely modern and has proved impossible to dislodge.

And then there is Iolo Morganwg. Edward Williams (1747–1826) was a Welsh stonemason, poet, radical and laudanum addict of prodigious energy, and one of the most consequential literary forgers in British history.

He produced quantities of "medieval" Welsh manuscripts he had written himself. He invented a druidic theology, published after his death as Barddas. And in 1792, on Primrose Hill in London, he convened the first Gorsedd of Bards — a ceremony he had made up, presented as the survival of an unbroken druidic order.

The Gorsedd is now a genuine Welsh national institution. It is central to the National Eisteddfod, it has conferred honours on Welsh cultural figures for two centuries, and it is a real and valued part of Welsh cultural life. It was founded on forgery, and Welsh scholars established this long ago, and it continues — which is the invented tradition pattern at its clearest and least embarrassed.

The Ancient Order of Druids was founded in 1781, and OBOD — the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids — in 1964 by Ross Nichols, whose conversations with Gerald Gardner produced the eight-fold Wheel of the Year that both movements now use.

How it is practised

Seasonal ceremony, often at the solstices and equinoxes and often outdoors; a three-grade structure of bard, ovate and druid in OBOD-derived orders; environmental commitment, which is central for many modern druids; and creative and poetic work.

Celtic Reconstructionism is a distinct and more scholarly current, attempting to rebuild practice from the surviving Irish and Welsh literature and from archaeology rather than from the revival tradition — and generally critical of it.

What we can and cannot say

We can say modern Druidry is a modern religion, and that the better-informed orders say so themselves. Its lineage runs to the eighteenth century, not to the Iron Age.

We can say the specific inventions are documented and datable: Stukeley's Stonehenge, Iolo's Gorsedd and Barddas, Graves's tree calendar in 1948, and the eight-fold Wheel in the 1950s.

We can say "Celtic spirituality" as a Christian category is also largely constructed. The idea of a distinctive Celtic Christianity — nature-loving, poetic, egalitarian, at odds with a legalistic Rome — is a modern composition. Donald Meek's The Quest for Celtic Christianity (2000) traces how it was assembled, and there was no separate "Celtic Church" in the sense the phrase implies.

We can say none of this makes contemporary practice worthless. People have kept these observances for generations, attached real meaning to them, and built communities on them. What is not sustainable is the claim of ancient descent — which is checkable, and has been checked.

We cannot say what the druids did. The most honest sentence in this article is that we do not know.

Further reading

• Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (2009) — definitive.
• Ronald Hutton, The Druids (2007) — the shorter version.
• Donald Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity (2000).