a summer solstice druid post

Greeting the summer solstice dawn at Stonehenge
photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/14472363215/in/photostream/

It’s the solstice (or it was when I started writing this), and once again, druids are convening at Stonehenge to celebrate. Good for them. Historically inaccurate of them, but good for them nonetheless. After all, there is a long history of people re-using the sites of previous religions to celebrate the rituals of new ones and, while the ongoing, amazing discoveries of the origin and context of Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments are fascinating in and of themselves, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that, without modern Druids and other pagans kicking up a fuss, people wouldn’t be as interested in doing–or funding–all that research.

But who are these druids, and how did they get the idea that Stonehenge belonged to them?

THE IRON AGE DRUIDS

I’ve long been interested in the ways people’s ideas about classes of individuals such as druids and witches have changed over time. Druids are the trickier of the two, because it’s impossible to state with absolute authority what, exactly, they were up to when they were a living element of Iron Age Celtic society. This is because, for reasons that apparently made good sense at the time, druids made a deliberate choice not to leave a paper trail, or much of a stone trail, or etched-on-metal-trail, or (probably) a scratched-onto-wood trail. You got the transient, ephemeral, spoken word from them, and if you didn’t remember it, tough luck. According to Julius Caesar–a biased witness, but you make do with what you have at this distance–druidic education consisted of 20 years of memorizing poetry, in which was encapsulated their religious, scientific, historical, and legal knowledge. Other classical commentators compared Celtic priests and their religious beliefs to those of the ancient Persians, Egyptians, and Hindus. Unfortunately, exactly how they are comparable is usually not very clear.

The original Wicker Man.
“Wicker man (Britannia antiqua illustrata)” by Unknown engraver – http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/early_books/pix/whicker.htm. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wicker_man_(Britannia_antiqua_illustrata).jpg#/media/File:Wicker_man_(Britannia_antiqua_illustrata).jpg

However, we can make some reasonable guesses. For instance, in terms of structure, the Celtic druids are grouped with the Persian magi, the Egyptian priesthood, and the Hindu Brahmins, which were what you might call organized, educated priesthoods: this was not a case of an inspired individual taking charge of a tribe’s religious life, like a Siberian shaman; or of a ritual position passed on solely due to inheritance. This was something you went to school for, something that had a hierarchy and specializations and some kind of international confraternity. Druids seem usually to come in flocks, a chief and an entourage. Sometimes, perhaps in their judicial mode, they sacrificed people–maybe.

The classical comparisons in terms of religious content are to other Indo-European religions–interestingly, to the easternmost Indo-European groups, the Indo-Iranians. But it should also be noted that, as the Roman Empire spread to encompass Gaul and Britannia, local deities were assimilated to Roman ones with, it would seem, relatively little cognitive dissonance for their worshipers. Sulis, the local goddess of Bath, turned into a form of Minerva; Mabon, “the divine son,” was worshiped at Corbridge as Maponos, Maponos Apollo, and Apollo Maponos. In other cases, a Celtic deity (often a goddess of a river or spring) was “married” to a Roman one and the pair worshiped as a divine couple: Rosmerta and Mercury, Sirona and Apollo Grannus, Nemetona and Mars Loucetius (the latter two male deities already assimilated to Celtic local gods). However, of all the Celtic deity names preserved through Roman inscriptions, that vast majority occur only once, and most of them appear to be associated with places rather than general concepts: a goddess of this spring, not the Water Goddess. So it is reasonable to assume that the druids were probably not that different from the Roman priesthood, either, and that their religion was part of the general pattern of Indo-European belief, with a a belief in some form of reincarnation rather than an afterlife and a penchant for localized, place-bound deities. The closest thing to a pan-Celtic deity, based on slim but geographically broad evidence, was Lugh, the many-talented god with shoes on.

Rosmerta and Mercury, a cute couple. From Eisenberg, Donnersbergkreis, ca. 200-250 C.E.
By QuartierLatin1968 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

In addition to their role as religious functionaries, however, druids also were counselors to the king, judges and lawyers, doctors, astronomers, historians, poets, and teachers–the Celtic professional class, the people who were not warriors, farmers, or artisans. (The most convincing evidence, to my mind, for the identification of Lindow Man, the peat-preserved body dug out of a bog near Manchester, England, in 1984, as a druid is that he did not have the musculature of a warrior, who would have over-developed muscles on his sword-arm side, or the scars that would be the inevitable result of working with your hands, either on a farm or in a workshop. In other words, he had the body of a man of thought rather than action, and at the time and place he lived, that means druid.) In many ways, the organization of druids seems to me comparable to that of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge prior to the late nineteenth century, when all Fellows were, de facto, clergy of the Church of England, even if they actually spent all their time on Latin love poetry or turning alchemy into chemistry.

POST-CHRISTIAN DRUIDS

Where we have written accounts of who the druids were and what they were up to, it’s always from outsiders–first the Greek and Roman historians and ethnographers, and then the monks of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland who decided to write down hitherto oral traditions of their pre-Christian past for reasons that are open to debate–possibly to give themselves a native analog to the Old Testament, a history of their world before they saw the light. Possibly presenting druids as local versions of the pagan Roman authorities who persecuted the early continental Christians (although it should be noted that the druids who turn up in Irish hagiographies are more apt to be martyred by the saint under discussion, rather than vice versa). Or possibly because they just couldn’t pass up a good story, no matter what the religious underpinning.

In the medieval period, though, druids per se disappear from the literature and are replaced by magicians (hey there, Merlin!), bards (thanks for stopping by, Taliesin!), radically unorthodox “saints” (hi, Brigit!), and crazed kings (Sweeney, get out of that tree this instant!). Likewise, the Latin and Greek writers who noted the characteristics of Iron Age Celtic society seem to have disappeared from monastic reading lists. As far as I can tell–and I am more than happy to be corrected on this matter–medieval Irish and Welsh monks were not sitting around the scriptorium reading and copying Caesar’s Gallic Wars, taking careful note of the religious customs of the French Gauls, and then constructing stories about their own Irish or Welsh ancestors that bore tantalizingly evocative similarities to classical works about people they probably didn’t realize they were related to. Nor did they deliberately devise stories about their ancestors in order to manufacture startling resemblances to archaeological discoveries that would not be made for some 400 years or more. Whoever wrote down the story of the shoe-making Llew Llaw Gyffes in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi in the White Book of Rhydderch in the late fourteenth century is really unlikely to have been aware that, some 1200 years earlier, a guild of Celtiberian shoemakers had worshiped “the Lughs” in north-central Spain.

It still seems to me–despite several decades of archaeological disavowal of “Celticity”–that the archaeological finds of the modern age in Ireland, Britain, and France; the medieval literature of the Welsh, Irish, Scots, Bretons, Manx, and Cornish; and the observations, however biased, of literate contemporaries of the Iron Age inhabitants of those same areas all cohere into a reasonable whole. Yes, there are geographic and temporal variations; there are things in the archaeological record not explained by literature and vice versa, but all in all, it seems to me that the literature is talking about a people as unified as, say, modern Americans. Which is to say that sometimes groups of people behave in big, generally similar ways and sometimes in small, locally unique ways, but being small and unique does not obviate the big similarities.

EARLY MODERN DRUIDS

So, where was I? Oh yes, druids. And the changing eternal.

To get 1066-and-All-That-ish about it, the Renaissance happened, and everyone was reading Caesar like nobody’s business. And–now that they realized that their world had had, so to speak, layers of occupation over the years–starting to wonder what all those big lumps of stone hanging around the landscape were about, not to mention those hills that, now you come to think about it, really look at them and think about it, didn’t look all that … natural. So they started digging, and trying to correlate what they dug up with what had been written so many centuries ago. Voila: archaeology.

Also, in other breaking news, voila: the Church of England. Enter, among others, William Stukeley.

What the eighteenth century thought a first-century druid looked like. Meta enough for you? From William Stukeley’s Stonehenge (1740).
William Stukeley [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Stukeley (1687-1765) was, first, a doctor; second, an antiquarian-cum-archaeologist; third, an adherent of Speculative Freemasonry and founder of Neo-Druidism; and fourth, an Anglican clergyman (please notice the order here–he took orders because of his archaeological and “druidic” interests). Following the path laid by John Aubrey in his Monumental Britannica (written in manuscript between 1663-1693), Stukeley dug at both Stonehenge and Avebury, as well as other stone circles and megalithic sites, between 1718-1725 and began propounding his theory, in his Stonehenge: A Temple Restored to the British Druids (1740) and Avebury: A Temple of the British Druids, with some others, Described (1743), that these monuments were the work of druids–and that druids were proponents of an “Abrahamic religion” and therefore, in essence, wandering Jews who were just waiting for Christ to come around so that they could turn to the true faith. (Henry Rowlands was another early archaeologist-clergyman who came to a similar conclusion.)

Stukeley was the big name in this line, but it is here, in the early modern period, roughly between the reigns of Charles II and George III, that the idea that the druids are responsible for Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments arises and worms its way inextricably into the public consciousness. This is when men in fancy dress start performing dawn rituals at Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice. Stukeley made the perfectly scientific observation that a Roman road cuts through the site of Stonehenge, and therefore Stonehenge must predate the Roman occupation of Britain; since, as far as anyone knew at the time, the only people in Britain before the Romans were the Celts, this “obviously” religious monument must have been built by and for the Celtic clergy: the druids. That was Stukeley’s conclusion, and he ran with it. And many still run with it, to this day.

Further reading

I am, of course, fond of my own Druid Shaman Priest: Metaphors of Celtic Paganism, which is out of print but still floating around. For further thoughts on the subject of druidic human sacrifice, my thoughts are laid out at length in a paper I presented at the UCLA Celtic Colloquium in 2000, titled “‘Hi, My Name’s Fox’?: An Alternative Explication of ‘Lindow Man’s’ Fox Fur Armband and Its Relevance to the Question of Human Sacrifice among the Celts.”

Ronald Hutton’s books on British paganism, real and imagined, are the go-to books on the subject; Blood and Mistletoe: A History of the Druids in Britain is obviously the place to start, but I’m also quite fond of The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (where it all started) and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.

It seems like every time you turn around, they’ve discovered something new about Stonehenge and environs. The most recent book by the guy in charge of the excavations is Stonehenge–A New Understanding: Solving the Mysteries of the Greatest Stone Age Monument by Mike Parker Pearson.

Welsh history, Welsh legend

the Madoc legend

Prince Madoc Leaving Wales, by William Cullen Bryant / C. Scribner’s Sons (1888) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

So here’s the story: after the death of Owein Gwynedd in 1170, his five million sons immediately began fighting over who would reign over the kingdom of Gwynedd in his stead. One of these sons–Madoc–decided that he was not interested in internecine warfare and set sail to the West, where he eventually landed some-undetermined-where on the shores of North America. Pleased with what he found, he returned to Wales and spread word of this Elysium to the West, gathered together a couple of shiploads of colonists equally fed up with intrafamilial squabbling, and sailed back into the West, never to be heard from again … until the more well-known colonization of the Americas in the early modern period, when stories of “Welsh-speaking Indians” began to spread, with some interesting results.

Okay, five million sons is a bit of an exaggeration; the whole population of Wales in the late thirteenth century has been estimated at about 100,000, so presumably the population was even lower a hundred years earlier, and even less than that in the kingdom of Gwynedd. However, Owein Gwynedd did have some thirteen children, at least seven of them sons, both legitimate and illegitimate. In medieval Welsh law, acknowledged illegitimate sons were equal heirs in a system that divided the inheritance among all male offspring (daughters got their cut as dowry), rather than the eldest-takes-all system of primogeniture. On the surface, this seems like a much more equitable–dare one say, socialist–method of providing for one’s progeny; the problem arises when some smartypants thinks things through, sees that even the most wealthy parent’s estate is still finite, and realizes that they will be better off in the long run with fewer siblings. Likewise, the medieval Welsh theory that a king should be elected by the kinship group of the previous king’s extended family sounds nascently democratic; the lingering archaic notion that a king must be physically whole and perfect, however, led ambitious warriors to industriously scuttle the chances of their brothers and uncles by blinding and/or castrating as many as they could get their hands on. They usually tried to avoid actually killing any of their rivals, though, because that would be murder! (See Thomas Charles-Edwards on Welsh dynastic succession in his Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, chapter 6.) Madoc was said to be one of Owein’s acknowledged illegitimate sons, and an unlikely heir to his father’s throne, but he realized that his chances of reaching a ripe old age with all his bodily members intact increased exponentially the further he got from the bosom of his loving family.

“Excalibur novel” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Excalibur_novel.jpg#/media/File:Excalibur_novel.jpg

I first encountered the Madoc legend when I was about 14, in the novel Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laubenthal–one of those life-changing novels you pick up almost by accident in your early teens and nothing is ever the same. My father covered motor sports for Sports Illustrated at the time, and it was decided that the whole family would accompany him to Florida, where he was covering the Daytona 500, and then proceed to visit my grandfather and his new wife in Naples. I have about three vague fragments of memory of sitting in the stand at the Daytona Speedway, a relatively vivid one of going shopping for crates of oranges to send back to the other grandparents up in the frozen wastelands of suburban New York, and a conglomerate, ineradicable memory of the bookstore in a shopping center down the street from our hotel that I think we must have visited every day we were there. Because that’s what we do, we Joneses, when we are on vacation: we go to bookstores, buy books, and sit together in a room, reading. The bookstore was utterly charmless–as far as I can reconstruct from my memory, it was an old supermarket where they had swept away the canned goods and filled all the shelves with books, or that’s what it felt like. (It was probably a nascent Barnes and Noble, before they got the idea of setting different book sections at angles to each other.) But it was huge. I had never seen so many books all in one place outside of a library–in other words, it was a library that all could, potentially, be mine. Forever. And they had pretty much the entire run of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which is where I found Excalibur. I think I read it in one swallow, out by the hotel pool and late into the night in bed.

One of the places where Madoc is said to have landed is Mobile, Alabama, where the Daughters of the American Revolution raised a plaque in his memory in 1953 (eventually removed in 2008). Laubenthal’s story takes place in Mobile, where a Welsh archaeologist is searching for the remains of Madoc’s settlement–and for the treasure Madoc brought with him: Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. The archaeologist is opposed by the undying sorceress, Morgan le Fay, and his quest for the sword, interwoven with another character’s quest for the Grail, proceeds on several levels, pagan and Christian, Welsh and American, this-worldly and Otherworldly. I was already vaguely interested in Arthurian literature and early medieval British archaeology; this is one of the books that set me firmly on the road to studying the Welsh stratum of Arthuriana.

Here’s the problem: Owein Gwynedd had too many sons, but until about the fifteenth century, none of them was named Madoc. Madoc doesn’t appear in any of the Welsh genealogies–and the medieval Welsh were serious about their geneaologies–and the story bears a striking resemblance to Irish legends of both pagan and Christian seafarers setting off to the West and discovering wondrous lands. The Voyage of Bran, son of Febal and The Voyage of Saint Brendan are the two most famous of these. Medieval Welsh princes who found the homeland too hot for them often set off to the West with an entourage, but usually only made it as far as Ireland–where they would likely have heard stories like those of Bran and Brendan. It’s probable that the story of Madoc began as a Welsh version of this kind of voyage tale.

Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae, the first printed reference to Madoc’s voyage.
By David Powel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In 1559, Humphrey Llwyd published his Cronica Walliae, a Latin version of the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion (the Chronicle of the Princes, a follow-on of sorts to the Brut y Brenhinedd or Chronicle of the Kings, itself a Welsh version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Brittaniae where Arthur makes his debut in the broader world of European letters–all this material cycling and circling in and out and between and among Welsh and Latin versions, with correspondingly small and large audiences. The Welsh tell each other stories; some of them seep out to the larger British populace and everyone goes nuts over them; the Welsh get quite proud of them and retranslate them back into Welsh and add their own embellishments; lather, rinse, repeat). Llwyd included Madoc’s discovery of the New World in his Cronica, and some twenty years later, Dr. John Dee–London-born but proudly of Welsh descent–presented the notion to Queen Elizabeth that, by a tortuous route through the Tudors’ own Welsh ancestry, she had, through Madoc, a far more legitimate claim to the riches of the Americas than those irritating Spaniards, ptui.

As a propaganda point, the late-Tudor legend of Madoc exploded from whatever backwater it had inhabited into the mainstream. It was particularly attractive to the Welsh, many of whom had followed their Mab Darogan (“prophesied son”), Henry VII, to London in search of greater opportunity. English people thus became somewhat accustomed to the sounds–but not the sense–of the Welsh language, and when immigration to the Americas brought them in contact with other peoples speaking equally incomprehensible languages, it appears that they frequently jumped to the conclusion that these guttural babblers were speaking Welsh. The Welsh, meanwhile, not finding quite as many opportunities as hoped for in England and becoming increasingly oppressed in Wales, began to dream of another prophesied land in the Americas, where they would be reunited with their long-lost Welsh-speaking brothers. By the eighteenth century, there were Welsh-backed expeditions mounted to discover these Welsh Indians–who always lived just over the mountain or just down the river from whoever had told the story to whoever was telling it now–and while they never did find Welsh-speaking Indians, they did trek through large swaths of the interior of the continent in the attempt. Thus, while it is unlikely that a twelfth-century Welshman discovered the Americas, the search for traces of him led to the discovery of much about them.

But what would have happened if “Madoc” and his followers did settle and prosper in North America in the twelfth century? The whole interface between Europeans and Americans would have gone down a completely different path. For one thing, these settlers would have arrived looking for a quiet place to live, rather than a source of riches to haul back home. Presumably they would have had the sense to approach the natives of the place with somewhat more humility and a cooperative mindset. There would not have been as big a difference in the two peoples’ respective military technologies in the age before the invention of muskets, and since the Welsh were not traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, their inadvertent importation of Old World diseases might not have had such a catastrophic effect on the Americans. Perhaps a less drastic introduction to diseases like smallpox would have served to immunize the Americans rather than decimate them. By the time early modern European navigation and the exploratory mindset had developed, Americans might have been much better ready to stand up to them. Think of Madoc and his Welsh as a hypothetical Euro-vaccination for the New World.

I like to think, on absolutely no evidence at all, that the Madocian Welsh landed in the vicinity of Cape May, New Jersey, where they would have first encountered the Lenni-Lenape, an Eastern Algonquian-speaking group whose culture had some interesting consonances with the traces of ancient Brythonic culture and mythology that survive in the medieval Welsh tales of the Mabinogi (which were probably in their early stages of being compiled and/or written down from oral tradition when Madoc left Wales). Chief among these is “the avunculate” (see Tomas O Cathasaigh, “The Sister’s Son in Early Irish Literature,” Peritia 5 [1986]:128-60) in which the raising of children is the primary responsibility, not of their father, but of their mother’s brother. And if, as I have absolutely no evidence for proposing, the real reason Madoc left Wales was that he was the chief of the last Welsh druids, the leader of a band of pagan Pilgrims, perhaps the structure of the Celtic religion was more consonant with that of the Lenni-Lenape. The chief god among Algonqiuan peoples took the form of a large rabbit; Dio Cassius implies that Andraste, the goddess of the Iceni, was linked with the hare when he describes Boudicca releasing a hare to take omens from its running before declaring war on the Romans. The clannish structure of medieval Welsh kingdoms was certainly congruous with the clans and phratries of the Lenni-Lenape. And one can’t help thinking that the Lenni-Lenape’s somewhat underdog position among their neighbors, nonetheless united with a status as the oldest group, the “grandfathers,” of the area, is consonant with the status and reputation of the Welsh among the English.

At any rate, it’s fun to think so.

foundation myth

Once upon a time (1987, to be precise), there were three little teaching assistants: Leslie, Susan, and Dan. In those days, when Folklore was a discipline in which you could get a Masters or PhD at UCLA, the field was going through one of its periodic convulsions in which everyone and his youngest brother was arguing about what folklore “really” is. A useful side effect of this exercise is that, once you have defined folklore to your fancy (which generally boils down to “what I like to study”), it becomes possible to define people who don’t fit that definition as “not real folklorists.” For it is a truth universally acknowledged, at least among folklorists, that all folklorists are good folklorists, and anyone whose work isn’t up to snuff isn’t a bad folklorist, or a sloppy scholar, or a just plain annoying person who won’t shut up at faculty meetings, but isn’t really a folklorist at all.

Jacob and William Grimm–a couple of real folklorists! Don’t they look interesting?

Susan studied how people told stories about things that had happened to them in the course of daily life. Dan studied people who saw visions of the Virgin Mary, space aliens, and other things that probably don’t exist in mundane reality. Leslie studied comparative mythology, especially medieval Celtic stories about journeys to the Otherworld. And all of them had been told at one point or another that they weren’t real folklorists. One day, as they were sitting around in the TA office, they came to the conclusion that all this arguing about “real” folklore was a waste of time.

“We study this stuff because it’s interesting,” one of them said.

“So why don’t we just change the name of the Center for Folklore and Mythology Studies to the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff and get down to studying it rather than wasting time arguing about it?” said another. (I’m pretty sure it was me, but Susan or Dan may dispute this. It wouldn’t be a myth worth its salt if there weren’t variants.)

“Yeah!” said the third, because there had to be dialogue for everyone. “As long as it’s real interesting, you can come here and study it.”

And thus was born the idea for the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff.

The Gundestrup Cauldron. You could spend a lifetime thinking about the imagery on this thing.

UCLA eventually threw its weight behind the alternative notion of changing the name of the Folklore and Mythology Center and Program to “Closed for Business.” Dan became a bona fide professor of Folklore, which is a mightily legitimating position to be in, so if he finds something interesting, it’s folklore enough to be getting on with. Susan became a corporate librarian, where she doesn’t have to worry about how people tell stories but still pays attention, because it’s interesting. And I became an academic editor and writer and intellectual flibbertigibbet, because there is just too much Interesting Stuff in the world. Ooooooh, shiny!

But the Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff (CSRIS) never really left me. For the last two years, I’ve been working on a Novel As Yet To Be Securely Titled that mashes up a lot of Celtic mythology with steampunk, alternate history, and anything else that takes my fancy. It’s set in 1920 in a world where, due to a concatenation of circumstances, the New World was colonized by the Welsh in the late twelfth century and, rather than having a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, Northern Europe reverted to its various indigenous paganisms. Oh yeah, and there are Galatian bellydancers.(“What do I want to have in this novel?” I asked myself. “Prince Madoc! And Druids! And … and bellydancers!” And for a while I thought I was sunk, until I remembered that there was a tribe of Celts who, in the second century BCE, made it as far east as central Anatolia and were still speaking a recognizably Celtic language in the fourth century CE, but who surely picked up some local habits as well ….)

It strikes me that a CSRIS is a perfect venue to talk about the background to what I’m writing, through essays, musing, rants, book reviews, and imagery: Celtic mythology, Welsh history and language, 1920s fashion and design, bellydance (particularly of a Turkish bent) and its music, Bollywood item numbers, alternate history and steampunk, paganism (neo- and otherwise), the most interesting cats in the world, and all the other shiny, pretty stuff there is to think with.

Because as long as it’s interesting, we don’t need no steenkin’ academic disciplines.

Florrie and Nellie, the Most Interesting Cats in the World

The Center for the Study of Real Interesting Stuff

"we don't need no steenkin' academic disciplines"

Tag Archives: druids

a summer solstice druid post

the Madoc legend

foundation myth