THE DRUIDS.
"----You Druids now maintain
Your barbarous rites, and sacrifice again;
You what heaven is, and gods alone can tell,
Or else alone are ignorant: you dwell
In vast and desert woods; you teach no spirit,
Pluto's pale kingdom can by death inherit:
They in another world inform again,
The space betwixt two lives is all the death."
LUCAN'S PHARSALIA, _T. May's Translation_, 1635.
To Julius Cæsar we are indebted for the clearest description of the
religious rites and ceremonies of the Druids; and as he beheld them
administered by these Priests to the ancient Britons, so they had no
doubt existed for several centuries before the Roman invasion, and
are therefore matters of history, prior to that period. There was a
wild poetry about their heathenish creed, something gloomy, and grand,
and supernatural in the dim, dreamy old forests where their altars
were raised: in the deep shadows which hung over their rude grey
cromlechs, on which the sacred fire burned. We catch glimpses between
the gnarled and twisted stems of those magnificent and aged oaks of
the solemn-looking druid, in his white robe of office, his flowing
beard blown for a moment aside, and breaking the dark green of the
underwood with the lower portion of his sweeping drapery, while he
stands like a grave enchanter, his deep sunk and terrible eyes fixed
upon the blue smoke as it curls upward amid the foliage--fixed, yet
only to appearance; for let but a light and wandering expression
pass over one single countenance in that assembled group, and those
deep grey piercing eyes would be seen glaring in anger upon the
culprit, and whether it were youth or maiden they would be banished
from the sacrifice, and all held accursed who dared to commune with
them--a curse more terrible than that which knelled the doom of
the excommunicated in a later day. There were none bold enough to
extinguish the baleful fire which was kindled around the wicker idol,
when its angry flames went crackling above the heads of the human
victims who were offered up to appease their brutal gods. In the centre
of their darksome forests were their rich treasures piled together,
the plunder of war; the wealth wrested from some neighbouring tribe;
rich ornaments brought by unknown voyagers from distant countries in
exchange for the tin which the island produced; or trophies won by
the British warriors who had fought in the ranks of the Gauls on the
opposite shore--all piled without order together, and guarded only
by the superstitious dread which they threw around everything they
possessed; for there ever hung the fear of a dreadful death over the
head of the plunderer who dared to touch the treasures which were
allotted to the awful druids. They kept no written record of their
innermost mysteries, but amid the drowsy rustling of the leaves and
the melancholy murmuring of the waters which ever flowed around their
wooded abodes, they taught the secrets of their cruel creed to those
who for long years had aided in the administration of their horrible
ceremonies, who without a blanched cheek or a quailing heart had grown
grey beneath the blaze of human sacrifices, and fired the wicker pile
with an unshaken hand--these alone were the truly initiated. They left
the younger disciples to mumble over matters of less import--written
doctrines which taught how the soul passed into other bodies in
never-ending succession; but they permitted them not to meddle in
matters of life and death; and many came from afar to study a religion
which armed the druids with more than sovereign power. All law was
administered by the same dreaded priests; no one dared to appeal from
their awful decree; he who was once sentenced had but to bow his head
and obey--rebellion was death, and a curse was thundered against all
who ventured to approach him; from that moment he became an outcast
amongst mankind. To impress the living with a dread of their power
even after death, they hesitated not in their doctrines to proclaim,
that they held control over departed and rebellious souls; and in the
midnight winds that went wailing through the shadowy forests, they
bade their believers listen to the cry of the disembodied spirits who
were moaning for forgiveness, and were driven by every blast that blew
against the opening arms of the giant oaks; for they gave substance
to shadows, and pointed out forms in the dark-moving clouds to add
to the terrors of their creed. They worshipped the sun and moon, and
ever kept the sacred fire burning upon some awful altar which had been
reddened by the blood of sacrifice. They headed the solemn processions
to springs and fountains, and muttered their incantations over the
moving water, for, next to fire, it was the element they held in the
highest veneration. But their grand temples--like Stonehenge--stood
in the centre of light, in the midst of broad, open, and spacious
plains, and there the great Beltian fire was kindled; there the distant
tribes congregated together, and unknown gods were evoked, whose very
names have perished, and whose existence could only be found in the
wooded hill, the giant tree, or the murmuring spring or fountain, over
which they were supposed to preside. There sat the arch-druid, in his
white surplice, the shadow of the mighty pillars of rough-hewn stone
chequering the stony rim of that vast circle--from his neck suspended
the wonderful egg which his credulous believers said fell from twined
serpents, that vanished hissing high in the air, after having in vain
pursued the mounted horseman who caught it, then galloped off at full
speed--that egg, cased in gold, which could by its magical virtues
swim against the stream. He held the mysterious symbol of office, in
his hands more potent than the sceptre swayed by the most powerful of
monarchs that ever sat upon our island throne, as he sat with his brow
furrowed by long thought, and ploughed deep by many a meditated plot,
while his soul spurned the ignorant herd who were assembled around
him, and he bit his haughty lip at the thought that he could devise no
further humiliation than to make them kneel and lick the sand on which
he stood.
They held the mistletoe which grew on the oak sacred, and on the sixth
day of the moon came in solemn procession to the tree on which it grew,
and offered up sacrifice, and prepared a feast beneath its hallowed
branches, adorning themselves with its leaves, as if they could never
sufficiently reverence the tree on which the mistletoe grew, although
they named themselves druids after the oak. White bulls were dragged
into the ceremony; their stiff necks bowed, and their broad foreheads
bound to the stem of the tree, while their loud bellowings came in like
a wild chorus to the rude anthem which was chaunted on the occasion:
these were slaughtered, and the morning sacrifice went streaming up
among the green branches. The chief druid ascended the oak, treading
haughtily upon the bended backs and broad shoulders of the blinded
slaves, who struggled to become stepping-stones beneath his feet, and
eagerly bowed their necks that he might trample upon them, while he
gathered his white garment in his hand, and drew it aside, lest it
should become sullied by touching their homely apparel. Below him stood
his brother idolators, their spotless garments outspread ready to catch
the falling sprigs of the mistletoe as they dropped beneath the stroke
of the golden pruning-knife. Doubtless the solemn mockery ended by the
assembled multitude carrying home with them a leaf or a berry each,
of the all-healing plant, as it was called, while the druids lingered
behind to consume the fatted sacrifice, and forge new fetters to bind
down their ignorant followers to their heathenish creed. Still it is
on record that they taught their disciples many things concerning
the stars and their motion; that they pretended to some knowledge
of distant countries, and the nature of the gods they worshipped.
Gildas, one of the earliest of our British historians, seeming to
write from what he saw, tells us that their idols almost surpassed in
number those of Egypt, and that monuments were then to be seen (in his
day) of "hideous images, whose frigid, ever-lowering, and depraved
countenances still frown upon us both within and outside the walls of
deserted cities. We shall not," he says, "recite the names that once
were heard on our mountains, that were repeated at our fountains,
that were echoed on our hills, and were pronounced over our rivers,
because the honours due to the Divinity alone were paid to them by a
blinded people." That their religion was but a system of long-practised
imposture admits not of a doubt; and as we have proof that they
possessed considerable knowledge for that period, it is evident that
they had recourse to these devices to delude and keep in subjection
their fellow-men, thereby obtaining a power which enabled them to live
in comparative idleness and luxury. Such were the ancient Egyptian
priests; and such, with but few exceptions, were all who, for many
centuries, held mighty nations in thrall by the mystic powers with
which they cunningly clothed idolatry. True, there might be amongst
their number a few blinded fanatics, who were victims to the very
deceit which they practised upon others, whose faculties fell prostrate
before the imaginary idols of their own creation, and who bowed down
and worshipped the workmanship of their own hands.
All the facts we are in possession of show that they contributed
nothing to the support of the community; they took no share in war,
though they claimed their portion of the plunder obtained from it;
they were amenable to no tribunal but their own, but only sat apart
in their gloomy groves, weaving their dangerous webs in darker folds
over the eyes of their blinded worshippers. We see dimly through the
shadows of those ancient forests where the druids dwelt; but amongst
the forms that move there we catch glimpses of women sharing in their
heathen rites; it may be of young and beautiful forms, who had the
choice offered them, whether they would become sacrifices in the fires
which so often blazed before their grim idols, or share in the solemn
mockeries which those darksome groves enshrouded--those secrets which
but to whisper abroad would have been death.
The day of reckoning at last came--as it is ever sure to come--and
heavy was the vengeance which alighted upon those bearded druids;
instead of such living and moving evils, the mute marble of the less
offensive gods which the Romans worshipped usurped the places where
their blood-stained sacrifices were held. Jupiter frowned coldly down
in stone, but he injured not. Mars held his pointed spear aloft,
but the dreaded blow never descended. They saw the form of man
worshipped, and though far off, it was still a nearer approach to the
true Divinity than the wicker idol surrounded with flames, and filled
with the writhing and shrieking victims who expired in the midst of
indescribable agonies. Hope sat there mute and sorrowful, with her head
bowed, and her finger upon her lip, listening for the sound of those
wings which she knew would bring Love and Mercy to her aid. She turned
not her head to gaze upon those heathenish priests as they were dragged
forward to deepen the inhuman stain which sunk deep into the dyed
granite of the altar, for she knew that the atmosphere their breath had
so long poisoned must be purified before the Divinity could approach;
for that bright star which was to illume the world had not yet arisen
in the east. The civilized heathen was already preparing the way in
the wilderness, and sweeping down the ruder barbarism before him. There
were Roman galleys before, and the sound of the gospel-trumpet behind;
and those old oaks jarred again to their very roots, and the huge
circus of Stonehenge shook to its broad centre; for the white cliffs
that looked out over the sea were soon to echo back a strange language,
for Roman cohorts, guided by Julius Cæsar, were riding upon the waves.