Heritage of the Celtic Druids

The Druids ended up an ancient order of Celtic monks in the societies of Western Europe, Britain and Eire. The Celtic Druids served their communities by combining the responsibilities of seer, priest, poet, thinker, historian, scholar, instructor, health care provider, astronomer and astrologer. The Celts experienced created a extremely subtle religious program, with three divisions of gentlemen who had been held in outstanding honor the cheapest division had been named the Ovates, the second division were named the Bards and then the Druids. The ovates had been the healers and seers the bards memorised the songs, poems, and tales of the tribe (historians) whilst the druids taught moral philosophy and had been professionals in the workings of natural science.

The Celtic Druids have been advisers to the rulers of that time, acted as judges in the celebration of disputes, supervised executions and even managed the legal process. They had been held in these kinds of respect that if they intervened in between two armies they could prevent the fight. The Druid monks and priestesses acted as mediums by way of which the spirits could be summoned and listened to, with rituals through the heritage of the Celtic Druids currently being enacted in sacred groves of oak trees and circles of standing stones

The 1st surviving and fullest account of the druids and their faith is that supplied by Julius Caesar in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, reserve VI, penned in Gaul in 59-51 BC. Overall, not much can be said of the druids with assurance as the resources of information and facts about them is limited. Even so they continued to aspect prominently in afterwards sources of Irish myth and literature. So, the record of the Celtic Druids presents several obscurities and our primary literary sources date again to the 2nd century BC with Pliny and The Commentaries of Caeser.

“The principal place of their doctrine”, Caesar wrote, “is that the soul does not die and that after demise it passes from a single human body into a different.”

Caesar ongoing:

“With regard to their actual system of experiments, the most important object of all schooling is, in their viewpoint, to imbue their students with a business belief in the indestructibility of the human soul, which, according to their perception, merely passes at death from one particular tenement to one more for by these kinds of doctrine alone, they say, which robs loss of life of all its terrors, can the greatest sort of human braveness be designed. Subsidiary to the teachings of this key theory, they hold many lectures and discussions on astronomy, on the extent and geographical distribution of the world, on the unique branches of natural philosophy, and on quite a few problems connected with religion”.

–Julius Cesar, “De Bello Gallico”, VI, 13

Soon after the to start with century BC the continental druids disappeared completely and were referred to only on very scarce events. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the druids of Ireland survived into the mid- to late-seventh century. In the De Mirabilibus Sacrae Scripturae of Augustinus Hibernicus, there is mention of local magi who educate a doctrine of reincarnation in the form of birds.

During the initial millennium, Celtic and Druid spirituality was preserved by the Christian clerics who performed the beneficial company of recording many of the stories and myths by which the oral teachings of the Druids had been conveyed. Men and women who consider that Druidry was destroyed with the coming of Christianity are unsuccessful to recognize the resilience of religious teachings when they are encoded in myths and stories: and it is many thanks to the clerics’ recording of these tales that we can be impressed by them currently. St Patrick also recorded all of the outdated Druid laws in Ireland – supplying us with invaluable information on the ethics and social construction of Celtic Druid culture.

DRUID’S CIRCLES
A Druid’s Circle is a popular title for circles of standing stones these types of as Stonehenge, which is the most well known example. These are also identified as the “Temples of the Druids”. Fantastic mounds of earth ended up also designed exactly where the apply of in search of rebirth in the Earth was executed (in which initiates would sit in darkness awaiting the time of their rebirth). The best case in point of this is observed at New Grange in Ireland, the place a shaft is oriented to the Wintertime Solstice dawn, so that the dawn rays can bathe the initiate in sunlight immediately after his or her vigil as a result of the night.