Who were the Druids?

They were not, as imagined in the 1970's, people who stood in stone circles wearing funny robes and chanting. The stone circles belong to the neolithic (they were primitive clocks and were built by people who worshipped the sun) and the druids were iron age people, and as we shall see, their culture was a reaction to the neolithic.

Druid means "men of the oak", deriving from the welsh word for oak; "derv", oak trees; "derwen". In Cornish the word for oak is "dar", and also "glastan". In Gaelic it is "dair". The place "KillDare" in Ireland is a corruption of "church of the oak", kill=church dare=oak.

Above are two great oak trees that are all that's left of an aveneue of oaks that led up to Glastonbury Tor (tor is the old Brythonic word for "hill", so Glastonbury Tor means "oak hill" in Cornish) source pinterrest

Sadly the oaks were cutdown in 1906. As recorded in the book "St. Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury" (1955) by Rev L Smithett Lewis:

From them ran also an avenue of oaks which led towards the Tor. This grove and avenue were shamefully cut down about 1906 to clear the ground of a farm! The trees were immense. They were all sold to Messrs. J. Snow & Son, timber merchants of Glastonbury. Mr. Curtis of that firm remembers five boys standing in one of them called Magog when he was a boy. The real Magog was cut down and so probably was the real Gog. Magog was eleven feet in diameter, and more than 2,000 season-rings were counted. Besides the two trees still called Gog and Magog, there are, by an ancient narrow road, now a lane, the remains of five other immense oaks. The biggest of all (possibly the real Gog) is cut down and prone on its side, and looks from the road across a field something like a shed. In hedges there are two other giants just dragging out the last flicker of life, and there are fragments of two other dead monarchs (doubtless some of those that were cut down) in hedges.

2000 season rings means they were planted about 500 years before the Romans came to Britain.

As you have probably guessed by now, Druid religion was about worship of trees. To understand why, we need to go back to the Stone Age.

The stone age is divided into three periods, the Paleolithic (old stone age), mezolithic (middle stone age), and neolithic(new stone age). During the Paleolithic and Mezolithic, humans were hunter-gatherers, the eras are distinguished only by the types of stone tools they used. But the neolithic was transformative, because this is the era when we transitioned from hunter-gathering to farming.

The neolithic was an incredibly destructive era, as far as nature went, and this is because our ancestors were brand new to farming and didn't really know what they were doing. They simply planted things, watered them, were delighted when they grew and did it all again the following year. However, in a natural forest, there is always soil formation and soil renewal due to deciduous trees shedding their leaves, which gently decompose to form organic matter. With no such soil renewal, the early farms ceased to yield crops, and the neolithic simply cut down a new section of forest to farm instead.

In addition, the animals domesticated by the neolithic were also voracious eaters. Farming started in the middle east, in between the river Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, and all domesticated animals originated there. Goats in particular would have eaten everything in sight, including brand new tree shoots. In a few decades, the areas the neolithic people were cultivating were turning into desert, and they started moving to find fresh fertile land. The idea of farming spread before the destructive effects of it did. So what were a small group of people living independently across Europe, were cutting down ancient forests in a prodigious manner and the forests of Europe started to disappear in just 500 years. As the trees disappeared, the land became stressed and rain became scarce.

Some neolithic people did figure it out: for example the Egyptians of the Nile Valley suddenly realised that everything grew better after the Nile's annual flood deposited silt in the fields, and thus organised themselves to plant only after the flood.

In Europe it took much longer to realise this, and it wasn't till the Iron Age and the coming of the Celts that intelligent land management came into being.

Most of what we know about the Celts comes from Julius Caesar's observations as he encountered them and defeated them. The Celts originated somewhere in Austria, and their culture spread, (though we think the people did not - rather local people elsewhere adopted the Celtic religion). According to Julius Caesar, the Celts of Gaul and Britain had three tiers: druids (priests), knights (warriors) and peasants (workers). The druids, he said, were incredibly secretive. They could write, but never wrote down anything to do with religion, only business and commerce was put into writing. Everything else was transmitted through oral poems and only to fellow Druids. It was obviously to keep the core of the religion secret, even from other Celts.

A clue as to what this was all about is in their worship of trees. For people throughout time, including today, the key aspect to survival is water, and trees are a key part to controlling the hydrocycle.

The hydrocycle is the endless manner in which water evaporates, forms clouds and then precipitates again. But climate frequently blows clouds away, for example causing deserts by evaporating all moisture in one place, and precipitating it a thousand miles elsewhere. Trees can help regulate this cycle. When rain falls on grassland or desert, a small amount will soak into the earth, but the bulk will sit on the surface and will evaporate, and the rest will run off towards the sea.

However, in the presence of a large amount of trees, most of the water soaks into the land. The roots of the trees have cut channels into the earth and water follows the channels down, aided by gravity. Eventually the water reaches non-porous rock and will pool there, and some will come back up in the form of a spring. In addition, trees with very deep roots are able to access the water table, and take in water, which they then give off in the form of dew. Thus if you have a large forest, you tend to get rain, simply due to the water vapour exuded from trees precipitating back down.

The Druids probably didn't understand the full science of the hydrocycle, but had observed that "trees bring rain", and trees were important to the religious function of being a "rainmaker". Their whole religion then became about planting, preserving and worshiping trees. Punishments were meted out for cutting down trees, with a hierarchy of trees and punishments (the most evil thing you could do was cut down an oak, and it was punishable by death).

According to the Roman historian Tacitus, during the conquest of Britain, one technique the Romans used to subdue the Britons was cutting down the sacred oak groves. The idea being that because the Druids believed the groves were magical, their destruction would make them feel their magic had gone rendering them helpless. In pre-Roman Britain, the island of Anglesy was the most sacred to the druids, and the Romans destroyed all the oak forests there in order to crush the Druids (successfully).