15 Facts About Druids

Druids were religious leaders as well as legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals and political advisors.

Druids wrote that they were exempt from military service and from paying taxes, and had the power to excommunicate people from religious festivals, making them social outcasts.

Druids remarked upon the importance of prophets in druidic ritual:.

Druids highlighted the attitude of "primitivism" in both Early Modern Europeans and Classical authors, owing to their perception that these newly encountered societies had less technological development and were backward in socio-political development.

Druids calls the first of these groups the "Posidonian" tradition after one of its primary exponents, Posidonious, and notes that it takes a largely critical attitude towards the Iron Age societies of Western Europe that emphasizes their "barbaric" qualities.

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Druids said they played an important part in Gaulish society, being one of the two respected classes along with the equites and that they performed the function of judges.

Druids remarked that they met annually at a sacred place in the region occupied by the Carnute tribe in Gaul, while they viewed Britain as the centre of druidic study; and that they were not found among the German tribes to the east of the Rhine.

Druids said that their main teaching was "the souls do not perish, but after death pass from one to another".

Druids says these "terrified our soldiers who had never seen such a thing before".

Druids'storian Ronald Hutton noted that there were two explanations for the use of the term in Wales: the first was that it was a survival from the pre-Christian era, when dryw had been ancient priests; the second was that the Welsh had borrowed the term from the Irish, as had the English .

Druids wrote that after being excommunicated by Germanus of Auxerre, the British leader Vortigern invited twelve druids to help him.

Druids began to figure widely in popular culture with the first advent of Romanticism.

Druids's writings, published posthumously as The Iolo Manuscripts and Barddas, are not considered credible by contemporary scholars.

Druids was arrested for cremating his deceased son, a practice he believed to be a druid ritual, but won his case; this in turn led to the Cremation Act 1902.

Archaeologist Stuart Piggott, author of The Druids, accepted the Greco-Roman accounts and considered the druids to be a barbaric and savage priesthood who performed human sacrifices.