The Druidic Syllabus, I: Elementary
They had all heard about Druids but never seen one before. Diviciacus the Aeduan stood before the Roman Senate, leaning on his shield, and uttered the outlandish words with such eloquence that the interpreter was probably a distraction. Five years later, in 58 BC, in the midst of a savage war, Diviciacus would embrace his friend Julius Caesar with tears in his eyes, pleading for the life of his rebellious brother. Caesar would take the Druid’s right hand and, comforting him, accede to his request. This was a man who possessed the art of inspiring an audience. The senators listened to what they already knew: somewhere beyond the Alps, great movements of tribes were disturbing the delicate peace. Wild Germans – ‘whose way of life’, said the speaker, ‘cannot be compared to that of the Gauls’ – had been hired by the Aedui’s rivals, the Sequani and the Arverni. Now, the German mercenaries had turned on their employers and were threatening to bring hordes of ‘untamed, barbaric men’ across the Rhine. The Aedui feared a massacre.
As ‘friends and kinsmen of the Roman people’, the Aedui were important allies. Their name was familiar to most educated Romans. They were the ‘Fiery Folk’ or the ‘People of the Hearth’, who lived in a river port on the Arar (the Saône) and in a mountain fastness girt with a wall twice the height of a Celtic man – or three times the height of a Roman – and six kilometres long. Like the Romans, the Aedui claimed Trojan descent, and there was something of the purity of the age of heroes in the orator’s braided hair, the lavish gold ornaments pinned to his woollen cloak, and his archaic pronunciation of place names. The quaint designs on his oblong shield might have been the faces of small animals tempted by an enchanter out of the wood and metal and fixed to the surface. The Senate would seriously consider granting the Aedui military assistance. Diviciacus was a barbarian and a Druid, but he, too, had a wife and children. He did not appear to be the kind of man who (as rumour suggested) would thrust his sword into a prisoner’s bowels and then studiously observe the pattern of his writhings to discern the will of the gods, and it was hard to imagine that tall and stately figure shinning up a tree under a six-day-old moon, the crescent of a gold sickle glinting, to cut the sacred mistletoe from the oak.
Quintus Cicero had met Diviciacus at his older brother’s house on the Palatine Hill. ‘If there really are Druids in Gaul . . .’ Quintus had said. ‘Well, there are – because I know one!’ His brother Marcus was interested in divination – one day, he would write a book on the subject, from a sceptical, modern point of view – and what better house-guest could he have? The Druid claimed to know the art of looking into the future (he was after all a diplomat), but he used a combination of augury and ‘conjectura’, which suggested some rational inspection of the dubious evidence. Disappointingly, he had no tales to tell of human sacrifice. The practice must have died out in the olden days. The Druid, mirabile dictu, was a civilized, erudite man who could happily eat exotic food in a villa above the Roman Forum and write a eulogy of his host. He could discuss politics and law. He was an astronomer and a student of what the Greeks called ‘physiologia’ – the scientific study of nature. Few Romans could boast such a panoply of accomplishments. His only obvious fault, apart from his ignorance of Latin, was his younger brother, Dumnorix, who had married their widowed mother to a rich and powerful Biturigan, taken a Helvetian bride for himself, and was flirting with any tribe that might help him to the supreme command of the Gauls.
Diviciacus, ‘the Avenger’; Dumnorix, ‘King of the Lower World’ . . . These Gauls had names that seemed to speak of the distant dawn of the Roman empire, when an army of Celtic warriors entered Rome and walked in silent parade through the streets beneath the Palatine Hill. On that day in 387 BC, the Eternal City had been abandoned by all but the old noblemen who sat motionless in their doorways. To the barbarian Celts, they seemed the living statues of gods, until one warrior, more foolhardy than the rest, reached out and stroked one of the long white beards. The old man retaliated with his ivory stick; the spell was broken, and the massacre continued until every Roman nobleman was dead. Even in the modern metropolis, more than three hundred years later, the old fears glowed like embers; there was something reassuringly farcical about those tales of Druidic practices. Later, the Romans would learn to fear the Druids – not the riddling, white-robed priests of a ridiculous cult, but the philosopher-politicians who could conjure vast armies out of the mist.
Diviciacus, one of the few Druids known to us by name until the Hibernian magicians and Gaulish university professors of the fifth century AD, had endured a long journey to Rome. The shortest routes from Aeduan territory lay through the lands now controlled by German warriors. But Diviciacus knew the geography of Keltika like the plan of a temple. In 58 BC, he would devise for his friend Caesar ‘a circuitous itinerary of more than fifty miles’ through the difficult country between Vesontio (Besançon) and Mons Vosegus (the Vosges). To reach Rome in 63 BC, he would have travelled south along the valley of the Rhodanus, entering the Roman province in southern Gaul somewhere near Arausio (Orange). Turning to the north-east, he had climbed towards the snowy horizon on roads that ran alongside the rivers fleeing from the Alps, to Brigantium, and from there, in the footsteps of Herakles, to the Matrona Pass. As he descended into the land of vineyards, Diviciacus contemplated an uncertain future, but perhaps, as he thought of the wife he had left behind, the paths of his conjecturing also led him back in time, to the days when he had embarked on the first great journey of his life.
Boys and girls who left for Druid school had already reached the age of reason. Some young people, said Caesar, go to the Druids of their own accord (‘sua sponte’). Others were sent by parents and relatives (‘parentibus propinquisque’): the phrase implies that several members of the clan, not just the immediate family, clubbed together to provide a scholarship. Some went to the Druids for a general education; others remained under Druidic tuition for twenty years before becoming Druids themselves. Roman writers assumed that the education was reserved for children of the aristocracy, but a protégé of Diviciacus called Viridomarus had ‘humble origins’, according to Caesar, as did the three generations of Druids mentioned by the poet Ausonius in the fourth century AD. No doubt it was an advantage to come from a good family, but the essential qualification was intelligence. With such a comprehensive syllabus, the Druidic education system was necessarily meritocratic.
Those diligent, ambitious children of the Iron Age who ‘[flocked] to the Druids in great numbers’, said Caesar, subjected themselves to the longest education in the ancient world. A Greek education began when the boy was seven, and usually lasted no more than eleven years. A pupil of the Druids remained in full-time education for as long as it takes a modern student to progress from nursery school to a doctoral degree. The family would lose a useful, intelligent child, but the advantages were enormous: not only were Druids exempt from tax and military service, they also settled disputes concerning inheritances and property boundaries, and they had the power to excommunicate offenders by banning them from sacrifices, which was the worst of all punishments.
No Druid school has ever been identified, perhaps because no one has looked for one. In AD 43, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela claimed that ‘the noblest of the Gauls’ received their twenty years of Druidic education ‘in caves and secret woods’. This was the civilized person’s fantasy of hermits’ glades and wizards’ glens accessible only by some Celtic equivalent of Platform 9¾. Apprentice Druids who required writing tablets, measuring equipment and medical instruments, not to mention board and lodging, would not have spent twenty years in a dank cavern or a sylvan hut, though some part of the syllabus may have involved a contemplative retreat or a spell of enforced intimacy with nature. The Druids were said by several ancient writers to follow the precepts of Pythagoras. One of those writers, Hippolytus of Rome, observed that ‘Pythagoras himself taught his disciples to be silent, and obliged the student to remain quietly in rooms underneath the earth’.
Some remarkably early evidence of a school has survived. It was in the Aeduan town of Augustodunum (Autun), between the oppida of Cabillonum (Châlon-sur-Saône) and Bibracte (Mont Beuvray). An analysis of the roads around Autun has shown that the dunum was already an important hub before the Romans named it after Augustus. It was there, in AD 21, that ‘the noblest progeny of the Gauls devoted themselves to a liberal education’. Tacitus mentions this in passing in his account of the Gaulish revolt of that year. Since the Druids were considered a subversive political force and were subsequently outlawed by imperial decrees, it can hardly be a coincidence that the revolt began in a town where the ‘noblest progeny of the Gauls’ were receiving a liberal education.
The university at Augustodunum, founded more than twelve centuries before the Sorbonne, was still a famous seat of learning in the fourth century AD, when the porticoes of its schools were adorned with one of the lost treasures of ancient Gaul – a scale map of the world showing seas, rivers and towns and the distances between them. By then, the university was already a venerable institution. Professors who proudly called themselves sons of Druids (presumably in private) were teaching at Bayeux and Bordeaux. They represented a scholastic tradition older than Augustodunum itself. When Diviciacus qualified as a Druid in the early first century BC, he would have received his robes, not at Augustodunum, but at the oppidum of Bibracte, which was the capital of the Aedui before the Gallic War.
Two slow cycling hours to the west of Autun, Mont Beuvray rises out of the forests of the Morvan plateau. The summit remains in sight throughout a day’s travel on either side: its ‘visibility footprint’ covers several thousand square kilometres between Burgundy and the Massif Central. The nearest village, Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray, lies eight kilometres to the east. From there, the road saunters off into beech woods before suddenly adopting the kind of gradients that signify a return to an earlier age: medieval mules were more patient than modern drivers, but even they would have baulked at the final ascent, which conjures up thoughts of penance and siege. In these parts of Gaul, the scale on an inclinometer could be marked off in centuries instead of degrees. Tracks like the one that climbs towards the oppidum from the Col du Rebout belong to a period when urban settlement took very different forms.
Roman visitors to Bibracte may well have felt that they were entering some other-worldly realm. On the undulating plateau at the summit of the mountain, monumental walls loomed out of the forest. All around were funeral pyres and orderly cemeteries that had been carefully maintained for many decades. After passing through the towering gateway, a visitor was greeted by the stench of tanneries and the forges’ smoke. The pre-Roman capital of the Aedui was a teeming town of shops and small factories, covering an area about two-thirds the size of medieval Paris. The streets were made of compacted stone and gravel, with a layer of sand to prevent them from becoming slippery in the winter. After the industrial quarter came the residential suburb and, beyond that, the shops and the temple, with a wide-open view of wheat fields and coppiced woods. In the east, smoke could be seen rising from the lands of the Sequani where the iron was mined. If the weather was fine, the jagged white hem of the Alps marked the horizon.
Near the centre of the oppidum, an unusual object seemed to block the street. One of the most intriguing archaeological discoveries of the last hundred years, it was so well preserved that when it was excavated in 1987 it looked like a modern reconstruction – a basin in the form of a slender oval, beautifully formed from blocks of pink granite. For some reason, the stone had been dressed using techniques normally applied to limestone: the stone was local but the masons were Mediterranean. Several teams of archaeologists have been unable to determine its purpose. It was too shallow to have served as a cistern, and there was no nearby source of running water. Some have suggested a ‘water cult’ or a foundation monument. Only two things are certain: the lateral axis of the basin is the line of the summer solstice sunset and the winter solstice sunrise at Bibracte, and the oval itself is the result of complex geometrical calculations. It would have been a familiar object to the apprentice Druids, and we shall return to the pink-granite basin at the appropriate point in the curriculum.
Most of the inhabitants of Bibracte lived in warm, well-insulated houses of wattle and daub; some of them may have had slaves. The school would have been comfortable and well equipped. Standards of hygiene were very high. According the Greek historian Timagenes, the Gauls were extremely punctilious about cleanliness and elegance: ‘You will never see in all these countries a man or a woman, however poor, either dirty or in rags’. The population of the Aeduan capital would have been particularly elegant. Though it stood on the summit of a mountain, it was one of the largest and best-supplied towns in eastern Gaul – ‘maximum et copiosissimum’, according to Caesar, who chose to spend the winter of 52–51 BC there, six hundred miles from home. In a town of teachers and students, he would not have lacked scribes, writing materials and reference works. The short passage on the Druids in De Bello Gallico, once thought to have been copied from an earlier source, is now recognized as an up-to-date description of the Druid order and the most reliable of all texts on the subject. The fact is rendered almost invisible by murky views of the Celtic past: one of the classics of world literature was written in an Iron Age oppidum.
A young Aeduan arriving at Druid school, knowing something of the superstitions that common people expressed on curse-tablets and at shrines in the form of crude oaken images, might have hoped to be provided with potions and magic spells. If so, they would have been disappointed. Druidic science was an arduous discipline. The young people, said Caesar, must ‘learn by heart a great number of verses’ – he supposed that this was why the education could last twenty years; ‘it is considered sacrilegious to commit the verses to writing’. For this reason, the Druids are often said to have been illiterate, yet Caesar went on to note that ‘in almost all other matters, public and private, they use the Greek alphabet’.* His own opinion was that rote learning was a pedagogical device designed to keep the minds of young Gauls healthy and alert. When, ten years later, during his siege of Alexandria, he accidentally set fire to the Great Library, he might have pondered the benefits of storing knowledge in thousands of trained minds.
Even the teachings that generations of Druids kept in their memories would one day disappear. Now, almost nothing seems to be left of them. Yet patterns of thought sometimes remain visible like crop marks in a field. The annals of the Celts, their religious and moral precepts, the names of places and heroes were preserved in the tripartite forms familiar from Celtic art and theology, just as they were later recorded in the triads of medieval Wales.
Triads were simple mnemonics that served as keys to greater stores of wisdom. Some were verbal maps of a kingdom, like the complex routes that were memorized by sailors, or like the Irish Dindsenchas (‘the lore of places’), which inculcated a sense of real and sacred geography by recounting the route taken by a god or a hero. Others were signposts at the meeting of three roads that led to different shires of tribal lore: ‘The Three Wives of Arthur’, ‘The Three Mistresses of Arthur’, ‘The Three Chief Rivers of the Island of Britain’, ‘The Three Unrestrained Ravagings of the Island of Britain’, etc. Mnemonic rhymes are still a common form of personal data storage (the number of days in each month, the notes on the lines of the treble clef, the burning properties of wood), and many Druids who were sent to take charge of remote temples must have blessed their teachers for imprinting the useful formulae on their brains.
It is astonishing how the lightest breath on the dust of an ancient text can reveal a lost Druidic lesson. Statements about the Celts’ beliefs often fall into threes and take a loosely strophic form. Caesar’s famous statement that ‘Gaul is divided into three parts’ may have a Celtic origin, and Pomponius Mela’s listing of the three peoples of Gaul may once have been a pair of triads:
From the Pyrenees to the Garonne are the Aquitanians, from the Garonne to the Seine the Celts, and from the Seine to the Rhine the Belgians.
The leading lights among the Aquitanians are the Ausci, among the Celts the Aedui, and among the Belgians the Treveri.
The flattering reference to the Aedui and to their allies, the Treveri, suggests that something very similar to this litany of origins once formed part of a history lesson at Bibracte.
When Timagenes was collecting information for his History of the Gauls, of which only a few excerpts survive, he heard the Celts’ own story of their origins. Although the triadic verses were never written down, they were so well rooted in the minds of educated Celts that they came quite naturally to the lips of his informants:
The Druids relate [‘memorant’: literally, ‘bring to memory’] as a true thing that part of the population [of Gaul] was indigenous, but that others flooded in from the outermost islands and regions across the Rhine, driven from their homes by frequent wars and inundations of the fiery seas [‘fervidi maris’].
Some say that after the destruction of Troy, a handful of Trojans fleeing from the Greeks, and scattering far and wide, took possession of these empty places.
The natives of these regions assert above all . . . that Herakles, son of Amphitryon, hastening to destroy the cruel tyrants, Geryon and Tauriscus, who were molesting Gaul and Spain, having overcome both, married a noble woman and begat many children who gave their names to the regions they ruled.
The names of those many Herculean children – and, in the matrilineal Celtic tradition, their mothers – would then have formed a geographical roll call of the Celtic tribes: Celtus, progenitor of the Celts; Galates, progenitor of the Gauls; Sardus, who gave his name to the Pyrenean Sardones; Bretannos, whose daughter gave birth to the Pretani.
The diversity of origins suggests a lively historical tradition. What Timagenes took to be competing views were probably the components of a broader picture that covered the entire Celtic world. It matches the historical evidence quite well, and it proves that, unlike some of their modern admirers, the ancient Celts never claimed a single ethnic origin (fig. 24).
Like all well-hidden secrets, the most important mnemonic riddle was there for all to see. The word ‘Druid’ was a cleverly tangled knot of meanings, and unravelling it would have required a long lecture on historical semantics. The ‘uid’ belongs to the same family as the Sanskrit ‘veda’ (‘knowledge’) and the Latin ‘videre’ (‘to see’). The ‘dru’ could mean either ‘very great’ or ‘oak’. Welsh and Breton forms derived from ‘do-are-wid’ contain the word ‘are’, meaning ‘eastward’, ‘in front of’ or ‘into the future’. Other words that were etymologically unrelated may have woven their connotations into the puzzle: ‘druta’ (‘swift’), ‘drutos’ (‘strong’ or ‘solid’), ‘uidua’ (‘tree’ or ‘wood’).
The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus found this riddling habit of the Celts exasperating (‘they use one word when they mean another’), and so do some modern etymologists who disagree about the exact meaning of ‘Druid’. The argument is endless because the word is deliberately ambiguous. A Druid was a great sage or scholar who knew the secrets of the oak, or whose wisdom was as strong and solid as wood, who looked to the east and who saw into the future. Some nuances have probably faded away for ever, but enough remain to show what games a Druid master could play with the philosophical pun. ‘Dysgogan derwydon meint a deruyd’, said a tenth-century Welsh poem: ‘Druids predict all that will come to pass’.
24. Legendary origins of the Gauls and the greatest extent of Celtic influence
From Timagenes’ History of the Gauls.
Before the apprentice Druids could begin to predict the future, there was a vast amount to be learned. Apart from history and geography, they studied moral philosophy, religion and theology. The keystone of the Druidic creed was the Pythagorean belief in the immortality of the soul and a life after death. Caesar naturally considered the military advantages of a belief in the transmigration of souls: ‘They wish above all to convince their pupils that souls do not perish [‘interire’] but pass [‘transire’] after death from one body into another, and this they see as an inducement to valour, for the dread of death is thereby negated.’ Caesar’s interpreter – perhaps Diviciacus himself – seems to have captured an echo of the rhyming pun that fixed the precept in the mind: ‘non interire, sed transire’.
According to the geographer Pomponius Mela, this was the only Druid teaching that ever ‘escaped’ into the wider world, yet the secret verses were so potent that fragments can still be picked up among Greek and Latin prose. ‘The Druids express their philosophy in riddles, urging men to honour the gods, to do no evil, and to exercise courage.’ This triadic litany, quoted by Diogenes Laertius from a work of the fourth century BC, is remarkably similar to a Welsh triad that was first written down in the thirteenth century AD: ‘These are the three main principles of wisdom: obedience to the laws of the Almighty, concern for the common good, and courage in the face of the accidents of life.’
Perhaps the Druids were not so secretive after all. Some of their lessons were reserved for initiates, but much of the education was public. A teaching order that had managed to syncretise thousands of local gods and legends into a European pantheon, and which had more influence over the actions of individual states than the United Nations does today, was obviously not given to incomprehensible mutterings in secluded forests. The Gaulish gentleman who noticed Lucian of Samosata gaping in horror at the image of Ogmios-Herakles (p. 10) was either a Druid himself or a graduate of Druid school. ‘Stranger,’ he said, ‘I shall explain the enigma of this portrait that seems to trouble you so.’ The man spoke impeccable Greek and chattered away in the pleasantly teasing tones of a man of the world on the subjects of comparative religion, mythology, art and literature. He littered his conversation with quotations from Homer, Euripides and a Greek comic poet whose works are otherwise unknown. He had a seductively soothing pedagogical manner which charmed his troubled listener and enlightened him far beyond his expectations. As Cicero had discovered in Rome, a Druid’s conversation could be delightful:
You should not be surprised to see the tongue of Herakles, that embodiment of eloquence, leading men by chains attached to their ears. Consider the relation between ear and tongue: this tongue-piercing is not intended as an insult. Was it not one of your comic poets who said, ‘The tongue of the chatterbox is always pierced at its tip’?
At this point, after the history, the geography, the moral philosophy and religion, the Greek language and literature, the boys and girls who had gone to the Druids for a general education would return to their families. The exoteric curriculum gave way to the esoteric, and the students who remained would now be inducted into the higher mysteries of Druidism.
* The same presumption of illiteracy is often extended to Celtic society as a whole, though Diodorus Siculus reported that the Celts ‘cast letters to their relatives onto funeral pyres in the belief that the dead will be able to read them’. See also p. xv.