Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/498

478 478 DRUIDISM had the story from the future emperor himself, that it had been foretold to Diocletian by one of these women that he would wear the purple after he had slain a wild boar. Many years afterwards, when Diocletian found himself, on the death of Numerian, unexpectedly declared emperor by the troops, he at once cut down with his sword Arrius A per, regarding whom dark suspicions were afloat, ex claiming, &quot; At length I have slain the fated wild boar,&quot; and thus fulfilled the prophecy delivered to him in Gaul by the weird woman. Ausonius of Bordeaux, tutor of Gratian, son of the Emperor Valentinian, in his Professores, or notices of the professors of bis native city, apostrophizes the rhetorician Attius Patera as sprung from a race of Druids and from the priesthood of Balenus, and as deriving his name of Patera from being connected through the latter with the mysteries of Apollo. He also addresses another as keeper of the temple of Balenus, and as the offspring of the Druids. Lastly, Ammianus Marcellinus, after noticing the foundation of Marseilles by a colony of Phocoeans, goes on to state that when the people in those parts had been gradually civilized, learned studies, which had been begun by the bards, the Euhages (probably a corruption of the Oiarcis, i.e., Vates, of Strabo), and the Druids, throve vigorously. Of these, he says the Druids were intellectually superior to the others, and were formed into unions in accordance with the precepts of Pythagoras. The early Christian fathers seldom mention the Druids. Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and others speak of them as philosophers or priests among the Gauls, but in a manner that shows they knew almost nothing about them. In early Irish poems and tales, however, a class of persons called by this name is frequently referred to, who also appear as Magi in certain well-known lives of Irish saints written in Latin. These Irish Druids were a kind of sorcerers. They were said to be in league with the demons of paganism, and to be able by this agency to do good to their friends and mischief to their enemies. The followers of the first missionaries of Christianity in Ireland and Scotland seem to have thought it necessary, in order to prove the superiority of the new faith, to spread the belief that its apostles also were gifted with supernatural powers, which they could iiss more especially for the purpose of counteracting the malice of these Druids. Thus Adamnun, in his life of Columba, represents that saint as miraculously baffling the machinations of Broichan, the Druid of the Pictish king Brude, when they met at the court of the latter near the mouth of the Ness. To John Toland probably belongs the credit of being the first to plan, for he did little more, a connected history of the Druids, in which the scanty notices of ancient writers were to be expanded and largely supplemented by details drawn from other sources. This he did in three letters addressed to Viscount Molesworth, and first published from the author s papers in 1726, some years after his death. A little later, Pelloutier, in his His- toire des Celtes, carried out a portion of Toland s design by giving a lengthened account of the origin, position, and influence of Druidism among the early Celtic tribes. On the foundations thus laid others were not slow to build. It is from Coesar and Pliny, of course, that the materials have been chiefly derived. But fragments of very doubtful value were eagerly appropriated from every quarter ; and in this way an imposing structure was reared, the solidity of which till very recently few ever thought of doubting. If we may trust these writers, the ancient priesthood of Britain and Gaul, in pomp of ritual no less than in learning and influence, rivalled the hierarchies of later days. Clad in white and wearing ornaments of gold, they celebrated their mystic rites in the depths of the forest. The Hesua mentioned by Lucan was said, on the authority of a remark by Lactantius, to be their chief deity. But they had other gods, especially Apollo, whom they worshipped under the name of Belinus, supposed to be the Phoenician Baal. They believed in metempsychosis, or the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. That their philosophy was identical with that of Pythagoras was held as certain, though whether Pythagoras was the instructor of the Druids or the Druids of Pythagoras, or whether indeed both did not derive their tenets from a common source, were moot questions. Pythagoras s friend Abaris, the mysterious Hyperborean philosopher who rode on an arrow, the gift of Apollo, must have been a British Druid. Botany, astronomy, medicine, and letters were all subjects studied by the Druids ; though, in spite of their boasted civilization, many of their rites were barbarous in the extreme. In mechanics they had attained to no mean skill, since the ponderous megalithic remains of Britain and France could have been set up only by them. Stone circles like Stennis and Callernish were ancient temples, once surrounding groves sacred to Druidism. According to Stukeley, Stonehenge was the cathedral of the arch- druid of all Britain, and Avebury with its avenues had been originally constructed in the form of a circle with a serpent attached to it, the circle being regarded as the symbol of the Supreme Being, and the serpent of the divine Son. Dolmens or cromlechs were transformed into altars, and even the menhir or stone pillar, and the rocking-stone, were pressed into the service of the druidi- cal priesthood. In the neighbourhood of the circles, as well as on the tops of mountains, may be seen cairns sur mounted each by a flat stone, on which Druid fires were lighted. Over their countrymen the authority of the Druids was almost unbounded, continuing to assert itself long after the order had passed away. With Druidism every unexplained custom and almost every relic of Celtic antiquity were held to be connected, and the superstitions that still linger in the ancient homes of the Celtic race were set down as derived from the same source. Its decadence is attributed by these writers to the hostility of the Romans. Ardent lovers of their country as well as of liberty, the Druids, it is asserted, were the uncompromising foes of Roman rule in the west. Hence sprang the orders issued for their suppression by Claudius, to which reference is made both by Pliny and Suetonius. In the end, Rome proved too strong for Druidism, and the political power of its priesthood was soon broken, especially in Gaul and South Britain. Some, among whom Herbert is prominent, maintain that, after the destruction of pagan Druidism as a system, the order was revived as a corrupt form of Christianity, in which the truths of the latter were largely mixed up with the rites of Mithras, the sun god of the Persians. This hypothesis, to which its supporters have given the name of neo-Druidism, has already been noticed in the article CELTIC LITERATURE (vol. v. p. 318). These views were for a long time generally received in this country as well as on the Continent. In France, Druidism has proved an attractive subject to some writers of a high order of ability, who have discussed it, if not from a more critical, at least from a more philosophical, stand-point. Amedee Thierry, in his Histoire des Gaulois, while adopt ing in the main the opinions of Toland, Pelloutier, and their followers, finds in the accounts that have come down to us traces of two distinct systems of religion in ancient Gaul. One of these was a worship of natural phenomena and objects, akin to the polytheism of the Greeks; the other a kind of metaphysical pantheism, strikingly resembling the religions of some Eastern nations. The latter, accord ing to him, was the foundation of Druidism, and had been brought into the country when the Cymric branch of the Gauls entered it under a leader named Hu, or Hesus.