FREE THE DRUIDS PRIMER PDF Luke Eastwood | 318 pages | 24 Feb 2012 | John Hunt Publishing | 9781846947643 | English | Ropley, United Kingdom Druid | Description, History, & Facts | Britannica A druid was a member of the high-ranking class in ancient Celtic cultures. Perhaps best remembered as religious leaders, they were also legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals and political advisors. While the druids are reported to have been literate, they are believed to have been prevented by doctrine from recording their knowledge in written form, thus they left no written accounts The Druids Primer themselves. They are however attested in some detail by their contemporaries from other cultures, such as the Romans and the Greeks. In about CE the word druid appears in a poem by Blathmacwho wrote about Jesussaying that he was "better than a prophet, more knowledgeable than every druid, a king who was a bishop and a complete sage. Many popular notions about druids, based on misconceptions of 18th century scholars, have been largely superseded by more recent study. Sources by ancient and medieval writers provide an idea of the religious The Druids Primer and social roles involved in being a druid. The Greco- Roman and the vernacular Irish sources agree that the druids played an important part in pagan Celtic society. In his description, Julius Caesar claimed that they were one of the two most important social groups in the region alongside the equitesor nobles and were responsible for organizing worship and sacrifices, divination, and judicial procedure in Gaulish, British, and Irish societies. Pomponius Mela [21] was the first author to say that the druids' instruction was secret and took place in caves and forests. Druidic lore consisted of a large number of verses learned by heart, and The Druids Primer remarked that it could take up to twenty years to complete the course of study. What was taught to The Druids Primer novices anywhere is conjecture: of the druids' oral literaturenot one certifiably ancient verse is known to have survived, even in translation. All instruction was communicated orally, but for ordinary purposes, Caesar reports, [22] the Gauls had a written language in which they used Greek characters. In this he probably draws on earlier writers; by the time of Caesar, Gaulish inscriptions had moved from the Greek script to the The Druids Primer script. Greek and Roman writers frequently made reference to the druids as practitioners of human sacrifice. A form The Druids Primer sacrifice recorded by Caesar was the burning alive of victims in a large wooden effigy, now often known as a wicker The Druids Primer. A differing account came from the 10th-century Commenta Bernensiawhich claimed that sacrifices to the deities TeutatesEsus and Taranis were by drowning, hanging and burning, respectively see threefold death. Diodorus Siculus asserts The Druids Primer a sacrifice acceptable to the Celtic gods had to be attended by a druid, for they were the intermediaries between the people and the divinities. He remarked upon the importance of prophets in druidic ritual:. These men predict the future by observing the flight and calls of birds The Druids Primer by the sacrifice of holy animals: all orders of society are in their power There is archaeological evidence from western Europe that has been widely used to back up the idea that human sacrifice was performed by the Iron Age Celts. Mass graves found in a ritual context dating from this period have been unearthed in Gaul, at both Gournay-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre in what was the The Druids Primer of the Belgae The Druids Primer. The excavator of these sites, Jean-Louis Brunaux, interpreted them as areas of human sacrifice in devotion The Druids Primer a war god, [24] [25] although this view was criticized by another archaeologist, Martin Brown, who believed that the corpses might be those of honoured warriors buried in the sanctuary rather than sacrifices. Rives remarked that it was "ambiguous" whether the druids ever performed such sacrifices, The Druids Primer the Romans and Greeks were known The Druids Primer project what they saw as barbarian traits onto foreign peoples including not only druids but Jews and Christians as well, thereby confirming their own "cultural superiority" in their own minds. Nora Chadwickan expert in medieval Welsh and Irish literature who believed the druids to be great philosophers, has also supported the idea that they The Druids Primer not been involved in human sacrifice, and that such accusations were imperialist Roman propaganda. Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor referred to the druids as philosophers and called their doctrine of the immortality of the soul and reincarnation or metempsychosis " Pythagorean ":. The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Gauls' teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a fixed number of years they will enter into another body. With regard to their actual course of studies, the main object of all education is, in their opinion, to imbue their scholars with a firm belief in the indestructibility of the human soul, which, according to their belief, merely passes at death from one tenement to another; for by such doctrine alone, they say, which robs death of all its The Druids Primer, can the The Druids Primer form of human courage be developed. Subsidiary to the teachings of this main principle, they hold various lectures and discussions on astronomyon the extent and geographical distribution of the globe, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion. Diodorus Siculuswriting in 36 BCE, described how the druids followed "the The Druids Primer doctrine", that human souls "are immortal and The Druids Primer a prescribed number of years they commence a new life in a new body". Mackenzie speculated that Buddhist missionaries had been sent by the Indian king Ashoka. Druids play a prominent role in Irish folkloregenerally serving lords and kings as high ranking priest-counselors with the gift of prophecy and other assorted mystical abilities — the best example of these possibly The Druids Primer Cathbad. The chief druid in the court of King Conchobar mac Nessa of UlsterCathbad features in several tales, most of which detail his ability to foretell the future. In the tale of Deirdre of the The Druids Primer — The Druids Primer foremost tragic heroine of the Ulster Cycle — the druid prophesied before the court of Conchobar that Deirdre would grow up to be very beautiful, but that kings and lords would go to war over her, much blood would be shed because of her, and Ulster's three greatest warriors would be forced into exile for her sake. This prophecy, ignored by the king, came true. Thus Amergin called upon the spirit of Ireland itself, chanting a powerful incantation that has come to be known as The Song of Amergin [34] and, eventually The Druids Primer successfully making landfallaiding and dividing the land between his royal brothers in the conquest of Ireland, [35] [36] [37] earning the title Chief Ollam of Ireland. Irish mythology has a number of female druids as well, often sharing similar prominent cultural and religious roles with their male counterparts. Which deities they honored is unknown. Sena, in the Britannic Sea, opposite the coast of the Osismi, is famous for its oracle of a Gaulish god, whose priestesses, living in the holiness of perpetual virginity, are said to be nine in number. They call them Gallizenae, and they believe them The Druids Primer be endowed The Druids Primer extraordinary gifts to rouse the sea and the wind by their incantations, to The Druids Primer themselves into whatsoever animal form they may choose, to cure diseases which among others are incurable, to know what is to come and to foretell it. They are, however, devoted to the service of voyagers only who have set out on no other errand than to consult them. According to Historia AugustaAlexander Severus received a prophecy about his death by a Gaul druidess druiada. The earliest surviving literary evidence of the druids emerges from the classical The Druids Primer of Greece and Rome. The archaeologist Stuart Piggott compared the The Druids Primer of the Classical authors towards the druids as being similar to the relationship that had existed in the 15th and 18th centuries between Europeans and the societies that they were just encountering in other parts of the world, such as the Americas and the South Sea Islands. He highlighted the attitude of " primitivism " in both Early Modern Europeans and Classical authors, owing to their perception that these newly encountered societies exhibited lesser technological development and backwardness in socio-political development. The historian Nora Chadwickin a categorization subsequently adopted by Piggott, divided the Classical accounts of the druids into two groups, distinguished by their approach to the subject as well as their chronological contexts. She refers to the first of these groups as 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. The second of these two groups is termed the "Alexandrian" group, being centred on the scholastic traditions of Alexandria in Egypt ; she notes that it took a more sympathetic and idealized attitude towards these foreign peoples. Lovejoy and Franz Boas. One school of thought within The Druids Primer scholarship has suggested that all of these accounts are inherently unreliable, and might be entirely fictional. They have suggested that the idea of the druid might have been a fiction created by Classical writers to reinforce the idea of the barbaric "other" who existed beyond the civilized Greco-Roman world, thereby legitimising the expansion of the Roman Empire into these areas.