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When the Emperor Claudius is said by Suetonius to have suppressed Druidism, what is meant is, in all probability, that the more inhuman rites were suppressed, leading, as the Scholiasts on Lucan seem to suggest, to a substitution of animal victims for men.
When the solemnity of Easter approached, Patrick considered that there was no place more suitable to celebrate the high solemnity of the year i.e., the Easter than in Magh-Bregh, the place where the head of the idolatry and druidism of Erinn was viz., in Temhair.
In view of the variety of grades of civilisation then co-existing in Gaul and Britain, it is not improbable that the development of the non-military professional class varied very considerably in different districts, and that all the aspects of Druidism which the ancient writers specify found their appropriate places in the social system of the Celts.
Paganism and Druidism, those twin monsters, receded before the advancing light of Christianity. Neither contained anything which could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of nationality. Druidism was the last stronghold of independent Gallic life. It was a mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis, coarse, mystical, and cruel.
My own explanation of the Ogam system is that it represents the signs made with the fingers in cryptic speech, used as very simple for cutting on stone when the need for mystery was at an end, that is to say, in all probability, when Druidism was just dying out, and the practice of committing nothing to writing had ceased to be a religious observance.
There were none among the ancients more eminent for all the arts of divination than the Druids. Many of the superstitious practices in use to this day among the country people for discovering their future fortune seem to be remains of Druidism. Futurity is the great concern of mankind.
Thierry thinks that this polytheism originally prevailed amongst the Gauls, but that the Kimry introduced druidism, which soon became the dominant religion over the whole of Gaul, though the original polytheism ingrafted upon it more or less, in different places, some of its tenets and ceremonies.
Nash says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth- century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in AD. 59, and never resuscitated.
Well; we know that Druidism did survive in Gaul a long time after the Romans had proscribed it. But Gaul became very thoroughly Romanized. But in Britain, as we have seen, while the Romans and their proscription were near enough to provide a salutary opposition and constant peril, there were many places in which the survivors of Suetonius' massacre in Mona might have taken refuge.
When Christianity began to penetrate into Gaul, it encountered there two religions very different one from the other, and infinitely more different from the Christian religion; these were Druidism and Paganism hostile one to the other, but with a hostility political only, and unconnected with those really religious questions that Christianity was coming to raise.
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