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Updated: May 1, 2025
"Go bring me those birds," said he to Laeg. The horses were plunging terribly when he said that. "I may not, O my master," said Laeg. "For even now, and with the reins in my hand, I am unable to restrain their fury and their madness, to such a degree have their noble minds been disturbed by the sorcery and the druidism and the enchantment with which they are surrounded.
In Britain it was the sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests performed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches: never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with such ceremonies and sacrifices as there. Imagine then a scene the chief Nature Festival of that forest worship: the New Year's day of the Druids.
Druidism, considered as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of metempsychosis that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures.
With those quotations from the classical writers in view if with nothing else, I think we may call Reincarnation.... the characteristic doctrine of Druidism.
But, you say, Augustus proscribed Druidism which sounds like carrying on Julius' nefarious work. He did, I believe; but why? Because Julius had seen to it that the white side of Druidism had perished. The Druids were magicians; and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained among them, at least in Gaul. So of course Augustus proscribed it.
Druidism remained a form exclusively national, and without universal capacity. The Greek attempts at reform, Orpheism, the Mysteries, did not suffice to give a solid aliment to the soul. Persia alone succeeded in making a dogmatic religion, almost Monotheistic, and skilfully organized; but it is very possible that this organization itself was but an imitation, or borrowed.
In all countries where Druidism was professed, the youth were generally instructed by that order; and yet was there little either in the manners of the people, in their way of life, or their works of art, that demonstrates profound science, or particularly mathematical skill.
Christianity, instead of being, like Druidism, a religion exclusively national and hostile to all that was foreign, proclaimed a universal religion, free from all local and national partiality, addressing itself to all men in the name of the same God, and offering to all the same salvation.
In the Celtic Mysteries of Druidism, the period in which the aspirant was immersed in darkness was nine days and nights; among the Greeks, at Eleusis, it was three times as long; and in the still severer rites of Mithras, in Persia, fifty days of darkness, solitude, and fasting were imposed upon the adventurous neophyte, who, by these excessive trials, was at length entitled to the full communication of the light of knowledge.
There is nothing in which I have not been, the question is, have these 'statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician' nothing which distinguishes them from 'similar creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote; have they not an inwardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the still reverberating echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism?
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