I went to this book knowing very little, next to nothing really, about the Druids. He is sort of right about this reader for sure. The Druids, while at times priests, were not even primarily that, but they were Celtic priests and there were Celtic priests who were not Druids.Įllis is worried that the Greek and Roman view of the Druids has influenced the modern world leaving us with a false and misleading view. Europe in the Celtic world there were four classes They were found to be in every part of the Celtic society but it was not until the second century BC that the Greeks realized that these individual learned functionaries had a collective name - the Druids.” The Druids were an indigenous Celtic intelligentsia, evolving from the original wise men and women during the age of the hunter-gatherers among the ancient ancestors of the Celts, losing their original functions but retaining the Celtic name of those with ‘oak knowledge’. “So before we continue to see just how the Greek and Roman commentators portrayed the Druids, let us summarize our argument. His view is that as the Romans began to move into Celtic regions (and this was in northern Italy, Spain and in Turkey!) they began to paint a quite biased view of the Druids. The Druids themselves had a prohibition on writing down any of their sacred lore, not because they didn’t have written language, but they didn’t want to put their own knowledge into print for others.

They could also sometimes be kings or chieftains….Įllis argues that our early Western sources about the Druids are from the Greeks and Romans. “The caste not only consisted of those who had a religious function, but also comprised philosophers, judges, teachers, historians, poets, musicians, physicians, astronomers, prophets, counselors.” “… formed the intellectuals, or learned class, … were deemed the highest caste.”

He claims there was a joint Indo-European origin and that what the Brahmins are to India the Druids are to the Celtic world – the intellectual class. Rather, he sees the Druids as one of the two historically known and surviving intellectual classes of the ancient Indo-European peoples and sees a very close relationship between the Druids and the Brahmins of India. He believes this view is decidedly incorrect.

It is his contention that until recent times popular knowledge have presented them as a sort of priestly, even magician class. Peter Berresford Ellis set out to give us a careful look at just who the Druids were.

Peter Berresford Ellis THE DRUIDS Book REVIEW THE DRUIDS Peter Berresford Ellis

The Celts by Peter Berresford Ellis