Little authentic information regarding the ancient Celts’ priestly caste, better known to the world as the Druids, has survived to the modern age. The mysterious segment of the Celtic hierarchy is thought to have first arrived in the British Isles, along with the rest of their people, between the 5th and 6th centuries BC.

With a name that translates from Gaelic as “knowing oak tree,” the priestly sect was tasked with guarding the sum of their civilization’s theological, philosophical scientific knowledge. Some of their responsibilities were similar to those of shaman in Pan-American cultures and included calendar recordation, the dispensation of herbal remedies and seasonally oriented mystic rites in designated sacred groves.

The practice that has most heavily influenced the popular conception of the Druids, however, is human sacrifice. One of their victims was the so-called Lindown Man – the remarkably well-preserved corpse of a Druidic priest that was found in a Manchester bog in 1984. His throat had been slit and he had, apparently, willingly offered himself up for sacrifice.

Following the Roman occupation of Britain, however, the Druids’ predilection for outlandish rituals soon drew the ire of the Empire and the Emperor Claudius had the sect outlawed in AD 43. The final blow came during the battle that followed that decree, when a battalion of sixty Roman troops assaulted a Druid outpost on the island of Mona. No quarter was given and the majority of the Druid population – men and women alike – was wiped out, their sacred meeting groves razed in the aftermath.

This left the Romans left in advantageous of being the first to record the history of the Druids, albeit from a skewed point of view that saw them as little more than barbarians. In fact, Roman historian Pliny the Elder provides the very first recorded account of a Druidic ritual in his Naturalis Historia, wherein he provides an in-depth description of their annual mistletoe harvest – a ingredient they frequently utilized in the making of charms.

The fact that the Druids conducted their rituals in sacred groves and arbors, and not stone circles, rules out their long-suspected connections to the monoliths at Stonehenge. That notion was the product of an 18th century outsider cleric, Dr. William Stukeley, who theorized that the Druidic sect was the direct forbearer of a pure British religion – later to be embodied, in his view, by the Church of England.

Though it is the modern adherents of Stukeley’s view who continue to congregate annually on Salisbury Plain for solstice rites at Stonehenge, there is no archaeological evidence linking the Druids to the site in any capacity. Any definitive information as to their true beliefs and practices were lost the years following their extermination by Romans - leaving the tenets of their dark religion as intriguing and mysterious today as they were at the turn of the first millennium.

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