Mention Druids and the average person envisions white-robed, beared elders winding in procession through Stonehenge at the time of the summer solstice, while operaphiles see Norma cutting the sacred mistletoe with her golden sickle and later ascending the funeral pyre. But just who were they really? Because they did not write their own story, we must rely on biased Roman writers, but there are certain things we can say about them.
Strabo tells us, "Among all the tribes, generally speaking, there are three classes of men held in special honour: the Bard, the Vates and the Druids. The bards are singers and poets; the Vates interpreters of sacrifice and natural philosophers; while the Druids, in addition to the science of nature, study also moral philosophy." Others call the Druids the learned men and natural philosophers, they are not referred to as priests although they did oversee sacred rites. Other classes were the plebes, who were little more than serfs, and the equites or knights.
Most writers report that the name comes from the IndoEuropean word dru, meaning oak, but there is no authentic pre-Christian inscription bearing the word DRUID We can say they were the learned men of the Celts. They apparently could read and write in Latin and Greek but wanted their traditions kept secret. Training to be a Druid took as long as twenty years. None of the law or lore was written down and much of the training consisted of the memorization of long sections of verse. In spite of this lengthy preparation, there was not shortage of recruits. They could come from any class and were exempt from military service and from taxation..
Druids knew enough astronomy to develop calendars; they were the repositories of all Celtic knowledge both public and arcane; they officiated at all events which involved ritual; and they were the judges in disputes. Once a year they came from all Gaul to a sacred site near Chartres in France, where they met under the leadership of a head Druid. (Caesar is the only one who mentions the head Druid.)
The decisions of the Druids were final and those who did not abide by their judgements or who failed to observe proper ritual in ceremonies were banned from attending sacrifices. This was a penalty even worse than death, so the Druids wielded enormous power.
Once the main aristocratic society of the Celts disintegrated under Rome, the Druids lost their power. For a while they were tolerated as long as Roman citizens were not involved with them. Most Celtic rituals continued after the conquest and officiating at sacrifices was just one of the functions of the Druids. Diviciacus, chief of one of the tribes whom Cicero calls a Druid, was very helpful to Caesar in persuading the Gauls to cooperate with the Romans. In the opera, Norma also strives for peace between conquerors and conquered. Caesar also tells of him but does not call him a Druid. Caesar wanted to picture the Druids as organizers of resistance and therefore dangerous. Finally, Claudius (d. AD 54) tried to eliminate them, but they made a brief comeback. The final contact with the Romans occurred in AD 60. Tacitus describes it thus:
He [Suetonius Paulinus] therefore prepared to attack the island of Mona [now Anglesey] which had a powerful population and was a refuge for fugitives....On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like Furies, with hair disheveled, waving brands. All around, the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralyzed, they stood motionless, a good target for the enemy. Then, urged on by their general's appearance and mutual encouragement not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.
The last bit is clearly hearsay, based on the biased reports of earlier writers.
There are only sparse references to female Druids such as Norma, but some have suggested that the 'frenzied women' mentioned above may have been druidesses. There were sporadic references to Druids after this but nothing extensive until the early Irish writers some six hundred years later.
1781 a London carpenter founded the Ancient Order of Druids. One of members was Winston Churchill who was initiated in 1908 while a student at Oxford. There are chapters all over the world, but they bear little or no relationship to the Druids of Norma
Why did the Druids share the dubious distinction with the Christians of being the only people subjected to extermination? It has been speculated that these two groups alone had the power to coordinate organized opposition to Rome. The Celts were divided into small, wandering tribes engaged in internecine warfare. The Druids, with their annual meetings, schools and control of rituals, were the only unifying force. Certainly they had the capability of leading opposition and this is reflected in Norma as the warriors wait for a signal from the gods through the priestess to start their rebellion.
Productions of Norma have used Stonehenge as a set. Is there a connection between the Druids and this megalithic monument? In the seventeenth cwentury it was thought to be much younger than it actually is. The infant science of archaeology assigned the same era to it as the Celtic settlements in Britain, and a whole mythology grew up connecting the two. Actually Stonehenge was started almost two thousand years before the first Celts arrived in Britain so, while the Druids may have used it as a temple, they could not have built it — or could they? Julius Caesar asserted that the Druids'"doctrine was discovered in Britain and thence imported into Gaul, and today most people who wish to study the subject thoroughly go there to learn it". Is it possible that there were Druids in Britain long before the Celts arrived? Some modern scholars are beginning to think so. Some say the Druids pre-dated the Celts in France, and there is no trace of Druidism among Celts other than those in France and Britain. Certainly in Neolithic times the tribal groups were even smaller than those of the Celts. Powerful leaders and a powerful doctrine would have been necessary to collect and coordinate the labor for such monumental construction. Were these leaders the Druids?