Episode #98 - Who Were The Druids?
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Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I'm not bad, how are you? I'm alright. I am excited to be back in the snow of Dublin after Rome. I'm insisting to myself that I'm very cosy in my three jumpers and a hot water bottle.

Because for four days until yesterday, I was in Rome where it was a very balmy 19 degrees and I was looking at many ancient things and I was by myself. So I got to just be unbelievably nerdy and spend many hours in the Capital Line Museum copying out every single epigraph that was on display and

and now I am back in Belfast and it is dark at 4pm and it is snowing but that is fine very good indeed at least snow is fun and pretty I've got cold and not snowy I'm glad yeah I'd rather it was snowing than like raining yeah I mean it's not raining either it's actually there's just a nice sunset actually at the moment out my window

But then it will be dark and it's not yet five o'clock. So swings and roundabouts. That is the disappointment. But I'm thinking I had a lovely time in Rome. That was great. Can't complain about that. Haven't been to Rome for a very long time. So it was nice to see all of the things. And I cried in the Domus Aurea like all cool and good people do.

That is the coolest thing you can do. Everyone knows this. It is, right? Because they've got a little VR bit. If you go to Rome, if anybody goes to Rome, you have to do the Domus Aurea. It's only open three days a week, which is why I had to go on an Italian language tour because all of the English language tours were sold out.

And so there was one space and one Italian language tour. It was only open one day I was there. So I had to go to the last tour on the Sunday in Italian, which I do not speak at all. Sure.

So I had to go to this Italian language tour, but they have this VR bit in the middle where they've got one of these rooms and it tells you the story of the room, how it was found, how the domicile rare, the bits that survive have survived so well because they were used as the foundations for a bath house that Trajan built on top of it.

So they were just filled in with earth, basically, which really preserved them in an unbelievable way. How they were found, how they were excavated, and then does a full reconstruction, not just of the room, but of the room in the context of the whole house. And then you come out of the house and see all of Rome, which they have reconstructed, digitally reconstructed, as the view would have looked in like 1650s.

That's extremely cool. Yeah. So with the temples reconstructed, with the Palatine, with the great Appian aqueduct going off into the distance and you're on top of a hill and you're looking out over all of these sites and it's so gorgeous. Then I burst into tears. In case anyone's ever doubted my commitment to Roman history. Yeah.

It is. You'd have to be a bit weird to doubt my commitment to it, but still. I was alone, the only English speaker on a tour that I did not understand crying into a VR headset. That's beautiful. Isn't it just? Yeah.

Yeah, but it was delightful. I had a lovely time. APOS recommend Italy in November. There's nobody else there. Yeah, I was in Italy in October and there were still quite a lot of people. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's still like one of the better times to go, I would say. It's too hot in the summer and there's too many people. Yeah, I like to take advantage of the fact that I don't have children to travel in the places that you can't travel if you have children because they have to be in school.

Yes, very sensible. Yeah. One of the many upsides of not having children. But today we're talking pre-Romans, Janina, here on this podcast that we do, which is called History is Sexy. Yes. Answer people's questions about history. What is the question?

The question is from, well, we have one from Bronwyn Cole, which was, what is the deal with Druids and Celtic gods and goddesses? And another, which is basically the same, from Lindsay Forch, which is, what is the history of the Druid religion?

So we're going to talk about pre-Roman Britain and Gaul to an extent and what we do and do not know about all of what we now call the Celts and what the Romans sometimes called the Celts and what we know about Druids and what they said about them. And it's going to be us saying we know some things, but not as much as you might think. Yeah.

I tell you, so a lot of this is from my research I did for the books I did with Greg Jenner, which came out earlier this year, which is the second in his series of Totally Chaotic History, which if you're looking for a present for a child who likes history, who's aged between about seven and 12, then obviously highly recommend these books. Either of them, he's done one about Egypt, he's done one about Roman Britain with me, and we have a big chunk in it about pre-Roman Britain. And Greg is...

is very interested in being accurate. He has no interest in just kind of churning out stuff that is common knowledge or is thought. He likes things to be rigorously researched and checked. And so we worked with Rachel Pope at Liverpool, who is an expert in pre-Roman Britain and Iron Age Britain, and did loads of research on it. And as a result, the books, both of them, and then the next one that's coming out, which is about the Stone Age, the whole Stone Age...

will tell you basically what academics think now about all of these subjects and what the general academic topics of conversation around these things are in a way that you won't get in very many books for children. So that is the basis of a lot of my research. So it's mostly going to be Britain and less so on Gaul or any of the other areas that are called Celtic and which are definitely part of the Celtic

language group or cultural group, as you might call them. So that's my disclaimer for this episode. Yeah, I think that is a thing. I did not realize that the term Celtic, as we understand it today, as concerning the historical background of loads of people in the British Isles, obviously Irish and Scottish and Cornish people, it's not what the ancient people were referring to when they talked about the Celts.

Not so much. There are kind of lots of different uses of the Celts and they kind of are and aren't because when we talk about like the Celtic ethnic group, then if in modern language we tend to be talking about that as meaning basically Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall and then possibly into like northern France.

Whereas the Romans and Greeks would be talking primarily about around like the earliest possible mention that we have of Celts is set in Marseilles, so Mediterranean. And then we have slightly later ones from Herodotus who describes them as being around the Danube and in Central Europe. So when the Greeks talked about Celts, they talked about a different culture.

but the groups that they are talking about probably does include the people of Britain in terms of language and general culture. And basically the idea counts as,

As the Greeks and Romans thought of them, they thought of them as one of the, this is very Greek way of putting it, but they called them one of the great barbarian peoples. Meaning just people who didn't speak Greek. Who weren't Greek. Yeah. Who didn't read Greek and didn't do things properly like the Greeks did. Yeah. Yeah.

People who are different from us, the best ones. As the perfect ones, with a whole theology about how we live in the best climate, therefore we are the most perfectly formed. I mean, they do have a pretty good climate. You can't argue with that. Pleasingly, when I was researching the Mansa Musa episode, I found the exact same argument in an Islamic scholar, 13th century Islamic scholar, arguing that the perfect climate is Iraq.

And therefore, like everybody else and like basically using the, I mean, it's a straight Aristotle using the exact same Aristotle argument of being like the people who are further south from us, too hot, rubbish, can't work. People who are further north than us, too cold, rubbish, can't work. Yeah. I mean, I do come from a country that prides itself on being like the best and most beautiful country in the world. So I get it. Not too hot, not too cold, just perfect. And therefore, your people have been created perfectly.

Yeah. So the four barbarian nations, as far as the Greeks were concerned, were the Scythians, the Persians, the Libyans and the Celts. And the Celts kind of covers everybody from like across what would be Gaul, kind of a chunk of Germany up to the Danube and then straight down, including Britain, Ireland, Northern France. So...

Our old timey Asterix and Obelisk cartoons. Asterix and Obelisk are Celts.

Yes. You can tell they're Celts because they have moustaches, which Julius Caesar mentions. And post-Julius Caesar, Gauls specifically are always described as having big moustaches. And they have trousers. And these are the two things that Gauls have, trousers and moustaches. That's why they're so funny. Yeah.

These are weirdos with their trousers. Their trousers and moustaches. I cannot tell you how weird Romans found moustaches. Like, they find them hilarious. They are pretty funny, to be fair. Like, you just... Yeah. You just don't go in halfway. Yeah.

Julius Caesar is a Roman and Romans love categorizing things. So when the Romans come in contact with Gaul and then into Britain, which is about 150 BCE, that's the first time they start to have proper contact with Britain, they start naming people and they love to break people down into categories. And Julius Caesar says that one of the people that he meets in Gaul call themselves Celts.

And he says that there are people in Britain who also call themselves cats. And so they are kind of a continental... They're a big linguistic group, which includes lots and lots of different languages, but which are very similar. And I think that the current...

theory is basically that it developed in the West out of Indo-European and it is like a specific set of languages that develop in Western Europe, basically. And it includes like

and Cornish and Welsh and Manx and Irish and Scots Gaelic and lots of other different languages as well from around kind of Western Europe and the Atlantic. And they also very clearly have...

cultural links as well. Particularly, there's this thing called La Tène pottery and La Tène art, which you find all over like France and various other places. And you find a

this this particular art form all over western europe as well and you'll find it from quite early on as well because there's like three phases iron age britain because that's what we're talking about is iron age britain so you have the iron age starts in about 800 bce and that is when you are that's when they start making iron fairly clearly um

And the early Iron Age is like 200 year period of people just making iron and living their lives. Then in 600, there is this like big climate shift and everything starts raining way more basically in Britain. And so people move up.

out of the lowlands a bit. And that's where you see what are called hill forts emerge, which are not believed to be forts anymore. They're still called hill forts because that's what Julius Caesar described them as.

But they are not thought to be actual spaces of warfare or defense or anything like that. It's just a house on a hill. It's not even a house on a hill. They're like big, they're kind of like a henge. I think would be the best. Or like...

They're monoliths, basically. They're earthworks, like huge, big earthworks that have been built in concentric circles or various shapes, like quite soft, round shapes around the tops of hills. And then they had wooden...

decorations of some kind of on them, possibly ramparts. But they're now thought less to be defensive and more to be just a demonstration of strength and power. Like, look at this cool thing we built. And also a demonstration of like, look how much abundance we have as a community that we can put manpower, like huge amounts of manpower into building things.

these big pointless things right basically and they show like they're big signs of social organization of groups working together over a long period of time to build something that is like kind of big and showy and cool looking and it doesn't necessarily have to be of a purpose yeah it's just a big display of wealth and power in the same way that

palaces are or like building a it's like 7 000 story building so that's when they start doing that and there's all kinds of arguments about this still i decided that i like rachel pope so i just go with her arguments and she is very fair enough yeah and there's only two like there's not that many people in this field barry cunliffe if anybody ever did this at university or at any point everybody will have read barry cunliffe because he kind of dominated the field for um

50 years and he's the only guy who's written any books about it he's the guy who you will find if you find any book on Celts or Iron Age Britain he wrote it in any bookshop and then there's loads of academics who are like fucking Barry Gould

And who disagree with him fundamentally, but they've not published any books. So they don't have like the cultural power. But Rachel Pope disagrees with Barry Conliff on basically everything. And her argument is that these are not...

They're not spaces that show the power of an individual coercing people or warfare because there's no evidence of warfare taking part there. There's no bones. There's no weaponry like you would expect to find weaponry. And when the Romans come and they are forced to use them as defensive spaces and they retreat to the hill forts, you do find loads of weaponry. And archaeologically, you find suddenly a big ton of like...

arrowheads and things like that but you just don't find any of that what you find is seed pits and evidence of people chilling out there um and seed pits are kind of the opposite of warfare they're just spaces to keep food yeah so you basically get that's what happens about 600 then 400 there is like this shift and you get what are called developed hill forts which basically means they get bigger and fancier and people kind of start seem to start living in them

communal activity this is mostly in south and central britain scotland and the north and is slightly different um they have brocks which are cool but you can read my the book to find out about blocks and basically everybody it seems like what you have for the most part is a pretty chill world where everybody is living relatively communally yeah

And there is limited evidence of warfare. And even when you have like the famous thing that everybody knows about from pre Roman Britain is the chariot burials, I think, um,

Yeah. Which is these, they're called the Arras burials and they were found in Yorkshire. And these are these big chariots that were buried with horses and they're like these big warrior burials and they look like it. And Rachel Pope's theory is that these, basically she's like these chariots and stuff have like no real evidence that any war was being fought. So I think that what she thinks that what we have is people who are like,

I am a big warrior. Look how cool I am as a warrior. I'm going to like shout about being a warrior and be buried as a warrior, but never actually does any fighting. It's just like the ancient world. Yeah. Just sheer posing as like...

Coolness. Yeah. I'm going to buy out someone else's chariot and pretend that it's mine. Yeah. Because I'm rich. Yeah, exactly. And then in 150 BC is when the South comes into contact with the Romans. The Romans have started marching around Gaul pretty intensely. And there starts to be a lot of back and forth contact between the South, East, and in particular, but also well into the Southwest with Rome.

The Roman Empire through France and through Belgium and the Netherlands, loads of stuff changes down south and the north kind of remains doing its thing. It doesn't really get affected by the Romans so much at all. But you start to get wine and fancy pots and cool brooches and people living in towns about 150 BCE. Mm-hmm.

And that is the first time that in the archaeology you see religious sites emerge. And this is when we're going to talk about religion. 20 minutes in. Finally getting to the question. Because an interesting thing about the entire period is that apart from hill forts, which we have no idea what they were doing there, virtually every site that is found in pre-Roman Britain is a residential site. Right.

And there are no temples. There are no votive deposits. There are no spaces that have any evidence that they were specifically used for religious worship. The only thing that we have is sometimes you see people burying things under the doorstep of the roundhouse. Not literate. So there's no writing at all.

And so everything that we know about religion in pre-Roman Britain comes from what the Romans said about them. And what the Romans said about them was not very nice. Shocking. Whom's could have predicted? Uh-huh.

And the Romans did not like Druids one single solitary bit, which will shock you, I know. Yeah, coming right out of this field. Yeah. They are described mostly as being in Gaul, but also in Britain. And it is clear that this is a religious culture that spans across Britain and Europe.

France and Belgium and the Netherlands and Switzerland and all of these kind of modern countries that would once have been gore. And the Romans write about them in the way that they write. I was going to say, if you've ever read Herodotus, but no one's read Herodotus, that's the kind of dumb shit that I say. Like, you know how normal people have all read Herodotus. Yeah, yeah. The first day of school, you learn to read, the first thing they give you is Herodotus. Yeah. They write about it as though they're writing about

What they think they are, like, foreign weirdos that they don't trust. And, like...

Like anthropologists used to write about, or still do write about, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. That's how they write about them. They are hilarious and stupid and aren't they weird? I, a sensible man, am going to explain them to you so that you can understand. We now tend to think of them as priests, but that is not how they are described.

Like, druids are not priests. And everyone, all of the ancient sources are pretty clear that they're not priests. They're like philosopher judges, basically, is how they are described. They are very interested in natural philosophy. So, like, the nature of the soul and...

the relationship between God and man and what the Romans would consider natural sciences. So like, you know, what trees do and things like that. Yeah, which bark will soothe your scrape. Yeah, yeah. But then they're also quite sort of theological in a way because one of the things that

all of the sources like Diodorus Siculus and Strabo write about them, who are both these geographers who travel about and write about their adventures. Both say that they're really interested in thinking about souls and afterlives and whether the soul continues to exist after we die. And so they...

them very much as philosophers and theologians who teach and think and so they're much closer to like Plato yeah and Socrates than they are to priests like they're not doing religion they're doing philosophy teaching philosophy and

And Caesar says that people send children to be taught by them. So like there'll be a good druid and they will send them to people like young men are exempted from military service if they go and die.

who study with a druid. So they're school teachers, basically. They're philosophy guys. They don't have to pay taxes and they give judgments on morality and justice and not law, but people come to them with their problems and they give... So people come and say, you know, he says that this cow is his cow and I say that this cow is my cow. And then the druids say...

Okay. Can you prove that this is your cow? And like they resolve people's conflicts. Yeah. So they're kind of like small town councillors and also private tutors and also theologians and philosophers. Yeah, basically. So they're like the learned guys. Yeah. That are considered to be the most...

well learned and they know the most about the world and they can solve your problems and they will solve disputes and they will also answer philosophical questions of morality or if you've got a difficult question and then they teach other people. And Caesar also says that, and so does Strabo, that they consider it to be

like tenant of their philosophy that they don't write stuff down. They memorize. Yeah. And this is a strongly oral culture and that they writing stuff down would be considered like, I don't know if you've ever read the thing about like when the printing press was invented and everybody and they were like moral panic. Yeah. That would lose our ability to remember things just in the same way as like everyone having Google maps now means that everyone's lost their memory.

kind of the sense of direction. Yeah, and they're right. I can't memorize anything, but I don't need to because it's written down. Well, it's one of those things that I think about a lot that I think we don't, we tend to, I think, feel like historically we,

people were very aware of the intangible nature of information. And that's why most cultures have specific methods of passing it on accurately, whether that's, you know, the Arabic libraries, making sure everything is duplicated loads of times so that there are loads of copies that will last, because having loads of copies is the only way to make sure something lasts. Or oral traditions where there are really strict methods in place of ensuring the story stays the same, like the way it is told,

stays consistent over time because of specific mechanisms that have been put in place to make sure that happens. Because I feel like now, because we live in this digital era, we assume information is permanent. There's always going to be somewhere, but that's actually not accurate. That is, we shouldn't, we shouldn't have the sense of security about data because it's still very intangible. It just like, it, it, it seems permanent because it's,

Because it's everywhere. You can access it on many computers, but...

That's not enough. Yes. Yeah. The You're Wrong About episode on Rumors, on Fleetwood Mac's Rumors, talks about this and how there is music stored on devices that is no longer accessible just because technology adapted so quickly that you can't find anything. It'll be on a mini disk file and you can't find a mini disk player to extract it. And it's much, much more...

to store things digitally only instead of to have like an old timey... It's all going to vanish. It's all going to vanish. Yeah. I mean, I've said before, and I'll say it again, that everyone should read Ted Chiang's story, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, which is, it's two stories. One is about a boy in Africa who is being trained to be a Christian scribe. Mm-hmm.

and is learning writing and having come from an oral culture and who then has to confront the fact that written records conflict with oral records. And he has to deal with that. And another story is like the simultaneous story of a man whose daughter has an implant that means she has access to all of her memories because they're recorded at all times. And he does not.

And learning that his memory of an event that is pivotal for their relationship, as he is a single father, is not what he remembers. He is confronted with a recording of something that he remembers very clearly. But the recording demonstrates it happened the exact opposite way to the way that he remembers it. And it is a very interesting kind of exploration of

memory and information and information storage and kind of, and how these things change and shape the world that we live in. And yeah, I recommend it to everybody. I recommend all Ted Chiang to everybody in fairness, but that one in particular. But anyway, yes, the Druids would very much think that writing was a

kind of the lazy way out and a much more sophisticated and civilised way of doing it was to memorise and to just have everything in your head so that you could access it. You don't have to go and look it up. I listened to the In Our Time episodes on Celts and Druids, which is, you know, very old history. It's BBC In Our Time. And they talked about some of the reasons for this and like it's speculation because we don't know anything. But one of the things they suggested was that people

the idea that written communication is so much more open to interpretation than verbal communication. You can be clearer and more definite. You can get more nuance across and leave fewer questions if you were speaking than if you were writing stuff down, which is something that had never occurred to me about the strength of an oral tradition as well. Yeah. That you have to be like, you have to be adding nuance because by definition has to be a conversation. Yeah.

It can't just be somebody putting information down and then you reading it in a completely different context. Yeah. And so, yeah, so that is certainly... And they definitely thought that it was...

Caesar has kind of reasons that he speculates on as to why he thinks that they're not interested in it, which is that they basically think that it is more accurate to constantly be talking, basically, rather than writing. Cicero, I think, says that he met a druid, which is quite impressive. It would have been presumably one that Caesar had captured and taken to Rome.

So Caesar invaded Britain in 45 BCE. What happens is he is invading Gaul. He spends a good long time rampaging through Gaul and having constant problems. He meets Druids in Gaul. He then invades Britain in 45 because he basically captures loads of people and he keeps capturing Britons.

who are coming over from Britain to Gaul to help the Gauls fight the Romans. And he's like, what the fuck? And so he decides that it's necessary to go and also invade Britain.

in order to basically cut off this supply of men that keep coming over that he can't stop. It drives him mental. So he comes over. He presumably, this druid that Cicero talks to who ends up in Rome is one that he has captured either from Gaul. Cicero claims that this guy is called Diviaticus, which is definitely not true.

because why would he be called a stupid man? It is a very Latin name. Especially because he says that he talks to him about natural philosophy and its use for divination. And so it seems unlikely that a man... It feels like Cicero was like, did you get his name? I didn't get a name. We talked about... We'll just add it on. Just call him Diviaticus.

It's like how when you watch Mad Max Fury Road, you assume that Furiosa is called that because she's done cool stuff on the Fury Road. And then you watch the movie Furiosa and know that's just her name. It's just a coincidence that she also does cool stuff on the Fury Road. Is she just nominative determinist? Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Yeah. And this is what the Romans do for this whole period is that they just turn up and name people. One of the things in Roman Britain in this period after Caesar invades and Claudius invades again in 54 CE, so nearly 100 years, over 100 years later, is that they basically turn up in places that don't seem to have any kind of...

hierarchical structure and go who's in charge and everyone says well the druids I guess nobody but they're not here right now like they're at their annual meeting because they have an annual meeting in Chartres in France or like they're somewhere else and he goes well no pick someone one of you is in charge like I'm not talking to everybody

I'm not... That's not how this works. Like, how this works is one guy here is in charge and I will talk to that guy. And so they had to pick a guy who would be in charge and then that guy became the king. And then the Romans would be like, oh, okay, these guys are the Trinoventaries and they just would, like, make up a name for a people and then...

then that guy would be the only person that the Romans would deal with. So when people became client kingdoms with the Romans, that guy became the guy that everybody... That basically was the beneficiary of being the guy that the Romans would talk to. So he became rich. And basically they invented hierarchy in Britain. And you really see this because in the archaeology you see in the South, you find...

Very suddenly, after their contact with the Romans, places in the south start building towns, start having people print coins. They start making coins with kings on them, which are in Roman style. Everybody starts dressing like a Roman.

They start like cosmetic kits. They really just rocked up and started laughing at their trousers and they felt self-conscious about it. And then they felt really self-conscious about their moustaches. And so you start getting cosmetic kits like appearing everywhere in the archaeology, which are like little things for grinding up

They're like a tiny pestle and mortar for grinding up powders for putting on your face. And they get snazzy brooches and stuff. And so the things become really Romanized. And

And one of the things that this does is introduce material culture of religion, which has not existed up until the Romans come. And you start getting this explosion of sites where people are leaving votive offerings and where they are

They don't start writing stuff down about gods really until about 100 years into the Roman occupation of Britain is when it really kicks off. But they write down nothing about gods or religion before they come in contact with the Romans. And so everything that we know from archaeology about religion is...

is basically through a Roman lens because by definition for a thousand years up until the Romans came, they were not doing it through writing, through physical objects. Or if they were, those physical objects were impermeable. They were not made of stone. And then all of a sudden the Romans come and like 50 BCE, you suddenly get them

going to sites and leaving behind objects and putting up altars. And so everything that we know about all of the gods is basically them mentioning their gods, quite possibly their gods existed before the Romans came, but we do not know how they worshipped them before the Romans came. So

What we do know is, okay, so they have druids. Druids don't really seem to be anything to do with the religion. They do philosophy and divination. And you might go and ask them like an oracle, what's going to happen in the future? Maybe. But they mainly seem to be philosophy guys.

Then you have bards who are singers and poets and they tell histories and stories. And then you have vates who seem to be the closest thing that there actually is to a priest, but you never see them in films. Yeah.

And Vartes also exist all over the Celtic world. And these are the guys that do sacrifices. And this is the thing that the Romans really did not like, which is the theory that Vartes, overseen by druids, did human sacrifices. Right. Yeah.

Which does seem like a lot. It does seem like a lot. They do put in some fun details about it. It is... Basically, one of the descriptions is... I really like this one. Basically, that the Varte will stab a man and then as he's dying, they will... Like...

interpret their death throes. Okay, it's like a divination thing. Yeah, exactly. It's a little bit spicier than tea leaves. It's very spicy. It feels like... I mean, look, human sacrifice has existed at various points in the world. It's possible that they did human sacrifice. It's pretty funny if that's how they did it. LAUGHTER

Like, this comes from Strabo and he basically says that they... Yeah, so they'll, like, stab a man in the back and then watch his death throes and then, like, interpret it and be like, oh, his left leg went that way and that means X, Y, Z. And then the druids oversee and go, yes, I agree. And then, like, call on whatever...

that they have in their heads. Anyway, that's one thing. He also says, and I like this one way more, Caesar also says this. So that's two sources, which isn't bad, that they built Wicker Men. Oh, nice. One of my favorite films of all time, The Wicker Man. Not the bees. Not the bees. Not the bees. The bees. I do, in fairness, also love that version just because it makes me cry laughing when Nicolas Cage just punches that woman. Yeah.

just comes into a room and punches a woman it's so funny it's a truly terrible remake but it's so funny no not the beast the original Edward Woodward version which is delightful and I mean I don't want to spoil it but it's got a wicker man in it and basically the both Strabo and Caesar says that

they would put the part of celtic religion was that they would put a man inside a giant wicker work figure and then they would burn them to death and ideally they would do this to criminals so most of the time this was a simultaneous form of punishment so this isn't like a

like, honoured sacrifice thing. This is a two birds, one stone situation where they're getting rid of criminals and at the same time sacrificing to their gods. And they literally will put them... They'll fill the wick man with men and animals and then they will burn that as part of a sacrifice to whatever gods. They do not say at any point what these gods are or who...

or who they're sacrificing to or anything like that because they've got no particular interest in it.

Those stories are what leads to the Romans thinking that druids are kind of barbarous and inhumane and evil and atrocious murderers is what Pomponius Mela calls them. And they kind of come up constantly in Roman or in the first century of the Roman Empire as like the worst baddies that you can humanly imagine. And Pliny the Elder says that they were wiped out because they were constantly doing human sacrifice and

And that is the strand of thought that gets you to the most famous image of Druids, which is... Because Romans just immediately forget to write about the Vartes. They're just like, Druids sounds cooler. So they...

The famous image of Druids, which I think is probably the image everybody imagines when they have them, is the final showdown between the Roman army and the Druids in Anglesey. And I'm going to read it because Tacitus is a great writer, even though he was a bastard.

On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving brands. All around, the druids, lifting their hands to heaven and pouring forth dreadful noises, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralyzed, they stood motionless.

Ugh.

That's pretty good. That's pretty evocative. He's a great writer. He then says that they have these like groves where they do human sacrifice and then consult human entrails instead of animal entrails, like normal people. Yeah.

Anyway, but notably the Druids are just sort of standing in a circle around them shouting at the Romans, but it's very evocative. And that is basically like the image that the Romans are left with. And as a result, that's what we are left with because that is the story that was...

that was told about them consistently. But it seems that they were mostly just guys who mostly, up until the Romans came at least, spent all of their time talking about the nature of the soul. Yeah. So different, different pictures. Maybe doing human sacrifice. But it seems pretty chill. Then what we have is around about the year 200-ish AD,

So fully 150 years after the Romans have been in Britain into the occupation of Britain post Claudius is this real explosion of altars and inscriptions on stone attesting to

gods that are only found in Britain and Gaul. So they're found around about the same time in German and French spaces and that kind of area of Europe, but they're not in continental Europe, but they're not found anywhere else in the world. So these are

that are known from votive altars. By definition, these are being worshipped in a Roman way and a lot of them are like syncretistic because they are squished together with a Roman god and this is where you get conversations around like Minerva Sulis is the very famous one because the

Roman baths in Bath are dedicated to Minerva Sulis, where Minerva is the Roman goddess and Sulis is the British goddess. And they've kind of smooshed them together into one and have turned them into Minerva Sulis. That's all you need. Okay. Yeah.

And that kind of has given rise to the notion that the Romans will happily just absorb any god. They'll be like, okay, sounds close enough. But also it goes the other way because these are local people who are absorbing the Roman gods and turning them into their thing. Mars turns up the most by a long way. And he gets squished together with basically every god that you have got. So the...

65 Roman gods that are like squished together with a god 35 of the gods that they are squished with are Mars okay so they just fucking love squishing like chucking Mars onto something for some reason regardless of whether it's war based or not

Yeah, they just really conned onto him. Something about Mars. They just really liked him. Yeah, that's nice. That's nice of him. And a lot of them only appear in like a single one. So there's like a god who seems specifically from Cambridge, I think.

who's called Aberdeenus. And you'll see from a lot of these that they have Latinized the name as well. Like this is clear, definitely not what they would have said in the kind of regional Celtic language. There's one votive feather from Cambridge that... So this is a thing that people start doing in Britain, which is very fun. They make tiny little votive things, like very thin metal objects. Some of them are plaques, like...

beaten gold or beaten lead or beaten silver like very very thin and then they'll like inscribe a little thing on it or decorate it and often they're leaf shaped sometimes they're feathers and these little they're very very pretty and then they put them in votive sites like religious sites that emerge that

are effectively brand new. Almost all around water, which leads people to think that water must have been a big thing for pre-Roman religion as well. Because putting things in water, in lakes, in basins,

the hot in springs, in rivers, like the dream for archaeologists because they dredge a river in Britain and they find loads of stuff. And for a long time, you could be a British archaeologist and dredge any kind of body of water that had been there for more than 20 minutes and find a ton of Roman era stuff. If you've got a metal detector, then just go and find your nearest small river and you should have a good time. Yeah.

Nice time. Nice time for all. Yeah. And then you have some that you find like loads and loads and loads of. Like there's one called Nodens. Nodens or Nodens? Nodens is N-O-D-E-N-S. So you find lots and lots of Mars Nodens. There's a big sanctuary of him at Lydney.

He's on curse tablets. He's associated with Mars and healing, and he's usually represented as a dog. So there's lots of dog, like votive dogs and dog imagery around him. And he seems to be a healer and a lot of, I mean, you find this everywhere, but a lot of the votive stuff is like, please, my eye, it hurts. Yeah.

Please, my leg, it hurts. Yeah, that's fair. Help me. We've been praying about the same things for thousands of years, humanity. I'm a bit sick. Please help. Yeah. This is unrelated, but I like it. But one of the weird things about British Roman archaeology is that there are

way more like eye medicines found in Britain than there are anywhere else in the empire. That's interesting. And they're like, they look like lip balms. They're like little squished, like square or triangular tubes of stuff that's like of goo that you put on your eye. And then some of them are imprinted with like instructions and like,

like what this is for and loads of them are for blurry vision so it's just short-sighted people like I just want to be able to see properly can someone please invent something just robbing lip balm into their eyes and a desperate attempt to fix it um yeah but that's that's unrelated

But yeah, so he's one that you find all over the place. And there's also these three mother goddesses called the Martres, which you find tons of. There's like 40 or 50. And you also find these all... This is one of the major Celtic goddesses that you find all over the Celtic world. In Germany, in France, in all over Britain, you find these things. And they're so cute. I'll pick pictures of them up because they just look like little gnomes.

Have you ever seen the, is it the Swedish version of The Hobbit? Like the drawings. And it's like, they look like just little triangles with faces. They're adorable. That's very good. I'm Googling it.

They are very good. Isn't it cute? I'll put this in the show notes as well. And I will also put some little images of these things in there. But yeah, they basically look like a triangle with a face and it's adorable. That is adorable. Yes. Very cute. Yeah. And there's like, there's tons and tons of gods that we find. A Tutartis is another one that we find and we find lots of rings with Tutartis on it or with Tot. Yeah.

which is thought to stand for Tutatis, which is a kind of general protector god of some kind, it seems like. And it's theorized, like loads of them come from Lincolnshire. So it's thought that there might be somebody producing them in Lincolnshire, like who really got into selling these protective rings, which I like the idea of an entrepreneurial guy going mad. Yeah.

producing these things, but you find him all over the show as well, which is great. And a lot of these come from the area of Hadrian's Wall. Sure. And so a lot of them are very linked to protection and army stuff and various other things. But what we don't know is how these gods relate to druids and vates. Right.

because we do not know how people related to their gods before the Romans came and kind of over the course of several generations. So like if you count the beginning of Roman contact from 150, it is like 300 years before Britons start pumping out like material evidence of religious worship. Right.

Right. Like it's about 100-ish, 50 to 100 BC, you start getting the first votive offerings in graves and in bodies of water. And then the Roman period, they build Roman temples and they build them in a specific style, like what's called Romano-Celtic, but they're still building Roman temples for Roman gods. And then about 200-ish is when you get this explosion of them really...

start writing stuff down about their gods and so it takes a long time for whatever they were doing before that to wear off and for them to to get i suppose get involved with the whole roman because the romans are obviously hugely into writing hugely into material culture like if it's not written down for generations and generations to see the romans are not that interested in it yeah

They are very much about making something for the world to forever remember them by. Yeah.

Well, they succeeded at that. They did. Yeah, they're very good at it. Literally can't fault them for it. Just went and walked around to their massive fucking city. It still looks great. Except the Roman Forum, which remains very cluttery. I like the Roman Forum, though. It's very interesting. It was my favourite thing in Rome, actually, is just wandering around listening to the audio guide of the Roman Forum. Having a nice time. Having a nice time. Lots of cool stories, you know? There are lots of cool stories. I did, I will say, I'm sorry, I'm like...

I'm not going to pretend that I'm sorry that I'm bringing this back to the Romans, but I did get to those of the Curia and I was the only person in the Curia and it was fabulous. And I was like, I'm a girl in the Curia. The Curia is where the Roman Senate would meet. And the one that's there was originally built by Julius Caesar after the Republican one got burnt down because Clodius Pulcher was murdered and then the people built his house

pyre out of benches that they ripped out of the Curia and then they burnt down the Curia. Extremely good fun. Yes, but bring it back to Britain and Gauls and Celtic gods. The one thing that we have that I know of or that I could find of is a place called the Cult of the Heads in Little Dean Hall, which is

is a religious site that has been used since the Neolithic period. So archaeology shows us that it is used from many thousands of years ago as a space where people came. The Romans turned it into a nymphaeum. So it's got these beautiful views. It's got a spring. So they turned it into basically a fancy little spot to worship nymphs. But

It's a space where hundreds of heads have been found. And they're like little carved heads. Some of them look like Picasso made them. Some of them look like...

They've just been squished into a face. Some of them look very pleasingly like a potato waffle in the shape of a face. You know those faces that are in the face, the little potato faces? Some of them look like that. That's delightful. I love those potato faces. Exactly. All of them come from the Roman period, but they are completely unique to Britain. And the space was used very much from...

much earlier than the British period and there are finds there from the Neolithic, from the Bronze Age, from the Iron Age, various bits and bobs that have been found and stones with carvings in them that have been put there for a long time. So this is clearly a space that was used in

in the pre-Roman period. Whether it was used by any kind of druid or vate or bard, we do not know, but we can tell that it was used. And it was used in a specifically British way, even during the Roman occupation, because it was like these little faces, these heads that are so cute. Yeah.

are completely unique. Like nobody else is making them in the whole empire. But there is something here that people are bringing tiny little heads and they're carving faces onto stones and they are bringing them there and they're piling them in this spring for some reason. Yeah. So there is some kind of...

continuity that still exists and there is some kind of something that continues throughout the roman period and basically british people seem to just absorb roman practice eventually but whatever they were doing beforehand does not seem to have left very much remark it might be that we just haven't found it yet it might be under birmingham or something like that like the big site for

religious worship in britain might just be as yet unfound and one day it'll be dug up by a farmer or yeah like there'll be an earthquake in manchester and some building will pull open and we'll find something enormous and have to redefine everything that we think we know which is the best thing that could ever possibly happen because it would be fantastic to like establish this was but

At the moment, we do not know how Celts really communicated with their gods in the pre-Roman world. We only know how they communicated with their gods after the Romans came and were like, you know what, guys, writing's cool. And eventually, British Celts were like, I guess. I suppose. I guess I'll make a note of this if you insist. If you must. Yeah.

I suppose. But even then, mostly only in very Roman areas. Like in the countryside, you're still not finding a lot of things. But you're just finding... You might find, but apart from deposit sites where people will chuck in a brooch or chuck in a coin or chuck in like gold thing. But even then, it's still not a huge...

a huge amount of them and they're concentrated on specific sites like Bath, like Lildeen Hall, like Lydney. So we don't know. Isn't that fun? It is fun. It's nice not to know. It means you can imagine whatever you want. You can imagine whatever you want as long as you don't imagine druids doing human sacrifice and screaming. If you want to imagine druids... So one thing that's off limits. Like basically being somewhere between Solomon and Plato, then I would say, yeah. Yeah.

Speaking of, the one thing I am going to say is, because people email me otherwise, is Lindow Man. You ever seen Lindow Man? I don't know. It's possible. I remember so little of what I've seen. He's in the British Museum now. Oh, then is he a bog man? He's a bog body. Yeah. I've seen the bog body that's in the British Museum. Yeah. I just don't remember things like what they're called. Yeah.

So he is a body from the first century CE. So frankly, very Roman period. He was found in the 80s in Cheshire and he died by, he was hit on the head and stabbed and strangled. It's a bit much. And the original interpretation of this is that, well, either he was an OG Rasputin who wouldn't die. That's my personal interpretation. Yeah.

Basically, it's that this is a ritualistic killing. He was the overkiller so much that it was a ritualistic killing and then he was pushed into a bog. I personally have never heard an argument that convinces me that. Mostly all of the writing about the ritualistic killing and human sacrifice that the pre-Roman Celts allegedly were doing involves stabbing, burning, and cutting open. None of it involves strangling and putting in a bog.

It really, to me, just seems like there was a fight and he wouldn't go down. And see, I can never... No evidence has ever been given to me that it couldn't have just been a murder. Like, people were still murdered in the first century. Yeah. Yeah. And there are also bodies found in...

food storage pits in various hill forts there are a lot of hill forts there's a lot of food storage pits they're literally just big pits that were built to put grain in and if you cover them over right then that makes an anaerobic space and it will keep the grain fresh over winter

basically. So that's all a grain pit, the seed pit is. Very clever, actually. But sometimes human remains are found in them, which has also been some, like, one of the arguments is that this is people being pushed into the grain as a form of human sacrifice, which feels like a great way to ruin your grain, frankly. Yeah, I don't think anyone at any time would want to do that to their grain. Yes. I...

I don't think that any of them are particularly great evidence for human sacrifice. I think Lindale Man is the one that comes up all the time as the best evidence for human sacrifice existing. If you've read Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, that is what is being recreated in Ghost Wall. But again, if they're using it for divination, you can't divine anything from a man in a pit. Yeah. You can only divine from a body that you still have access to.

Yeah. And a man in a pit is not, I think that he was murdered. And until somebody tells me otherwise or comes up with a better argument, then I'm always open to new evidence. But currently, I think Lindell Mann was murdered. As an aside... It really seems like it might have been like the fight at the end of a slasher movie where they just won't go down. You know, you think you've killed them and then they rear up again and you have to...

shoot them in the head after you already stabbed them five times yeah exactly that's what it feels like and then you've strangled him you've put him down and then eventually you have to push him into a bog yeah yeah but so it might have been just a very nasty day for one guy and now he's in a museum and everybody looks at him yeah

And he's just called Inderman. And in a very amusing aside, which I like very much, another body was found in the 1980s and was believed to be a murder victim from the 1980s. And a man was sent to prison for murdering his wife on the basis that they found her body in prison.

a bog and he they confronted him with the body like he had been under suspicion because his wife had gone missing they said we found her body in a bog and he confessed and they sent him to prison and then after they had sent him to prison the analysis from the labs came back and it turned out that that body was from like 50 BCE and that

That's fantastic. Very much not his wife. But he had killed his wife, but just put her somewhere else. Her body has never been found. And he is still in prison, but he confessed. And as a result, that was very much not his wife. So sending people to prison from well beyond the grave there.

yeah yeah um obviously bad to send someone to prison off the evidence of a body that isn't not at all related to them yeah but um you know but also pretty funny yeah it's also pretty funny and he had done it yeah and he just immediately caved and was like oh shit yeah i did delightful

Yeah, and then that is near enough everything I know about Druids and Celtic religion. Great, great. Yeah. Druids, nice guys, really. Nice guys, really. Vates, maybe not.

But we don't know. Yeah. We can't make a firm ruling. But the one thing that we do know they believed, because every single source mentions it, is that they believe that souls continue after you die. So that's nice. That is nice. Yeah. And next episode, Janina, is our 100th episode. It is. Can you believe it? I can't, actually. I mean, it does feel like it's taken quite a long time for us to get to 100. But also, 100 is a lot.

It's a lot of episodes. It is. It's taken us a while, but I think that it's all been build up and you don't want too fast to build up. You need to...

You know, build the tension to get up to 100. So we're going to do a special 100th episode? Yeah, we're going to do a chill 100th episode where we're going to answer our own strong opinions on things. So the historical hill that we will die on, our problematic historical fave, and sexy facts about history.

And maybe alternative histories we wish existed. Yeah. And possibly we will drink while we're doing it. Yeah. Yeah. And it will be a delight. It will be. It's going to be a celebration. Yeah. Yeah. If you would like to get in touch with us, ask us a question or support us, you can do that at history60.com.

Yes, everything is there. You can find us on Patreon and support us there. And you get episodes early and you get to hang out in the Discord. And I'm going to see Gladiator and Janina is going to see Gladiator and then we're going to record an episode about it. So that is, if you want to know how we feel about Gladiator, then you have to be a Patreon supporter. Yeah.

And I've also seen Megalopolis. So if you want to know my many, many feelings about that, Patreon is the place to be. And you also get a sticker from my own fair hands if you're a £3 or above supporter. And I don't know why you wouldn't want a sticker. So they're very good stickers. They're very good stickers.

Yeah. And you can ask us a question at historyofsexy.com. And yeah, everything is there. Just go to historyofsexy.com. Anything else you want to plug? Janina's other podcast, Within the Wires, is I think halfway through later season.

Yes, I think it was just episode six has come out this week. It's very exciting. I want to kick the main character slightly less now, so that is good. Now I feel quite sorry for her. And after the first two episodes, I texted Janina and said, I wish to kick her. And now I feel sad for her. So that is the power of Janina. I think you texted me.

That you wanted to drown her, actually. Oh, yeah, that might have been it. She was a real pain. She was a real dick in the first two episodes. And now, the power of Janina's storytelling is that she is revealing herself to be a flawed and fascinating human being. So...

Listen to Within the Wires as well. And the actress is very, very good that you've got. She's very good. She's delightful. She, like, it was, yeah, she's fantastic. So, yeah, listen to Within the Wires by books that we have written and come and hang out with us on Patreon. And until episode 100, bye, Janina. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.