383. Romans vs Druids: The War For Celtic Britain (Ep 1)

20:34William Dalrymple:In this sort of modern Druidic tradition, if you like, I mean, there's talk of Beltane, the great fire festivals, when you drive, they say you used to drive cattle between two fires for purification before taking them out to summer pasture. Are you saying actually that's a retrospective projection because we don't know? No, it's not that. Some of the customs carried on are genuinely old, and there are some old customs at most of the festivals. These are recorded way back to the Middle Ages, often the early Middle Ages, sometimes in the ancient world. So that's part of the effect I spoke of, of taking genuinely ancient ideas and images and practices and making them relevant for a modern world.

21:23People these days who celebrate the opening of summer, May Day, Beltane and Irish do not mostly drive livestock between two fires. But they do accept the idea of fire as an exciting and purifying element. and they do often jump over the fires hand in hand for luck and for love, as people did long ago when they were also driving livestock around them.

21:48Anita Anand:Now, you were talking about these strange links with much, much further east, and one of these things seems to be this belief in sacred rivers. Now, obviously, that's something that's very current in India today. I lived near the Yamuna and the Ganges. I went to the Kumela last year. Millions of people turning up to dunk themselves in rivers. And are we right to see echoes of that when we go to the British Museum and we see the Battersea Shield, which someone deposited in the Thames 2 ,000 years ago? Is that the same sort of body of ideas that a river is something that is alive and deserves worship and presence, whether it's coconuts or whether it's Iron Age shields?

22:35Anita Anand:Is there a link or are they just two completely different things? I think there's such a strong link. It can also be called a complete identity with both. However, as in India and elsewhere, sacred waters are rather particular. It's not any river in Britain in which people deposit huge numbers of offerings. It's selected rivers in England flowing east, like the Thames and the Witham and the Tyne. It's also selected small lakes in Wales and selected lakes and bogs in Scotland. So there are very clearly bits of water which for some reason or another are sacred and others which are not. But also the veneration of water in particular in Britain is period-specific.

23:29It's constricted mostly to round about 1000 BC or BCE through to the coming of the Romans and a bit after. It's when the circles, the round circles are abandoned and before we get into Romanisation and Christianisation.

23:50William Dalrymple:I want to talk more about water, but actually I want to do a pivot and talk about bogs. We're going to take a break. After the break, can we come back and talk about the thing that I'm obsessed with, which is the bodies found in the bogs of Ireland? Join us after the break.

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26:09William Dalrymple:Welcome back. Now, just before the break, I was talking about bogs. And the reason I'm obsessed with them is because, actually, they have this remarkable chemistry that preserves things so that we can see in enormous detail what went in at the time that it went in. Ronald, tell me about one of the most famous bog bodies that was found in Ireland because there is that sort of rather horrific detail that we know his nipples were cut off. Why? Why? Why, Ronald? Why? What do we know about this? Tell us about the nipples. Well, this is prehistoric, so of course we can't be sure. If we relate it to a medieval Irish text, which stated that part of homage to an early Irish king is to suck his nipples as though he's acting as a kind of mother to you, then this is a form of homage.

27:01in which case your dead man could have been an unlucky king deposed by his own people or killed by an enemy people who has his nipples cut off to destroy his royalty. On the other hand, it could just have been something really nasty being done to an enemy warrior whom you'd captured and were putting to death horribly, or a warrior on your side, or just a man of your tribe who'd committed a heinous crime and was being stripped of his dignity and his place in the community before being killed and tipped into the bog.

27:40Anita Anand:But there's reason to believe that just as we've got all these beautiful shields and swords that are thrown into the towns, that these bodies are put into the bogs ritually that this is part of a religious ceremony, not just a random dumping of some fellow into the bog at the back of the settlement? No, it's certainly not random, but ritual can cover an enormous number of different things. One is the slaughter of enemies. In other words, you've had a successful war. You execute selected prisoners as part of weakening the enemy, and then you ritually dump them in a place in which they are out of the community.

28:25Explanation two is they're executed criminals. They're people who have offended the community and are from the community and they are then sentenced to death and they are placed outside the bounds of the community in order to rid them of the malefactors in death as in life. And the third one is human sacrifice, that these people are actually offered up to deities like material objects, and they're put into the bogs because the bogs are portals, liminal places, gateways to other worlds. Actually, all three of those explanations have equal probability, but there's a tendency to home in on human sacrifice because it's sexiest.

29:11William Dalrymple:Ronald, just tell us a little bit about the other world, this space between life and death. I mean, who believes in it and what is it exactly? Human beings across the planet believe in other worlds in the sense of worlds in which spirits or deities live. Sometimes humans can go there and the spirits and deities can pretty well always cross into our world. A lot of peoples think that worlds are on different levels. You have the terrestrial one and then the heavens and the underworld are for the non-human beings. Other cultures believe that there are parallel dimensions on Earth, which you can access by going into water or sailing across it or by moving through gateways into hollow hills or through portals in woods.

30:06And then you're simply moving sideways and encountering the fairies, the elves, the gnomes or the gods.

30:13Anita Anand:And we have Irish sources particularly, which kind of illuminate this, this idea of the land of youth, the Tirnanog. Oh, yes. The Irish aren't alone in this, but they produce this fantastic medieval literature, which talks about the other world or other worlds. Once again, they're not consistent in where it is. To some, you have to get into a car, a boat, and sail into the ocean, and then you start landing in the other world. My favourite object in the National Museum of Ireland, that gorgeous golden boat that must be some sort of reference to that. Absolutely so. To others, you go into hollow hills like the enormous Neolithic burial mounds in the Boyne Valley or into natural hills.

30:59So the Irish are not sure where the other world is and how you reach it, but they're absolutely sure that somehow or other it's there.

31:06William Dalrymple:There's a wonderful woman who makes just brilliant television. Derry Girls is one of her babies, Lisa McGee, and she's just done another one, which is fantastic, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. And she has this other world where the veil lifts at a certain time. And it is in between sort of rubble, sort of what was stone circle. So it's still very much present in the minds of the Irish as part of their inheritance, who they are. It's found absolutely everywhere. And it's related to a fact which traditional peoples incorporate into their everyday culture, and the modern West tries desperately to ignore, which is that there is a substantial minority of people in every society who simply see and hear things that the majority don't, who encounter visibly non-human beings that are like humans, call them fairies, elves, if you like, and sometimes actually have interchanges with them.

32:10William Dalrymple:So, Ronald, you're saying that there's two-way traffic in the minds of the people, that you can go across and you can meet these fantastical creatures, but they can also come and what is the purpose? Who comes back in folklore and what do they give us? Well, it's chosen people, chosen usually by the other beings who get to meet them and tend to cross into their world. Some spend a long time there. Some actually form romantic relationships with the other beings. mostly, and especially in modern times, the apparent meetings with these fairy-like beings are very brief and very transitory. But there's an enormous literature and an enormous folklore of more extended contacts.

32:56I mean, these contacts used to be essential to humanity, in that traditional peoples who are utterly dependent on a very often hostile and difficult natural environment to survival will be forever negotiating with the spirits of it. Otherwise, they don't believe they can survive.

33:18Anita Anand:Ronald, how far do you think you can use this rich Irish medieval literature which talks about all this wonderful mythology and stories of cattle raids and warrior aristocracy. Is that good evidence for what people were believing in mainland Britain centuries ago, or maybe not? Maybe, maybe not, because we have no idea how similar British and Irish beliefs were. But it should be pointed out that medieval Irish literature isn't even really solid evidence for what people believed in pre-Christian Ireland, because it's all the work of medieval Christian Irish writers and storytellers. And we've no idea how good their information was.

34:06It may be very accurate about pagan Ireland, or it may be all made up by them.

34:12Anita Anand:It's so frustrating as well, because there's so much that's so thrilling and exciting, and there's arrows pointing in certain directions, but we can't say with certainty any more than these things may have existed. And nowhere is this more true than the Druids. When I was growing up, I used to read Nora Chadwick, who claimed that the classical sources on the Druids were nonsense, and we shouldn't believe a word that Caesar or Pliny or Tacitus says. You take them rather more seriously now, don't you? You think you can say things about Druids, but maybe they're very different to what the people in Stonehenge, the solstice, think the Druids are.

34:52Anita Anand:So maybe we should just start with the simple question, who were the Druids and what do we know about them? The Druids were the experts in spiritual matters, religion and magic, the spiritual professionals of the peoples of Northwestern Europe when they first emerged into history, 2 ,000 years ago in what we call the Iron Age. And we have this extraordinary description of this in AD 60. And it's worth maybe lingering here, because we do actually have something solid that is well recorded by the Roman sources. And they talk about the Roman governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, leading his legions to the shores of the Minai Strait in North Wales and crossing over to the far bank on Anglesey, where there is this sort of slaughter of the priesthood, those who knew the law and retained it but never wrote it down frustratingly for us.

35:54Anita Anand:Tell us about that. What was their beef, the Romans, with these people? The Romans outlawed Druids largely because they regarded them as leaders of the resistance to Roman conquest. They also used them as a justification for that conquest by accusing them of beastly religious practices above all human sacrifice. The problem here is we've no idea how accurate the Roman propaganda was and how far they distorted or even made up things. We can't trust a word that any Greek or Roman writes about the Druids. You're more on the Nora Chadwick end. Oh, there's nothing changed there. Nora was right. It must be said that Greeks in particular wrote lots of very admiring things about Druids, which we can't trust either, although everything may be correct.

36:51With the case of the famous image of the Druids on Anglesey, Anglesey is a centre of resistance to Roman conquest, which is why the Romans go there to take it out. and the famous story of the Druids and Anglesey is found in just one Roman writer, Tacitus the Historian, and it describes how the Romans discovered that the island of Anglesey, Mon in Welsh, which lies off the northwest coast of Wales, was becoming a major centre of resistance to Roman conquest. So the Roman governor decided to take it out, and when his army reached the shore opposite the island. They saw an enemy army drawn up to fight it, with tall druids shrieking curses, and black-robed women like furies with flaming torches.

37:47Good stuff. We want more of that. Well, you don't get any more of that because it's the only mention. And the Roman soldiers were paralysed with shock and terror. They'd never seen anything like this, which does seem to indicate that Druids cursing Romans was something they hadn't encountered before. And the strapping hero of the governor, square-jawed, probably went to a good school, steps forward and encourages his men by telling them they're cowards if they run away from magicians and women. And the Roman legions, heartened by their general, cross the water and indeed slaughter the enemy army, including, one assumes, the Druids and the women, and expose the fact that a religion dedicated to human sacrifice had been carried out in the island.

38:39This is the only mention of Druids in Britain. It's a spectacular story. We've no idea where the truth lies on a spectrum with at one end that this is a totally accurate account taken from an eyewitness who was on the spot. Shading through, Tacitus met a superannuated drunken leisurely in a bar in Rome who spun him this story too. And this is possible. Tacitus invented the whole episode himself because his history was getting dull and he needed a moral account which showed Rome and the Roman general whom he admired in the best light. You are a cynic, Ronald. No, I'm not a cynic. I'm following what the experts say.

39:24The latest book on Tacitus as a historian has the title The History of Make-Believe. That's really quite telling.

39:33William Dalrymple:Ronald, just bearing in mind your advice, and I would never argue, don't believe the Greeks, don't believe the Romans. But they talk about mistletoe being really important, and you also ascribe a great deal of importance to mistletoe. So first of all, talk about that. What role does mistletoe play? And why do we believe them when they talk about mistletoe? Well, we can believe the Greeks and Romans when they talk about themselves. And when they describe particular native customs that have no obvious propaganda value to them, then we're more inclined to take that seriously. Mistletoe is connected with the peoples of northwestern Europe, only in one passage in the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder, where he says that the tribes of the extreme south of France venerated mistletoe as sacred when they found it growing on an oak tree, which, as anybody who knows the countryside knows, hardly ever happens.

40:37So it's a big deal when it's found on the oak. And then six days after the next new moon, they have this ceremony which Pliny describes, in which a white-robed priest, he doesn't call him a druid, goes up with a golden sickle, cuts down the mistletoe, it's caught in midair, and then they sacrifice white cattle, and the mistletoe is made into a potent healing drink. Now, we presume that the priest is a Druid because these are tribes from southern France who spoke the language in which priests are called Druids. But you may note that there's no indication that anybody but the tribes of southern France did this.

41:21There's no connection with midwinter. There's no connection with fertility or kissing under it.

41:26Anita Anand:But there is mistletoe found in the belly of one of our bog bodies. Lindow Man has mistletoe pollen in his stomach, doesn't he? And so the idea is that he was given a mistletoe to ingest before he sacrificed, maybe? First, we're not sure if Lindow Man's a sacrifice. He may have been a mugging victim, or he may have been an executed criminal. Second, we found four grains of mistletoe in his tongue. That's really very little. And it could just be that mistletoe pollen blew onto his last meal. Mistletoe is quite specific. You don't find it. I mean, if I was mugging victim tomorrow, I wouldn't necessarily have mistletoe in my tummy.

42:07Yeah, we not necessarily would not have it. This could be just a complete accident, a freak of nature produced by the breeze that was blowing through particular vegetation when this occurred.

42:20Anita Anand:Now, Ronald, given your very measured support for the sources that we have, I suspect you're not going to be a fan of druids burning bodies and wicker men, much as I enjoyed the movie. Now, one iconic image people have of the druids is the wicker man, thanks to Robin Hardy's 1970s horror film, where huge human-shaped figures are burnt by sort of wicked Scottish islanders who've adopted a type of Celtic paganism. Is there any truth to the idea of the wicker man being used in druid spirituality? Or is that, again, very, very improbable? Well, we all love the movie The Wicker Man, who can turn down Christopher Lee and drag.

43:06But the image of the Wicker Man is possible as history, but it's unstable. It occurs in just two sources, one of which may have taken it from the other. The big one is Julius Caesar, who actually campaigned among tribes that had druids. He knew somebody whom somebody else says was a druid. The trouble is that the passage in which he describes druids is an odd one in Caesar's book. It doesn't fit in with the rest. It's actually contradicted in places by things that Caesar himself said. And we know that Caesar left his book unfinished when he got knifed. And so it could be that his successor, the guy who finished the book, decided he was getting boring at that stage and chucked in extra material of unknown reliability.

44:01The person who finished his book didn't go to Gaul with Caesar. And so his knowledge would have been very sketchy. And that's the only place where you find the burning alive in big wicker images. There's a later Greek geographer called Strabo. He's in Alexandria. wasn't it? Yes, that's right. He may have got as far as Sicily, but that's still a very long way from Druids. And he repeats the same information, maybe from an independent source, maybe from Caesar. So it's all very shaky.

44:34William Dalrymple:Ronald, it does seem as if the tradition of the Druids was completely wiped out or drowned in blood in Anglesey, but it survives in Ireland. What do we put that down to? The problem for us is that the word druid just means an expert in religion and magic. It's not as if there's an international training program for druids. Druids in Ireland are unlikely to be like druids in Gaul, which is now France, where Caesar, correctly or not, says did have a 20-year training program and a supratribal meeting place. So they were a kind of priestly caste, rather like Brahmins in India. Whereas in the medieval Irish literature, which may or may not have any contact with pre-Christian reality, a druid is a magician, and druidcraft is just the Irish word for magic.

45:32And so anybody who's working a magic spell is a druid at the moment at which they're working it. However, there are full-time magicians who are full-time druids and do act as advisors to kings and wise people and merlin figures. But whether, as I've said, this actually is anchored in any kind of pagan reality, we simply don't know.

45:59Anita Anand:Ronald, as frustrating as this dark cloud over this period is, it's fascinating to talk to you. We're going to move in the next episode to a world that is more brightly illuminated, and that is how the religion of these islands changes once the Romans arrive. And we're going to go to Hadrian's Wall, where we actually do have solid evidence with inscriptions for the names of the gods, many of them local, who were worshipped there. And we're going to have the wonderful Ellen Barraclough, last seen with us last year in Greenland, coming with us to the marches of Hadrian's Wall to explore the religion of the Celts up there.

46:53Anita Anand:Thank you very much for listening to Empire. Goodbye from me, William Durinpole.

46:59William Dalrymple:And goodbye from me, Anita Arnon.

47:02Anita Anand:And goodbye from me.

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