Druid

The word druid names two distinct things, and an honest account keeps them apart: the learned class of the ancient Celts, and the members of the modern movement of Druidry.

The ancient learned class

Among the ancient Celtic peoples the druids were a learned class serving as priests, judges, teachers and keepers of tradition, holding religious and legal authority and undergoing a long oral training, and much of what they knew was deliberately never written, so that they left no scriptures of their own. What is known of them comes largely from outside observers, above all the Romans, whose accounts are partial and hostile, so the reliable knowledge of the ancient druids is limited and much that is popularly believed of them is later invention.

The modern revival

Modern Druidry is a separate phenomenon, a set of movements that arose from the eighteenth century onward, romantic, fraternal and later religious, drawing on the fragmentary and often unreliable picture of the ancient druids to build new traditions of nature reverence and ceremony, some of which are now recognised as forms of contemporary Paganism. The monuments popularly associated with the druids, such as Stonehenge, in fact predate the Celts by many centuries, a connection made by early modern antiquarians rather than by history. To speak clearly of the druid, then, is to distinguish the imperfectly known ancient learned class from the modern revival that took its name and reimagined it, rather than to run the two together as popular usage does.

Much of what modern Druidry treats as ancient ritual was demonstrably invented in the eighteenth century by identifiable individuals: the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg fabricated the Gorsedd of Bards ceremony and a body of supposedly ancient druidic lore in the 1790s, later shown by scholars to include forged manuscripts, yet his invented ceremonial has nonetheless been absorbed into real Welsh cultural institutions, including the National Eisteddfod, and into the ritual practice of later Druid orders, a case historians of religion often cite as a clear example of an invented tradition becoming genuinely traditional through use over time regardless of its fabricated origin.

The Ancient Order of Druids, founded in London in 1781 as a fraternal and charitable society along Freemasonic lines, and later orders including the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids founded in the twentieth century, developed modern Druidry into an organised movement with its own ceremonial calendar tied to the solstices and equinoxes. That movement gained formal state recognition as a religion in England and Wales in 2010, when the Charity Commission registered the Druid Network as a charity on the basis that Druidry meets the legal test for a religion, a status most contemporary Pagan traditions in the United Kingdom still lack.