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Note: This essay should be read in conjunction
with Indo-European Caste Systems
and Cosmologies, elsewhere on this website.
It’s important to remember that a lot
of history happened in Europe before anyone got around to writing
it down. Around 4000 B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”)
the tribes that spoke a language that linguists refer to as “Proto-Indo-European”
began to migrate away from their original homeland, which was
probably the territory around the northwest shores of
the Black Sea. Some went southeast and founded the Armenian,
Iranian and Indic cultures (Indian archeologists, however, insist
that everyone started in India and went west). Others went south
to Anatolia and Palestine, and became known as Hittites and Mitanni.
Those who went southwest to the Balkans became Thracians and
Greeks. Others who went west and north established the Celtic,
Slavic, Germanic, and Baltic cultures.
All this migrating around took many centuries
and may have involved a lot of bloodshed. Previous inhabitants
of a given piece of territory had to be persuaded, sometimes
at swordpoint, to let the newcomers in — and there went
the neighborhood! The pre-Indo-European cultures in Europe (which
were not “peaceful matriarchies” or peace-love-and-granola
“matrifocal” cultures, despite what current politically
correct theories may hold) were all still in the late Neolithic
or “New Stone Age” cultural stage of development. This
means that they had only stone axes, arrowheads, spears and knives
(lots of which have been found) with which to defend themselves.
The Indo-European newcomers had bronze weapons and armor with
which to fight or hunt, plus bronze axes with which to clear
the great forests that covered the continent, bronze-edged plows
to till the soil, etc.
Current archeological theory is that much
of the transmission of Indo-European languages and their once-associated
genepools may have been as much through the peaceful transfer
of knowledge (and exchange of spouses) between neighboring tribes
as through warfare. The popular image of the Indo-European barbarians
raping, looting, and pillaging their way across a continent owes
at least as much to the cultural outlook of late 19th century
archeologists, all of whom were from imperialist cultures, as
it does to either the available archeological evidence or the
surviving Indo-European myths and sagas. Most of the latter were,
we must remember, composed to entertain the warriors at their
feasting, and thus may have placed far more emphasis on violence
and bloodshed than was actually experienced by their predecessors.
As every bard (or advertising mogul) knows, sex and violence
are popular themes for entertainment. Bawdy humor and erotic
tales were not approved of by the Christians who wrote down the
Celtic, Slavic and Germanic stories for us, but stories of blood
and thunder were (for that matter, stories which showed clergy
and magicians in a positive light were also unlikely to be preserved
by Christian scribes).
The impact of the Indo-Europeans’ superior
bronze (and later iron) technology can be judged by the fact
that, by the time of the Roman Empire, nearly every language
spoken in “Europe” (except Basque, Lappish and Finnish)
was a member of the Western branch of the Indo-European language
family. Everything west of the Urals was pretty much dominated
by a loosely interlinked conglomeration of related cultures,
each of which was a mixture of one or more Indo-European cultures
and those of the previous holders of its territory. The largest
group of cultures north of the Roman borders was that of the
Celts, and the second largest that of the Germans. Some scholars
consider the Germans to be so closely related culturally to the
Celts as to be practically a subset, at least in archeological
terms (this annoys German archeologists terribly).
At the opening of the Common Era, European
Paleopaganism consisted of at least four interwoven layers: firstly,
the original pre-Indo-European religions (which were of course
also the results of several millenia of religious evolution and
cultural blending between multiple cultures); secondly, the proto-Indo-European
belief system held by the PIE speakers before they began their
migrations; thirdly, the bronze age variations of the PIE beliefs
as adapted to different bioregions and already existing cultural
complexes, and fourthly, the full scale “high religions”
of the “fully developed” and more-or-less distinct
Indo-European cultures. Disentangling these various layers is
going to take scholars a very long time, if indeed it will ever
be actually possible.
Thanks to the work of Georges
Dumezil and others, we have a clear idea of the social, political,
magical and religious functions of the priestly caste in Indo-European
Paleopaganism. I use the word “caste”
deliberately, for the Western Indo-European cultures seem to
have been built on the same fundamental social pattern as that
with which we are familiar in Vedic India: clergy, warriors,
high class and low class providers (farmers, craftspeople, traders,
herders, etc.), plus slaves/serfs, cultural “outsiders,”
and some sort of “royalty” at the center of each tribe.
In fact, a close correspondance can be made between the religious,
political and social functions originally performed by a Latin
“flamen,” a Celtic “draoi” (druid), or a
Vedic “brahmin.”
The Indo-European clergy basically included
the entire intelligensia of their cultures: poets, musicians,
historians, astronomers, genealogists, judges, diviners, and
of course, leaders and supervisors of religious rituals. Officially,
they ranked immediately below the local tribal chieftains or
“kings” and above the warriors. However, since the
kings were quasi-religious figures, usually inaugurated by the
clergy, and often dominated by them, it may have been a toss-up
as to who was in charge in any given tribe. The Gaulish clergy
were exempt from taxation and military service, and were said
to have spent decades in specialized training.
The IE clergy seem to have been responsible
for all public religious rituals (private ones were run by the
heads of each household). Public ceremonies were most often held
in fenced groves of sacred trees. In Europe, these were usually
of birch, yew, and oak (or ash where oaks were rare), depending
upon the spirits, ancestors, or deities being addressed, as well
as the specific occasion. Various members of the priestly caste
would be responsible for music, recitation of prayers, sacrificing
of animals (or occasionally human criminals or prisoners of war),
divination from the flames of the ritual fire or the entrails
of the sacrificial victim, and other minor ritual duties. Senior
members of the caste (“the” druids, “the”
brahmans or “the” flamens as such) would be responsible
for making sure that the rites were done exactly according to
tradition. Without such supervision, public rituals were generally
impossible, because their re-creation of the cosmos might be
erroneous, which would bring enormous danger to the tribe. Hence
perhaps Caesar’s comment that all public Gaulish sacrifices
required a Druid to be present.
There are definite indications that the Indo-European
clergy held certain polytheological and mystical opinions in
common, although only the vaguest outlines are known at this
point. There was a belief in reincarnation (with time spent between
lives in an Otherworld very similar to the Earthly one), in the
sacredness of particular trees, in the continuing relationship
between mortals, ancestors and deities, and naturally in the
standard laws of magic (see Real
Magic). There was an ascetic tradition of the sort
that developed into the various types of yoga in India, complete
with the Pagan equivalent of monasteries and convents. There
was also, I believe, a European “tantric” tradition
of sex and drug magic, although it’s possible that this
was mostly surviving pre-IE shamanic methods or borrowings from
the Central Asian and Finnish territories (which were still in
the hunter-gatherer style of culture necessary to shamanism)
being absorbed and transmuted.
Only the western Celtic clergy (the Druids)
seem to have had any sort of organized inter-tribal communications
network, via traveling bards and brehons (judges/mediators).
Most of the rest of the IE clergy seem to have kept to their
own local tribes. Among the Germanic peoples, the priestly class
had weakened by the early centuries of the Common Era to the
point where the majority of ritual work was done by the heads
of households.
We don’t know whether or not any but
the highest ranking clergy were full-time priests and priestesses.
At the height of the Celtic cultures, training for the clergy
was said to take twenty years of hard work (although this may
have simply reflected growing up in druidic families), which
would not have left much time or energy for developing other
careers. Among the Scandinavians, there seem to have been priests
and priestesses (godar, gydjur) who lived in small temples
and occasionally toured the countryside with statues of their
patron/matron deities, to whom they were considered to be “married”
(as happens with clergy in some African American Mesopaganisms
such as Voudoun). In the rest of the Germanic, Slavic and Baltic
cultures, however, many of the clergy may have worked part-time,
a common custom in many tribal societies.
It’s also common for tribal cultures
to have full- or part-time healers, who may use herbs, hypnosis,
psychology, massage, magic and other techniques. Frequently they
will also have diviners and weather predictors (or controllers).
Midwives, almost always female, are also standard and, as mentioned
above, there is usually a priestess or priest working at least
part-time. What causes confusion, especially when dealing with
extinct cultures, is that different tribes combine these offices
into different people. An important point for Wiccans to be aware
of, however, is that all the IE cultures had specific words for
“priest,” “priestess,” “healer,”
“midwife,” “diviner,” “matchmaker,”
“advisor,” “wise one,” etc. — none
of which appear to have been linguistically related, except in
the most metaphorical sense, to the various words which became
“wicce/wicca” in Anglo-Saxon, and eventually
“witch” in Modern English. Despite the modern Wiccan
belief that “wicca” meant “wise one,” it
looks like it really meant “bender, changer, sorcerer or
possibly invoker” with a neutral-to-negative connotation
even among the Paleopagans. Whatever else they may have been,
for good or ill, Paleopagan witches were not the “priests
and priestesses of The Old Religion.”
The Romans discovered when conquering Hispania
(modern Spain and Portugal) that the Druids were a major source
of trouble, since their wandering members kept warning tribes
who hadn’t been subjugated yet of what to expect. Julius
Caesar knew this history well and made it a point in his conquest
of Gaul to kill every Druid his troops could get their hands
on (except for a few “native guides”). When the Roman
Empire changed hands and continued under new management, the
Church perpetuated this policy of killing every Druid (or other
Paleopagan clergyperson in other cultures) who would not convert.
Thus, by the time of the seventh century C.E., Paleopagan clergy had been either murdered, converted
or driven completely underground throughout the Western Celtic
lands. In parts of Wales and Ireland, and possibly in the Scottish
Highlands, fragments of Druidism seem to have survived in heavy
disguise through the institutions of the Celtic Church, of the
bards and poets, and of the brehons, as well as in peasant folk
customs (especially the seasonal celebrations). Some of these
survivals of Druidic belief and practice, along with a great
deal of speculation and a few outright forgeries, inspired the
creation of the “Mesopagan Druid
fraternities of the 1700’s. These groups have handed
on these fragments (and speculations and forgeries) to this very
day, augmenting them with a great deal of folkloric and other
research.
These would seem to most Americans to be the
only sources of information about Paleopagan Druidism. However,
research done by Russian and Eastern European folklorists, anthropologists
and musicologists among the Baltic peoples of Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia indicates that Paleopagan traditions may have
survived in small villages, hidden in the woods and swamps, even
into the current century! Some of these villages still had people
dressing up in long white robes and going out to sacred groves
to do ceremonies, as recently as World War Two! Soviet social
scientists interviewed the local clergy, recorded the ceremonies
and songs, and otherwise made a thorough study of their “quaint
traditions” preparatory to turning them all into good Marxists.
Ironically enough, some of the oldest “fossils” of
preserved Indo-European traditions (along with bits of vocabulary
from Proto-German and other early IE tongues) seem to have been
kept by Finno-Ugric peoples such as the Cheremis. Most of this
research has been published in a variety of Soviet academic books
and journals, and has never been translated into English. This
material, when combined with the Vedic and Celtic sources, could
give us most of the missing links necessary to reconstruct Paleopagan
Druidism.
But there are some definite “nonfacts”
about the ancient Druids that need to be mentioned: There are
no real indications that they used stone altars (at Stonehenge
or anywhere else); that they were better philosophers than the
classical Greeks or Egyptians; that they had anything to do with
the mythical continents of Atlantis or Mu; or that they wore
gold Masonic regalia or used Rosicrucian passwords. They were
not the architects of (a) Stonehenge, (b) the megalithic
circles and lines of Northwestern Europe, (c) the Pyramids of
Egypt, (d) the Pyramids of the Americas, (e) the statues of Easter
Island, or (f) anything other than wooden barns, stone houses,
and an occasional hill fort. There is no proof that any of them
were monotheists, or “Pre-Christian Christians,” or
that they understood or invented either Pythagorean or Gnostic
or Cabalistic mysticism, although much of Pythagorean mysticism
may have come from the same common IE roots as Druidic mysticism.
They did not all have long white beards, which would have been
difficult for the 50% of them who were women or the children
in the caste. Golden sickles are also highly unlikely to have
been used by the ancient Druids, despite what Pliny says, because
their cutting edges would have been too soft for harvesting mistletoe,
which is an exceptionally tough plant (although sickles make
an excellent symbol for a Nature-based religion that stresses
the importance of both sacrifice and harvesting the results of
seeds planted).
Separating the sense from the nonsense, and
the probabilities from the absurdities, about the Paleopagan
clergy of Europe, including those who inspire modern Druids,
is going to take a great deal of work. But the results should
be worth it, since we will wind up with a much clearer image
of the real “Old Religions” of Europe than Neopagans
have ever had available before. This will have liturgical, philosophical
and political consequences that will affect our future, and that
of our planet, for many years to come.
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