Читать книгу 366 Celt: A Year and A Day of Celtic Wisdom and Lore - Carl McColman - Страница 20

If there’s one word firmly associated with Celtic mysticism, it is “druid.” And yet probably no other concept connected with the spirituality of the Celts is less understood, or more frequently consigned to the mists of fantasy. We have only a handful of written records from ancient times (when the original druids were still active in the Celtic lands, prior to the coming of Christianity), and the druids themselves wrote none of these. Instead, Greek and Roman authors like Julius Caesar and Pliny have given us what little information we have about the earliest druids—and when you consider how some of these classical authors were biased against the Celts, it’s easy to see how this source material is not only scanty, but unreliable.

We’re not even entirely sure what the word druid means, although the popular notion that it has to do with “oak wisdom” is as good a theory as any. Seen this way, a druid is a natural philosopher, one who discerns the innate wisdom of the earth and interprets it for the good of the community. So when modern folks dismiss the druids as “tree huggers,” they’re probably not too far from the truth. But a druid would reply in an ironic tone of voice, “You say that like it’s a bad thing?”