The Story of Druidism In comprising this paper, I had to read several books and text just to get a sense of who the Druids were and where they came from. This was not an easy task because there is so much that is not known. They did not keep records; they were a non-literate tribe and orally taught their religion to their disciples. Depending on the author and his/her belief, you get a different opinion.
Hence, because of this, I have identified the history, legend and folklore of the Druids into two groups; the Classical belief and the Romantic belief. The Classical being the more reality based understanding of the Druids and the Romantic being the romanticized understanding of the Druids. However, before we find out about who they were, I wanted to give an overview of where they came from and their timeline.
AN OVERVIEW It is thought that the Druids first surfaced around the third century B.C.
Druids Temple (Ilton)
18th-century engraving reproducing a bas-relief fo...
A group of druids from the Sylvan Grove of the Ord...This is not known for sure but is speculated from what little information that we have on them from other scholars and chroniclers. "Our most informative sources "ÃÂ Strabo, Diodorus Siculua and Julius Caesar- which were all writing in the mid or late first century BC. However, we can push the literary evidence for Druidism back somewhat further, inasmuch as all these historians undoubtedly drew on a single earlier source, Posidonius, a Greek philosopher from Syria, who flourished around the first century BC. But the earliest literature to mention Druids may have been the work of Timaeus, a Greek historian who lived in the mid-Fourth to mid-third century BC, and who was used as an authority by many later chroniclers, including Diodorus."ÃÂ (Green, pg 14). Now there was actually other accounts that trace Druidism back even earlier in...