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

What are the links between the Druids and Stonehenge? Why did Romans massacre Druids in Anglesey, Wales? What is the Pagan Calendar and how is modern Halloween derived from it? What can we learn from the mysterious ‘bog bodies’? In Episode 1 of this new series, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand are joined by Professor Ronald Hutton, author of Pagan Britain, The Druids, and Blood and Mistletoe, to discuss the ancient spiritual practices of the British Isles. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/EMPIRE. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  So we've got some very exciting news for you. We've sold out our first show, but we've got a second show at The Rest Is Fest in September.

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  And we have a brilliant lineup, incredibly topical one, too. We're calling it Three Ayatollahs: An Iranian Dynasty.

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  Delighted to say we're going to be joined by a great friend of the show, Ali Ansari, one of Britain's foremost experts on Iranian history. He is an excellent storyteller. Ali, just tell us, what are we going to be chatting about?

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  Well, we will be exploring big questions like how has the influence of the Ayatollahs shaped Iran since the 1979 revolution? Does the Islamic Republic's grip appear to be fracturing? And what role have other nations played in shaping Iran's fate?

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  And I can't wait to get into the discussion.

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  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  And me, William Derumpel. And today, we start a new series on the earliest gods and religions of the British Isles. Before Christianity, before Rome, before even the written word, the islands of Britain and Ireland were alive with gods. Gods of rivers and sacred springs, gods of the hilltop and the sacred grove, gods who demanded the most beautiful objects be thrown into bogs and into water, and sometimes who demanded human beings. We're going to present an epic story over six episodes, taking us from Stonehenge through the Iron Age Druids, through the painted pics of Scotland, St Patrick in Ireland, and

• 3:23Speaker 03

  finally, the arrival of the Vikings, their dragonships, and the gods of the North.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  This story's got everything in it, I have to say. It is a story of Britain and Ireland, and it isn't one of transformation, but really, you know, sort of the layering, several layers, one on top of each other, across more than a thousand years. So in today's episode, we're going inside the mysterious sacred worlds of early Britain and Ireland. Britain's earliest religious buildings, called Long Barrows, then Stonehenge, the other world, the bog bodies, the pagan festivals, and of course, the Druids. And we do so with the finest guide available, Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol, author of Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Blood and Mistletoe,

• 4:14Speaker 02

  The History of the Druids in Britain, and The Druids, simply The Druids. Ronald, welcome to Empire. Delighted to have you.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  I'm delighted to be with you both.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Ronald, 20 years ago, you and I met outside a Long Barrow, at West Kennet in Wiltshire, near Silbury Hill, near Avebury. And I've never forgotten our meeting and how you taught me something I hadn't realised, that there was, at West Kennet, not one period and one religion, but two religions in conflict. So Ronald, maybe you could just explain to us, what is West Kennet Long Barrow to those who haven't had a chance to see it yet? And what indeed is a Long Barrow? And when were they built?

• 4:54Speaker 05

  A Long Barrow is the local southern English name for a particular type of monument that represents the first really widespread architectural tradition of the entire human race. There are around 40,000 of these structures still surviving, in a great arc along the western seaboard of Europe, from south-eastern Spain, right round through the British Isles and Netherlands, to southern Scandinavia and northern Germany.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  And this enormous area is covered in them, from about 8,000 years ago to about 5,000 years ago. And that's before you have any widespread ceremonial architecture over any other region of the globe. So they matter.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  So tell us what people did with them? And what was the religious and spiritual world that they're associated with?

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Over such a big area, there's an enormous variety, both in the nature of the structures and what happened there. The basic idea with which people play is to build a chamber of huge stone, sometimes huge timbers, covered by a mound that is usually much bigger than is needed to cover the chamber. In other words, which makes a statement in the landscape. And you usually find dead human beings or bits of them in the chamber. So at this basis, this is a religion which has mediated at least partly through the dead, and which creates enormous structures to which the eye is drawn wherever they're made.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  So Ronald, I mean, I remember at school, going on trips and looking at mounds, and very sort of serious, white-haired teacher saying, well, you know, these Long Barrows, they were all sealed up, and, you know, it was the Beaker people that did it. The Beaker people what's done it? Now, first of all, who are the Beaker people? And second of all, why would they seal up these barrows? And third of all, I think you've got something of an intellectual cat to throw among the pigeons when it comes to the Beaker people as well.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm a gentle self, so I don't throw cats among pigeons. It's bad both for the cats and the pigeons. What I can say is that, for sure, the religion of the Long Barrow people and of this huge tradition of great mounds and internal megalithic chambers comes to a halt. At different places, different times, but it really grinds to a halt round about 3,000 before the common or Christian era. And certainly in southern Britain, this is quite a traumatic change, because the mounds

• 7:49Speaker 05

  are not just deserted, the chambers are actually blocked up, and in some cases, very carefully closed against anybody trying to get in ever again. This is probably because of a religious reformation, equivalent to that which swept Christianity in the 16th century. We used to be told, well, we were told by the Victorians, that this was the work of an invading force called the Beaker people, who brought a new cultural package like big drinking vessels, and metals, and stone circles, and urban circles, and so on.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  The Victorians thought that everything was due to invasions by new and superior races with new and superior technologies, because this was exactly the treatment the Victorians themselves were meeting out to indigenous peoples all over the world as part of the imperialism with which both of you are historically so deeply interested. We, in the 1990s in Britain, tended to abandon this idea, largely because the changes associated with the so-called Beaker people proved to have turned up in this country really slowly, spread over about a thousand years, instead of arriving altogether.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  And the bodies you find in the burial places don't look ethnically much different from each other. However, there really is a cat among the pigeons at present, produced by geneticists, the DNA specialists, who claim to have found that round about halfway through the third millennium, we're talking round about 2,500 B.C. or B.C.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  There's a genetic makeover. In other words, most of the people in Britain seem to be replaced by foreigners. Trouble is, there's no sign of invasion, no sign of warfare, no sign of trauma, no sign of any change in the way people live or worship, no sign of big change in their technology. So whatever this cataclysm is, it doesn't measure up to the archaeology, and we're still trying to get our heads around it. So the message is, since the 1990s, the Beaker people are out, and this has nothing to do with me.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  How does this all relate to the waves of Indo-European language speakers who seem to spread out from, let's start off on the step and one lot are heading down to India and Iran, while others are crossing Anatolia into Western Europe. Where does, where did this linguistic map fit into the DNA and the archaeology?

• 10:39Speaker 05

  The answer is, we at present have no idea. So it's open season on the facts. What we can say is that Indo-European languages do engulf most of the Old World. But there's big argument over when. Some think they arrived with the long barriers, with the megalithic tombs. Others put them as late as the first millennium B.C. or BCE, and there's no consensus. What we can say is that by the first millennium, you have not just this linguistic zone which stretches all the way from the Far East to the Atlantic seaboard,

• 11:22Speaker 05

  but you have a wonderful exchange of art and ideas. And my great piece of evidence here would be the Gundustrop cauldron.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Which I've seen in Copenhagen, yes.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. It's found in a bog in Denmark, which is why it's in Copenhagen. It was said until recently to be a supreme example of Celtic art, because there are some similarities with Celtic designs. But we've got a double whammy now with it. First, the metallurgy shows it was made probably in the Ukraine.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  It's definitely on the shores of the Black Sea, and then traded westwards. And second, we've always been a bit puzzled by a goddess-like figure on the side of it with the weird beast beside her, looks like an elephant. And we're now sure that that's because it is an elephant. The original designs for some of the pictures and the cauldrons were found in the Indus Valley. We're talking about Pakistan.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  And they get very excited about this in India because it's the, it's the figure of Shiva, isn't it?

• 12:27Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  The lord of the beasts, surrounded by these beasts and sitting in a yogic position.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  That's it. I'm wearing pyjamas. You've got it perfectly.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  I'm wearing mine now.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  I'm dead impressed. You have perfect dedications to some continents.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Don't encourage him, Ronald. Do not encourage him, Ronald. But you know, on, you know, if, if you've got that Indian influence, which it's just mind-blowing that you'd have elephants there in the carving. Are there other parallels that you've found between Brahminic traditions and, say, Druidic traditions in England?

• 13:00Speaker 05

  The simple answer is we don't know enough about the Druidic traditions to say. But what we can say is if artistic designs travel with great precision across the highest mountains in the world and the vast open steppes of Eurasia, as far as the Black Sea, then stories and ideas are going to travel even more easily because you don't actually have to pack them and carry them. So there's a huge amount of super racial, super cultural transmission going on across the Old World before our bit of it gets anywhere near history.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  And where does Stonehenge fit into this picture? Because there are so, we all know there are many different phases of Stonehenge. This big reformation that you talked about happens in the middle, doesn't it, between two phases?

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Well, it's, it happens at the beginning, which is why we get a Stonehenge at all. What people do when they give up making megalithic tombs and communing with the dead inside them is to get out in the open air and worship inside circles of whatever happens to be easiest to hand to make them. In soft soil without big stones, you simply dig a ditch and pile up a circular bank. In areas where you have lots of trees, you put up rings of timber posts. And where you have big rocks lying around handy, you put them up on ends and create a stone circle. And Stonehenge comes in in this tradition. It has all three. It has the bank,

• 14:33Speaker 05

  it has the timbers, and eventually it has the stone circle. But the thing about Stonehenge is it's unique. It's a logo, nothing else like it. It's created by demented megalomaniac woodworkers, carpenters, who take enormous stones and shape them, smooth them, and fit them together as if they were timbers. It's a brilliant idea. It's so impossibly difficult that nobody tried it again.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Can I just ask, you know, I'm really struck by something you said just a moment ago, saying we really don't know very much about the Druidic traditions. In popular culture, you always have Druids dancing around Stonehenge. You know, they're very much sort of wound together. You're saying, well, we don't know that, or you're saying, no, that's not happening?

• 15:24Speaker 05

  I'm saying we don't know that. It might have happened. Problem is, the Druids are the common names in Celtic languages for the priests and magicians who are in charge of northwestern European society when history begins. And before we had a realisation of how immensely long prehistory is, we assumed that anything prehistoric must therefore have been their work. But now you're going back over thousands and thousands of years with dramatic changes in the nature of monuments and therefore belief systems. It's most unlikely that the same kinds of functory with the same beliefs

• 16:06Speaker 05

  would have been around in the year zero in the common or Christian reckoning than were about 3,000 years before.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I mean, recently, New Age pagans who, who do believe very much that they are the inheritors of whatever the Druidic tradition might have been, they've embraced something called the Iron Age calendar festivals, you know, celebrating things like Sarawen. That's, is that the way I say it? It's around Halloween. I've probably massacred the pronunciation of that. What is the real history behind the pagan calendar? And can you maybe talk us through some of the different festivals in the year?

• 16:44Speaker 05

  Okay, Sarawen, which is Irish, is Halloween, and it's the Irish name for the ancient festival that underlies Halloween. It's one of eight festivals which modern pagans celebrate. And six of those, that's the solstices, midsummer, midwinter, and the feasts that open seasons, the beginning of spring, summer, autumn and winter, are very ancient. The odd ones out are the equinoxes, which seem to have been less generally observed in ancient Europe, but are added at the present day for the sake of symmetry, and they work very well like that. So we now, at the present day, have the solstices and equinoxes

• 17:29Speaker 05

  and the quarter days that begin the seasons. And as said, at least six of those are really old and have an immense amount of history and folklore attached to them.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Ronald, why do you think it still has such currency, Stonehenge? Are the people still, you know, at the time of the equinox, equinox or the solstice, they, they beat a path to this particular Stonehenge stone circle?

• 17:53Speaker 05

  Well, number one, it's the most famous prehistoric monument in the world. Number two, it's incredibly accessible, just off the A303. Very nice for the home counties. Number three, there's a tremendous contemporary wish for reconnection with fundamentals, with community, with nature, with the land. And Stonehenge enables all three. It's a place in which people can worship as ancestors did up to around 5,000 years ago.

• 18:30Speaker 05

  There's a great buzz there on solstice night, lots of drumming, dancing, wonderful costumes, and a sense of linking together horizontally with everybody else who's there, and vertically with things, whatever they were, that happened there a long time ago.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  There's no historic link between either the Victorian Druids that are still around today and the ceremonies that happened there historically, or would you, again, sit out on that one?

• 19:01Speaker 05

  We don't know what ceremonies happened there prehistorically at all. We have to imagine it, which we're entitled to do, even if we come up with different answers. There's no absolute continuity between ancient and modern pagans, but modern pagans are very sensibly reviving and have revived various images and ideas from the ancient world with relevance to modern needs like feminism, environmentalism, and personal growth. They do serve those rather well.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  In this sort of modern Druidic tradition, if you like, I mean, you know, 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?

• 19:54Speaker 05

  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. People 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

• 20:36Speaker 05

  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.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  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. Obviously, that's something that's very current in India today. I lived near the Yamuna and the Ganges. I went to the Kumbh Mela 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

• 21:30Speaker 03

  worship and presence, whether it's coconuts or whether it's Iron Age shields? Is there a link, or are they just two completely different things?

• 21:40Speaker 05

  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 Wither and the Thyme. 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.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  But also, the veneration of water in particular in Britain is period-specific. It's constricted mostly to round about 1,000 B.C. 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.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  I want to talk more about water, but actually, I want to do a pivot and talk about bogs. Are we 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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• 24:44Speaker 02

  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?

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Tell us about the nipples.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  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, in 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

• 26:01Speaker 05

  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.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  But there's reason to believe that just as we've got all these beautiful shields and swords that are thrown into the Thames, 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.

• 26:39Speaker 05

  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. Explanation 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.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  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. Uh, actually, all three of those explanations have equal probability. But there's a tendency to home in on human sacrifice because it's sexiest.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Ronald, just tell us a little bit about the other world, you know, this, this space between life and death. I mean, who believes in it and what is it exactly?

• 28:01Speaker 05

  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, uh, which you can access by going into water or sailing across it or uh, by moving through gateways into hollow hills or through portals in woods.

• 28:46Speaker 05

  Uh, and then you're simply moving sideways and encountering the fairies, the elves, the gnomes, uh, or the gods.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  And we have Irish sources particularly which kind of illuminate this, this idea of the land of youth, the Tirneog.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. Uh, the Irish aren't alone in this, uh, 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 cara, a boat, and sail into the ocean and then you start landing in the other world.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  My favourite object to the National Museum of Ireland, that gorgeous golden boat that must be some sort of reference to that.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  Absolutely so. To others, you go into hollow hills like the enormous Neolithic burial mounds in the Boyne Valley, uh, or into natural hills. So 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.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a wonderful, um, uh, a, a, a woman who makes just brilliant television, Dairy Girls is one of her, 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, you know, other world where the veil lifts at a certain time and it is in between sort of rubble, you know, sort of the, what was stone circles. So it's still very much present in, in the minds of the Irish as part of, you know, their, their inheritance, who they are.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  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, uh, visibly non-human beings that are like humans, call them fairies, elves, if you like, uh, and sometimes, uh, actually have interchanges with them.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  So Ronald, I mean, you, you're saying that there's two-way traffic that, that in the minds of the people, that, you know, you can go across and you can meet these fantastical creatures, but they can also come and, and what is the purpose? Who comes back in, in folklore and what do they give us?

• 31:04Speaker 05

  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, uh, form romantic relationships with the other beings. Uh, 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. I mean, these contacts used to be essential to humanity in that traditional peoples who

• 31:43Speaker 05

  are utterly dependent on a, a very often hostile and difficult natural environment for survival will be forever negotiating with the spirits of it. Otherwise, they don't believe they can survive.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Ronald, um, how far do you think you can use this rich Irish medieval literature which talks about, uh, this, all this wonderful mythology and stories of cattle raids and warrior aristocracy? Is that good evidence for, for what people were believing in mainland Britain, um, centuries ago or maybe not?

• 32:20Speaker 05

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

• 32:52Speaker 03

  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, uh, any more than, than, than these things may have existed. And nowhere is this more true than the Druids. When I, when I was growing up, uh, I used to read Nora Chadwick, who, who claimed that the classical sources on the Druids were nonsense and, and that 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, um, the people in Stonehenge, the solstice, think the Druids are. So maybe we should just start with the simple question, who were the Druids and, and what do we know about them?

• 33:36Speaker 05

  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 2000 years ago in what we call the Iron Age.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  And we have this extraordinary description of this in AD 60, uh, and it's worth maybe lingering here because we do actually have something solid, um, that is well recorded by the, uh, Roman sources. And they talk about the Roman governor of Britain, Gaius Suetonius Polinus, leading his legions to the shores of the Minai Strait in, in North Wales and crossing all over to the far bank on Anglesey, where there is this, this sort of slaughter of the, of the priesthood, uh, uh, that those who, who knew the law and retained it, but never wrote it down, frustratingly for us. Tell us, tell us about that.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  What, what were the Romans, what was their beef, uh, the Romans with these people?

• 34:39Speaker 05

  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. Problem here is we've no idea how accurate the Roman propaganda was and how far they distorted or even made up things. Uh, we can't trust a word that any Greek or Roman writes about the Druids.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  You're more on the Nora, Nora Chadwick end of the thing.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  Oh, you know, there's nothing changed there. Nora was right. Uh, it, 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. With the case of the famous image of the Druids on Anglesey. Anglesey is a centre of resistance to Roman conquest, uh, which is why the Romans go there to take it out. And the famous story of the Druids on 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,

• 36:00Speaker 05

  which lies off the north-west coast of Wales, was becoming a major centre of resistance to Roman conquest. So the Roman governor decides to take it out and when his army reached the shore opposite the island, they saw, uh, an enemy army drawn up to fight it with tall Druids shrieking curses and black-robed women like Furies with flaming torches.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Good stuff. We, we want more of that.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Well, you don't get any more of that because it's the only mention. Uh, and the Roman soldiers were paralyzed 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, uh, 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.

• 37:09Speaker 05

  assumes the Druids and the women and exposed the fact that a religion dedicated to human sacrifice had been carried out in the island. This is the only mention of Druids in Britain. It's a spectacular story. We've no idea where the truth lies on the spectrum with at one end, this is a totally accurate account taken from an eyewitness who was on the spot, shading through Tacitus met a superannuated drunken lejery in a bar in Rome who spun in 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

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Rome and the Roman general whom he admired in the best light.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  You are cynic, Ronald.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  No, I'm not a cynic. I'm following what the experts say. The latest book on Tacitus as a historian has the title The History of Make-believe. That's really quite telling.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Ronald, just bearing in mind your advice, and I would never argue, don't believe the Greeks, don't believe the Romans. But, you know, 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?

• 38:33Speaker 05

  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

• 39:14Speaker 05

  countryside knows, hardly ever happens. So 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

• 39:58Speaker 05

  tribes of southern France did this. There's no connection with midwinter. There's no connection with fertility or kissing under it.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  But there is mistletoe found in the belly of one of our bog bodies. Lindo 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?

• 40:21Speaker 05

  First, we're not sure if Lindo 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 tummy. That's really very little. And it could just be that mistletoe pollen blew onto his last meal.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Mistletoe is quite specific. You don't find it. I mean, you know, if I was being shunned, if I was a mugging victim tomorrow, I wouldn't necessarily have mistletoe in my tummy.

• 40:47Speaker 05

  No, 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.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  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?

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Well, we all love the movie The Wicker Man. Who can turn down Christopher Lee in drag? But 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

• 42:21Speaker 05

  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. The 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.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  He's in Alexandria, wasn't he?

• 42:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Ronald, it does seem as if, you know, the tradition of the Druids was completely wiped out or, you know, drowned in blood in Anglesey. But it survives in Ireland. What do we put that down to?

• 43:27Speaker 05

  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 programme 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 programme and a supra-tribal meeting place. So they are 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,

• 44:06Speaker 05

  a Druid is a magician, and Druidcraft is just the Irish word for magic. And 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.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Ronald, frustrating as this, there's 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 Eleanor Baraklaff,

• 45:20Speaker 03

  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. Thank you very much for listening to Empire. Goodbye from me, William Durrell.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  And goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 45:41Speaker 05

  And goodbye from me.

• 45:51Speaker 01

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