Druids

The most impressive scholarly work in the story of Stonehenge was carried out by John Aubrey, who should be the hero of the tale. With encouragement from the king (Charles II) he embarked on an antiquarian study first of the standing stones at Avebury, and then, in his efforts to work out some kind of chronology, of all the other similar monuments, all smaller than Avebury itself, including Stonehenge. Unfortunately, he was unable to organize his writing so as to be publishable during his lifetime and, consequently, it found its way rather quietly into the public arena.12 What he did was to argue that because of the distribution of these monuments it was unlikely that they were made by invading cultures, whether Romans, Saxons, or Danes. Moreover, the monuments had features that made one want to link them together as the products of a common culture of some kind, but they were unlike the monuments that the Romans, Saxons, and Danes were known to have made in their home territories. Therefore, he proposed that the monuments, including Stonehenge, were of great antiquity – older than the time of the Roman invasion – but he could not say what people had produced the monuments. Perhaps it was the Druids.

Very little is known about the Druids. There are some fleeting refer­ences to them in ancient Latin texts. Tacitus gave a description of them in Wales, as a frightening rabble, who were nevertheless overcome by the Romans, who then cut down the groves of trees, ‘dedicated to their super – stitions’.13 Julius Caesar encountered some of them when he was in Gaul.14 They had a reputation for human sacrifice. The material is slight, but it was an eye-witness account of the people who inhabited Britain before the Romans came. William Stukeley was a dogged antiquary who took up and continued Aubrey’s studies. He was not a fraud, but he was attracted by the idea of Druids, and saw evidence of their activities wherever he looked. His great work was Palaeographia Sacra: or, Discourses on Sacred Subjects (1763) a learned and elaborate masterpiece of self-delusion, in which he argued that Christianity was the original religion of the world, and that the Welsh priests had practised rites descended from the worship of Ammon in ancient Egypt. Where his ideas about Stonehenge and the Druids were concerned, he was no more deluded than Inigo Jones and Walter Charleton had been. However, his contribution to the history of the imagination is more significant then theirs because it was taken up more widely and has proved to be more tenacious (Figures 1.4-1.7).

When the Druids were invented, it became possible for the British to lay claim to an indigenous culture that had both the antiquity and something of the sophistication of that of ancient Greece. There was a strong desire for

1.4

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Portrait of Chyndonax (Stukeley’s Druidic persona)

1.5

View of

Stonehenge

(Stukeley)

Reconstruction of Stonehenge with Druids

1.7

A portrait of an imaginary Druid (Stukeley)

such a tradition, and when it was offered, the proposal was not greeted with rigorous scepticism. It was in the atmosphere that cried up the Macpherson ‘Ossian’ poems as great literature that Druidism took root and flourished.15 Stukeley’s arcane researches and tendentious arguments produced fantastical detail, that quickly propagated across a very receptive British culture. He found, for example, that the unit of measurement at Stonehenge had been the Egyptian cubit, and managed to conflate the Welsh language with Hebrew, making it seem that the Welsh were a lost tribe of Israel.16 By reasoning about the orientation of the stones and the then-current ideas about the cyclical wandering of magnetic north, Stukeley proposed a date of c.460 bc for the monument, making it about 2,200 years old in his day. Stukeley produced a more accurate survey of Stonehenge than anything that had been done previously, and this valuable work lent authority to what he had to say about the Druids, which was less directly substantiated. He adopted a Druidic name ‘Chyndonax’, and after retiring from the medical practice that had supported

his archaeological endeavours, he took holy orders and started to improvise ceremonies.

Stukeley’s legacy is still evident at Stonehenge, where the summer solstice is celebrated by a band of Druids who conduct themselves in a manner designed to suggest remote antiquity. The first such ceremony actually to be held at Stonehenge was in 1905, when there was a mass initiation with about 700 Druids in attendance, dressed in white robes, with long white beards, and carrying poles with sickles on the end of them – devised with the idea that this would have been an implement for cutting mistletoe down from trees, but here used for symbolic purposes.17 These ceremonies continue, harmlessly enough perhaps, but there cannot be any convincing claim to continuity with the human sacrifices and reading of human entrails that the historical record tells us was what the Druids did. Even the tree-cult that developed in the new Druidism does not have any part to play in this particular part of Salisbury Plain.

From the point of view of historical method, what the development of Druidism around Stonehenge shows, is that the capacity to project strong feelings and emotional conviction on to a place or a building needs very little support from actual evidence. The merest hints will suffice if the pre­disposition is there, and counter-evidence is easily dismissed as irrelevant to the picture or as wilful fraud. Stonehenge has been a compelling presence because the huge stones are impressive and clearly signify a building of importance, but its original purpose and significance are unknown and, therefore, it acts as a blank and receptive screen for our inclination to project our own desires on to it – a ‘white wall’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s termin­ology.18 John Wood’s survey plan of 1840 shows very well the ambiguous quality of the evidence on the ground (Figure 1.8). It is as inconclusive as a Rorschach ink blot, and just as revealing.

Stukeley’s survey work was admirable, but his history was poor and so, therefore, was his interpretation of the evidence that he found. His cultural achievement was nevertheless great, if unscientific. He presented the British people with an image of themselves in antiquity that was found to be compelling, and was adopted willingly, working in the same way as Walter Scott’s fictional works would, in defining what it meant to be Scottish – which was a real practical result that was achieved whether or not the historical facts were absolutely accurate. Shakepeare’s history plays are not the most accurate versions of history, but we find them valuable for other reasons. There are some fictional characters, such as Sherlock Holmes, or Scott’s Waverley, who have such a firm hold on our imaginations that they seem to have crossed some threshold and become historical persons. Stukeley’s Druids belong to this class of character – fictional inventions, who have taken

1.8

Ground plan of the ruins of Stonehenge as surveyed by John Wood of Bath, 1740

up residence in the real world. Properly the modern Druids belong to the same category of groups as the Walter Scott Society, or the Dracula Society. There is something of value here, as friendships form around shared acts of imagin­ation and scholarship, but the value is not, at root, historical, but celebratory, and there is no continuity between the ancient Druids and the modern ones. It is a misprision of the scant material that was available, that made a powerful appeal to the imagination, and is to be valued for that appeal. It need not be condemned simply on the grounds that it is an invented tradition, because all tradition that is recognized as such is invented to a degree.19 What is important about traditions is not the historical correctness of their origin, but their usefulness in enabling us to construct identities and, however fictional they might be, the Druids have played an important part in the formation of a certain type of British identity – perhaps more specifically and importantly of a type of Welsh identity.

The most extended and systematic collection of essays on the topic of the role of historic places, objects and ideas in developing a sense of tradition and culture is Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de memoire (literally ‘places of

memory’).20 It is a collection of essays about things that have been given a role in the shaping of French culture and sense of identity, including such topics as Alexandre Lenoir and the museums of French monuments, Viollet – le-Duc and restoration, the Lascaux caves, Vezelay, Notre-Dame de Paris, the Loire chateaux, Sacre-Coeur at Montmartre, and the Eiffel Tower.21 Nora’s point is that these elements of culture become significant at the moment when the culture seems to be in the process of disappearing, and so the tokens of survival come to seem significant. The places (lieux) of memory emerge as significant at the point when they cease to be fully absorbed in their milieux.22 It is the onset of self-consciousness that changes these places into surviving tokens of a vanishing past. Each of these ‘places’ is created as an act of misprision – the place in question must be creatively reinterpreted and deployed to an end that played no part in its creation. Whatever the painters of the images on the walls of the Lascaux caves had in mind, it was certainly not that they would, in due course, be acting as a focus of feeling about French national identity. The Druids are such a lieu de memoire for the British, but in this case it is a ‘recovered’ memory, largely fictitious, but compelling in its appeal to a certain sort of imaginative engagement with a past that, if it existed, has certainly been lost.

Updated: 3rd October 2014 — 1:37 pm