March 26, 2019 • 40 mins
Anyone who likes Led Zeppelin, plays Dungeons & Dragons, or worships the rising sun at Stonehenge on the vernal equinox can tell you druids are cool. But archaeologists will tell you we can’t even be certain druids existed. Buckle in for a history mystery!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's
guest producer Josh over there again and this is stuff
you should know. The led Zeppelin Edition, the Wet Edition,
(00:24):
the led Zeppelin Edition. Is that what you thought of? Yeah?
Anytime I see like that, Um, I guess it was.
It's not the Zoso album cover, but I think it
was like a poster that you'd see in Spencer's that
was like, I think from led Zeppelin four. It was
like a guy with a long beard. He looked like,
um oh, sure, he looked like what was his name,
(00:47):
the guy from Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, he
looks like Gandalf. Basically. Yeah, Zeppelin was very You know,
if anyone who's ever seen song remains the same, they
it all sort of like mystical druid esque, right they were.
They were well known for their druid escu leaning. But
(01:10):
so that's what I think of with druids, and it
turns out that that is in one sense very much accurate.
That is what a druid looks like. But if you're
talking strictly about druids that came from the seventeenth century onward,
so like just a few hundred years ago, you would
be correct if you're talking about the ancient druids. The druids.
(01:33):
Druids the once that everybody thinks of is like like
the O G Druids, they we have no idea what
they were like. Really we or we have very very
little idea what they were like. And it's based on
such um potentially slanted evidence that some archaeologists refused to
(01:56):
agree with certainty that druids ever even exists the way
that we think they did. Yeah, and it's funny this. Uh,
the Grabster helped us out with this one, with the
research and he I don't know if Ed's been listening
to us for too long or what, because he fell
into the Josh and Chuck trap of not even saying
(02:17):
what the druid was until page four. So we should
just go ahead and say, when we're talking about the
ancient druids, Uh, it wasn't like a race of people
or anything like that. They were celts and as defined
by some history website. I went to UM, there were
(02:38):
members of the learned class of ancient Celts and ancient
Britain and France, and they acted as um, it was
really more like job based. They were teachers and judges
and priests and philosophers. So that's I mean, I never
knew that it was really just sort of um uh
che's I don't even know how to define it. Not
a class of people, well, sort of a class, yeah,
(03:01):
but it was kind of uh, job based. I didn't
know that an occupation yeah, occupational. Yeah, they had had
a union, They had pretty decent health insurance was ironic
because they didn't know what they were doing with medicine
at the time. Or if you you know, if you
had really good insurance, you could wind up in the
wicker Man getting burned alive, right, your family would would
(03:26):
benefit from that, you wouldn't potentially write. But that's I mean,
what you just said is basically the the most you
can say about druids with any level of of accuracy.
Are we done? Yep? That was It's true. It's everybody
short stuff. Um. Everything beyond that is is different varying
(03:50):
degrees of conjecture, And I don't want to like beat
this horse over and over again. So I think it's
really just good to kind of like just put it
out at the beginning, like everything we're talking about from
this point on is relatively UNPROVENUM archaeology is being very
stubborn and to their credit about what they will agree
(04:11):
about druids and what they won't agree about druids. UM.
And I think that's great, But everybody else is like, hey,
that's good. You guys sit there and doggedly and methodically
figure it out. We're going to just let our imaginations
run wild and and come up with this conception of druids. Yeah.
And you know, one of the big reasons why we
don't have a lot of firsthand accounting is because the
(04:33):
druids did not uh and they had a very good reason,
but they didn't write things down. They didn't keep a
historical record about themselves. And the reason makes a lot
of sense. It was there was a lot of power
in the fact that they remained sort of mystical and
that a conquering enemy or foe can't just get a
bunch of druid I is that a word, Yes, druid
(04:56):
I writings to figure out what they're all about. So
there was a lot of mystery and mystique and because
of that a lot of power in just passing along
traditions orally within their own group. Uh, it really ended
up kind of being given them a stranglehold on their mystique, right, Yeah,
for sure. Um. The thing is, though, that's a super
(05:19):
important point. They didn't write things down, But almost as
important is to to say that they weren't illiterate. Now,
like the Celts wrote stuff down. And surprisingly when they
wrote stuff down, they wrote it in Greek. So the
later Romans who came along, as we'll see and had
a huge influence on Celtic culture when they encountered the Celts,
(05:40):
these heathens, these savage tribes, they are what the Romans
considered them to be. They they found that they already
wrote in Greek. But the Celts themselves, Chuck and I
didn't know this. Um they were. They were basically a
multi ethnic group. They were not just like you know, um, Germanic,
(06:03):
or they weren't just like Aryan or um, you know,
North African like. They weren't like an ethnic group. They
were apparently connected by language, but they were very tribal
and they warred with each other pretty much constantly. So
each little each little tribe would have its own kingdom,
but they all were united under this culture, this Celtic
(06:26):
culture and Celtic language. Yeah, and um. Even though the
Druids didn't write about themselves, UM, early Greeks did UM
specifically Posidonius. And here's where, like you said earlier, it's
like someone writes about the Druids, maybe based on uh
(06:46):
lore or legend um, sometimes maybe first hand accounts, but
then other people write about those accounts, and then people
write about the accounts of the accounts, and pretty soon
all of the sort of quote unquote knowledge we have
about the Druids is based on It's like a game
of telephone essentially. UM. And one of the biggest contributors
(07:07):
to UM I guess druid I writing was Julius Caesar.
He wrote a lot about the Druids, but from the
perspective of a conquering army, you know, so that's a
it's definitely gonna have a slant. And he also based
a lot of his writings on Posidonius to begin with, right, Yeah,
Posidonius's writings were lost, like all of them were lost,
(07:30):
so we know he wrote a lot about the Druids because,
like you said, all those people came later and referenced
his writings before his writings have been lost, but we've
never seen his writings, which is a shame because we
probably could have learned a lot about the Celts and
the Druids firsthand. Um. But by the time so Posidonius
was was working in the first century b c. E. Um,
(07:53):
by the time Julius Caesar comes along, I think about
fifty sixty years later, um, he he has a different
slant than Posidonius probably would have like, because, like you said,
he was showing up and saying, here are all these
people who we are subjugating, and then here's the reason
why we're subjugating them. He wasn't writing about the Celts,
(08:15):
and he wasn't writing about the Druids to document their culture.
He was writing propaganda to support the campaign of Roman
imperialism back home, so that everybody saw, oh, it is
good that we're going and conquering these people and bringing
civilization to these heathen tribes, because they're just running around
cutting each other's heads off and um, sacrificing one another
(08:38):
to their oak trees and possibly even eating one another. Um.
And and now it's up to historians and archaeologists to say, Okay,
how much of that is accurate, how much of that
comes from a kernel of truth, and how much of
it is outright just you know, fraudulent propaganda, which is
a huge job to undertake. Yeah, and we'll we'll touch
(08:58):
more on the human sacrifice stuff because that's certainly juicy. Yeah,
but um so, I guess Caesar writes a lot about this.
And it's like you said, from that perspective, when things
really get wacky is when our old buddy Plenty the
elder starts writing. And this is about what about a
hundred years later, and this is when things when this
(09:22):
is when the writing really amped them up as like
very odd wizard like people. Yeah. And Pliny, Pliny, so
he was a Roman citizen. He was a great traveler
though in a great um a great uhman. He was
a great wing man. He would just support you eat
(09:43):
whether you struck out or not. Um struck out? He
uh three's company. What's going on? Yeah, if you went
to the Regal Beagle with Pliny, you're gonna come away
happy one way or another. Um so. He but he
was like he was a documentary of all the other
cultures that's why he was going to do. But the
problem is that he was still a Roman citizen, so
he saw things through Roman I So that means that
(10:06):
he saw Heathens as heathens, like, yeah, their culture was
interesting and it was worth writing down, But it doesn't
mean that he had a respect for it or got
everything right or understood everything correctly. But you you, the
point is you could take Plenties writings potentially with a
little more of a grain of sand than Caesar's. But
(10:26):
but yeah, that's right, whatever you want to chew on.
But the but Caesar's writings have an advantage over Plenties
and that his were more contemporaneous to Celtic culture. By
the time Plenty came along, the Romans had already spread
their culture throughout the Celtic lands. They stamped out every
(10:46):
other culture basically. And what I found interesting from research, Chuck,
is that there were varying degrees of grudging nous at
accepting that culture among the Celtic tribes. In some respects
they were like, oh, yes, I love civilization. It's way
better than the life we were living before. There's so
(11:06):
many great trappings to it, and it's so much less
like you know, um hard and difficult and muddy. But
at the same time, I also don't like how the
Romans like just kind of like rape everybody they feel
like raping and tax us even though we're considered basically
slaves to them. So there was a real like um
(11:27):
weird period where the Romans started to permeate with their culture,
the Celtic culture of um I guess ambivalence towards that
that permeation, yeah, um so, I mean these are the
historical writings that we have as far as actual, real
archaeological evidence. It's not much better as far as conjecture
(11:50):
goes a couple of examples, because there's always you know,
this longing to connect the Druids and their paganism, their
brand of pagan him to this ritual sacrifice again because
it's juicy. So the lynd the very famous Lindau Man
who was Lindao to Lindau one was a woman. But
(12:11):
this was a body that they found in nineteen four
preserved in Pete and a Pete bog h. He was
a dude in his mid twenties and had a very
violent death. As it appears um they found food in
his belly, so they there's so much conjecture. The conjecture
there is essentially that he was ritually sacrificed, that was
(12:34):
his last meal, and then he had what's known as
three deaths. He was strangled. Uh, their ligature marks on
his neck very well preserved. You should look him up
the garrett. The leather strap is still around his neck um.
He was hit on the head after that, like blunt
forced trauma style, and then his throat was cut. So
(12:55):
the speculation is they gave him a last meal and
then gave him possibly three deaths, to satisfy three different
pagan gods. But it also he was found naked, so
there's speculation that he could have just been robbed of
his clothes and robbed of his money and uh maybe
by someone who it was a sick oh maybe or
(13:18):
somebody who is like, get that thing out of my
face and put some clothes on. I'm telling you for
the last time. And then it went it went south
from there. Yeah, and you can go see he travels
a little bit, but he's on permanent display in the
British Museum. If you want to go, uh, say hi. Yeah,
if you ever want to be reminded that you're really
not a lot more than a bag of skin. Go
check out pictures of a lindau Man because that's basically
(13:41):
what he is. Yeah. They've also found mass graves um
from the Iron Age in in these areas where where
the druids were around, and again conjecture that this was
an example of like mass ritual sacrifice, but that's largely
been pretty much poopooed over the years as well. Yeah,
it's definitely up for debate whether they were just executed
(14:04):
or whether they were um killed in battle or whether
the yeah, they were sacrificed. Um. There's some other there's
some other archaeology that has has really tantalized archaeologist. There's
one called the Deal Warrior. Yeah, that's name. Yeah, it
really is, especially if you check out like how he
was found. He was found with a shield, a spear,
(14:25):
and a sword and wearing a crown. And as far
as they can tell, there's no other Celtic um burial
that that has been found thus far that had all
of these accoutrema. So this is an extraordinarily important person.
But they have no idea who it was, but they
want to say druids so bad they can taste it
(14:46):
and then one of the other burials that was found,
they found him in a graveyard somewhere in I believe Britain, um,
and he was found with a lot of weird stuff like, uh,
what appears to be a board game but that they
think possibly was was used for divining you know, the future,
(15:07):
like rolling dice or something like that. Um. He was
found with divining rods, you know, like they used to
find water and that kind of thing, so that indicates
some sort of ritual magic. He was also found with
a set of surgical tools. So they're calling this guy
the doctor. Because the archaeologists are being level headed. Everybody
else is saying, this is the grave of a druid.
(15:28):
It's the grave of a druid. Just say it, you
stupid archaeologist. And he's like, no, I won't say it.
He won't say it, but it's a it's it could
prove to be a really um important Fine. It probably
it probably already has proven itself that we just aren't
openly interpreting it yet. Yeah, and um, I should mention
if Deal Warrior is not the name of a death
(15:48):
metal band, then someone's doing it wrong. Yeah. All you
need is a picture of this guy on your album cover.
It is your first one. Should we take a break, Yeah,
let's all right, let's take a little break and we'll
come back and talk. Uh, we'll post some more conjecture
right after this. All right, Chuck, we're back. It's time
(16:30):
for more conjecture again. Some archaeologists refused to to say
that druids definitely existed, that a priestly class of Druids
and Celtic culture existed. Just chew on that one for
a while, alright, totally undermined your led Zeppelin poster. Yeah. Well,
here's the thing too about the Celts is we don't
(16:52):
know a lot about where their culture began or when
it began exactly. Because Druids are Celts, we obviously don't
know much about where they began either. Um. We do
know that how how it kind of all ended. Um,
And when we say ended, I mean there, I mean
you can go to modern druid in Druidism websites today
(17:14):
and and go wear a flowery dress and frolic barefoot
in a field with people in any given country. Probably,
But that's not exactly the same thing the actual druids. Uh,
we know because of writing from the first and second centuries. Basically, Uh,
there are laws all over the place that banned druidism.
(17:36):
Part of this Roman uh conquering way, which is like, Hi,
we're here, so forget everything, forget your way of life.
You are now Roman enjoy using toilets, right exactly, And
I like, I do like the toilets a lot, right.
So so with Claudia, I'd like a couple of um
Caesar's Augustus and Tiberius said Okay, Romans citizen and aren't
(18:00):
allowed to participate in druidism. And then by the time
Claudius came around, uh, and by the time his rule
ended in fifty four CE UM, the Druids have had
been at least officially stamped out. Like not only could
you as a Roman citizen not participate in druidism, Druidism
in in totality was banned in the Roman empire um
(18:24):
under punishment of death. And uh, it had uh the
effect of driving Druidism underground, for sure. Yeah, but it's
not like it just went away. They still, like, you know,
they would go off and and and do their own
thing quietly as much as possible, right, and and so
I And I mean, when Claudius is banning this, it's
(18:46):
not just like no, we we don't like this. It's
a threat to to the Roman control over the Gallic
lands and these celts Um. That's not the reason that
he gave, although that was almost certainly the reason why
they outlaw druids. But the reason they gave were things like,
these people practice an inhuman religion where they sacrifice people
(19:08):
to their gods. Apparently they would go through criminals and prisoners,
and then once they ran out of criminals and prisoners,
they would start sacrificing their own innocent people. They just
had this blood lust, so that religion had to be
stamped out and repressed. And of course the Roman citizen
around the world said, oh, yeah, that's great, get rid
of druidism. But like you said, it just kind of
(19:30):
went underground, it seems like. And then as rebellion started
to kind of crop up around them the British Isles
and in France um against Roman rule. It's pretty much
a sure bet that if there were such a thing
as druids, they were helping to foment that that rebellion
and that uprising. Yeah, and I think I get the
(19:51):
idea that the Romans were a little spooked by the Druids. Um,
while they were like vastly superior with their military in
their might, um, they paid a lot of attention to them,
and like, they're not gonna make a bunch of hay
about something that they don't think is a threat. And
I think they were spooked out a little bit, like, uh,
when they were resisting, you know, after these laws were passed,
(20:13):
the Druids invoked a prophecy saying the end of the
world is coming near and the Roman Empire is going
to be destroyed by fire. And I don't think it
was just like the Romans just brushed that off. I
think they're like, oh jeez, those those guys are crazy. Um.
And also, how are we going to deal with a
big fire? Right exactly? So that's so that I mean,
(20:36):
I could see being spooked by that, couldn't you. Yeah, So, um,
they they definitely if they weren't spook chucking, at least,
they took them quite seriously and like again like outright
banned them. But not only did they did they prophecy
that they were going to um be burned by fire
like the some of these early writings of drewids, especially Pliny,
(20:59):
may did it seem kind of like creepy and magical
and wizardy, you know, like like Pliny described druids as
holding um blood offerings, like like slaughters of animals and
humans and their sacred oak groves. And we should say,
I don't think we said this, but the word druid
one of the suggestions for the etymology of it is
(21:21):
drew and wind, and drew means to know, and wind
means oak, So drew wid may mean nowhere of the
oaks or the people who who have the knowledge of
these sacred oak trees. Um and Plenty described these guys
and like white beards and long white robes, climbing up
oak trees to cut down mistletoe with golden sickles, you know,
(21:44):
around saw wayne or um you know, the spring solstice
or summer solstice or spring equinox um, and and worshiping
this whole pantheon of gods that unfortunately the Romans didn't
bother to write down the names of. Yeah and once, uh,
isn't there speculation that Merlin from the Arthurian legend was
(22:04):
a druid, like he survived, you know, the not just
the Roman Romanization of Celtic culture and also the Christianization
of Celtic culture, but into the Middle Ages, um, when
he was supposedly running around. Yeah, and again because they
weren't writing anything down. You know, when you're when you're
a conquering person, you can go in and like raid
(22:26):
the archives and get a lot of knowledge. I imagine
it was kind of creepy in and of itself to
just find that they had no writings at all, Right,
and then you're all of a sudden, I mean, I'm
sure there was like questioning and stuff, but then you're
just going on whatever they wanted to tell you, and
any Druid worth assault was probably like, you know, probably
tease them a bit about how creepy they might be. Sure,
(22:50):
you know. So that whole not writing things down thing,
that's that's an important point. So one thing, it means
that we don't have any direct understanding of the druids
from the druids. But um, the reason why they didn't
write things down was two fold. One, if they were
this priestly elite class that stood between the average celt
(23:11):
and the gods, Um, they were the ones who knew
the secrets of the oak and the wisdom of the
oak and all that um. One way they maintained that monopoly,
or that that have the market cornered on that knowledge
was to make it so that the only way you
could learn to be a druid was from another druid,
and to pass along this ancient tradition of knowledge, which
(23:32):
makes the whole thing way more mystical. Then even if
there was some main religious book or something like that,
it's oral ancient knowledge passed on from druid to druid.
That's how they passed it on. And that's why they
didn't write anything down. And then elsewhere I saw I
think it was maybe stray Bow or someone else said
that the reason they didn't write things down was because
(23:54):
they felt like by reading you didn't learn as much
as from being immersed in it and in having had
explained to you over the period of something like twenty
years by another druid, Because that's about how long it
took to be initiated into being a full druid, a
full rank druid, a full rank a black belt druid. Uh,
(24:14):
shall we take another break? Why not? Man? All right,
let's do it, and then we'll talk a little bit
more about whether or not they practice human sacrifice and
stonehenge in all sorts of other good things right after this.
(24:49):
All right, So we talked a lot so far about
or a little bit rather about whether or not they
did practice human sacrifice, the sort of the sixty thousand
dollar question. And like we said, because the Romans really
wanted to propagandas and paint a picture of listen, we
gotta do this. These people are barbarians. Uh, they're sacrificing
(25:12):
and like you said, maybe even eating each other. That
that cooks up a good case basically, especially when it's
coming from Caesar's pin um or whatever he wrote with
what it's right with hero with the blood of his enemies, Okay, which,
by the way, by the way, Chuck, we are one
day out from the IDEs of March, that's right, which
(25:33):
marked the death of Caesar, one day before your birthday,
So happy early birthday from everybody and stuff. You should know, Like, um,
so did they or did they not? That is a
big question and the answer is maybe. Right. So you know,
there's a lot of writings about it, but again you
gotta take all that with a grain of salt. Is propaganda.
(25:55):
But you know, some of it was super detailed. Um
could just be good writing and good imagination, but there
was enough of it um to where there is a
lot of speculation that you know, they may have done
so maybe not on some huge mascale, but that doesn't
mean that if you people weren't thrown in a wicker
man every now and then in set ablaze. Yeah, and
(26:15):
that's I mean, that's worth really just saying overly one
of the things that whole wicker Man. If you haven't
seen Wickerman, go watch it. Not the knick Cage version both, Okay, Gussie,
both their moments in the Nick Cage when they are
so bad, it's pretty wonderful to watch. Okay, alright, alright,
granted the original one is pretty awesome. I think, like
Peter Peter Cushing in it, well, Christopher Lee was the
(26:37):
the main creep, wasn't he. Well obviously that was the
main creep in his own life. Um, he was great.
But so in Wickerman, I think it was from this investigator.
I think goes into like this kind of isolated, insular,
kind of Celtic tradition community and ends up finding himself
inside a giant wicker man being burned alive. They that's
(27:01):
based on legend about the the Druids that they used
to sacrifice people by making giant wicker figures, putting somebody
in there and setting it on fire. And that was
just one of the ways they supposedly sacrificed people. Another
one I read about was that they would slash people
in the back with a mortal wound, and then one
(27:21):
of the druids or one of their assistants would watch
the person's death throws and death agony to divine the future,
like you could tell by the way somebody arrived or wriggled,
or maybe how they bled what the future would be.
And then with Lindale man, you were saying, remember he
was he was had his neck broken, he was choked,
(27:41):
hit over the head, and he was slashed in the throat.
They think that possibly the choking thing, the strangulation, and
the slash in the throat were related to where he
would produce like a fountain of blood when when he
was when his throat was slashed while he was being strangled,
that would tell them something. Possibly, That's that's the legend,
(28:02):
the whole cannibalism thing. I saw zero evidence for at all. Yeah,
there is no evidence for cannibalism human sacrifice. There are
a lot of good cases out there that that really
possibly did happen among the Celts. Yeah. And part of
the reason this is so uh so tantalizing all these
years later is when they link them to things like
(28:23):
Stonehenge and you go to Stonehenge and you're told some
story by some snot nose kid you know that's visiting
from Indiana that like, you know, the Druids used to
you know, sacrifice people here and that's why they built it,
which is not true at all. It's gotten all mixed up. Um.
Stonehenge was around long before the Celts and the Druids
(28:45):
were doing their thing there. But they may have gone there,
I mean ed makes a good point like a lot
of times when they were religious temples and things that
had been evacuated another pagan religion might move in just
because it's there and it's ready to go. So they
may have gone to Stonehenge and to perform some ceremonies,
but that was not the purpose for Stonehenge. Yeah, we
(29:09):
have no idea why they built Stonehenge or even who
built Stonehenge. But the first the first unambiguous appearance of
the Celts comes hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of years
after Stonehenge was first built. But yeah, they may have
used it. If you were a Druid, wouldn't you like say, yeah,
Stonehenge is probably pretty important. It lines up I think
(29:31):
with the summer solstice, the the rising sun and the
summer solstice. That was a very important um time to
the Druids as far as we understand, so of course
they would pay attention to it and use it. And
maybe another way to look at it is that the
Druid tradition and maybe even the Celts themselves directly grew
out of the people in the culture that built Stonehenge originally,
(29:55):
because I think see I think it was Caesar who
wrote that the Celts culture and Druids grew out of
the British isles first and then spread westward or eastward
into Europe, primarily France, right yeah, yeah, although there's I've
seen references that it made it as far as Turkey.
The Celtic culture did um and had extensive trading routes,
(30:18):
So they weren't like this this you know, isolated group
of bumpkins. They were spread out all over the place.
They knew how to trade. Then they had their own civilization.
It just wasn't nearly as advanced as as Roman civilization,
but they had like an established culture by the time
Rome showed up. We just don't know quite that much
about it as it was right before Rome came. Yeah,
(30:40):
and as you said, I thinking like the very beginning,
like you know, years and years later, like in the
seventeen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, there were people in groups
of people that referred to themselves as druids and claimed
that they were practicing these true traditions. Um, but there's
really no like there's really no proof that any of
(31:01):
that is true at all. And and it's likely that
it was just these people many many years later that
just sort of, um, kind of dug up this ancient
thing and made it their own. No, it's it's a
hundred percent that way. And even like the the neo
Druidic groups that you see today, don't try to to
make it any make it out any other way. Um.
(31:23):
A lot of the a lot of them will say,
you know, we we are. This druidism we practice has
been around a few hundred years and it's based on
ancient you know, folklore and tradition that you will find
in Ireland. And that's that's a really good point too.
Like like Neo Druids, m traces its roots back to
(31:43):
the seventeenth century when some historians and antiquarians got interested
in some of the ancient Irish stuff. Um. And they
think possibly that some of the ancient Irish myths and
legends are a form, a kind of a preserved form
of ancient Celtic and Druidic culture. Because the Romans never
(32:05):
set foot in Ireland, they never managed to conquer Scotland.
The picks up there, who you will remember from the
Locknest episode, drove them back. And so these two, these
two areas where Celtic culture lived, was able to kind
of live and preserve and and continue on until about
the five hundreds when the Christians showed up and finally
managed to convert everybody um, and then Celtic culture thank you,
(32:31):
and then um. But but Celtic culture had an extra
five hundred years to continue on and then make it
into you know, the written word and written language. And
so you can go back and look at Irish mythology
and a lot of people say this is this here,
here's your example of Druidism right here. Um, which it
(32:52):
could be a variation of it because these were isolated cultures,
but still it probably is some form of Druidism. And
then that is what the seventeenth century onward in Dano
Druids based their stuff on. But they don't claim to
say we have unmolested ancient knowledge from the original or
(33:12):
tradition of druids. They just are kind of basically doing
their own thing, you know. Yeah, and it's so rich
for um literature and movies. It's just it's been definitely
just sort of malleable and bastardized just to fit like
a screenplay of um Celtic folklore and like these kind
(33:35):
of creepy, blissed out flower children who uh throw people
in a wicker man. Or there was a movie with
Christopher Lambert of you know, the Highlander called Druids, which
I'm sure is I haven't seen it, but I imagine
is just cooked up for movies. You know. There's a
really good movie from around the time Wickerman came out
(33:58):
called Blood the I think Blood on Satan's Claw. Dude,
this terrible title. It is amazing that it's part of
like wicker Band and Blood on Satan's Claws, they're part
of something called folk horror. Yeah. Yeah, and we would
not have folk horror if it wasn't for those antiquarians
in the seventeen hundreds of being the sixteen hundreds being
becoming interested in Druidism. We we might not even have
(34:21):
led Zeppelin, my friend, if it wasn't for some of
those guys. Well, the guy who did uh Hereditary, his
the trailer for his new movie just came out and
it is straight up like druid centric. I can't wait.
Like these these you know, teenage campers in like Sweden
(34:42):
or something. I think it's Sweden, I'm not sure. You know,
they find this, you know, group of people in a
field who are doing creepy things, and it just it
looks really creepy and awesome. I'm assuming is producing it.
Probably like four could show a movie of somebody's spit
into a pale for two hours and I'd be like,
(35:02):
I want to watch that. Yeah, they're a good outfit.
They were a great outfit. Uh Oh. One other thing
I also saw that um Druids, the ancient Druids, if
they did exist as like an elite priestly class would
not have gotten their hands dirty with sacrifice. They would
have just overseen it. And then possibly a sub order
(35:26):
of druids called vates would have divined, you know, what
was going on from the way the blood was spilled
or whatever. So not, uh what are they vates? Vates?
And then there was also bards. They were not druids,
not full fledged druids. I I don't I don't know,
I don't understand it. I've just seen it. I've seen
it delineated like vate, vates, Bards and druids. And then
(35:49):
I've also seen I think in this article Ed places
druids is kind of like the whole elite class. It
was definitely a higher class, right. And then I also
saw in UM some archaeology UM article that that there's
really no evidence that druids, if they did exist as
a separate class, existed as separate class until very late,
(36:12):
right before the Romans came, and they would have just
been integrated into everyday life and it would have been,
like you said, an occupation, like you know, Todd over there,
Todd Merwin, Um, he's really good with the divining rod.
So that's what that's what we rely on Todd for.
But he wasn't like an elite class, and then maybe
it developed out of that kind of specialization over time.
(36:34):
I love that Todd is your kind of go to
over the years. I do too, love Todd. Uh. That's
it for druids. Although there is a lot more out there,
and a lot of it's confusing, but a hundred percent
of it is awesome, especially if you're um flow. If
your boat is floated by dungeons and dragons type stuff. Uh.
(36:54):
And since I said dungeons and dragons, it's time for
listener mail. I thought you were about to say, since
I said dungeons and dragons, that's Friday night and I'm
in a basement. I love it. Hi, guys, I worked
this is on bed bugs. By the way, we got
a lot of replies about short stuff on bed bugs, um,
(37:18):
including quite a few from the people in the hospitality industry. Yes,
which is very gross. Um. Hey, guys, worked as a
guest service agent for a three star hotel in Charlotte,
North Carolina for over three years. It was called bed
Bugs City. Bed Bugs was basically a curse word, and
(37:41):
it couldn't be used in front of guests, and we
heard from a couple of other people in the service
industry that you never say that word out loud. They
called them BB's at this place, but another guy called
them the visitors. Oh my god. So I'm not really
sure if it was true or not, but um, a
general manager told me that this picular hotel chain did
not believe in putting mattress covers on their mattresses. The
(38:04):
logic being housekeepers are required to inspect mattresses every time
a guest checks out of a room and every time
they change the bed. If they were to put mattress
covers on the beds and guests would notice them, it
would give the guests the idea that bed bugs were
in that mattress already interesting. In addition this, the manager
explained to me that guests are the ones who bring
(38:26):
bed bugs into hotels. I don't know about that. Sounds
like blaming the victim, agreed, So if a guest calls
after they've checked out of a room to report bed bugs,
this complaint basically fell on deaf ears. If the guest
called to report bed bugs during this stay, the company
is not obligated to refund the nightly rate. Um, but
sometimes they might adjust your rate. It's a sign of goodwill.
(38:49):
They don't reimburse people for finding bed bugs in the
rooms because to them, that is an admission of guilt.
So instead they will offer I can't believe this part.
Instead the hotel will offered to wash your clothes, movie
to a different room, place the room with bed bugs
out of service, and then tell you to throw your
stuff in the trunk of your car in plastic bags
(39:11):
and leave the car in the sun. Very rare occasions,
they might even issue a future night's day that can
be used at any Bedbug City right across the country.
You get what you pay for with the three star hotel. Yeah,
I don't know. Man. Three star used to be different.
It used to be sure, and then the corporate takeover
(39:32):
of America undid that difference. So that is from J.
The letter J. The letter J. This this listener mail
is brought to you by the letter Jan Colling down
to bed Bug City. Thanks Jay from bed Bug City.
We appreciate that peak behind the curtain. UM, if you
(39:54):
work in some industry we've talked about and want to
tell us all the gross and horrific things that the
general public doesn't know about. We love that stuff. You
can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and
look for all of our social links there. You can
also go to my website, The Josh Clarkway dot com.
You can send us all an email to stuff Podcasts
at I heart podcast Network dot com for more on
(40:21):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's
guest producer Josh over there again and this is stuff
you should know. The led Zeppelin Edition, the Wet Edition,
(00:24):
the led Zeppelin Edition. Is that what you thought of? Yeah?
Anytime I see like that, Um, I guess it was.
It's not the Zoso album cover, but I think it
was like a poster that you'd see in Spencer's that
was like, I think from led Zeppelin four. It was
like a guy with a long beard. He looked like,
um oh, sure, he looked like what was his name,
(00:47):
the guy from Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, he
looks like Gandalf. Basically. Yeah, Zeppelin was very You know,
if anyone who's ever seen song remains the same, they
it all sort of like mystical druid esque, right they were.
They were well known for their druid escu leaning. But
(01:10):
so that's what I think of with druids, and it
turns out that that is in one sense very much accurate.
That is what a druid looks like. But if you're
talking strictly about druids that came from the seventeenth century onward,
so like just a few hundred years ago, you would
be correct if you're talking about the ancient druids. The druids.
(01:33):
Druids the once that everybody thinks of is like like
the O G Druids, they we have no idea what
they were like. Really we or we have very very
little idea what they were like. And it's based on
such um potentially slanted evidence that some archaeologists refused to
(01:56):
agree with certainty that druids ever even exists the way
that we think they did. Yeah, and it's funny this. Uh,
the Grabster helped us out with this one, with the
research and he I don't know if Ed's been listening
to us for too long or what, because he fell
into the Josh and Chuck trap of not even saying
(02:17):
what the druid was until page four. So we should
just go ahead and say, when we're talking about the
ancient druids, Uh, it wasn't like a race of people
or anything like that. They were celts and as defined
by some history website. I went to UM, there were
(02:38):
members of the learned class of ancient Celts and ancient
Britain and France, and they acted as um, it was
really more like job based. They were teachers and judges
and priests and philosophers. So that's I mean, I never
knew that it was really just sort of um uh
che's I don't even know how to define it. Not
a class of people, well, sort of a class, yeah,
(03:01):
but it was kind of uh, job based. I didn't
know that an occupation yeah, occupational. Yeah, they had had
a union, They had pretty decent health insurance was ironic
because they didn't know what they were doing with medicine
at the time. Or if you you know, if you
had really good insurance, you could wind up in the
wicker Man getting burned alive, right, your family would would
(03:26):
benefit from that, you wouldn't potentially write. But that's I mean,
what you just said is basically the the most you
can say about druids with any level of of accuracy.
Are we done? Yep? That was It's true. It's everybody
short stuff. Um. Everything beyond that is is different varying
(03:50):
degrees of conjecture, And I don't want to like beat
this horse over and over again. So I think it's
really just good to kind of like just put it
out at the beginning, like everything we're talking about from
this point on is relatively UNPROVENUM archaeology is being very
stubborn and to their credit about what they will agree
(04:11):
about druids and what they won't agree about druids. UM.
And I think that's great, But everybody else is like, hey,
that's good. You guys sit there and doggedly and methodically
figure it out. We're going to just let our imaginations
run wild and and come up with this conception of druids. Yeah.
And you know, one of the big reasons why we
don't have a lot of firsthand accounting is because the
(04:33):
druids did not uh and they had a very good reason,
but they didn't write things down. They didn't keep a
historical record about themselves. And the reason makes a lot
of sense. It was there was a lot of power
in the fact that they remained sort of mystical and
that a conquering enemy or foe can't just get a
bunch of druid I is that a word, Yes, druid
(04:56):
I writings to figure out what they're all about. So
there was a lot of mystery and mystique and because
of that a lot of power in just passing along
traditions orally within their own group. Uh, it really ended
up kind of being given them a stranglehold on their mystique, right, Yeah,
for sure. Um. The thing is, though, that's a super
(05:19):
important point. They didn't write things down, But almost as
important is to to say that they weren't illiterate. Now,
like the Celts wrote stuff down. And surprisingly when they
wrote stuff down, they wrote it in Greek. So the
later Romans who came along, as we'll see and had
a huge influence on Celtic culture when they encountered the Celts,
(05:40):
these heathens, these savage tribes, they are what the Romans
considered them to be. They they found that they already
wrote in Greek. But the Celts themselves, Chuck and I
didn't know this. Um they were. They were basically a
multi ethnic group. They were not just like you know, um, Germanic,
(06:03):
or they weren't just like Aryan or um, you know,
North African like. They weren't like an ethnic group. They
were apparently connected by language, but they were very tribal
and they warred with each other pretty much constantly. So
each little each little tribe would have its own kingdom,
but they all were united under this culture, this Celtic
(06:26):
culture and Celtic language. Yeah, and um. Even though the
Druids didn't write about themselves, UM, early Greeks did UM
specifically Posidonius. And here's where, like you said earlier, it's
like someone writes about the Druids, maybe based on uh
(06:46):
lore or legend um, sometimes maybe first hand accounts, but
then other people write about those accounts, and then people
write about the accounts of the accounts, and pretty soon
all of the sort of quote unquote knowledge we have
about the Druids is based on It's like a game
of telephone essentially. UM. And one of the biggest contributors
(07:07):
to UM I guess druid I writing was Julius Caesar.
He wrote a lot about the Druids, but from the
perspective of a conquering army, you know, so that's a
it's definitely gonna have a slant. And he also based
a lot of his writings on Posidonius to begin with, right, Yeah,
Posidonius's writings were lost, like all of them were lost,
(07:30):
so we know he wrote a lot about the Druids because,
like you said, all those people came later and referenced
his writings before his writings have been lost, but we've
never seen his writings, which is a shame because we
probably could have learned a lot about the Celts and
the Druids firsthand. Um. But by the time so Posidonius
was was working in the first century b c. E. Um,
(07:53):
by the time Julius Caesar comes along, I think about
fifty sixty years later, um, he he has a different
slant than Posidonius probably would have like, because, like you said,
he was showing up and saying, here are all these
people who we are subjugating, and then here's the reason
why we're subjugating them. He wasn't writing about the Celts,
(08:15):
and he wasn't writing about the Druids to document their culture.
He was writing propaganda to support the campaign of Roman
imperialism back home, so that everybody saw, oh, it is
good that we're going and conquering these people and bringing
civilization to these heathen tribes, because they're just running around
cutting each other's heads off and um, sacrificing one another
(08:38):
to their oak trees and possibly even eating one another. Um.
And and now it's up to historians and archaeologists to say, Okay,
how much of that is accurate, how much of that
comes from a kernel of truth, and how much of
it is outright just you know, fraudulent propaganda, which is
a huge job to undertake. Yeah, and we'll we'll touch
(08:58):
more on the human sacrifice stuff because that's certainly juicy. Yeah,
but um so, I guess Caesar writes a lot about this.
And it's like you said, from that perspective, when things
really get wacky is when our old buddy Plenty the
elder starts writing. And this is about what about a
hundred years later, and this is when things when this
(09:22):
is when the writing really amped them up as like
very odd wizard like people. Yeah. And Pliny, Pliny, so
he was a Roman citizen. He was a great traveler
though in a great um a great uhman. He was
a great wing man. He would just support you eat
(09:43):
whether you struck out or not. Um struck out? He
uh three's company. What's going on? Yeah, if you went
to the Regal Beagle with Pliny, you're gonna come away
happy one way or another. Um so. He but he
was like he was a documentary of all the other
cultures that's why he was going to do. But the
problem is that he was still a Roman citizen, so
he saw things through Roman I So that means that
(10:06):
he saw Heathens as heathens, like, yeah, their culture was
interesting and it was worth writing down, But it doesn't
mean that he had a respect for it or got
everything right or understood everything correctly. But you you, the
point is you could take Plenties writings potentially with a
little more of a grain of sand than Caesar's. But
(10:26):
but yeah, that's right, whatever you want to chew on.
But the but Caesar's writings have an advantage over Plenties
and that his were more contemporaneous to Celtic culture. By
the time Plenty came along, the Romans had already spread
their culture throughout the Celtic lands. They stamped out every
(10:46):
other culture basically. And what I found interesting from research, Chuck,
is that there were varying degrees of grudging nous at
accepting that culture among the Celtic tribes. In some respects
they were like, oh, yes, I love civilization. It's way
better than the life we were living before. There's so
(11:06):
many great trappings to it, and it's so much less
like you know, um hard and difficult and muddy. But
at the same time, I also don't like how the
Romans like just kind of like rape everybody they feel
like raping and tax us even though we're considered basically
slaves to them. So there was a real like um
(11:27):
weird period where the Romans started to permeate with their culture,
the Celtic culture of um I guess ambivalence towards that
that permeation, yeah, um so, I mean these are the
historical writings that we have as far as actual, real
archaeological evidence. It's not much better as far as conjecture
(11:50):
goes a couple of examples, because there's always you know,
this longing to connect the Druids and their paganism, their
brand of pagan him to this ritual sacrifice again because
it's juicy. So the lynd the very famous Lindau Man
who was Lindao to Lindau one was a woman. But
(12:11):
this was a body that they found in nineteen four
preserved in Pete and a Pete bog h. He was
a dude in his mid twenties and had a very
violent death. As it appears um they found food in
his belly, so they there's so much conjecture. The conjecture
there is essentially that he was ritually sacrificed, that was
(12:34):
his last meal, and then he had what's known as
three deaths. He was strangled. Uh, their ligature marks on
his neck very well preserved. You should look him up
the garrett. The leather strap is still around his neck um.
He was hit on the head after that, like blunt
forced trauma style, and then his throat was cut. So
(12:55):
the speculation is they gave him a last meal and
then gave him possibly three deaths, to satisfy three different
pagan gods. But it also he was found naked, so
there's speculation that he could have just been robbed of
his clothes and robbed of his money and uh maybe
by someone who it was a sick oh maybe or
(13:18):
somebody who is like, get that thing out of my
face and put some clothes on. I'm telling you for
the last time. And then it went it went south
from there. Yeah, and you can go see he travels
a little bit, but he's on permanent display in the
British Museum. If you want to go, uh, say hi. Yeah,
if you ever want to be reminded that you're really
not a lot more than a bag of skin. Go
check out pictures of a lindau Man because that's basically
(13:41):
what he is. Yeah. They've also found mass graves um
from the Iron Age in in these areas where where
the druids were around, and again conjecture that this was
an example of like mass ritual sacrifice, but that's largely
been pretty much poopooed over the years as well. Yeah,
it's definitely up for debate whether they were just executed
(14:04):
or whether they were um killed in battle or whether
the yeah, they were sacrificed. Um. There's some other there's
some other archaeology that has has really tantalized archaeologist. There's
one called the Deal Warrior. Yeah, that's name. Yeah, it
really is, especially if you check out like how he
was found. He was found with a shield, a spear,
(14:25):
and a sword and wearing a crown. And as far
as they can tell, there's no other Celtic um burial
that that has been found thus far that had all
of these accoutrema. So this is an extraordinarily important person.
But they have no idea who it was, but they
want to say druids so bad they can taste it
(14:46):
and then one of the other burials that was found,
they found him in a graveyard somewhere in I believe Britain, um,
and he was found with a lot of weird stuff like, uh,
what appears to be a board game but that they
think possibly was was used for divining you know, the future,
(15:07):
like rolling dice or something like that. Um. He was
found with divining rods, you know, like they used to
find water and that kind of thing, so that indicates
some sort of ritual magic. He was also found with
a set of surgical tools. So they're calling this guy
the doctor. Because the archaeologists are being level headed. Everybody
else is saying, this is the grave of a druid.
(15:28):
It's the grave of a druid. Just say it, you
stupid archaeologist. And he's like, no, I won't say it.
He won't say it, but it's a it's it could
prove to be a really um important Fine. It probably
it probably already has proven itself that we just aren't
openly interpreting it yet. Yeah, and um, I should mention
if Deal Warrior is not the name of a death
(15:48):
metal band, then someone's doing it wrong. Yeah. All you
need is a picture of this guy on your album cover.
It is your first one. Should we take a break, Yeah,
let's all right, let's take a little break and we'll
come back and talk. Uh, we'll post some more conjecture
right after this. All right, Chuck, we're back. It's time
(16:30):
for more conjecture again. Some archaeologists refused to to say
that druids definitely existed, that a priestly class of Druids
and Celtic culture existed. Just chew on that one for
a while, alright, totally undermined your led Zeppelin poster. Yeah. Well,
here's the thing too about the Celts is we don't
(16:52):
know a lot about where their culture began or when
it began exactly. Because Druids are Celts, we obviously don't
know much about where they began either. Um. We do
know that how how it kind of all ended. Um,
And when we say ended, I mean there, I mean
you can go to modern druid in Druidism websites today
(17:14):
and and go wear a flowery dress and frolic barefoot
in a field with people in any given country. Probably,
But that's not exactly the same thing the actual druids. Uh,
we know because of writing from the first and second centuries. Basically, Uh,
there are laws all over the place that banned druidism.
(17:36):
Part of this Roman uh conquering way, which is like, Hi,
we're here, so forget everything, forget your way of life.
You are now Roman enjoy using toilets, right exactly, And
I like, I do like the toilets a lot, right.
So so with Claudia, I'd like a couple of um
Caesar's Augustus and Tiberius said Okay, Romans citizen and aren't
(18:00):
allowed to participate in druidism. And then by the time
Claudius came around, uh, and by the time his rule
ended in fifty four CE UM, the Druids have had
been at least officially stamped out. Like not only could
you as a Roman citizen not participate in druidism, Druidism
in in totality was banned in the Roman empire um
(18:24):
under punishment of death. And uh, it had uh the
effect of driving Druidism underground, for sure. Yeah, but it's
not like it just went away. They still, like, you know,
they would go off and and and do their own
thing quietly as much as possible, right, and and so
I And I mean, when Claudius is banning this, it's
(18:46):
not just like no, we we don't like this. It's
a threat to to the Roman control over the Gallic
lands and these celts Um. That's not the reason that
he gave, although that was almost certainly the reason why
they outlaw druids. But the reason they gave were things like,
these people practice an inhuman religion where they sacrifice people
(19:08):
to their gods. Apparently they would go through criminals and prisoners,
and then once they ran out of criminals and prisoners,
they would start sacrificing their own innocent people. They just
had this blood lust, so that religion had to be
stamped out and repressed. And of course the Roman citizen
around the world said, oh, yeah, that's great, get rid
of druidism. But like you said, it just kind of
(19:30):
went underground, it seems like. And then as rebellion started
to kind of crop up around them the British Isles
and in France um against Roman rule. It's pretty much
a sure bet that if there were such a thing
as druids, they were helping to foment that that rebellion
and that uprising. Yeah, and I think I get the
(19:51):
idea that the Romans were a little spooked by the Druids. Um,
while they were like vastly superior with their military in
their might, um, they paid a lot of attention to them,
and like, they're not gonna make a bunch of hay
about something that they don't think is a threat. And
I think they were spooked out a little bit, like, uh,
when they were resisting, you know, after these laws were passed,
(20:13):
the Druids invoked a prophecy saying the end of the
world is coming near and the Roman Empire is going
to be destroyed by fire. And I don't think it
was just like the Romans just brushed that off. I
think they're like, oh jeez, those those guys are crazy. Um.
And also, how are we going to deal with a
big fire? Right exactly? So that's so that I mean,
(20:36):
I could see being spooked by that, couldn't you. Yeah, So, um,
they they definitely if they weren't spook chucking, at least,
they took them quite seriously and like again like outright
banned them. But not only did they did they prophecy
that they were going to um be burned by fire
like the some of these early writings of drewids, especially Pliny,
(20:59):
may did it seem kind of like creepy and magical
and wizardy, you know, like like Pliny described druids as
holding um blood offerings, like like slaughters of animals and
humans and their sacred oak groves. And we should say,
I don't think we said this, but the word druid
one of the suggestions for the etymology of it is
(21:21):
drew and wind, and drew means to know, and wind
means oak, So drew wid may mean nowhere of the
oaks or the people who who have the knowledge of
these sacred oak trees. Um and Plenty described these guys
and like white beards and long white robes, climbing up
oak trees to cut down mistletoe with golden sickles, you know,
(21:44):
around saw wayne or um you know, the spring solstice
or summer solstice or spring equinox um, and and worshiping
this whole pantheon of gods that unfortunately the Romans didn't
bother to write down the names of. Yeah and once, uh,
isn't there speculation that Merlin from the Arthurian legend was
(22:04):
a druid, like he survived, you know, the not just
the Roman Romanization of Celtic culture and also the Christianization
of Celtic culture, but into the Middle Ages, um, when
he was supposedly running around. Yeah, and again because they
weren't writing anything down. You know, when you're when you're
a conquering person, you can go in and like raid
(22:26):
the archives and get a lot of knowledge. I imagine
it was kind of creepy in and of itself to
just find that they had no writings at all, Right,
and then you're all of a sudden, I mean, I'm
sure there was like questioning and stuff, but then you're
just going on whatever they wanted to tell you, and
any Druid worth assault was probably like, you know, probably
tease them a bit about how creepy they might be. Sure,
(22:50):
you know. So that whole not writing things down thing,
that's that's an important point. So one thing, it means
that we don't have any direct understanding of the druids
from the druids. But um, the reason why they didn't
write things down was two fold. One, if they were
this priestly elite class that stood between the average celt
(23:11):
and the gods, Um, they were the ones who knew
the secrets of the oak and the wisdom of the
oak and all that um. One way they maintained that monopoly,
or that that have the market cornered on that knowledge
was to make it so that the only way you
could learn to be a druid was from another druid,
and to pass along this ancient tradition of knowledge, which
(23:32):
makes the whole thing way more mystical. Then even if
there was some main religious book or something like that,
it's oral ancient knowledge passed on from druid to druid.
That's how they passed it on. And that's why they
didn't write anything down. And then elsewhere I saw I
think it was maybe stray Bow or someone else said
that the reason they didn't write things down was because
(23:54):
they felt like by reading you didn't learn as much
as from being immersed in it and in having had
explained to you over the period of something like twenty
years by another druid, Because that's about how long it
took to be initiated into being a full druid, a
full rank druid, a full rank a black belt druid. Uh,
(24:14):
shall we take another break? Why not? Man? All right,
let's do it, and then we'll talk a little bit
more about whether or not they practice human sacrifice and
stonehenge in all sorts of other good things right after this.
(24:49):
All right, So we talked a lot so far about
or a little bit rather about whether or not they
did practice human sacrifice, the sort of the sixty thousand
dollar question. And like we said, because the Romans really
wanted to propagandas and paint a picture of listen, we
gotta do this. These people are barbarians. Uh, they're sacrificing
(25:12):
and like you said, maybe even eating each other. That
that cooks up a good case basically, especially when it's
coming from Caesar's pin um or whatever he wrote with
what it's right with hero with the blood of his enemies, Okay, which,
by the way, by the way, Chuck, we are one
day out from the IDEs of March, that's right, which
(25:33):
marked the death of Caesar, one day before your birthday,
So happy early birthday from everybody and stuff. You should know, Like, um,
so did they or did they not? That is a
big question and the answer is maybe. Right. So you know,
there's a lot of writings about it, but again you
gotta take all that with a grain of salt. Is propaganda.
(25:55):
But you know, some of it was super detailed. Um
could just be good writing and good imagination, but there
was enough of it um to where there is a
lot of speculation that you know, they may have done
so maybe not on some huge mascale, but that doesn't
mean that if you people weren't thrown in a wicker
man every now and then in set ablaze. Yeah, and
(26:15):
that's I mean, that's worth really just saying overly one
of the things that whole wicker Man. If you haven't
seen Wickerman, go watch it. Not the knick Cage version both, Okay, Gussie,
both their moments in the Nick Cage when they are
so bad, it's pretty wonderful to watch. Okay, alright, alright,
granted the original one is pretty awesome. I think, like
Peter Peter Cushing in it, well, Christopher Lee was the
(26:37):
the main creep, wasn't he. Well obviously that was the
main creep in his own life. Um, he was great.
But so in Wickerman, I think it was from this investigator.
I think goes into like this kind of isolated, insular,
kind of Celtic tradition community and ends up finding himself
inside a giant wicker man being burned alive. They that's
(27:01):
based on legend about the the Druids that they used
to sacrifice people by making giant wicker figures, putting somebody
in there and setting it on fire. And that was
just one of the ways they supposedly sacrificed people. Another
one I read about was that they would slash people
in the back with a mortal wound, and then one
(27:21):
of the druids or one of their assistants would watch
the person's death throws and death agony to divine the future,
like you could tell by the way somebody arrived or wriggled,
or maybe how they bled what the future would be.
And then with Lindale man, you were saying, remember he
was he was had his neck broken, he was choked,
(27:41):
hit over the head, and he was slashed in the throat.
They think that possibly the choking thing, the strangulation, and
the slash in the throat were related to where he
would produce like a fountain of blood when when he
was when his throat was slashed while he was being strangled,
that would tell them something. Possibly, That's that's the legend,
(28:02):
the whole cannibalism thing. I saw zero evidence for at all. Yeah,
there is no evidence for cannibalism human sacrifice. There are
a lot of good cases out there that that really
possibly did happen among the Celts. Yeah. And part of
the reason this is so uh so tantalizing all these
years later is when they link them to things like
(28:23):
Stonehenge and you go to Stonehenge and you're told some
story by some snot nose kid you know that's visiting
from Indiana that like, you know, the Druids used to
you know, sacrifice people here and that's why they built it,
which is not true at all. It's gotten all mixed up. Um.
Stonehenge was around long before the Celts and the Druids
(28:45):
were doing their thing there. But they may have gone there,
I mean ed makes a good point like a lot
of times when they were religious temples and things that
had been evacuated another pagan religion might move in just
because it's there and it's ready to go. So they
may have gone to Stonehenge and to perform some ceremonies,
but that was not the purpose for Stonehenge. Yeah, we
(29:09):
have no idea why they built Stonehenge or even who
built Stonehenge. But the first the first unambiguous appearance of
the Celts comes hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of years
after Stonehenge was first built. But yeah, they may have
used it. If you were a Druid, wouldn't you like say, yeah,
Stonehenge is probably pretty important. It lines up I think
(29:31):
with the summer solstice, the the rising sun and the
summer solstice. That was a very important um time to
the Druids as far as we understand, so of course
they would pay attention to it and use it. And
maybe another way to look at it is that the
Druid tradition and maybe even the Celts themselves directly grew
out of the people in the culture that built Stonehenge originally,
(29:55):
because I think see I think it was Caesar who
wrote that the Celts culture and Druids grew out of
the British isles first and then spread westward or eastward
into Europe, primarily France, right yeah, yeah, although there's I've
seen references that it made it as far as Turkey.
The Celtic culture did um and had extensive trading routes,
(30:18):
So they weren't like this this you know, isolated group
of bumpkins. They were spread out all over the place.
They knew how to trade. Then they had their own civilization.
It just wasn't nearly as advanced as as Roman civilization,
but they had like an established culture by the time
Rome showed up. We just don't know quite that much
about it as it was right before Rome came. Yeah,
(30:40):
and as you said, I thinking like the very beginning,
like you know, years and years later, like in the
seventeen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, there were people in groups
of people that referred to themselves as druids and claimed
that they were practicing these true traditions. Um, but there's
really no like there's really no proof that any of
(31:01):
that is true at all. And and it's likely that
it was just these people many many years later that
just sort of, um, kind of dug up this ancient
thing and made it their own. No, it's it's a
hundred percent that way. And even like the the neo
Druidic groups that you see today, don't try to to
make it any make it out any other way. Um.
(31:23):
A lot of the a lot of them will say,
you know, we we are. This druidism we practice has
been around a few hundred years and it's based on
ancient you know, folklore and tradition that you will find
in Ireland. And that's that's a really good point too.
Like like Neo Druids, m traces its roots back to
(31:43):
the seventeenth century when some historians and antiquarians got interested
in some of the ancient Irish stuff. Um. And they
think possibly that some of the ancient Irish myths and
legends are a form, a kind of a preserved form
of ancient Celtic and Druidic culture. Because the Romans never
(32:05):
set foot in Ireland, they never managed to conquer Scotland.
The picks up there, who you will remember from the
Locknest episode, drove them back. And so these two, these
two areas where Celtic culture lived, was able to kind
of live and preserve and and continue on until about
the five hundreds when the Christians showed up and finally
managed to convert everybody um, and then Celtic culture thank you,
(32:31):
and then um. But but Celtic culture had an extra
five hundred years to continue on and then make it
into you know, the written word and written language. And
so you can go back and look at Irish mythology
and a lot of people say this is this here,
here's your example of Druidism right here. Um, which it
(32:52):
could be a variation of it because these were isolated cultures,
but still it probably is some form of Druidism. And
then that is what the seventeenth century onward in Dano
Druids based their stuff on. But they don't claim to
say we have unmolested ancient knowledge from the original or
(33:12):
tradition of druids. They just are kind of basically doing
their own thing, you know. Yeah, and it's so rich
for um literature and movies. It's just it's been definitely
just sort of malleable and bastardized just to fit like
a screenplay of um Celtic folklore and like these kind
(33:35):
of creepy, blissed out flower children who uh throw people
in a wicker man. Or there was a movie with
Christopher Lambert of you know, the Highlander called Druids, which
I'm sure is I haven't seen it, but I imagine
is just cooked up for movies. You know. There's a
really good movie from around the time Wickerman came out
(33:58):
called Blood the I think Blood on Satan's Claw. Dude,
this terrible title. It is amazing that it's part of
like wicker Band and Blood on Satan's Claws, they're part
of something called folk horror. Yeah. Yeah, and we would
not have folk horror if it wasn't for those antiquarians
in the seventeen hundreds of being the sixteen hundreds being
becoming interested in Druidism. We we might not even have
(34:21):
led Zeppelin, my friend, if it wasn't for some of
those guys. Well, the guy who did uh Hereditary, his
the trailer for his new movie just came out and
it is straight up like druid centric. I can't wait.
Like these these you know, teenage campers in like Sweden
(34:42):
or something. I think it's Sweden, I'm not sure. You know,
they find this, you know, group of people in a
field who are doing creepy things, and it just it
looks really creepy and awesome. I'm assuming is producing it.
Probably like four could show a movie of somebody's spit
into a pale for two hours and I'd be like,
(35:02):
I want to watch that. Yeah, they're a good outfit.
They were a great outfit. Uh Oh. One other thing
I also saw that um Druids, the ancient Druids, if
they did exist as like an elite priestly class would
not have gotten their hands dirty with sacrifice. They would
have just overseen it. And then possibly a sub order
(35:26):
of druids called vates would have divined, you know, what
was going on from the way the blood was spilled
or whatever. So not, uh what are they vates? Vates?
And then there was also bards. They were not druids,
not full fledged druids. I I don't I don't know,
I don't understand it. I've just seen it. I've seen
it delineated like vate, vates, Bards and druids. And then
(35:49):
I've also seen I think in this article Ed places
druids is kind of like the whole elite class. It
was definitely a higher class, right. And then I also
saw in UM some archaeology UM article that that there's
really no evidence that druids, if they did exist as
a separate class, existed as separate class until very late,
(36:12):
right before the Romans came, and they would have just
been integrated into everyday life and it would have been,
like you said, an occupation, like you know, Todd over there,
Todd Merwin, Um, he's really good with the divining rod.
So that's what that's what we rely on Todd for.
But he wasn't like an elite class, and then maybe
it developed out of that kind of specialization over time.
(36:34):
I love that Todd is your kind of go to
over the years. I do too, love Todd. Uh. That's
it for druids. Although there is a lot more out there,
and a lot of it's confusing, but a hundred percent
of it is awesome, especially if you're um flow. If
your boat is floated by dungeons and dragons type stuff. Uh.
(36:54):
And since I said dungeons and dragons, it's time for
listener mail. I thought you were about to say, since
I said dungeons and dragons, that's Friday night and I'm
in a basement. I love it. Hi, guys, I worked
this is on bed bugs. By the way, we got
a lot of replies about short stuff on bed bugs, um,
(37:18):
including quite a few from the people in the hospitality industry. Yes,
which is very gross. Um. Hey, guys, worked as a
guest service agent for a three star hotel in Charlotte,
North Carolina for over three years. It was called bed
Bugs City. Bed Bugs was basically a curse word, and
(37:41):
it couldn't be used in front of guests, and we
heard from a couple of other people in the service
industry that you never say that word out loud. They
called them BB's at this place, but another guy called
them the visitors. Oh my god. So I'm not really
sure if it was true or not, but um, a
general manager told me that this picular hotel chain did
not believe in putting mattress covers on their mattresses. The
(38:04):
logic being housekeepers are required to inspect mattresses every time
a guest checks out of a room and every time
they change the bed. If they were to put mattress
covers on the beds and guests would notice them, it
would give the guests the idea that bed bugs were
in that mattress already interesting. In addition this, the manager
explained to me that guests are the ones who bring
(38:26):
bed bugs into hotels. I don't know about that. Sounds
like blaming the victim, agreed, So if a guest calls
after they've checked out of a room to report bed bugs,
this complaint basically fell on deaf ears. If the guest
called to report bed bugs during this stay, the company
is not obligated to refund the nightly rate. Um, but
sometimes they might adjust your rate. It's a sign of goodwill.
(38:49):
They don't reimburse people for finding bed bugs in the
rooms because to them, that is an admission of guilt.
So instead they will offer I can't believe this part.
Instead the hotel will offered to wash your clothes, movie
to a different room, place the room with bed bugs
out of service, and then tell you to throw your
stuff in the trunk of your car in plastic bags
(39:11):
and leave the car in the sun. Very rare occasions,
they might even issue a future night's day that can
be used at any Bedbug City right across the country.
You get what you pay for with the three star hotel. Yeah,
I don't know. Man. Three star used to be different.
It used to be sure, and then the corporate takeover
(39:32):
of America undid that difference. So that is from J.
The letter J. The letter J. This this listener mail
is brought to you by the letter Jan Colling down
to bed Bug City. Thanks Jay from bed Bug City.
We appreciate that peak behind the curtain. UM, if you
(39:54):
work in some industry we've talked about and want to
tell us all the gross and horrific things that the
general public doesn't know about. We love that stuff. You
can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and
look for all of our social links there. You can
also go to my website, The Josh Clarkway dot com.
You can send us all an email to stuff Podcasts
at I heart podcast Network dot com for more on
(40:21):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
Works dot com.
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