October 27, 2025 • 50 mins
Margaret talks to Sophie about the philosophers of the celts.
Sources:
https://irishfolklore.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/blacksmiths-and-the-supernatural/
https://folklorethursday.com/folklore-of-archaeology/ferrous-friend-foe-iron-became-enemy-fairy-folk/
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/28y8zwazfxaq2tsb933b54wf0slfcj
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/02/woodhenge-is-just-as-fascinating-and-mysterious-as-its-famous-neighbor-stonehenge/
https://irishmyths.com/2022/04/29/female-druids/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and we're going to go people who did cool stuff.
You're once a year reminder that I like talking about
spooky stuff kind of all the time. But I am
absolutely willing to do the thing where I take the
end of October to do something that I find spooky
and interesting. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and my guest
and my producer is Sophie ray Lichterman.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
How are you?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
You know I'm excited we're doing Spooky Week. I'm with you.
That's always good. My dogs are good. My dog Truman
had a very productive vet appointment this morning, and I
feel like her past trauma is healing in a beautiful
way and I'm so proud of my girly pop amazing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Does that mean Truman's gonna start urinating in places that
aren't the backyard, like on walks?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I mean, perhaps she is urinating like a normal dog
now and goes like five times a day that have
just once or twice. That's progress, serious progress, and she's
just like a happy, good girl. But this is like
a lot of information, So if people don't care, that's fine.
I'm going to talk about it anyways. I produced this podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
The Dog cast.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
I took her to what's called a veterinary behaviorist, which
is like, you know, the equivalent of like a like
MD doctor also has a PhD in something. He's like
a specialized doctor. Because my dog, Truman came to me
with a lot of past trauma. She was severely abused
and caged and hit and kicked, and so I've had
(01:40):
her fromost a year and we've worked really hard to
make her better. But I finally got in an appointment
with this behavioralist VET, which is hopefully the right title.
I don't know. All I know is I waited four
months and it was so worth it.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
They're going to be listening and they're gonna be so
mad if you yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
That's okay. I gave him a lot of money, okay.
But it was the first time, besides her wonderful trainer
that we work with, that I felt like somebody really
understood my dog and that we have a very oh
and now innocent sparking in the background, which is very unhelpful.
And I feel like she's going to be on an
(02:21):
even better path to be her best self. And I
think that's really cool. And today's cool people who did
cool stuff is not Truman.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It's true today's cool people who did cool stuff, which
is more of a like spooky people who did spooky stuff.
Although gee, I actually came around. I expected this just
to be spooky people who did spooky stuff. I actually
came around. I actually think these people are cool people
who did cool stuff. Sophie, what do you know about druids?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I only know the basic, which is that like they're
like ancient Celtic like I don't know, like like mystical,
like preus, like mentors or like role knowledge, like the
authority figures. I guess I would say, Am I right?
Am I wrong? Like they are like somewhat mystical, but
(03:10):
they're definitely like in positions of authority, like teacher, priests.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, that's the rough of it. Although what's funny is
that we know a lot of specific things beyond that,
but a lot of the specific things we have contradict
each other. Oh and so that's what you just said
is kind of the like what we can all agree on,
except actually that's not true. A lot of people are
specifically like they were not priests, but they were certainly
(03:36):
the philosophers and on some level religious but mostly political.
Maybe figures of the Celtic world. Okay, but I started
off being like, oh, okay, they're spooky or whatever. One
of the single main things that every version that talks
about druids with any like knowledge admits and talks about
(03:57):
is one of the main things they did was de
escalate conflicts. They were mediators, They were a lot of things.
They were judges, they were philosophers. They oversaw sacrifices. Probably
we'll talk about sacrifice a lot and without a lot
of clear answers, but with a lot of really interesting
it's not gonna be boring. But specifically they would go
(04:18):
and they would mediate conflicts between groups. They would also
sometimes be the generals and kings and things like that.
But I don't know. To the modern audience, they're probably
the most familiar modern version of a druid is like
the D and D or video game version where they
worship nature and transform into owl bears or whatever. To
the medieval imagination, they were scary secret basically witches, and
(04:44):
for example, there's an eighth century Irish hymn where you
can ask God for protection against the spells cast by
the three most logical when you think of people who
might cast spells against you. You obviously are going to
think of the following three categories. Druids, can't trust them, women,
am I right? And blacksmiths.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
That's the trifecta from.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Hell, I know, which means before we even get into druids,
I have to go on to my first tangent, which
is about the fucking blacksmith thing.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Context, contexts context.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
This is context, but this is almost more.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
This is just magpie is interested in.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, this is tripping down various rabbit holes.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
So so many more.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Obviously we all understand what we need protection from women?
Why the medieval mind. Actually, something that I've covered on
the show a bunch of times is that the modern conception,
like the twentieth century conception of like women as like
meek and like docile creatures or whatever, is so completely
opposite to the medieval European conception of women. The misogyny
(05:55):
in the Middle Ages, instead of being like women are
weak and we can push them around, was like women
are terrifying us. Men are civilized. Women are the wild creatures.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I mean facts.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Though I know I was like, I don't mind that
one at all. A lot of the shit that like,
like with druids. Right, there's two versions of druids. There's like, oh,
they like sacrifice tons of people and we're spooky, and
then there's like, oh, they were like nice lawbringers and
they you know, did a lot of like mediation and stuff.
And I'm just very like, why not both do give?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Like?
Speaker 2 (06:26):
This is how I feel about it. But so I
tried to track down the Blacksmith thing.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
M hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I tried to find the actual hymn, but I sourced
it to a book from nineteen eighty eight, and then
I was like, I'm not going and buying this print
only book to find the specific hymn. This is a tangent.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
I have to stop wait to self at it. I'm
so proud of you, thank you, thank you. It only
took what how many years have we done this podcast?
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I have to admit, if I lived somewhere where delivery
was faster, I might have gotten this book do this
one thing. But I learned about this on like Monday,
and I was like, I got to record on Thursday.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
I'm anyway incredible.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
So in Ireland, where more of the information we have
about druids going longer comes just because it resisted, it
didn't get colonized by Rome. In Ireland, iron was a
magical medal to the early medieval mind because iron wards
off evil and it's necessary to defeat fairies. Obviously, everyone
knows these things about iron, and blacksmiths do magical shit
(07:28):
with iron. Blacksmiths are presented as like supernaturally strong and large.
You always want to be on their good side. You
have this classic Irish belief were counted at least into
the twentieth century that a blacksmith can curse somebody by
pointing the horn of his anvil to the east and
then pronouncing the curse. There's a story about how the
(07:49):
cops were going to come evict someone. A lot of
Irish curses are specifically we hate landlords, and on Easter
Sunday they were going to evict this person, and so
everyone from town went to the forge and prayed around
the anvil after moving it to the east, you know,
and then would rise up and strike it. And this
keeps the cops from evicting people, okay, And blacksmiths can
(08:11):
curse people to death and they're friends with the fairies.
Why does iron hurt fairies? Have you run across this
before that. No, So there's this like folkloric belief that, like,
you need cold iron to hurt fairies, kind of in
the same way that silver hurts werewolves.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Where fuck would anybody want to hurt fairies?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, fairies are seen as malicious forces in the medieval mind. Okay,
and specifically, spoiler, the fairies are probably representations of like
the people that you've previously colonized. Copy cold iron hurts
the fairies. Cold is just literally cold iron just literally
means like iron. It doesn't actually mean it's in the
refrigerator or whatever. It's just a poetic way of describing
(08:53):
it that's come down. And iron does a bunch of
magical shit. So people were really into iron. It conducts electricity.
I fell down another rabbit hole trying to figure out
who invented the lightning rod. The Internet wants you to
know it's either a check Man or Benjamin Franklin, and
the two sides are very upset about each other about this.
But around seventeen fifty people figured out the lightning rod.
But before that you had kind of lightning roddish effects, like,
(09:17):
for example, you would have people who would survive being
struck when they're in a belfrey and you got a
big iron bell, and then light strikes the bellfrey while
someone's ringing the bell. The ringer might survive because the
bell like conducts the electricity elsewhere and then it goes
down to the ground or whatever. I don't totally understand
this mechanism, but there's all these people saying like this
(09:38):
has happened. Iron magical. It defeats lightning, It defeats the gods,
it defeats the pagan gods. Iron is a sign that
the church is more powerful than foreign zeus.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And this is the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, this is pretty Protestant shita. Yeah. The first compasses
are made of natural iron of loadstone in China thousands
of years ago. You can drop an iron needle in
a bowl of water and it'll tell you where to go.
Like I was like at first, I was like, yeah,
why iron? And then I like read all the shit
and I'm like, no, I get that. Like if there's
like a metal that just like fucking tells you where
(10:21):
to go, like that's fucking magic, you know, A compass.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
No, that's fucking wizardry in the coolest way.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, and this is why horseshoes over your doorway are lucky.
They're made by blacksmiths of iron. They keep the fairies away.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
I had no idea, you know, I've always known that
horseshoes are lucky, but I've never like looked into it.
That is incredibly cool.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, and then here's the part that I get. I've
read two conflicting things about the original Britons of southern
Britain and the Picts of Northern Britain. Celtic people, they're
less technologically advanced, and I have read in one source
they had weapons made out of bronze. I have read
(11:08):
in other sources that actually the reason that the Celts
were so successful is that they figured out iron earlier
than other people and were ahead of the time. But whatever.
At some point people are fighting. One group has iron
and the other group has bronze, and you're gonna trash
an army with bronze. If you have iron, it'll like
(11:29):
cut through their shields and shit. But here comes Rome.
They have iron weapons, and they're fighting these small wild
warriors who fight dirty by disappearing into the forests. They
seem to be magically appearing and disappearing through portals, and
they're like often naked and covered in blue spirals, and
like it's just fucking trippy and strange. It's surreal, like
(11:51):
a bunch of fairies, but the Romans of Iron. So
they just fucking killed them eventually. Booh yeah, that's the
spoiler alert for a lot of this. All right, So
the Druids, we know very very little about Druids, or
we actually know a lot of things about Druids, but
we know a lot of like kind of random specific things,
(12:12):
and we don't know which ones are accurate because they
are all written by people who hate the Druids. The
Druids did not write, but it wasn't that they were illiterate.
The Celts did start writing once they started running across
people with writing, but they had a specific religious prohibition
on writing down knowledge. And it's interesting their argument, at
(12:34):
least as Caesar represents it. We don't know that that's
true or not, but Caesar says the Druids didn't write
anything down because it wasn't a like, oh it's spooky magic,
it'll ruin everything. It's kind of like why we hate Ai.
Their argument was, if you write everything down, you'll lose
your mental capacity because you'll just rely on the written
(12:56):
word to remember things instead of having a well developed memory.
And I wouldn't remember anything if I couldn't write it down.
So I don't agree with this argument, but it's interesting.
Modern Druidism, the modern revival religion, is seen by most
scholars as only loosely related to historical Druidism. It's basically
(13:17):
a reconstruction thing. And it's not that the things that
they've reconstructed are inherently wrong. It's just that they're not
inherently right either, Like they connect the dots where you
don't know what it's supposed to end up looking, Like,
you know, we have a lot of dots and you
have to try and figure out what they all look like.
But there's so many different ways you can connect them.
(13:38):
But the things that we do know about them are
pretty fucking cool, Like not necessarily cool isn't good, But
cool isn't like interesting. Sure, it's really really natural to
want to freeform connect the dots. I found myself doing
it constantly. I've like never before been so strongly like
drawn to be like, well, now I want to write
fiction set in this world so that I can connect
the dots. But in the shortest version of what we
(14:01):
think we know about the druids. In the at least
the Atlantic Celtic society like France and Britain, there was
an elite class of philosophers in the society that were
seen as the conduit between people and the gods. Their
main job was as judges, as advisors, as mediators of conflict,
and they also oversaw but were not performing rituals and sacrifice.
(14:24):
There's another class that are actually the sort of priests.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
That was my general knowledge roughly.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, exactly, And it's an oral culture, so everything that
they know, including this encyclopedic knowledge of like astrology, was memorized.
Druid school was probably either nineteen or twenty years long.
But look at what age, I don't know. I would guess.
I think it's like the only thing I've seen is
(14:52):
that Caesar wrote that like young people went to go
study with them, So it's probably like, if I were
to guess, and this is a I guess it'd be
like thirteen years old or something. Yeah, like a young
adult in the medieval mind or.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Whatever in that time.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, but it's like twenty years of schooling when.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Life spans weren't even that great.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I know. But it's funny because like people are like, oh,
the medieval people only live to be thirty. That's not
quite true. It looks like that because so many people
died young that the average is really low. If you
make it to twenty, you might make it to fifty, sixty, seventy,
you know, sure, but still not long lived times, you know,
(15:34):
and you're going to twenty years of school, okay. The
other way that people can sceptualize the druids, though, one
that I find fairly convincing, is that it was less
of like a secret society that you join or a
job in society to be a Druid, as much as
it was an intellectual class of people. And specifically there's
a lot of comparisons. There's this whole thing. We covered
(15:56):
it on one of our episodes, the episode about hunger
strikes and how hunger strikes are found in India and
Ireland in the legal structure, and how India and Ireland
have like all of these wild overlaps in terms of
legal structures and cultural things and language, and it's because
of the proto Indo European people kind of spread out
(16:19):
as far as they could, and the edges are where
more of the original ideas stayed. So people presented as
a cast thing also. And I'm not as convinced by this,
but I read a historian who didn't know its way
more ra others than I do that he's like, this
is the intellectual caste of the Celtic people, which makes
(16:39):
me like it less because I'm not a big fan
of that because I have friends who have fled India
because of caste society. But yeah, it's the intelligentsia. It's
the like, oh, I went to school, but instead of
going to get bachelor's and now you're the educated people.
You're going for twenty fucking years. And we know for
certain that they start existing around the fourth century b
(17:00):
as foreigners start writing about them, but there's decent enough
evidence that they might have been around a couple thousand
years before that. People argue about whether or not they
like predate, even the Celts and all this shit. I
don't know whatever. Then Celtic society was fucked up by
the Romans, who wrote long tracks about how evil the
Celtic religion was and how evil the Druids were, And
(17:22):
so most of the writing we have about druids is
Romans who are writing propaganda to defend themselves, going to
war to kill all the Celts.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, because they want to do they want a genocide.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, which they did do.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah. What we have is like trying to learn about
Islam by reading like history. Yeah yeah. And so there's
kind of no reason to trust almost anything that's been
written about them. But there's also no reason to assume
that the things that are written about them are inherently lies. Okay,
and pretty often, Sophie, you're probably familiar with this. I
(17:57):
get pretty far along in my show, my script, and
then some big thing that was not addressed, usually has
how the subject relates to women comes along. This week
is no exception.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Cool cuck Cool.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I read a whole last book about druids by this
esteemed scholar that basically never mentioned women except as a
throwaway line about Oh, and then there's like some women
in black moving among the soldiers, actually quoted specifically later
in the script. So you had to learn more about that,
uh huh. And so then I started looking at other
books that I on the subject, and other articles and
(18:34):
things like that, and like this book that I read
just completely assumes Celtic culture's patriarchal. All of the people
involved are men. There's no reason to assume that, And
there's so many reasons to assume the opposite, like all
of the evidence, both archaeological and in written at the station,
and like oral traditions and all these other things that
(18:56):
there are women Druids, like to the point where they
might not even be like, oh we women and every
now and then it might have just been like fucking
genderlest thing. And we also know that there are people
from that time period writing about how the Celts were
ruled by men and women equally. So I read the
wrong book first, as per usual, basically, And what's interesting
(19:18):
about this, the erasing of women from the story of
Druids is actually playing into the hands of the Romans,
the people who destroyed the Druids, who were a much
more patriarchal society. Jean Marcel wrote in nineteen seventy two
about this. He wrote, the Druids represented an absolute threat
to the Roman state because their science and philosophy dangerously
(19:41):
contradicted Roman orthodoxy. The Romans were materialistics, the Druids spiritual.
For the Romans, the state was a monolithic structure spread
over territories, deliberately organized into a hierarchy. With the Druids,
it was a freely consented moral order with an entirely
mythical central idea. The Romans base their law on private
(20:03):
ownership of land, with property rights entirely vested in the
head of the family, whereas the Druids always considered ownership collective.
The Romans looked upon women as bearers of children and
objects of pleasure, while the Druids included women in their
political and religious life. So that's when I now turned
it around to oh, this is not just spooky people
(20:24):
did spooky stuff. This is cool people that did cool stuff.
Was Yeah, the Celtic culture was far more interesting than
the Roman one.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
To me, Yeah, I'm just marinating on it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And now I want to know. I mean, there's like
obviously like entire degree programs around Celtic studies and things
like that, and there's going to be arguments this way
and that about go ahead.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I was gonna say, what's the sourcing on this?
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So that one I am reading a book written in
ninety four quoting someone from nineteen seventy two. The book
that I disagree with more was written more recently and
is a little bit more objective. So there is this
like thing that people are doing where they're kind of like, no, no, no,
the Celts are cool though, right, and I want to
believe that, So I am like trying to be careful
(21:07):
of my own thing around that. But I do find
that this maps, This idea that the Celts have a
much more communal way of life, maps with everything I
have learned over the course of all these years, like
especially when I'm reading about Irish history, where Celtic traditions
lasted much longer, where there's all of these ways of
having your town be like you divide up the land
(21:32):
so that everyone is farming with equal access to good
land a farm and things like that, and there's like
the land is usually sort of collectively owned but then
individually worked. And it's not like anarchist communism or whatever
the fuck, right, but it is a very very different
economic system and a much more fair one. And there
is a lot of voting, although even this more biased
(21:54):
author points out that like the voting is among everyone
gets to vote for someone from the intellectual class. You know,
it's not like what we would necessarily call democracy.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
No, it sounds like limited democracy.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah. And then the other thing is that it's like
we're also talking about like a huge chunk of area
over thousands of years, and so there seems to be
an idea that I'm fairly convinced by that they moved
more towards patriarchy further along, especially once they had contact
with the Romans, but even before that they were moving
(22:33):
more in that direction. And the main evidence we have
about druids comes in two forms. There's archaeological evidence, mostly
about the Celtic culture, written large because there's not a
ton of archaeological evidence that's like here's a druid, right, sure.
And then there's anecdotes written by these early Greek and
Roman observers, and many of the original manuscripts are long lost,
(22:56):
but we have scholars quoting those sources reasonably extensive, Like
there'll be a Greek guy and he'd be like, ah,
I'll live with the Celts for a long time, and
I wrote a whole book about him, and then that
book is long gone. But there's all of these books
where people are like, oh, yeah, I read that book
and I like this quote. So it'd be like if
people had to reconstruct ancient history by only having cool
people who did cool stuff scripts And it reminds me
(23:18):
of the importance of sourcing and quotings. Yeah, there's also
stuff we know about them that comes from oral tradition
and legend carried mostly in Ireland because the Romans never
got there and Scotland to some degree also, and then
it was written down in the ninth to eleventh century
by Christian monks. But their stuff is also it's far
(23:40):
more speculative, it's more removed from the time period, and
everyone's got a bias. Yeah, right, Like all the Romans
are like trying to write Islamophobia so they can go
destroy the place, and the Christian monks are trying to
be like and this is why it's good that we're
in charge now.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Well, yeah, because, like I mean to simplify, oral tradition
is word of mouth. Yeah, so somebody told a story
to somebody, who told a story, who told a story,
who told a story to someone to someone to someone
to someone.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
For a thousand years, for a thousand years.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It's like the game of telephone.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah, which is interesting because like that is how Druidic
knowledge was always passed on, and I wonder whether one
of the reasons that they did it. This is entirely speculation.
I could see them doing it so that the law
and the things that are true are allowed to shift generationally, right,
(24:31):
because like if it's all word of mouth, everyone's interpreting
the law every you know, generation or so. But do
you know what, Sophie is a constant in the universe. Potato,
that's right, which they didn't have access to at the time,
but eventually they would and it would be very good.
(24:52):
And that is why we are sponsored by the concept
of potatoes. You can eat them, you can make clocks
out of them. I think I think I did that
when I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
I had a fantastic potato. My parents celebrated their forty
first wedding anniversary and I took them out to dinner
and this restaurant had grilled like potatoes and it was
like yukung gold grilled potatoes, and it was magical.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
That sounds so good, and I wish all.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
The good people could have grilled potatoes.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
I got to eat a meal of potatoes I grew
for the first time in the past couple weeks.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
That's so cool.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
This is my third year of trying to grow potatoes,
and this year I succeeded to greater degrees than previously. Anyway,
that's probably the only ad. But in case there any
others are trying to say something, we'll just let them
do it here.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
So to talk about the Druids, we have to talk
about your favorite sports team, the Celtics.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
That was really mean.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
That was apparently meaner than I. Yeah, completely under to
the Celtics. It's spelled the same. It actually probably is related.
But in order to talk about the Druids, we have
to talk about the Celts, the people, not the sports team.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Why is it racist and overrated? Oh?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Probably, To be honest, the Celts are probably racist and overrated.
That is probably true. I don't know one way or
the other about how the Celts perceived race. I only
know a little bit more about how Medio Irish people did.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Celtics fans don't DM me. I don't care. My opinion's
never changing.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
The Celtic fans you can DM me, but I won't
have any idea what you're talking about. If you had
asked me an hour ago what sport the Celtics played,
I would have said Boston.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
That works.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Are they from Boston? Yes, okay, I thought so. All right,
Now it helps that we have a lot more information
about the celt sorry, the Celts, more broadly than a
specific social strata. Like we know more about Celtic culture
than Druids. But you can't talk about one Celtic culture
and be accurate. You're talking about a bunch of different
cultures over the span of thousands of years. So things
(26:59):
are gonna be real differ. Like take a white North American.
It is a different culture now than five hundred years ago. Right,
things are not static, even in the before civilization times.
I had always been told that the Celts were an
ethnic group. This is not true. It is more accurate
to say that Celts are the people who spoke a
(27:20):
Celtic language these days by that standard, which is actually
kind of cool, because it was never an ethnic group,
which actually means that, like, you know a lot of
people who are trying to be racist, like do nationalism wrong? Whatever? Anyway,
So the remaining Celts, by this standard, the people who
speak the Celtic language. You're pretty much talking about people
in Wales, Brittany, which is northwest France and Ireland, with
(27:43):
Scotland trying to revive its Gaelic language as well, and
in Brittany some people still speak Breton. Previously, people tended
to think that Celtic culture came from the east and
settled what we would call Atlantic Europe, like basically from
the West coast to the Iberian Peninsula like Spain and Portugal,
up through the Netherlands. In Britain and Ireland, during the Renaissance,
(28:06):
people thought that the Celts actually came from Anatolia Turkey,
but no one thinks this anymore. But the reason I
think that, which I think is kind of interesting. The Galatians,
who Paul wrote a letter to in the Bible. If
you ever go to a church and they're like Paul
to the Galatians or whatever the fuck right, the Galatians
were Celtics, Celtic people who were I apparently broke Sophie.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I really hope none of my Catholic relatives ever listened
to this.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Come on, why would you be a fan of Paul.
Paul's not the best of them. Paul's just a jerk,
I mean whatever. So the Galatians were Celtic people living
in what we've called Swanna now, right, and because the
Celts did travel really far, but they didn't come from there.
So what people say more recently is that they're like, oh,
(29:03):
we think the Celts came from roughly Switzerland, like the
middle of Europe, and then migrate out in every direction
and then it happened to only stick around successfully in
the very west. But modern scholarship seems to hold that
the Celts actually start as an Atlantic European culture like Brittany,
Ireland and Britain and western Iberia, and then they actually
(29:26):
migrated east from there and did get as far as
Anatolia and like have the Galatians, and again it's less
of an ethnic group and more of a language group. Basically,
there's all of these people. They're living along the coast,
they're trading all the time, and they're like, this will
probably be easier if we spoke the same language. And
they're probably speaking kind of similar languages anyway, because they're
coming from the same proto Indo European language group.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, communication is cool.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, and that's where probably the Celts come from. Whereas
the Celtic language itself as part of the Indo European
language family, which modern scholars tends to assume started in
the steps of Western Asia near the Black Sea and
spread out from there. And you've got the Celts and
they're doing all right over in Atlantic Europe and they
start spreading east, and like everyone else in Europe at
(30:11):
the time, they're not doing any writing. And when they
do start writing, after connecting with like ancient Greece and
the later Rome, they write in Greek characters in the
later the Latin alphabet. But they also have a religious
thing where they're not supposed to write down like important things. Yeah,
and so mostly like stuff that's written down is like names.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Do we know, like what why that transition exists? Is
it something like it was too holy or is it
not exp Well, it's because they didn't write it down,
so is it not necessarily explained.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So we don't have from their point of view. But
what Caesar says is that the Celts believed it would
fuck their memories up if they wrote stuff down.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
That's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, you know, other people assume it was about keeping
information secret and like being like only the cool click
has it right, But like most places that do that
write books and then just don't let them go into circulation,
you know, keep them in one place, and the Irish celts.
Eventually they are writing in ogum, which is like lines
with other lines coming off of it. It's really pretty.
(31:16):
But that doesn't show up until the fourth century CE,
so this has already passed. The era of druids is
a big thing anywhere but Ireland. And the Greeks show
up around six hundred BCE in southern France in Marseille.
They found the Colony of Marseille. And the more I
read ancient history, the more I'm like, the fucking ancient
(31:36):
world was so intense. It is so fucking metal, at
least in Europe, where I've read the most about it.
It is full of such dark shit. The ancient Greeks
show up in Gaul, you know, France, they found the
Marseille and they meet one of the most into skulls
and decapitated heads cultures that's ever existed. There are temples everywhere,
(31:59):
these Celtic temples, and I think there may be open
air from what I've read, but they're just covered in
pillars filled with human skulls. Alcove after alcove for skulls,
and not just skulls, but also decapitated heads, loss of
decapitated heads.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Oh oh.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Having been to the catacombs under Paris, I can say
the French have just never changed. It's just kept on
and there's only so much we know about the Celtic religion.
And there's more of this like skull time stuff happening
in southern France than elsewhere. Like basically, if you got
into Britain, there's like some skull stuff happening, but it's
like southern France is just like skull Town, and the
(32:42):
heads come from three places. Probably there's the remains of
people who died sort of normally that are then collected
and brought back to decorate the town. And then there's
head hunting, which is almost certainly happening. And basically in
southern France, if you go and you fight, and you
kill someone in battle, you bring back their head and
(33:03):
you nail it to the door of your house and
then you preserve it with oil. And when one trader
was like, hey, I want to buy some of those heads,
people were like, I will never sell you the head.
It is like there's no amount of gold you could
give me to sell this head. And then there's probably
human sacrifice. We don't know for certain, but they almost
(33:26):
certainly sacrifice people. There's some archaeological evidence that heavily suggests it.
And then there's attestation after attestation by their enemies saying
that they sacrifice people. When I say that they sacrifice
people and did hud hunting and all this stuff, I'm
not trying to separate them out from anyone else during
this time period, Like southern France was like probably more
(33:48):
specifically into heads and skulls than the average place. But
almost everyone is sacrificing humans in the ancient world, at
least anywhere near this area, and lots of other places
cross the world.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, it's an unfortunate trend.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, and you have this thing where like that's still
used as like the reason why civilization is good, And
I'm not civilization by one definition, like Western civilization coming
and telling everyone what to do or whatever, right, like, oh,
this is necessary, we needed to invade Mexico because we
had to stop the Aztecs, or like, you know, there's
(34:25):
a lot of behind the bastards on the like people
who are like, oh, we're just trying to stop the
slave trade in Africa and that's why we're colonizing and
murdering everyone there, right, But if you look at the
ancient world, it's full of this pretty brutal stuff. But
the thing is is that the like state just comes
(34:46):
in and systematizes it instead. Like the wildest execution methods
I've ever read were not Pagans. They were Christians in Europe,
tying people in the sacks and throwing them off of
buildings and shit. You know. And and basically this matters
because this is why people argue about the human sacrifice thing.
(35:06):
People who want to believe the Celts are good are
going to downplay or say the sacrifice didn't happen, and
people who want to say, no, the Romans are good
are going to play up the human sacrifice. And again
I'm just like kind of onlike both, Like, I don't know,
they probably did it. It still was better than being
genocided whatever. Like, considering Rome is going to come in
(35:27):
and kill a third of the people in gaul Over
like only a couple of years, they're going to come
in and kill a third of the people there and
enslave a third of people there, I'm like, you would
have had to sacrifice so many people every day to
come anywhere near the evil that Rome is going to do.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, there's evil, and there's evil, then there's evil, then
there's e Well then there's Rome.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, yeah exactly. But do you know, Sophie, what's not evil.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Potatoes?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
That's right, that's right, unless they're getting green, in which
case it's a little bit of evil coming in. It's
a little bit of evil. But you can peel that
right off and get to the good, non green potato underneath,
and we're back. The Celts had a bunch of different
funeral practices, The most famous are the ones that we
(36:24):
see evidence of today. Obviously, everyone knows the word barrow, right,
that's a normal word that normal people use. I thought that,
you know, the word barrow means in casual conversation.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I don't like I'm thinking of like a wheelbarrow, or
like there's like a city in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Well that's a metal name for a city.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
I wrote a whole book called The Barrow Will Send
what it may thinking normal people knew what the word
barrow meant. They don't. Barrows are burial mounds?
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Ah, I mean, you know, well.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
The Celts were building barrow mounds at least going back
to the third and fourth century BCE. You build a
wooden or stone place to inter the dead, like kind
of like a family tomb, and then when it's full
or the family line is dead or whatever, you dig
trenches alongside it and you put all that dirt on
top of it, and you build a big hill or
a little hill, a big mound, little hill. I walked
(37:22):
on one of these ones outside Stonehenge, and I think
a fox ran up the hill and it was cool
as hell, But I like have don't believe my own
memory about it because it just feels too on the.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Nose, so magical. No, that happened. That fucking happened to you.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
I remember it. Yeah, that was fucking cool. And so
those are the barrows, right, and there's evidence of them
all over Britain at least where you know, you have
these big hills, and the dead were buried with grave
goods like jewelry and weapons and shit, and in general
people would assume meaning like, oh, you need this in afterlife.
But actually the Celtic religion was actually more into reincarnation,
(37:59):
which is another in comparison to the Far East and
proto Windo European culture, and so it's probable that the
grave goods might have been like, oh, you'll need these
later for your next life, but they might have been
more When someone dies, you put their body on display,
and then all of the family members and stuff come
leave grave goods and sacrifice and it's a way of
(38:20):
like and then it's all buried together. And so it's
kind of a like showing off your familial wealth. It's
like how much shit can you bury with the dead?
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Got it? Like, Oh, we don't need this right now,
we're putting this forward for the next.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Yeah, we're just like, well, it's less about it becoming
useful and like they're really into sacrifice is like a
way of showing I think probably as a way of
showing wealth. Is just like yeah, we don't need this,
we you know, or we're giving this up. We can
give up more than you can give up. And this
is how the elite were buried for thousands of years
(38:54):
through the Celtic world. But most people weren't interred in
the earth. Most people didn't have crypts with family tombs
and burial goods. Far and away the most common form
of burial was what's called and this is a word
I didn't know, but it's my new favorite word. X carnation.
It's sky burial is the other thing that I've heard of.
(39:16):
You leave a body out for the birds and shit.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Oh that's dark.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
That's dark.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I don't love that.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Oh oh well it's gonna get darker. Oh cool. I
was so excited about the word xcarnate that I was like,
I'm not even gonna say it'd be a good band
name on the show, because like, I don't want anyone
to steal it. But then I looked it up myself
and on Encyclopedia Metalum or Metallium or whatever the fuck
the like Wikipedia of Bands, and it informed me that Xcarnate,
(39:48):
the death metal band from Melbourne, Australia, is not to
be confused that the death metal band xcarnated from Melbourne
or Australia, so that was taken.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Also, I just learned that Barrow, Alaska is no longer
called Barrow, Alaska, and it is now called I'm gonna
try to pronounce this correctly wit Kiavik. Fucking you know.
It's like want of like located in the super north
of the Arctic Circle. It's like one of the northernmost
(40:21):
cities in towns.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
That's cool. I'm glad that they got their name back.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah, they got their name back. So bye bye barrow.
Yeah got barrow, got barrowed.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, just buried. I bet barrow and buried have the
same whatever.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah. No, Like I'm like really thinking about this cause like, ah,
it's so cool that they got there because like it's
a huge indigenous community there. I'm sure it's a very
small town, but like it's so cool they got their
name back.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah. So after the dead are picked over by birds,
when they're excarnated, people would just go out and collect
the remains I guess mostly bones, but honestly knowing the
Celts might have been full on gore and then bring
them back home to venerate or decorate. And if I
ever start an excarnation home remodeling show, it's going to
be called decorate to venerate. It is sort of meaningful
(41:18):
that some of the dead and Celtic society are going
to the earth and barrows, and some are being eaten
by the birds and going up to the sky. Because
while most of what we know about their religionist conjecture
in general. To Barry Cunleaf, he said, quote A simple
underlying pattern can be discerned, which may be characterized as
the balance of opposites between the Earth and the sky,
(41:39):
the fertile earth providing the sustenance essential for the community's
well being, the ever consistent sky offering the signs that
chart the passage of time. Both were inhabited by gods
who had to be cajoled and placated, and so at death,
one group of people go to the earth and one
of the two realms, and the other people go to
the other realm, the sky. And I don't think this
(42:01):
is a heaven and hell thing, for yes.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
That seems to be like what would be the most
literal to like common Western knowledge. What do you interpret
that as?
Speaker 2 (42:11):
I suspect that it's like the elite are going to
the earth and everyone else is going to the sky,
which by Western heaven and hell means the rich are
going to hell. Yeah, And I think that's cool, but
I don't know, yeah, because also eventually you get cremation
on funeral pyres, and once they start doing that, part
(42:32):
of the body goes to the sky and then the
ashes are buried in the earth, and so you get
this almost like more holistic, you kind of get both
okay cool and as part of their general religious practices,
you've got pillars and pits, which, if I'm on a
naming kick, is what I would name a ye oldie
Celtic role playing game. Most people know about Stonehenge, where
(42:53):
you've got these huge stones upright with cross pieces and
an altar and it's like perfectly calculated to cast light
with the sun on the solstices, and shit, there's a
lot of henges going on. Two miles away from Stonehenge
was Woodhenge I'm actually afraid of. Like one book I
read just like talked about this as being the Celts,
and then another book I read was like this is
the proto Celts. They're very different, and I'm like, I
(43:13):
don't fucking know, you're both fucking academics that they were
supposed to make sources. I trust whatever. Anyway, it certainly
maps well that. So there's another henge near Stonehenge called Woodhenge.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
I want a Henge in my yard.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I know. Henges are cool as fuck. Have you ever
seeing the movie twenty seven years later came out this Yere? Yeah, yeah,
you know there's like the pillars of skulls in it. Yeah, yeah,
I thought that was just a cool, weird image.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
It's back to Henges.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
It fits what we know about the Celts. There's no
specific evidence that they had like a pillar where they
just stacked skulls, but this idea of building these like
if you look at the reconstructions that people try and
put together of like ancient open air temples, it's all
of these like pillars, it's these like like a field
of and like uprights or upright stones. So the idea
(44:03):
of them being full like made out of skulls, especially
since they literally would put skulls on a lot of them,
is totally fitting.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, like when they use so there's that popular book
and TV show Outlander, like she goes back in time
through Henges.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, totally. Oh that annoys me because I haven't seen that.
But I've been specifically thinking, to be really funny if
I would write a book where it would be the
Druids are doing human sacrifice, but it's actually just time
travelers coming from the future and they're like fuck future people.
They keep killing them as soon as they show up.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
I don't know like much about that book or that
that thing, but like my knowledge only comes from my
mom who would have had that on at some point
and I was like, ooh henges.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, and so henges are like a big thing, but
mostly actually in Britain and not in rest of Celtic area.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I want a henge.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah, you should build a henge. Oh now I'm like, Oh,
I live on acres, I could build a hinge. Magpie,
this is what I should do with my life. This
is the kind of wingnut. I should become magpie. You
want to build a henge together? Yes, make sure to
subscribe to Cooler Zone Media so that we have enough
money to build henges old.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Hinges on like both coasts of a bit like.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Oh, and then we can just get connect through to
each other.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
That way East coast, West coast hinges. Okay, this is
a great plan. Sorry listeners, Yeah, sorry, friendship, that is
happening here.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
So this woodhnge is six concentric rings of posts and
at the center is a burial mound and this will
be the darkest moment of the episode. Inside the mound
are the remains of a three year old boy whose
skull was split open.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
He was probably sacrificed to make the place holy.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Others think that the weight of the earth split the
skull later. It also seems possible to me that I'm like,
I don't know, I could imagine them burying this kid
and then building the templar around it.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
But I hope it was not. I hope it was quick. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
And we can't actually go and look at the skeleton
anymore because it was an earth probably in about nineteen
twenty six or so when it was discovered, but it
was moved to London, and then the Nazis blew it
up during the Blitz in World War Two, so we
can't analyze the evidence anymore.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Another reason to hate the Nazis if you need it.
I know, we didn't need more. But there's another one.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
I know. And so they have these pillars, right, and
these hinges, but you've also got these pits they're digging.
And when I first read about these pits, you know
how when like anthropologist are always like, oh, and everything
is religion, Like when we don't understand a thing, we're like,
it's a religious artifact, you know, hu, And it seems
kind of silly. When I first read about all these
(46:52):
pits and the history and I was reading, was like, ah, yes,
these are religious pits, and I'm like, I don't know, man,
maybe they're just like buryings stuff, or like maybe there
were wells because some of them were wells, or they.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Were like a lot of people use pits to cook too.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, they're digging like twenty meters deep pits.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Oh that way, that's a very large pit.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah. Then it's possible that they were using some of
them as wells, and then when they stopped using them
as well as they start depositing stuff in them. But
they would basically just dig these holes as deep as
they could and then they would just throw stuff down
there and bury it. Some of them probably started as wells,
some of them start as granaries and cachets. But they're
doing this thing called deposition, where you ritualistically put items
(47:35):
into the earth or water as sacrifice. And so there's
like bronze axe heads down there, but there's also like
the remains of a guy who sure looked tied up,
you know. But burying valuables is an important version of sacrifice.
And to talk about what that sacrifice means and about
(47:57):
how the whole burning people in Wickerman this is the
reason I'm pretty excited. You're the guest I know, you're
a big Fanily, it's.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
One of my favorite movies, The Original Motherfuckers.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Yeah, yeah, probably accurate. The Wickerman thing.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Wow, I wish Sarah Marshall was here. I know Sarah
and I watch Wickerman at least once a year together.
Every year, it's our tradition.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
I listen to the soundtrack of Wickerman a lot.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
I'm so good.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
The song they sing while they're burning the guy in
a Wickerman is a Oh, it's a oldest It's the
oldest quote unquote secular song in English that was written
in English. And it's funny because they're like secular song
and you're like, no, motherfuckers, that's pagan. It's pagan. It's
just not Christian.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Incredible. If you don't like the Landlord's Daughter song, What's
wrong with You?
Speaker 4 (48:47):
What's wrong with you? That song a bop talking bob
good way to do a creepy atmosphere. After reading all
of this, I was like, I understand why the best
folk car from Britain now, like, the best folk car
is like what if we were Celts again, and with
(49:08):
all of the positives and negatives involved in that, That's
what full car is.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Wow? Is this my cliffhanger it is, and the rest
of my cliffhanger is that we'll also talk about why
the Druids lasted longer in Ireland and how kings were
bathing into blood well into the supposedly Christian era base,
and we'll talk about that on Wednesday. Wow uh the plugs.
Cool Zone Media makes a bunch of cool stuff Cooler
(49:36):
Zone Media. If you subscribe, it means there's no ads.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
Season two of saddle Ligarc is dropping episodes now. Oh shit,
it's really fucking good. Jake henri Hen is really a
like the first episode of the season might be my
favorite episode of a podcast that Jake's ever put out.
It's so funny.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Oh shit, Okay, yeah, Jake is one of my favorite podcasters.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
So and the art is cool and each episode has
like custom art too, and that's really fun.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Cool Chick's so cool and.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Detail oriented and a pleasure to work with. Sock check
that out and remember pet a dog, but only if
they want you to.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
Yeah, all right, see all Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Goozonemedia dot com. Or check us out
on I Heard Radio
Speaker 1 (50:31):
App hop, a podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and we're going to go people who did cool stuff.
You're once a year reminder that I like talking about
spooky stuff kind of all the time. But I am
absolutely willing to do the thing where I take the
end of October to do something that I find spooky
and interesting. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and my guest
and my producer is Sophie ray Lichterman.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
How are you?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
You know I'm excited we're doing Spooky Week. I'm with you.
That's always good. My dogs are good. My dog Truman
had a very productive vet appointment this morning, and I
feel like her past trauma is healing in a beautiful
way and I'm so proud of my girly pop amazing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Does that mean Truman's gonna start urinating in places that
aren't the backyard, like on walks?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I mean, perhaps she is urinating like a normal dog
now and goes like five times a day that have
just once or twice. That's progress, serious progress, and she's
just like a happy, good girl. But this is like
a lot of information, So if people don't care, that's fine.
I'm going to talk about it anyways. I produced this podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
The Dog cast.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
I took her to what's called a veterinary behaviorist, which
is like, you know, the equivalent of like a like
MD doctor also has a PhD in something. He's like
a specialized doctor. Because my dog, Truman came to me
with a lot of past trauma. She was severely abused
and caged and hit and kicked, and so I've had
(01:40):
her fromost a year and we've worked really hard to
make her better. But I finally got in an appointment
with this behavioralist VET, which is hopefully the right title.
I don't know. All I know is I waited four
months and it was so worth it.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
They're going to be listening and they're gonna be so
mad if you yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
That's okay. I gave him a lot of money, okay.
But it was the first time, besides her wonderful trainer
that we work with, that I felt like somebody really
understood my dog and that we have a very oh
and now innocent sparking in the background, which is very unhelpful.
And I feel like she's going to be on an
(02:21):
even better path to be her best self. And I
think that's really cool. And today's cool people who did
cool stuff is not Truman.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It's true today's cool people who did cool stuff, which
is more of a like spooky people who did spooky stuff.
Although gee, I actually came around. I expected this just
to be spooky people who did spooky stuff. I actually
came around. I actually think these people are cool people
who did cool stuff. Sophie, what do you know about druids?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I only know the basic, which is that like they're
like ancient Celtic like I don't know, like like mystical,
like preus, like mentors or like role knowledge, like the
authority figures. I guess I would say, Am I right?
Am I wrong? Like they are like somewhat mystical, but
(03:10):
they're definitely like in positions of authority, like teacher, priests.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, that's the rough of it. Although what's funny is
that we know a lot of specific things beyond that,
but a lot of the specific things we have contradict
each other. Oh and so that's what you just said
is kind of the like what we can all agree on,
except actually that's not true. A lot of people are
specifically like they were not priests, but they were certainly
(03:36):
the philosophers and on some level religious but mostly political.
Maybe figures of the Celtic world. Okay, but I started
off being like, oh, okay, they're spooky or whatever. One
of the single main things that every version that talks
about druids with any like knowledge admits and talks about
(03:57):
is one of the main things they did was de
escalate conflicts. They were mediators, They were a lot of things.
They were judges, they were philosophers. They oversaw sacrifices. Probably
we'll talk about sacrifice a lot and without a lot
of clear answers, but with a lot of really interesting
it's not gonna be boring. But specifically they would go
(04:18):
and they would mediate conflicts between groups. They would also
sometimes be the generals and kings and things like that.
But I don't know. To the modern audience, they're probably
the most familiar modern version of a druid is like
the D and D or video game version where they
worship nature and transform into owl bears or whatever. To
the medieval imagination, they were scary secret basically witches, and
(04:44):
for example, there's an eighth century Irish hymn where you
can ask God for protection against the spells cast by
the three most logical when you think of people who
might cast spells against you. You obviously are going to
think of the following three categories. Druids, can't trust them, women,
am I right? And blacksmiths.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
That's the trifecta from.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Hell, I know, which means before we even get into druids,
I have to go on to my first tangent, which
is about the fucking blacksmith thing.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Context, contexts context.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
This is context, but this is almost more.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
This is just magpie is interested in.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, this is tripping down various rabbit holes.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
So so many more.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Obviously we all understand what we need protection from women?
Why the medieval mind. Actually, something that I've covered on
the show a bunch of times is that the modern conception,
like the twentieth century conception of like women as like
meek and like docile creatures or whatever, is so completely
opposite to the medieval European conception of women. The misogyny
(05:55):
in the Middle Ages, instead of being like women are
weak and we can push them around, was like women
are terrifying us. Men are civilized. Women are the wild creatures.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
I mean facts.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Though I know I was like, I don't mind that
one at all. A lot of the shit that like,
like with druids. Right, there's two versions of druids. There's like, oh,
they like sacrifice tons of people and we're spooky, and
then there's like, oh, they were like nice lawbringers and
they you know, did a lot of like mediation and stuff.
And I'm just very like, why not both do give?
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Like?
Speaker 2 (06:26):
This is how I feel about it. But so I
tried to track down the Blacksmith thing.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
M hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I tried to find the actual hymn, but I sourced
it to a book from nineteen eighty eight, and then
I was like, I'm not going and buying this print
only book to find the specific hymn. This is a tangent.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
I have to stop wait to self at it. I'm
so proud of you, thank you, thank you. It only
took what how many years have we done this podcast?
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I have to admit, if I lived somewhere where delivery
was faster, I might have gotten this book do this
one thing. But I learned about this on like Monday,
and I was like, I got to record on Thursday.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
I'm anyway incredible.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
So in Ireland, where more of the information we have
about druids going longer comes just because it resisted, it
didn't get colonized by Rome. In Ireland, iron was a
magical medal to the early medieval mind because iron wards
off evil and it's necessary to defeat fairies. Obviously, everyone
knows these things about iron, and blacksmiths do magical shit
(07:28):
with iron. Blacksmiths are presented as like supernaturally strong and large.
You always want to be on their good side. You
have this classic Irish belief were counted at least into
the twentieth century that a blacksmith can curse somebody by
pointing the horn of his anvil to the east and
then pronouncing the curse. There's a story about how the
(07:49):
cops were going to come evict someone. A lot of
Irish curses are specifically we hate landlords, and on Easter
Sunday they were going to evict this person, and so
everyone from town went to the forge and prayed around
the anvil after moving it to the east, you know,
and then would rise up and strike it. And this
keeps the cops from evicting people, okay, And blacksmiths can
(08:11):
curse people to death and they're friends with the fairies.
Why does iron hurt fairies? Have you run across this
before that. No, So there's this like folkloric belief that, like,
you need cold iron to hurt fairies, kind of in
the same way that silver hurts werewolves.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Where fuck would anybody want to hurt fairies?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Well, fairies are seen as malicious forces in the medieval mind. Okay,
and specifically, spoiler, the fairies are probably representations of like
the people that you've previously colonized. Copy cold iron hurts
the fairies. Cold is just literally cold iron just literally
means like iron. It doesn't actually mean it's in the
refrigerator or whatever. It's just a poetic way of describing
(08:53):
it that's come down. And iron does a bunch of
magical shit. So people were really into iron. It conducts electricity.
I fell down another rabbit hole trying to figure out
who invented the lightning rod. The Internet wants you to
know it's either a check Man or Benjamin Franklin, and
the two sides are very upset about each other about this.
But around seventeen fifty people figured out the lightning rod.
But before that you had kind of lightning roddish effects, like,
(09:17):
for example, you would have people who would survive being
struck when they're in a belfrey and you got a
big iron bell, and then light strikes the bellfrey while
someone's ringing the bell. The ringer might survive because the
bell like conducts the electricity elsewhere and then it goes
down to the ground or whatever. I don't totally understand
this mechanism, but there's all these people saying like this
(09:38):
has happened. Iron magical. It defeats lightning, It defeats the gods,
it defeats the pagan gods. Iron is a sign that
the church is more powerful than foreign zeus.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And this is the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, this is pretty Protestant shita. Yeah. The first compasses
are made of natural iron of loadstone in China thousands
of years ago. You can drop an iron needle in
a bowl of water and it'll tell you where to go.
Like I was like at first, I was like, yeah,
why iron? And then I like read all the shit
and I'm like, no, I get that. Like if there's
like a metal that just like fucking tells you where
(10:21):
to go, like that's fucking magic, you know, A compass.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
No, that's fucking wizardry in the coolest way.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, and this is why horseshoes over your doorway are lucky.
They're made by blacksmiths of iron. They keep the fairies away.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
I had no idea, you know, I've always known that
horseshoes are lucky, but I've never like looked into it.
That is incredibly cool.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, and then here's the part that I get. I've
read two conflicting things about the original Britons of southern
Britain and the Picts of Northern Britain. Celtic people, they're
less technologically advanced, and I have read in one source
they had weapons made out of bronze. I have read
(11:08):
in other sources that actually the reason that the Celts
were so successful is that they figured out iron earlier
than other people and were ahead of the time. But whatever.
At some point people are fighting. One group has iron
and the other group has bronze, and you're gonna trash
an army with bronze. If you have iron, it'll like
(11:29):
cut through their shields and shit. But here comes Rome.
They have iron weapons, and they're fighting these small wild
warriors who fight dirty by disappearing into the forests. They
seem to be magically appearing and disappearing through portals, and
they're like often naked and covered in blue spirals, and
like it's just fucking trippy and strange. It's surreal, like
(11:51):
a bunch of fairies, but the Romans of Iron. So
they just fucking killed them eventually. Booh yeah, that's the
spoiler alert for a lot of this. All right, So
the Druids, we know very very little about Druids, or
we actually know a lot of things about Druids, but
we know a lot of like kind of random specific things,
(12:12):
and we don't know which ones are accurate because they
are all written by people who hate the Druids. The
Druids did not write, but it wasn't that they were illiterate.
The Celts did start writing once they started running across
people with writing, but they had a specific religious prohibition
on writing down knowledge. And it's interesting their argument, at
(12:34):
least as Caesar represents it. We don't know that that's
true or not, but Caesar says the Druids didn't write
anything down because it wasn't a like, oh it's spooky magic,
it'll ruin everything. It's kind of like why we hate Ai.
Their argument was, if you write everything down, you'll lose
your mental capacity because you'll just rely on the written
(12:56):
word to remember things instead of having a well developed memory.
And I wouldn't remember anything if I couldn't write it down.
So I don't agree with this argument, but it's interesting.
Modern Druidism, the modern revival religion, is seen by most
scholars as only loosely related to historical Druidism. It's basically
(13:17):
a reconstruction thing. And it's not that the things that
they've reconstructed are inherently wrong. It's just that they're not
inherently right either, Like they connect the dots where you
don't know what it's supposed to end up looking, Like,
you know, we have a lot of dots and you
have to try and figure out what they all look like.
But there's so many different ways you can connect them.
(13:38):
But the things that we do know about them are
pretty fucking cool, Like not necessarily cool isn't good, But
cool isn't like interesting. Sure, it's really really natural to
want to freeform connect the dots. I found myself doing
it constantly. I've like never before been so strongly like
drawn to be like, well, now I want to write
fiction set in this world so that I can connect
the dots. But in the shortest version of what we
(14:01):
think we know about the druids. In the at least
the Atlantic Celtic society like France and Britain, there was
an elite class of philosophers in the society that were
seen as the conduit between people and the gods. Their
main job was as judges, as advisors, as mediators of conflict,
and they also oversaw but were not performing rituals and sacrifice.
(14:24):
There's another class that are actually the sort of priests.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
That was my general knowledge roughly.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah, exactly, And it's an oral culture, so everything that
they know, including this encyclopedic knowledge of like astrology, was memorized.
Druid school was probably either nineteen or twenty years long.
But look at what age, I don't know. I would guess.
I think it's like the only thing I've seen is
(14:52):
that Caesar wrote that like young people went to go
study with them, So it's probably like, if I were
to guess, and this is a I guess it'd be
like thirteen years old or something. Yeah, like a young
adult in the medieval mind or.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Whatever in that time.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, but it's like twenty years of schooling when.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Life spans weren't even that great.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I know. But it's funny because like people are like, oh,
the medieval people only live to be thirty. That's not
quite true. It looks like that because so many people
died young that the average is really low. If you
make it to twenty, you might make it to fifty, sixty, seventy,
you know, sure, but still not long lived times, you know,
(15:34):
and you're going to twenty years of school, okay. The
other way that people can sceptualize the druids, though, one
that I find fairly convincing, is that it was less
of like a secret society that you join or a
job in society to be a Druid, as much as
it was an intellectual class of people. And specifically there's
a lot of comparisons. There's this whole thing. We covered
(15:56):
it on one of our episodes, the episode about hunger
strikes and how hunger strikes are found in India and
Ireland in the legal structure, and how India and Ireland
have like all of these wild overlaps in terms of
legal structures and cultural things and language, and it's because
of the proto Indo European people kind of spread out
(16:19):
as far as they could, and the edges are where
more of the original ideas stayed. So people presented as
a cast thing also. And I'm not as convinced by this,
but I read a historian who didn't know its way
more ra others than I do that he's like, this
is the intellectual caste of the Celtic people, which makes
(16:39):
me like it less because I'm not a big fan
of that because I have friends who have fled India
because of caste society. But yeah, it's the intelligentsia. It's
the like, oh, I went to school, but instead of
going to get bachelor's and now you're the educated people.
You're going for twenty fucking years. And we know for
certain that they start existing around the fourth century b
(17:00):
as foreigners start writing about them, but there's decent enough
evidence that they might have been around a couple thousand
years before that. People argue about whether or not they
like predate, even the Celts and all this shit. I
don't know whatever. Then Celtic society was fucked up by
the Romans, who wrote long tracks about how evil the
Celtic religion was and how evil the Druids were, And
(17:22):
so most of the writing we have about druids is
Romans who are writing propaganda to defend themselves, going to
war to kill all the Celts.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, because they want to do they want a genocide.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah, which they did do.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah. What we have is like trying to learn about
Islam by reading like history. Yeah yeah. And so there's
kind of no reason to trust almost anything that's been
written about them. But there's also no reason to assume
that the things that are written about them are inherently lies. Okay,
and pretty often, Sophie, you're probably familiar with this. I
(17:57):
get pretty far along in my show, my script, and
then some big thing that was not addressed, usually has
how the subject relates to women comes along. This week
is no exception.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Cool cuck Cool.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I read a whole last book about druids by this
esteemed scholar that basically never mentioned women except as a
throwaway line about Oh, and then there's like some women
in black moving among the soldiers, actually quoted specifically later
in the script. So you had to learn more about that,
uh huh. And so then I started looking at other
books that I on the subject, and other articles and
(18:34):
things like that, and like this book that I read
just completely assumes Celtic culture's patriarchal. All of the people
involved are men. There's no reason to assume that, And
there's so many reasons to assume the opposite, like all
of the evidence, both archaeological and in written at the station,
and like oral traditions and all these other things that
(18:56):
there are women Druids, like to the point where they
might not even be like, oh we women and every
now and then it might have just been like fucking
genderlest thing. And we also know that there are people
from that time period writing about how the Celts were
ruled by men and women equally. So I read the
wrong book first, as per usual, basically, And what's interesting
(19:18):
about this, the erasing of women from the story of
Druids is actually playing into the hands of the Romans,
the people who destroyed the Druids, who were a much
more patriarchal society. Jean Marcel wrote in nineteen seventy two
about this. He wrote, the Druids represented an absolute threat
to the Roman state because their science and philosophy dangerously
(19:41):
contradicted Roman orthodoxy. The Romans were materialistics, the Druids spiritual.
For the Romans, the state was a monolithic structure spread
over territories, deliberately organized into a hierarchy. With the Druids,
it was a freely consented moral order with an entirely
mythical central idea. The Romans base their law on private
(20:03):
ownership of land, with property rights entirely vested in the
head of the family, whereas the Druids always considered ownership collective.
The Romans looked upon women as bearers of children and
objects of pleasure, while the Druids included women in their
political and religious life. So that's when I now turned
it around to oh, this is not just spooky people
(20:24):
did spooky stuff. This is cool people that did cool stuff.
Was Yeah, the Celtic culture was far more interesting than
the Roman one.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
To me, Yeah, I'm just marinating on it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And now I want to know. I mean, there's like
obviously like entire degree programs around Celtic studies and things
like that, and there's going to be arguments this way
and that about go ahead.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I was gonna say, what's the sourcing on this?
Speaker 2 (20:46):
So that one I am reading a book written in
ninety four quoting someone from nineteen seventy two. The book
that I disagree with more was written more recently and
is a little bit more objective. So there is this
like thing that people are doing where they're kind of like, no, no, no,
the Celts are cool though, right, and I want to
believe that, So I am like trying to be careful
(21:07):
of my own thing around that. But I do find
that this maps, This idea that the Celts have a
much more communal way of life, maps with everything I
have learned over the course of all these years, like
especially when I'm reading about Irish history, where Celtic traditions
lasted much longer, where there's all of these ways of
having your town be like you divide up the land
(21:32):
so that everyone is farming with equal access to good
land a farm and things like that, and there's like
the land is usually sort of collectively owned but then
individually worked. And it's not like anarchist communism or whatever
the fuck, right, but it is a very very different
economic system and a much more fair one. And there
is a lot of voting, although even this more biased
(21:54):
author points out that like the voting is among everyone
gets to vote for someone from the intellectual class. You know,
it's not like what we would necessarily call democracy.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
No, it sounds like limited democracy.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah. And then the other thing is that it's like
we're also talking about like a huge chunk of area
over thousands of years, and so there seems to be
an idea that I'm fairly convinced by that they moved
more towards patriarchy further along, especially once they had contact
with the Romans, but even before that they were moving
(22:33):
more in that direction. And the main evidence we have
about druids comes in two forms. There's archaeological evidence, mostly
about the Celtic culture, written large because there's not a
ton of archaeological evidence that's like here's a druid, right, sure.
And then there's anecdotes written by these early Greek and
Roman observers, and many of the original manuscripts are long lost,
(22:56):
but we have scholars quoting those sources reasonably extensive, Like
there'll be a Greek guy and he'd be like, ah,
I'll live with the Celts for a long time, and
I wrote a whole book about him, and then that
book is long gone. But there's all of these books
where people are like, oh, yeah, I read that book
and I like this quote. So it'd be like if
people had to reconstruct ancient history by only having cool
people who did cool stuff scripts And it reminds me
(23:18):
of the importance of sourcing and quotings. Yeah, there's also
stuff we know about them that comes from oral tradition
and legend carried mostly in Ireland because the Romans never
got there and Scotland to some degree also, and then
it was written down in the ninth to eleventh century
by Christian monks. But their stuff is also it's far
(23:40):
more speculative, it's more removed from the time period, and
everyone's got a bias. Yeah, right, Like all the Romans
are like trying to write Islamophobia so they can go
destroy the place, and the Christian monks are trying to
be like and this is why it's good that we're
in charge now.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
Well, yeah, because, like I mean to simplify, oral tradition
is word of mouth. Yeah, so somebody told a story
to somebody, who told a story, who told a story,
who told a story to someone to someone to someone
to someone.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
For a thousand years, for a thousand years.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It's like the game of telephone.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah, which is interesting because like that is how Druidic
knowledge was always passed on, and I wonder whether one
of the reasons that they did it. This is entirely speculation.
I could see them doing it so that the law
and the things that are true are allowed to shift generationally, right,
(24:31):
because like if it's all word of mouth, everyone's interpreting
the law every you know, generation or so. But do
you know what, Sophie is a constant in the universe. Potato,
that's right, which they didn't have access to at the time,
but eventually they would and it would be very good.
(24:52):
And that is why we are sponsored by the concept
of potatoes. You can eat them, you can make clocks
out of them. I think I think I did that
when I was a kid.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
I had a fantastic potato. My parents celebrated their forty
first wedding anniversary and I took them out to dinner
and this restaurant had grilled like potatoes and it was
like yukung gold grilled potatoes, and it was magical.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
That sounds so good, and I wish all.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
The good people could have grilled potatoes.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
I got to eat a meal of potatoes I grew
for the first time in the past couple weeks.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
That's so cool.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
This is my third year of trying to grow potatoes,
and this year I succeeded to greater degrees than previously. Anyway,
that's probably the only ad. But in case there any
others are trying to say something, we'll just let them
do it here.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
So to talk about the Druids, we have to talk
about your favorite sports team, the Celtics.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
That was really mean.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
That was apparently meaner than I. Yeah, completely under to
the Celtics. It's spelled the same. It actually probably is related.
But in order to talk about the Druids, we have
to talk about the Celts, the people, not the sports team.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Why is it racist and overrated? Oh?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Probably, To be honest, the Celts are probably racist and overrated.
That is probably true. I don't know one way or
the other about how the Celts perceived race. I only
know a little bit more about how Medio Irish people did.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Celtics fans don't DM me. I don't care. My opinion's
never changing.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
The Celtic fans you can DM me, but I won't
have any idea what you're talking about. If you had
asked me an hour ago what sport the Celtics played,
I would have said Boston.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
That works.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Are they from Boston? Yes, okay, I thought so. All right,
Now it helps that we have a lot more information
about the celt sorry, the Celts, more broadly than a
specific social strata. Like we know more about Celtic culture
than Druids. But you can't talk about one Celtic culture
and be accurate. You're talking about a bunch of different
cultures over the span of thousands of years. So things
(26:59):
are gonna be real differ. Like take a white North American.
It is a different culture now than five hundred years ago. Right,
things are not static, even in the before civilization times.
I had always been told that the Celts were an
ethnic group. This is not true. It is more accurate
to say that Celts are the people who spoke a
(27:20):
Celtic language these days by that standard, which is actually
kind of cool, because it was never an ethnic group,
which actually means that, like, you know a lot of
people who are trying to be racist, like do nationalism wrong? Whatever? Anyway,
So the remaining Celts, by this standard, the people who
speak the Celtic language. You're pretty much talking about people
in Wales, Brittany, which is northwest France and Ireland, with
(27:43):
Scotland trying to revive its Gaelic language as well, and
in Brittany some people still speak Breton. Previously, people tended
to think that Celtic culture came from the east and
settled what we would call Atlantic Europe, like basically from
the West coast to the Iberian Peninsula like Spain and Portugal,
up through the Netherlands. In Britain and Ireland, during the Renaissance,
(28:06):
people thought that the Celts actually came from Anatolia Turkey,
but no one thinks this anymore. But the reason I
think that, which I think is kind of interesting. The Galatians,
who Paul wrote a letter to in the Bible. If
you ever go to a church and they're like Paul
to the Galatians or whatever the fuck right, the Galatians
were Celtics, Celtic people who were I apparently broke Sophie.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
I really hope none of my Catholic relatives ever listened
to this.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Come on, why would you be a fan of Paul.
Paul's not the best of them. Paul's just a jerk,
I mean whatever. So the Galatians were Celtic people living
in what we've called Swanna now, right, and because the
Celts did travel really far, but they didn't come from there.
So what people say more recently is that they're like, oh,
(29:03):
we think the Celts came from roughly Switzerland, like the
middle of Europe, and then migrate out in every direction
and then it happened to only stick around successfully in
the very west. But modern scholarship seems to hold that
the Celts actually start as an Atlantic European culture like Brittany,
Ireland and Britain and western Iberia, and then they actually
(29:26):
migrated east from there and did get as far as
Anatolia and like have the Galatians, and again it's less
of an ethnic group and more of a language group. Basically,
there's all of these people. They're living along the coast,
they're trading all the time, and they're like, this will
probably be easier if we spoke the same language. And
they're probably speaking kind of similar languages anyway, because they're
coming from the same proto Indo European language group.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, communication is cool.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, and that's where probably the Celts come from. Whereas
the Celtic language itself as part of the Indo European
language family, which modern scholars tends to assume started in
the steps of Western Asia near the Black Sea and
spread out from there. And you've got the Celts and
they're doing all right over in Atlantic Europe and they
start spreading east, and like everyone else in Europe at
(30:11):
the time, they're not doing any writing. And when they
do start writing, after connecting with like ancient Greece and
the later Rome, they write in Greek characters in the
later the Latin alphabet. But they also have a religious
thing where they're not supposed to write down like important things. Yeah,
and so mostly like stuff that's written down is like names.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Do we know, like what why that transition exists? Is
it something like it was too holy or is it
not exp Well, it's because they didn't write it down,
so is it not necessarily explained.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
So we don't have from their point of view. But
what Caesar says is that the Celts believed it would
fuck their memories up if they wrote stuff down.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
That's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, you know, other people assume it was about keeping
information secret and like being like only the cool click
has it right, But like most places that do that
write books and then just don't let them go into circulation,
you know, keep them in one place, and the Irish celts.
Eventually they are writing in ogum, which is like lines
with other lines coming off of it. It's really pretty.
(31:16):
But that doesn't show up until the fourth century CE,
so this has already passed. The era of druids is
a big thing anywhere but Ireland. And the Greeks show
up around six hundred BCE in southern France in Marseille.
They found the Colony of Marseille. And the more I
read ancient history, the more I'm like, the fucking ancient
(31:36):
world was so intense. It is so fucking metal, at
least in Europe, where I've read the most about it.
It is full of such dark shit. The ancient Greeks
show up in Gaul, you know, France, they found the
Marseille and they meet one of the most into skulls
and decapitated heads cultures that's ever existed. There are temples everywhere,
(31:59):
these Celtic temples, and I think there may be open
air from what I've read, but they're just covered in
pillars filled with human skulls. Alcove after alcove for skulls,
and not just skulls, but also decapitated heads, loss of
decapitated heads.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
Oh oh.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Having been to the catacombs under Paris, I can say
the French have just never changed. It's just kept on
and there's only so much we know about the Celtic religion.
And there's more of this like skull time stuff happening
in southern France than elsewhere. Like basically, if you got
into Britain, there's like some skull stuff happening, but it's
like southern France is just like skull Town, and the
(32:42):
heads come from three places. Probably there's the remains of
people who died sort of normally that are then collected
and brought back to decorate the town. And then there's
head hunting, which is almost certainly happening. And basically in
southern France, if you go and you fight, and you
kill someone in battle, you bring back their head and
(33:03):
you nail it to the door of your house and
then you preserve it with oil. And when one trader
was like, hey, I want to buy some of those heads,
people were like, I will never sell you the head.
It is like there's no amount of gold you could
give me to sell this head. And then there's probably
human sacrifice. We don't know for certain, but they almost
(33:26):
certainly sacrifice people. There's some archaeological evidence that heavily suggests it.
And then there's attestation after attestation by their enemies saying
that they sacrifice people. When I say that they sacrifice
people and did hud hunting and all this stuff, I'm
not trying to separate them out from anyone else during
this time period, Like southern France was like probably more
(33:48):
specifically into heads and skulls than the average place. But
almost everyone is sacrificing humans in the ancient world, at
least anywhere near this area, and lots of other places
cross the world.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, it's an unfortunate trend.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, and you have this thing where like that's still
used as like the reason why civilization is good, And
I'm not civilization by one definition, like Western civilization coming
and telling everyone what to do or whatever, right, like, oh,
this is necessary, we needed to invade Mexico because we
had to stop the Aztecs, or like, you know, there's
(34:25):
a lot of behind the bastards on the like people
who are like, oh, we're just trying to stop the
slave trade in Africa and that's why we're colonizing and
murdering everyone there, right, But if you look at the
ancient world, it's full of this pretty brutal stuff. But
the thing is is that the like state just comes
(34:46):
in and systematizes it instead. Like the wildest execution methods
I've ever read were not Pagans. They were Christians in Europe,
tying people in the sacks and throwing them off of
buildings and shit. You know. And and basically this matters
because this is why people argue about the human sacrifice thing.
(35:06):
People who want to believe the Celts are good are
going to downplay or say the sacrifice didn't happen, and
people who want to say, no, the Romans are good
are going to play up the human sacrifice. And again
I'm just like kind of onlike both, Like, I don't know,
they probably did it. It still was better than being
genocided whatever. Like, considering Rome is going to come in
(35:27):
and kill a third of the people in gaul Over
like only a couple of years, they're going to come
in and kill a third of the people there and
enslave a third of people there, I'm like, you would
have had to sacrifice so many people every day to
come anywhere near the evil that Rome is going to do.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, there's evil, and there's evil, then there's evil, then
there's e Well then there's Rome.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, yeah exactly. But do you know, Sophie, what's not evil.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Potatoes?
Speaker 2 (36:02):
That's right, that's right, unless they're getting green, in which
case it's a little bit of evil coming in. It's
a little bit of evil. But you can peel that
right off and get to the good, non green potato underneath,
and we're back. The Celts had a bunch of different
funeral practices, The most famous are the ones that we
(36:24):
see evidence of today. Obviously, everyone knows the word barrow, right,
that's a normal word that normal people use. I thought that,
you know, the word barrow means in casual conversation.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
I don't like I'm thinking of like a wheelbarrow, or
like there's like a city in Alaska.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Well that's a metal name for a city.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
I wrote a whole book called The Barrow Will Send
what it may thinking normal people knew what the word
barrow meant. They don't. Barrows are burial mounds?
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Ah, I mean, you know, well.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
The Celts were building barrow mounds at least going back
to the third and fourth century BCE. You build a
wooden or stone place to inter the dead, like kind
of like a family tomb, and then when it's full
or the family line is dead or whatever, you dig
trenches alongside it and you put all that dirt on
top of it, and you build a big hill or
a little hill, a big mound, little hill. I walked
(37:22):
on one of these ones outside Stonehenge, and I think
a fox ran up the hill and it was cool
as hell, But I like have don't believe my own
memory about it because it just feels too on the.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Nose, so magical. No, that happened. That fucking happened to you.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
I remember it. Yeah, that was fucking cool. And so
those are the barrows, right, and there's evidence of them
all over Britain at least where you know, you have
these big hills, and the dead were buried with grave
goods like jewelry and weapons and shit, and in general
people would assume meaning like, oh, you need this in afterlife.
But actually the Celtic religion was actually more into reincarnation,
(37:59):
which is another in comparison to the Far East and
proto Windo European culture, and so it's probable that the
grave goods might have been like, oh, you'll need these
later for your next life, but they might have been
more When someone dies, you put their body on display,
and then all of the family members and stuff come
leave grave goods and sacrifice and it's a way of
(38:20):
like and then it's all buried together. And so it's
kind of a like showing off your familial wealth. It's
like how much shit can you bury with the dead?
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Got it? Like, Oh, we don't need this right now,
we're putting this forward for the next.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Yeah, we're just like, well, it's less about it becoming
useful and like they're really into sacrifice is like a
way of showing I think probably as a way of
showing wealth. Is just like yeah, we don't need this,
we you know, or we're giving this up. We can
give up more than you can give up. And this
is how the elite were buried for thousands of years
(38:54):
through the Celtic world. But most people weren't interred in
the earth. Most people didn't have crypts with family tombs
and burial goods. Far and away the most common form
of burial was what's called and this is a word
I didn't know, but it's my new favorite word. X carnation.
It's sky burial is the other thing that I've heard of.
(39:16):
You leave a body out for the birds and shit.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Oh that's dark.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
That's dark.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
I don't love that.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Oh oh well it's gonna get darker. Oh cool. I
was so excited about the word xcarnate that I was like,
I'm not even gonna say it'd be a good band
name on the show, because like, I don't want anyone
to steal it. But then I looked it up myself
and on Encyclopedia Metalum or Metallium or whatever the fuck
the like Wikipedia of Bands, and it informed me that Xcarnate,
(39:48):
the death metal band from Melbourne, Australia, is not to
be confused that the death metal band xcarnated from Melbourne
or Australia, so that was taken.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Also, I just learned that Barrow, Alaska is no longer
called Barrow, Alaska, and it is now called I'm gonna
try to pronounce this correctly wit Kiavik. Fucking you know.
It's like want of like located in the super north
of the Arctic Circle. It's like one of the northernmost
(40:21):
cities in towns.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
That's cool. I'm glad that they got their name back.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yeah, they got their name back. So bye bye barrow.
Yeah got barrow, got barrowed.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, just buried. I bet barrow and buried have the
same whatever.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Yeah. No, Like I'm like really thinking about this cause like, ah,
it's so cool that they got there because like it's
a huge indigenous community there. I'm sure it's a very
small town, but like it's so cool they got their
name back.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah. So after the dead are picked over by birds,
when they're excarnated, people would just go out and collect
the remains I guess mostly bones, but honestly knowing the
Celts might have been full on gore and then bring
them back home to venerate or decorate. And if I
ever start an excarnation home remodeling show, it's going to
be called decorate to venerate. It is sort of meaningful
(41:18):
that some of the dead and Celtic society are going
to the earth and barrows, and some are being eaten
by the birds and going up to the sky. Because
while most of what we know about their religionist conjecture
in general. To Barry Cunleaf, he said, quote A simple
underlying pattern can be discerned, which may be characterized as
the balance of opposites between the Earth and the sky,
(41:39):
the fertile earth providing the sustenance essential for the community's
well being, the ever consistent sky offering the signs that
chart the passage of time. Both were inhabited by gods
who had to be cajoled and placated, and so at death,
one group of people go to the earth and one
of the two realms, and the other people go to
the other realm, the sky. And I don't think this
(42:01):
is a heaven and hell thing, for yes.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
That seems to be like what would be the most
literal to like common Western knowledge. What do you interpret
that as?
Speaker 2 (42:11):
I suspect that it's like the elite are going to
the earth and everyone else is going to the sky,
which by Western heaven and hell means the rich are
going to hell. Yeah, And I think that's cool, but
I don't know, yeah, because also eventually you get cremation
on funeral pyres, and once they start doing that, part
(42:32):
of the body goes to the sky and then the
ashes are buried in the earth, and so you get
this almost like more holistic, you kind of get both
okay cool and as part of their general religious practices,
you've got pillars and pits, which, if I'm on a
naming kick, is what I would name a ye oldie
Celtic role playing game. Most people know about Stonehenge, where
(42:53):
you've got these huge stones upright with cross pieces and
an altar and it's like perfectly calculated to cast light
with the sun on the solstices, and shit, there's a
lot of henges going on. Two miles away from Stonehenge
was Woodhenge I'm actually afraid of. Like one book I
read just like talked about this as being the Celts,
and then another book I read was like this is
the proto Celts. They're very different, and I'm like, I
(43:13):
don't fucking know, you're both fucking academics that they were
supposed to make sources. I trust whatever. Anyway, it certainly
maps well that. So there's another henge near Stonehenge called Woodhenge.
Speaker 1 (43:26):
I want a Henge in my yard.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I know. Henges are cool as fuck. Have you ever
seeing the movie twenty seven years later came out this Yere? Yeah, yeah,
you know there's like the pillars of skulls in it. Yeah, yeah,
I thought that was just a cool, weird image.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
It's back to Henges.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
It fits what we know about the Celts. There's no
specific evidence that they had like a pillar where they
just stacked skulls, but this idea of building these like
if you look at the reconstructions that people try and
put together of like ancient open air temples, it's all
of these like pillars, it's these like like a field
of and like uprights or upright stones. So the idea
(44:03):
of them being full like made out of skulls, especially
since they literally would put skulls on a lot of them,
is totally fitting.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, like when they use so there's that popular book
and TV show Outlander, like she goes back in time
through Henges.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, totally. Oh that annoys me because I haven't seen that.
But I've been specifically thinking, to be really funny if
I would write a book where it would be the
Druids are doing human sacrifice, but it's actually just time
travelers coming from the future and they're like fuck future people.
They keep killing them as soon as they show up.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
I don't know like much about that book or that
that thing, but like my knowledge only comes from my
mom who would have had that on at some point
and I was like, ooh henges.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, and so henges are like a big thing, but
mostly actually in Britain and not in rest of Celtic area.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I want a henge.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah, you should build a henge. Oh now I'm like, Oh,
I live on acres, I could build a hinge. Magpie,
this is what I should do with my life. This
is the kind of wingnut. I should become magpie. You
want to build a henge together? Yes, make sure to
subscribe to Cooler Zone Media so that we have enough
money to build henges old.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Hinges on like both coasts of a bit like.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Oh, and then we can just get connect through to
each other.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
That way East coast, West coast hinges. Okay, this is
a great plan. Sorry listeners, Yeah, sorry, friendship, that is
happening here.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
So this woodhnge is six concentric rings of posts and
at the center is a burial mound and this will
be the darkest moment of the episode. Inside the mound
are the remains of a three year old boy whose
skull was split open.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
He was probably sacrificed to make the place holy.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Others think that the weight of the earth split the
skull later. It also seems possible to me that I'm like,
I don't know, I could imagine them burying this kid
and then building the templar around it.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
But I hope it was not. I hope it was quick. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
And we can't actually go and look at the skeleton
anymore because it was an earth probably in about nineteen
twenty six or so when it was discovered, but it
was moved to London, and then the Nazis blew it
up during the Blitz in World War Two, so we
can't analyze the evidence anymore.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Another reason to hate the Nazis if you need it.
I know, we didn't need more. But there's another one.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
I know. And so they have these pillars, right, and
these hinges, but you've also got these pits they're digging.
And when I first read about these pits, you know
how when like anthropologist are always like, oh, and everything
is religion, Like when we don't understand a thing, we're like,
it's a religious artifact, you know, hu, And it seems
kind of silly. When I first read about all these
(46:52):
pits and the history and I was reading, was like, ah, yes,
these are religious pits, and I'm like, I don't know, man,
maybe they're just like buryings stuff, or like maybe there
were wells because some of them were wells, or they.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Were like a lot of people use pits to cook too.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, they're digging like twenty meters deep pits.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Oh that way, that's a very large pit.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah. Then it's possible that they were using some of
them as wells, and then when they stopped using them
as well as they start depositing stuff in them. But
they would basically just dig these holes as deep as
they could and then they would just throw stuff down
there and bury it. Some of them probably started as wells,
some of them start as granaries and cachets. But they're
doing this thing called deposition, where you ritualistically put items
(47:35):
into the earth or water as sacrifice. And so there's
like bronze axe heads down there, but there's also like
the remains of a guy who sure looked tied up,
you know. But burying valuables is an important version of sacrifice.
And to talk about what that sacrifice means and about
(47:57):
how the whole burning people in Wickerman this is the
reason I'm pretty excited. You're the guest I know, you're
a big Fanily, it's.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
One of my favorite movies, The Original Motherfuckers.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Yeah, yeah, probably accurate. The Wickerman thing.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Wow, I wish Sarah Marshall was here. I know Sarah
and I watch Wickerman at least once a year together.
Every year, it's our tradition.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
I listen to the soundtrack of Wickerman a lot.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
I'm so good.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
The song they sing while they're burning the guy in
a Wickerman is a Oh, it's a oldest It's the
oldest quote unquote secular song in English that was written
in English. And it's funny because they're like secular song
and you're like, no, motherfuckers, that's pagan. It's pagan. It's
just not Christian.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Incredible. If you don't like the Landlord's Daughter song, What's
wrong with You?
Speaker 4 (48:47):
What's wrong with you? That song a bop talking bob
good way to do a creepy atmosphere. After reading all
of this, I was like, I understand why the best
folk car from Britain now, like, the best folk car
is like what if we were Celts again, and with
(49:08):
all of the positives and negatives involved in that, That's
what full car is.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Wow? Is this my cliffhanger it is, and the rest
of my cliffhanger is that we'll also talk about why
the Druids lasted longer in Ireland and how kings were
bathing into blood well into the supposedly Christian era base,
and we'll talk about that on Wednesday. Wow uh the plugs.
Cool Zone Media makes a bunch of cool stuff Cooler
(49:36):
Zone Media. If you subscribe, it means there's no ads.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
Season two of saddle Ligarc is dropping episodes now. Oh shit,
it's really fucking good. Jake henri Hen is really a
like the first episode of the season might be my
favorite episode of a podcast that Jake's ever put out.
It's so funny.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Oh shit, Okay, yeah, Jake is one of my favorite podcasters.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
So and the art is cool and each episode has
like custom art too, and that's really fun.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Cool Chick's so cool and.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Detail oriented and a pleasure to work with. Sock check
that out and remember pet a dog, but only if
they want you to.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
Yeah, all right, see all Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (50:21):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Goozonemedia dot com. Or check us out
on I Heard Radio
Speaker 1 (50:31):
App hop, a podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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