October 29, 2025 • 49 mins
Margaret continues her talk with 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/
Barry Cunliffe, Druids: A Very Short Introduction
Peter Berresford Ellis, The Druids
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool stuff.
You're the weekly reminder that usually I do things that
are a little bit more political, and sometimes it's spooky
month and I want to do a thing that I've
always been curious about and I want an excuse to research.
I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this
week is also my producer, Sophie. Hey, how are you
(00:26):
you know?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
This Monday?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, which is a different than normal recording day for
all you people who want to know too much about
my life. But you know, sometimes things happen. Sometimes, unlike
the druids who have a mastery of time, we have
to look at clocks and things go poorly, and then
(00:49):
we have to do things at different times, and.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
You would say, you know, we're really sacrificing our time.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Are we sacrificing our time? Because that's where we're at
in the script, how do you know? It's almost like
just to give everyone a peek behind the curtain. Normally
the guest has no idea what the subject matter is,
but Sophie gets to look at the script, and since
Sophie is both Sophie has multi classed in the parlance
of tabletop roleplaying games.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I really enjoyed taking advantage of the knowing a thing.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, have you played role playing games?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I'd be really good at them, But no, you would be.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Really good at them. One day, we're gonna get you
on which could be a teaser for that fact that
this very Sunday, Cool Zone Media is going to be
me and Robert and some other friends playing Pathfinder, which
is a role playing game.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Who's Robert.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I'm surprised you haven't heard of him. He's the only
person named Robert Evans. I think I've made the joke
on this before or pointed out on this show before
that I didn't know why Robert Evans always said the
only Robert Evans. I was like, that's probably more than that.
For example, the chain of restaurants. I never eat there
(02:05):
because I'm vegan, so I don't actually.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Know there's a chain of restaurants.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Bob Evans, Oh.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, I didn't think about that.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah. Well, we are on part two of a two
parter about druids because I wanted to read about the
Celts and weird sacrifice shit because I'm like, I'm so
sick of knowing really really vague things. That I think
are wrong about various cultures. You know, yes, And unfortunately,
(02:40):
the thing that happens when you research something like the
Celts or especially the Druids more specifically, you end up
with even you don't get like the answers. You just
get even more vague stuff that may or may not
be right. But if you get enough of it, you
can kind of paint a picture. And the picture I
was painting for you where we left off last week
(03:01):
is that the Druids, and just the Celts in general,
and the Druids probably in particular. Although there's argument about that,
because there's argument about everything. We're particularly into sacrifice, and
sacrifice had an awful lot of meanings. But I want
to talk about them because it's really hard. I think
(03:22):
I've said this last time. Normally I've record five minutes later,
So if I'm repeating myself, you'all just have to deal
with it. It's really hard, I think, in the modern world
to sort of imagine sacrifice as like a thing that
would make any sense to do. Right, Like, ah, I
got like a certain amount of food, so I'm just
gonna fucking set some of it on fire. It's like
(03:42):
not what we immediately think to do right. So sacrifice
is one of the harder things for the modern mind
to really wrap itself around. Not sacrifice like giving yourself
up for the greater good. I think people can kind
of imagine that like being sort of a whether It's like, oh,
I'm going to do all of the housework and then
(04:02):
no one will appreciate me, but I know that I'm
the best.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
No, we're talking like, you know, slaughter a goat sacrifice, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Okay, or like make a really nice thing and then
throw it in the river. That was a big Celtic
thing to do.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Got it? Got it.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
France, as I mentioned, is a place with a real
claim to be into sacrifice, or at least skulls and beheadings.
And so of course it was a french Man that
I'm going to quote about the nature of sacrifice, George Batai.
I'm not going to do a whole like biography about
this man, but I'm just gonna acknowledge. Some right wing
folks are like, oh, Buttie's our guy. But Buttai is
(04:39):
the guy who specifically wrote like, fuck the Nazis. They
shouldn't get to appropriate Nietzsche because fuck the Nazis. I'm
not a big nietzsche girl, but like, you know, but.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Tie was like Nietzsche girl.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Now. As the kind of thing that comes up in
normal people's lives, right is they have to relate themselves
as relates to Battai and Nietzsche and all that.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, huh.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Everyone has opinions about Hagel versus Marxist dialectics, right, That's
like a normal experience that everyone has. This is why
I'm always invited to dinner parties. So but Ti eventually, okay,
he's actually doing some interesting shit, like interesting, not good necessarily,
but interesting. He found a secret society called Asciphail and
I don't know how to pronounce it because I refuse
(05:20):
to look up French. And one day I'll get over
that and or not. Yeah, well we'll see. We'll see
how long I can run this bit, especially because I
like can speak a tiny bit of French. But whatever,
I didn't look it up. So he forms a secret
society obsessed with sacrifice. And this is an anecdote this
part of the story because this was told to me
as an anecdote by a close friend who is obsessed
(05:42):
with Bati. So it is not properly sourced, because I
was like, hey, you got source on that, and they
were like, the source is I read a lot of
this in my twenties, so you have the Secret Society
and they're like, fuck yeah, this is like the nineteen,
I don't know, twenties or thirties, and they're like, fuck yeah,
we're gonna do human sacrifice. That's how fucking edgy we are.
But they had a problem, Sophie. They didn't have any volunteers.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
That's so crazy. They didn't have like a cat andus Eberdeen, nothing.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So the thing is they had more than one person
volunteer to be sacrificed.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Ah, nobody wanted to be a murderer.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, everyone's down to die, but no one's down to
kill anyone, which is like the most wholesome human sacrifice
story you can imagine. So no one ends up dying
wild probably until World War Two, where probably a lot
of them died because they probably fought the Nazis.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Okay, Magpie, thanks for the depression.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
That's okay, they died fighting Nazis. Like whatever, we're all
gonna die one way. I hope I die in bed,
and second to that, I hope I die fighting Nazis.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Whenever I think of like how people want to die,
I think of Tyrian Lanister talking about it in Game
of Thrones.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Oh what's his ways of? It's been a minute since
I've seen this.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
He wants to die at a ripe old age in
his bed with a woman's mouth around.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
His Oh yeah, yeah, huh yeah, huh yeah. I had
a Latin teacher who was not a good man, who
was kicked out of this teaching shortly after I graduated.
But uh, he always used to tell us that his
plan was to die at ninety five, killed in a
(07:27):
jealous rage by a husband. Sir, yeah, because he was
going to be, like, you know, sleeping with some younger
woman when he was ninety five and her husband was
going to kill him. He also used to tell directly sexist,
homophobic jokes and ask the pretty girls to sit in
the front of the class. Anyway, he has been driven.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Out from I hope he's having a real rough day
wherever he is.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I know ew. He was also everyone's favorite teacher and
he like let everyone cheat, which is both the reason
I don't know any Latin but also the reason I
didn't like die of stress. In high school. It's really complicated.
It's so complicated. But one time I got into an argument.
I was in the Gay Straight Alliance, as all of
us straight kids were. My gays Straight Alliance in the
nineties was entirely so called straight people. All of us
(08:15):
are Gary anarchis now and the teacher he told a
homophobic joke and I was like, you can't say that shit,
And then like the whole room gets quiet, and I'm
waiting for the rest of my friends to stand up
for me, and everyone's just quiet.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
That sucks.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
It was a bad time anyway. Sacrifice but tie so
they can't get any volunteers to do the killing. The
logo of this group is a headless man, which again
just feels very French with this whole Celtic thing, but
I don't know, it might be a coincidence. Is a
headless man holding a burning heart in one hand and
(08:51):
a dagger in the other. And my friend says about
this logo quote, the agreed upon significance of the headless
figure is escaping authority, godhead, king, et cetera, as well
as escaping reason. And so there's this argument that part
of the point of sacrifice is because it's an unreasonable
(09:12):
thing to do. But tie's whole thing about sacrifice. To
quote my friend mar when I asked them to explain
this stuff to me again quote, sacrifice is an act
of creation through the means of loss or non productive
excessive expenditure. So basically, like, in order for something to
be sacrificed, you make it sacred. The etymological root of
(09:33):
sacrifice is to make something sacred, you get rid of
it in a non productive way and you take it
out of the utilitarian economy, and it at first you're like, yeah, no, totally, yeah,
you set your shit on fire, Like congratulations, don't have
that shit anymore. But think about all of those memes
that you and I probably in particular, look at with
dreamy thought where it's like, what if not everything you
(09:54):
did was productive? What if you just read a book
this afternoon? What if you you know, And we're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's for other people, but hustle culture is for us,
you know.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
I do.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, But those people are right, the people who tell
you that not everything you should do should be productive
and like fit into the capitalist economy, And actually you're
happier and more sacred if you like, do shit that's
not within that. A lot those people are right and
I'm wrong because I spend all my time working, but
(10:25):
I also have the best job that anyone's ever had,
So it's alla toss up. Anyway. When we refuse the
cult of productivity, we are closer to divinity, is the
argument here, And it's interesting because then this also filters
down to ideas like non productive sex, like gay sex,
or like any sex where you're not trying to have
(10:45):
kids can fit into this, and so can sacrificing animal
or human life, which I am not condoning. I am
not being like the way to step outside of capitalism
is to start sacrificing people, but if you're truly Celtic,
you might Gifting is also a way to make something
non productive because you're not getting something from it, which
(11:06):
is actually probably cooler than killing people. He also has
this class analysis in all of this about sacrifice, like, look,
if you've got power, you can sacrifice so much shit.
You're like so holy because you've got so many goats
that you can just start throwing away goats, whereas like,
if all you got is like one cow, and I
know that an early medieval Irish people, a lot of
them would like. The way they would survive is that,
(11:27):
like I have one cow, and so I eat the
milk or meat. I make cheese from the cow or whatever,
and that's what I live off of. You know, you're
not going to want to kill that cow, but if
you're rich, mean kill cows all day. And so how
do you get away from this like class problem with
your sacrifice? Well, Sophie, but Ti has an answer for you. Okay,
(11:48):
the bourgeois sacrifice people in animals, but the proletarians they
do this expenditure, this like holy expenditure through violent revolution.
It is sacred in this context to smash up your
own city and anger or run around and kill other
rich people.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Okay, I like this stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
When I started thinking about it in this way, started
thinking about this like modern version of it, it helped
me kind of feel like I could understand what the
oldie druids and shit would be doing.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Right right right. That like helps conceptualize what otherwise is
a really dark topic.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Totally and like even because like, well there's two parts
of it. The human sacrifice in particular is very dark.
I also don't totally love animal sacrifice, but it's we
also eat them, so I don't know whatever, but most
people do. But they also, like the Celts are really
and just like throwing gold into lakes and shit, you know,
and it's like kind of hard to wrap my head around,
like I'm gonna make stuff just to destroy it in
(12:52):
a time when there's like we don't really imagine these
societies as like abundant, where they're just like I got
so much stuff, I can like set it on fire,
you know. It meant something to them to make a
thing and then throw it away. And the argument about
whether or not the Celts did human sacrifice is ongoing
(13:13):
and will continue to be ongoing forever. The most likely
answer is yes. But all of the like anecdotal evidence
is made in the context of drumming up a war
against the Celts. So we have all of these romans
being like, oh, those people over there, those people are barbarians.
They sacrifice humans. It's like dark and evil. We probably
(13:33):
need to kill them all. But we also have some
archaeological evidence that they probably were probably killing people. We
talked about this last time. I think you have you know,
like bodies tied up at the bottom of holes and
there's dead people in bog There's like a dead guy
in a bog who got killed three times. He was
(13:53):
bashed with the rock and then strangled and then had
his throat slit, And the archaeological argus human is that
is not just someone who was like really mad, but
probably a sacificat.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
And as a reminder to listeners in Part one, Magpie
talks about this a lot, but like, there's no written
records by actual druids.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, at all, and it's so frustrating, and that was
part of their whole deal is you don't write stuff down.
And probably they were doing human sacrifice at reasonable scale,
but we just like straight up don't know it. There's
also this argument that people make, which is very believable
to me, that like a lot of the rest of
the world around that time, the people they had in
(14:36):
contact with, like Rome, they were moving away from human
sacrifice at this point, and they were starting to get
like more like representative sacrifice where you're like, oh, it's
like kind of like a guy where it counts as
a guy or whatever. But there was one type of
human sacrifice that they did that I'm just gonna throw
out there without any argument. In favor or against, which
(14:59):
is our episodes about Sown, which is coming up like
right around now. Kings who weren't doing right by their
people might have been sacrificed at their sown festival, like
cut off their nipples and slit their throat. That was
a thing. Yeah, ow I know, but it's just it's
the king. It's different.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
And then Sophie our joint favorite film, The Wickerman yep
based on certainly multiple thousands of year old attestations and
probably just based on the truth. They probably made big
people out of wicker and then put people inside those
things and then set them on fire. And also you
(15:42):
could just make a guy out of straw. You don't
feel like building the whole Wickerman, you can build a
straw man straw man argument with a whole new purpose.
Caesar said that the gods preferred it that the Celts
preferred that they sacrifice victims who had been caught in
the act of theft or some other crime, but that
innocent people would do if there was no criminals around
(16:03):
the barn. And there's like no reason to disbelieve Caesar
about that. But there's also no reason to believe Caesar
about that but do you know what we also worship
at the altar of.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Well, if it's us, I would have to say it's
clean drinking water, potatoes and dogs.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yes, yeah, I think that the best thing to do
is you take a potato and you carve it into
the likeness of a god m and then you deep
fry it and then you eat it.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Fun fact, dog backwards spells God. Anyways, coincidence, I think.
So here's ads and we're back.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And so if you're thinking some of those ads seem
like I just be throwing money away, but not all
of them, because some of them are probably genuinely good,
but some of them feel like they might be throwing
money away, Well, have I got news for you. It
would be very Celtic of you to throw money away. Specifically,
they would just like probably just make thousands of bronze
(17:19):
axe heads just to put them into holes and sacrifice
them to the Thonic gods, the gods of the earth,
by just throwing the stuff that they made into a hole.
And the reason we think that these aren't like detritis.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
I want one, I know, bronze axead I know, but
I would keep it.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
I know. Maybe they sacrifice them to the future. Maybe
they were gifts from the Celts to us.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, God, I have a friend who has like a
Roman coin, but I'm like, no, I want a Celtic acxhead,
like a genuine Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
But they're just like throwing these epic things like away
as a form of sacrifice. Is that understanding?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah? And the reason we think that they when I
say we, I mean the scholars I read think that
these have been sacrificed specifically and aren't just like a
cash to comped back to or some other reason is
that a lot of these axe heads were made with
so much lead in the bronze that they were kind
of useless for battle, and it was like a way
to just like make them cheaper, unless they were like
(18:22):
we know that the Romans like having too much lead
in their drinking water. What if we put it directly
in their bloodstream? But no, they mass manufactured individually, one
at a time. They mass manufactured axheads to bury into holes. Yeah,
and they were really into throwing shit into rivers and bogs,
at least the Irish Celts and probably the rest of them.
We probably see bogs as holy places. You actually get
(18:45):
ear plugs like stretched ear gauges like big old like
you have to stretch your ear hole. Huh. The Celts
did those, and we have some of the originals of those.
What are bogs, Let's go with swamp and don't ask
me to tell you the difference between a swamp a
fen and a bog in a marsh. It's a wetland. Okay, great,
(19:06):
someone out there there are many people who are mad
that I don't know the difference on the top of
my head, but I don't.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
You know what crime your river? And then I'll throw
some shit in it.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
I'll throw an accent into the river.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Of your tears, motherfucker. Oh sorry, this is a happy podcast.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, And so they would like there's all these spots
where they're like, oh, this seemed to be a common
spot that people would throw things because they would find
all this stuff in these in these various bogs and things.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
That's really cool. Actually, I know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
We know about the stuff they gave to like the
Thonic gods. The earth gods is my new favorite word.
It's the word that looks like Lovecraft would write. It's
like c thho and I see yeah, oh, I see
whatever it only spelled correctly, don't listen to me, and
we know that it's much easier to give stuff to
the ground gods. Right, you can like throw it in
a hole. But if you start like throwing axes in
(20:01):
the air, like the gods don't take those. They come
back down and hit people, which, you know whatever. The
Francesco was an axe built specifically to do that. It
was a throwing act where it would bunce on the
ground and cause havoc within the enemy troops. Fuck yeah, yeah,
so they might have like sacrificed stuff to fire, but
we wouldn't really have as much record of that. But
people were into the sky gods as well. One Greek
(20:26):
explorer says that he landed on an island it's probably
Britain or one of the islands off Britain, and found
it full of people who are like sort of a
Greek myth in some ways. But he found some people
he called this Greek myth the Hyperboreans, the people of
the far North, and it's this like sort of mythological
fantasy race of happy people who live on a sunny
(20:47):
island beyond the North, which is why it doesn't feel
like it could be Britain. I was there a couple times,
and you literally have to descend through layers and layers
of clouds in order to go into that accursed land.
But he went there and he probably met some Britons
or other Celts, and he talked about how the god
of the moon came every nineteen years to these folks,
(21:08):
and that is probably a reference to at that I
guess latitude or longitude or whatever the fuck there's an
eighteen point six one year lunar cycle that happens that
far north. So like the moon and stars and shit
are back into this right arrangement every nineteen years. And
the Celts worshiped the sky by fucking knowing the sun
(21:31):
and the moon and the stars like inside and out,
which meant tracking things and studying things and remembering things.
And they did all of that without a written culture.
Like I think they might have had something about this
learning how to remember things if you practice remembering things
all the time, because like I can't imagine having a
star chart in my head. Besides like, oh that one's
(21:53):
the Seven Sisters. There's a Ryan, you know, but like
knowing like ah, yes, this is relates to this means
that we are in like the following cycle, because they
had a whole lunar calendar and shit like that. And
it was probably the Druids doing this study and remembering,
and it is possible that they went passing on that
information since like two thousand BCE, but we don't know.
(22:16):
We only have evidence of the group called the Druids
starting around four hundred BCE okay, and slowly near the
end of the BCE, folks started meeting and talking to
actual Druids, and the ancient Greeks were like, oh, these
guys are the wise philosophers of their people. They are
(22:36):
cool and smart and good. We like them. They're like,
basically just as advanced as us. Fuck yeah, Druids. That
is the last time anyone will say anything nice about
the Druids until people get into weird mining the past
to try and make them cool again. Hundreds or thousands
of years after they died out. Everything written about them
(22:57):
is possibly touched by bias. Aratio wrote that the Druids
must be consulted by the Celtic kings and their wisdom
must be followed. Another guy wrote that the Druids study
nature and moral philosophy, and they are the judges of
their people more generally, like, there's also druids who are kings,
which sort of goes into the like the druids or
(23:18):
a caste of people, right like, or they're like an
educated elite of people, and some of them men of kings,
and some of them are advisors to kings, and some
of them are like, I don't know it probably hermits
and shit, I like to imagine.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, when Julius Caesar he shows up later to invade
Gaul in the first century BCE, and he's one of
the main sources of druids, and he wrote about them. Quote.
They hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements,
about the size of the universe and the earth, about
the nature of the physical world, and about the power
(23:53):
and properties of the immortal gods, subjects in which they
give instructions to their pupils. They also taught, in contrast,
I believe to Greek or to Roman teachings, I don't
know whatever, that the soul and the earth are both immortal,
and so basically like essentially reincarnation, your soul continues and
(24:14):
shows up in a new body. I've always had a
math problem with believing that. Mm hmm, but you know whatever,
they had a lunar calendar. They record the days as
starting with the night before, which a friend of mine
told me is the Jewish tradition also, and they start
months at the new moon, not the full moon. And
there is a single surviving account of a Druidic ritual
(24:37):
written by I think plenty of the Elder in the
first century AD. He didn't see this firsthand, and he
didn't cite his source. And a lot of people call
bullshit on this.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Right right, I mean fair, Yeah, that's shaky. What does
it say.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
It's an interesting ritual, it's like, and this is the
ritual from which all of the like when you imagine
a sort of I don't know actual I haven't talked
to neopagans about Druidic beliefs, but when you imagine the
sort of cliche one it's based on this, Yeah, he
wrote quote. The Druids hold nothing more sacred than the
mistletoe and the tree on which it grows, provided that
(25:18):
it is an oak. They choose groves of oak for
the sake of the tree alone, and they never perform
any sacred rite unless they have a branch of it.
They think that everything that grows on it is sent
from heaven and by the God himself. Mistletoe, however, is
rarely found on the oak, and when it is, it
is gathered with a great deal of ceremony, if possible,
(25:41):
on the sixth day of the moon. They choose this
day because although the moon has not yet reached half size,
it already has considerable influence. They call the missletoe by
the name that means all healing. They prepare a ritual
sacrifice and feast under the tree, and lee in two
white bulls whose horns are bound. For the first time
(26:04):
on this occasion, a priest attired in a white vestiment
ascends the tree and with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe,
which is caught in a white cloth. Then next they
sacrifice the victims, praying that God will make his got
his gift propetuited properly good. Sorry, I just don't pronounce
(26:25):
that word. Propetuus propitious, I don't know. You know, means
good to those to whom He has given it. They
believe that if given in a drink, the mistletoe will
give fertility to any barren animal, and that it is
a remedy against all poisons. That's Pliny the Elder, or
I think the Elder it's the source I read just
(26:47):
as Pliny, but I think it's Pliny the Elder. I
want one A golden sickle. Yeah, I want a golden sickle.
Pretty bad, be pretty cool. Imagine gold has always been valued.
What I feel is so much cheaper than right, like
a golden sickle is.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Like absolutely, i'de like, yeah, I don't know. I I
think that, like, you know, Trump's put like gold shit
all over the White House and it looks cheap and
ugly as hell. Yeah, but like seriously janky, but like
you know, a house and then like somebody has like
a cool like brass or gold knob on a cabinet.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Love it? Yeah? No, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
And but like back then, like I feel like gold
was much more accessible and wasn't this like when they're
talking about it. I feel like it's not like, you know,
the way that we talk about something that's like unachievable.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I guess, yeah, like gold is like three thousand dollars
an ounce where we record this, don't ask why I
know the price of gold off the top of my head,
and like my Prepper show is called Live like the
world is dying. I don't advocate buying gold anyway, but yeah,
like a sickle of it you're talking talking about, like
like I'm not getting a sickle of gold anytime soon.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
That's like, that's like a lot.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Okay. I would get like a titanium and do it.
Get it anidized like most of the jewelry I wear
as gold anidized fucking titanium.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, anyways, my bad, I have the shit.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
No no, no no, but it's it's kind of interesting,
like so you get this like the white robe, the mistletoe,
the like sacred oak. Pliny writes that the word druid
comes from the Greek words for basically the person who
knows the oak, but it probably actually came from the
(28:39):
Celtic words that either mean the same or mean like
the wise person. And if they mean the wise person,
it's because like oak and wisdom have kind of the
same root going on, and it's kind of interesting that
basically it just kind of means druid. Is this ancient
fuck word, So that both the Greek and Celtic are
(29:03):
coming from the proto Indo European words, which rules. And
I said before that there were women druids, and I
hold by that, but it is complicated by the fact
that we don't actually know a lot about the social
class of druid. Druids get used as both like here's
a member of a specific organization of druids. Were probably
(29:24):
a membership, and you know, you go to school or
whatever is led by an arch druid, according to I
think Caesar. But then it's like, it can't be just
one arch druid because he claims it as an arch
druid in Gaul. But then he claims that the actually
Druidism comes from Britain, and so you had to go
there to learn. So there's probably either an arch arch
druid or there's different druidic whatever. I don't fucking know.
But it's also a general term for a wise philosopher,
(29:47):
magician who mediates conflict between people and between armies and
between people and the gods. And so if we go
by this, there are so many women in this role.
We have all of these like quotes about being like oh,
when you go deal with the like barbarians or whatever,
and you get in to a fight, the women are
going to come out and solve this conflict at the end,
(30:08):
which will shock you, Sophie that women are the ones.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Oh my god, are women as problem solvers? I know, Magpie,
I don't know about that.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah. And then also like there's a lot of attestation,
like people specifically being like and when you go to
the Celts, men and women are both equally rulers. Isn't
that wacky? We're in upside downland?
Speaker 1 (30:32):
You know, women can't be bosses, I know.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
And reasonably there's like, you know, Celtic women warriors and
probably not in this like total there's no such thing
as gender in the society thing, but like it's not
what later patriarchal society has like declared the past is.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Like right, dare I say druid fluid ruidh huh?
Speaker 2 (30:55):
That could be a good gender. People could pick up
on that one. Cool and well, later, once the druidsm
been driven underground by Roman conquest, druid gets used as
a word kind of like people would use the word
which a couple hundred years later, So just like a
lone practitioner of magic who's kind of sketchy but kind
of cool be a druid and there's also this thing
(31:16):
that happened that some people called Druidism and some people don't.
The Celts had sacred isles where only women lived, which
is cool, and these women weren't trapped. They could go
to the mainland to fuk if they wanted, So it
was just women wanted to live alone on an island.
(31:38):
I've read about two of these isles, and it's like
reference that there's probably a ton of these isles in
different places around Celtic world. Also, the Celtic world again
is like actually, since I wrote this script, I've been
reading more and more about it. The Celtic world is
like really when you're like, oh, Celtic culture was like this,
Like earlier I quoted about how Celtic culture was super
egalitarian compared to Roman culture, and it's like, well, no,
(31:59):
some of the Celtic clans and tribes were like basically
voting and had like something that looks like republics or
you know, decentralized good things, and some of them were
like total autocracies or whatever. Like they're just different. And
so you have these aisles all over the Celtic world.
I know of at least two of them, but the
implication there's more, and then there's a story about this that,
(32:22):
you know what, I'm willing to be down to believe
is true. And also I would write this into a
full car movie in a second if it is true.
But it might also be the kind of shit that
people made up to demonize women. I don't fucking know.
My dearest desire is to get a time machine and
go back in time and find out how metal the
past is, because people write about it like it's the
most metal thing in the world. But also sometimes people
(32:44):
do whatever. Okay, let me just tell you what it is.
On this aisle at the base of the river where
the river meets the sea, every year, these sacred women
would take the roof off their temple. Then each of
them would pick up the roofing material like thatch or
whatever the fuck it is, and walk back to the
temple to put it back on. But then one of
(33:06):
them would like nudge another one, and like someone gets
knocked over, and then they rip the fallen woman to
shreds and just rip her limb from limb, and then
everyone parades around with their former friend's body parts, which
is not what we accept within polite society. Currently, Well,
(33:27):
no wonder, England is where all the best foll car
comes from when people are doing this kind of shit.
But what doesn't come from England but is grown right
here in the United States of America is some portion
of our ads and one hundred percent of the potatoes
that you grow at home if you grow them in
(33:48):
the United States. Otherwise they're home grown wherever you are.
You're probably able to figure that out for yourself, but
I just want to be really clear. They're only American
grown potatoes if you grow them in America. Otherwise they're
just sparkling potatoes. And we're back. So Rome is doing
its Rome thing where they think they should be in
(34:10):
charge of everything, and they're conquering Iberia aka Spain and Portugal,
only that doesn't get called that at the time. And
they have to get stuff there, and you can get
across the sea to get there. But it's like when
you want to have like a lot of stuff and
support a military, you kind of want to go up
and over. And for those who have an American sense
of geography, just know that the south of France slash
(34:32):
gall touches that water area there. I'm an American too.
The Mediterranean, that's the word for it. So so there's
these long supply lines that run along southern Gaul, okay.
And the way that I see this presented, even by
historians is largely like all of these like raiding clans
(34:53):
of Gauls and you know, these Celts just sort of like, fuck, yeah,
we're gonna steal your shit because it's like coming through
where we can get to it, and we're a bunch
of raiders and bandits. There were evil barbarians and whatever.
These people are literally Rome is literally invading everywhere, including Gaul, and.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
That I'm saying they're fucking genociders.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, it's like steal their loot.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, fuck yeah, fucket.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And so it's somewhere between banditry and anti colonial resistance,
and honestly, the line has never been totally solid between
those things anywhere in the fucking history. And the Druids
are organizing a lot of this best as I can tell.
They certainly are going to get the credit for organizing this,
And so Rome is like, oh, we no longer like
(35:43):
you Druids. You're no longer like the cool philosophers, like
the Greeks saw you all as you all are evil
murderer horror movie people. So we're going to kill you all.
So Rome goes to war against the various tribes of
Gauls and they win spoiler alert, although they don't like
they never get Scotland and they never get Ireland, but
they kind of get everywhere else and they conquer and
(36:07):
they steal all the gold and silver from all the
temples because you know, fucking Celts are real into sacrificing
their shit, and realizing that the Galls love throwing valuable
shit like gold into lakes, the Romans start auctioning off
the captured This is the most modern part of this
whole story. America would do this. They start auctioning off
(36:28):
the lakes to the highest bidder for entrepreneurs willing to
go through the expense of trying to get the gold
from the bottom of the lake.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
That is so America, I know, very funny.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
And it's interesting too because this whole area in southern
Gaul before they go to war, before Rome like really
goes to war, it's the wild West, Like it's a
colonial force that's expanding westward and is like setting up
these frontier towns and the actual like demographic makeup of
(37:04):
the people in these Roman towns is actually much more
mixed than like Rome itself. So you have people from
far flung parts of the Empire are looking to get ahead,
and so they're gonna go to where shit's sketchy, and
they're gonna go to the edge of the colonial frontier.
We actually covered a very similar thing when we talked
about Japanese colonization of Korea, because you have like the
(37:26):
colonial Japanese were often poorer Japanese who are trying to
come up by go fucking over the Koreans. And you
have the same thing where people from the outskirts of
the Roman Empire are gonna go to southern Gaul and
like be part of that colonizing force and shit, because
it's a good way to get money anyway. This is
(37:49):
just like one of the most like never change history,
never fucking change, because they do it basically in Islamophobia
to justify the Iraq War, only it's the fucking invasion
of Gaul. And like they also do the fucking like frontiers,
like kill all the indigenous North Americans. Shit, it's just
like we have.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Never learned a single fucking thing, is what you're telling me.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
No, no, we probably never will. But you know it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
You're gonna tell me Rome in conclusion, Rome like does
a full on chinacide.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Yeah, no, Yeah, at the end, they're going to yeah,
kill I think I said I spoiled this earlier. They're
going to kill one third of the golf. According to
at least one source, they're going to kill one third
of the Galls and not Galway. I was gonna call Galway.
That's a different place. That's actually where my family's from.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I know that's Ireland, which we're going to talk about it.
I know at the end here.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
They kill one third of the people and enslave another third.
And like I think we talked about last time, it's
like you would have to kill an awful lot of
people doing human sacrifice to come anywhere near the tiniest
percentage of the evil of killing a third of a
population and a slaving another third.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Oh huh.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
This happens over the course of about one hundred and
fifty years from like two hundred BCE fifty BC really roughly,
and the barbarians just refuse to stay conquered, and Celtic
society starts changing because of the closeness of the frontier, right,
and so you already have the first written attestations about
the Druids say things like, well, things have changed since
(39:18):
in the old days. You know, this is the new
way that things are happening, right, And so that's part
of why we think like maybe they were doing less sacrifice,
but also just they were like adapting to you know,
the old ways were disappearing. And ironically, one of our
first main sources from trans Alpina is a Stoic philosopher
who believe that basically civilization is bad and the barbarians
(39:40):
are good. But I read another person who said that
actually his theory was exactly the opposite. And I fucking
hate historians. Actually I don't. I just wish I had
a year to research each topic so I could have
my own opinion on more of these things. But people
are like, oh, some noble savagery going on whatever. And
he writes that there's three sort of intellectually elite classes
(40:01):
in Celtic society. The bards, who are the singers and poets.
The vates, who are the seers, which is not a
Celtic word, that's a Roman word, who are the seers
who interpret sacrifice and study the natural world, and the
druids who study both the natural world and moral philosophy.
And so when the Vatas do a sacrifice, you need
(40:24):
a druid around to make it actually count. Okay, So
they're like, what's the thing that's like basically a doctor,
but non a doctor, a physician's assistant. You have to
have a doctor on call. Otherwise you're not allowed to
practice medicine. That's the right one version of this. Caesar
disagreed with this assessment. His assessment came a little later,
and so this might be that shit has changed, or
(40:44):
Caesar's line or he is a different part of fucking
Celtic Land. He says that there's only the druids and
the knights among the elites in Celtic society. But either way,
they're like, all right, we got to kill all these people,
and they kind of do, but not all and there's still,
you know, people speaking Bretin. I think I put it
in the script earlier. I think it is Breton in Brittany. Also,
(41:07):
since the last episode, this never happens because usually recorded
at the same time. Since the last episode, someone was
like the Gaelic stuff in Scotland actually they're like, it
really is growing and there's more people who are speaking it.
But Ireland, being a beautiful backwater untouched by the Romans,
was one of the last strongholds of pagan culture, and
(41:28):
it's likely where the druid stayed in power the longest.
We know a bit about pre Christian Irish culture. There's
about one hundred and fifty tribes. Each had a king
or queen. We at least have evidence of queens in
the Sagas, and then elsewhere in the Celtic world there's
lots of evidence of this whatever. And each king had
a druid, a sear, the filid, and a bard. So
(41:49):
the seer sort of the filid is kind of counting
us the vatz essentially, and the druid is the most
powerful of these, and this is the person who sets
the rules for the king. They make gi the geesa
the rules the commands upon the king. Some examples of
this that I've seen are you can't eat horse flesh
before getting into your chariot, although actually I think there's
(42:14):
no evidence of chariots in Ireland outside of the Sagas,
but I'm not sure about that. Okay, you have to
straighten your spear point with your teeth was another geese
that was applied to a king. And then my favorite,
because it's absolutely the bitchest. You're not allowed to talk
to company until your druid has spoken first, based I know,
(42:35):
and the Filid had twelve years of education. And slowly
the Filid got more powerful as the Druids start to
decline and they start taking some of the poetry rolls
from the Bard. Then Ireland becomes Christian over a couple
hundred years in the middle of the first millennium CE,
and suddenly the Filid are just sort of they sort
of probably join the church and keep on going, taking
(42:56):
on the power from the bards as well, although bards
end up in kind of a more of a working
class role. And then also people argue that the Druids
secretly didn't go anywhere, and that people fucking argue about
the shit everyone writes about it like it's true, and
none of it's true. All history is fake. This is
the most frustrating thing I've ever wanted to learn about,
and I'm still really excited about it. By the seventh century,
there's no more distinct order of druids that people are
(43:18):
aware of the filid are a distinct order until the
seventeenth century before the English are like, y'all can't keep
doing that weird heathen shit. We let you get away
with for a very long time, but you gotta stop
now we are English. Please button your top button and
drink tea. And the role of the druids advising and
controlling the kings is taken on by the clerics by Catholics.
(43:39):
But as always you have the fun thing about medieval
Ireland where it's like Christian kind of in air quotes,
because you have women initiating divorce, you have abortion, you
have women owning property of all kinds of Unchristian shit
for the time and shit is like real pagan.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Real fucking pagan.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
I forgot that I mentioned in one of the other
episodes about how Irish kings during the Christian era would
have to fuck a horse before becoming king. The poor horse,
It's gonna get worse for the horse. I'm gonna read
now the single most metal thing so and possibly the
most pagan and dark, not pagan equals dark, but in
this case, the wildest shit that I've read on the
(44:20):
show in a long time. The rest of what happens
with that horse. This coronation ceremony is related by a
guy named Geraldus Cambrensis from his book from eleven eighty five.
And the people talk about it like it's real. It's
probably real. I'm just always skeptical of everything. Quote. The
whole people of that country gathered in one place. A
(44:41):
white mare is led into the midst of them, and
he who is to be inaugurated, not as a prince,
but as a brute, not as a king, but an outlaw,
comes before the people on all fours, confessing himself a
beast with no less impudence than imprudence. The mayor being
immediately killed and cut into pieces and boiled. A bath
(45:03):
Yeah no, I like I said, it's just bad for
the it's bad for the WORSESO. A bath is prepared
for him from the broth. Sitting in this, he eats
the flesh. This again, seriously, this is like Bastard's level.
Sitting in this, he eats the flesh which is brought
to him, the people staring round and partaking. Also, he
is also required to drink the broth in which he
(45:25):
is bathed, not drawing it in any vessel, nor even
in his hand but lapping it with his mouth and
uh yeah, fuh fuck that Christian.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, you know, OKAYI is thing I did not like that.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
No, uh, which is funny because I was like, we actually,
I don't know, man, they might have made up with
that ship after the Christians. Who fucking knows. Father Joe
mcveig wrote nineteen ninety three quote, the first Christian missionaries
to Ireland did not attempt a root and branch eradication
of the Celtic Druidic tradition and beliefs. Instead, the new
religion absorbed the Holy Mountains and the innumerable Holy wells
(46:09):
and gave him a Christian name. And so that's just
like syncretism. And throughout the Celtic world, especially in Ireland,
there's evidence that the Druids didn't really go away as
much as like vaguely convert to Catholicism and become priests
the new educated class, while still remaining Druids. A lot
of Celtic Christian saints get called druids. One saint, Saint Bueno,
(46:32):
was a Welsh guy who was said to have raised
seven people from the dead because you know, saints have
to do miracles, uh, huh. His last words as he
was dying was that he saw the Holy Trinity, the Saints,
and the Druids.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
Fucking sick.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
And there's an anecdote that I think I hinted at
in the first episode that I somehow forgot, and it's
my favorite anecdote, this whole thing. When I'm preparing for
a script, as I read, I like torture my poor
friends who just want to hear in my life, and
instead I just like talk to them and I tell
them all of the things that I've been reading, because
that's the answer to how my life is, is that
I read books all day, which rules but leaves me
(47:09):
incapable of acting normal at parties, and so instead at
parties I tell people the following anecdote, which is that
when the Roman army reached Britain and they captured most
of Britain, and they go to this final island and
they're capturing and it's like the biggest stand off fight.
It's the big clibactic moment of the movie. Unfortunately, the
Druids are going to lose. And he writes about seeing
(47:31):
the enemy line there in the trees and among the
enemy soldiers, among the Celtic soldiers are a lot of
women in all black moving through the ranks.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Oh that's cool.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah. And then the Druids are also saying, you know,
scary things, and so there's a question of whether or
not the women in black are like a separate class
in the Druids, or they are Druids. But they also
write that this like so scared the Roman army that
for a while they just stood Dylan didn't defend themselves,
as like arrows rained down upon them. And so it
(48:05):
was a fierce spell and it worked. It cast fear
into the enemy. I think that's cool. Unfortunately, the spell
was not a powerful high enough rank spell to kill
the enemy, and the Celts all died. I don't know, well,
not all of them, but a lot of them. And
that is the Druids. The past is metal as fuck.
(48:27):
I wish I had a time machine. And I don't
know whether I would like them or not, but my god,
they're interesting and they sure fought tooth and fucking nail
against rum.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Love it, thank you, enjoyed it. Spooky week.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Spooky Week is over. Next week I'll talk about something
spookier like capitalism and the people who fight it. Or
whatever the fuck I don't know. And also just to
say here at the end that if you want to
listen to me and Robert Evans and a bunch of
people play really fun role playing games, we're going to
(49:04):
do a takeover of cool Zone Media book Club for
six weeks where we're going to play Pathfinder, which is
like Dungeons and Dragons, but I like it more. And
our game master is none other than Jason Bowman, the
creator of Pathfinder. And I'm very cool, pretty excited about that,
and you could be excited about it too by checking
it out this Sunday on cool Zone Media book Club.
(49:25):
And also, nothing's happening in the regular world right now.
People don't have to listen to like news shows. They
can just listen to history and games. Yeah, okay, great,
bye everyone.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
By Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. More podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on our radio app, a podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool stuff.
You're the weekly reminder that usually I do things that
are a little bit more political, and sometimes it's spooky
month and I want to do a thing that I've
always been curious about and I want an excuse to research.
I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest this
week is also my producer, Sophie. Hey, how are you
(00:26):
you know?
Speaker 1 (00:27):
This Monday?
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, which is a different than normal recording day for
all you people who want to know too much about
my life. But you know, sometimes things happen. Sometimes, unlike
the druids who have a mastery of time, we have
to look at clocks and things go poorly, and then
(00:49):
we have to do things at different times, and.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
You would say, you know, we're really sacrificing our time.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Are we sacrificing our time? Because that's where we're at
in the script, how do you know? It's almost like
just to give everyone a peek behind the curtain. Normally
the guest has no idea what the subject matter is,
but Sophie gets to look at the script, and since
Sophie is both Sophie has multi classed in the parlance
of tabletop roleplaying games.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I really enjoyed taking advantage of the knowing a thing.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, have you played role playing games?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I'd be really good at them, But no, you would be.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Really good at them. One day, we're gonna get you
on which could be a teaser for that fact that
this very Sunday, Cool Zone Media is going to be
me and Robert and some other friends playing Pathfinder, which
is a role playing game.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Who's Robert.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I'm surprised you haven't heard of him. He's the only
person named Robert Evans. I think I've made the joke
on this before or pointed out on this show before
that I didn't know why Robert Evans always said the
only Robert Evans. I was like, that's probably more than that.
For example, the chain of restaurants. I never eat there
(02:05):
because I'm vegan, so I don't actually.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Know there's a chain of restaurants.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Bob Evans, Oh.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, I didn't think about that.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah. Well, we are on part two of a two
parter about druids because I wanted to read about the
Celts and weird sacrifice shit because I'm like, I'm so
sick of knowing really really vague things. That I think
are wrong about various cultures. You know, yes, And unfortunately,
(02:40):
the thing that happens when you research something like the
Celts or especially the Druids more specifically, you end up
with even you don't get like the answers. You just
get even more vague stuff that may or may not
be right. But if you get enough of it, you
can kind of paint a picture. And the picture I
was painting for you where we left off last week
(03:01):
is that the Druids, and just the Celts in general,
and the Druids probably in particular. Although there's argument about that,
because there's argument about everything. We're particularly into sacrifice, and
sacrifice had an awful lot of meanings. But I want
to talk about them because it's really hard. I think
(03:22):
I've said this last time. Normally I've record five minutes later,
So if I'm repeating myself, you'all just have to deal
with it. It's really hard, I think, in the modern world
to sort of imagine sacrifice as like a thing that
would make any sense to do. Right, Like, ah, I
got like a certain amount of food, so I'm just
gonna fucking set some of it on fire. It's like
(03:42):
not what we immediately think to do right. So sacrifice
is one of the harder things for the modern mind
to really wrap itself around. Not sacrifice like giving yourself
up for the greater good. I think people can kind
of imagine that like being sort of a whether It's like, oh,
I'm going to do all of the housework and then
(04:02):
no one will appreciate me, but I know that I'm
the best.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
No, we're talking like, you know, slaughter a goat sacrifice, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Okay, or like make a really nice thing and then
throw it in the river. That was a big Celtic
thing to do.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Got it? Got it.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
France, as I mentioned, is a place with a real
claim to be into sacrifice, or at least skulls and beheadings.
And so of course it was a french Man that
I'm going to quote about the nature of sacrifice, George Batai.
I'm not going to do a whole like biography about
this man, but I'm just gonna acknowledge. Some right wing
folks are like, oh, Buttie's our guy. But Buttai is
(04:39):
the guy who specifically wrote like, fuck the Nazis. They
shouldn't get to appropriate Nietzsche because fuck the Nazis. I'm
not a big nietzsche girl, but like, you know, but.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Tie was like Nietzsche girl.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Now. As the kind of thing that comes up in
normal people's lives, right is they have to relate themselves
as relates to Battai and Nietzsche and all that.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, huh.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Everyone has opinions about Hagel versus Marxist dialectics, right, That's
like a normal experience that everyone has. This is why
I'm always invited to dinner parties. So but Ti eventually, okay,
he's actually doing some interesting shit, like interesting, not good necessarily,
but interesting. He found a secret society called Asciphail and
I don't know how to pronounce it because I refuse
(05:20):
to look up French. And one day I'll get over
that and or not. Yeah, well we'll see. We'll see
how long I can run this bit, especially because I
like can speak a tiny bit of French. But whatever,
I didn't look it up. So he forms a secret
society obsessed with sacrifice. And this is an anecdote this
part of the story because this was told to me
as an anecdote by a close friend who is obsessed
(05:42):
with Bati. So it is not properly sourced, because I
was like, hey, you got source on that, and they
were like, the source is I read a lot of
this in my twenties, so you have the Secret Society
and they're like, fuck yeah, this is like the nineteen,
I don't know, twenties or thirties, and they're like, fuck yeah,
we're gonna do human sacrifice. That's how fucking edgy we are.
But they had a problem, Sophie. They didn't have any volunteers.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
That's so crazy. They didn't have like a cat andus Eberdeen, nothing.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
So the thing is they had more than one person
volunteer to be sacrificed.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Ah, nobody wanted to be a murderer.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, everyone's down to die, but no one's down to
kill anyone, which is like the most wholesome human sacrifice
story you can imagine. So no one ends up dying
wild probably until World War Two, where probably a lot
of them died because they probably fought the Nazis.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Okay, Magpie, thanks for the depression.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
That's okay, they died fighting Nazis. Like whatever, we're all
gonna die one way. I hope I die in bed,
and second to that, I hope I die fighting Nazis.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Whenever I think of like how people want to die,
I think of Tyrian Lanister talking about it in Game
of Thrones.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Oh what's his ways of? It's been a minute since
I've seen this.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
He wants to die at a ripe old age in
his bed with a woman's mouth around.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
His Oh yeah, yeah, huh yeah, huh yeah. I had
a Latin teacher who was not a good man, who
was kicked out of this teaching shortly after I graduated.
But uh, he always used to tell us that his
plan was to die at ninety five, killed in a
(07:27):
jealous rage by a husband. Sir, yeah, because he was
going to be, like, you know, sleeping with some younger
woman when he was ninety five and her husband was
going to kill him. He also used to tell directly sexist,
homophobic jokes and ask the pretty girls to sit in
the front of the class. Anyway, he has been driven.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Out from I hope he's having a real rough day
wherever he is.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I know ew. He was also everyone's favorite teacher and
he like let everyone cheat, which is both the reason
I don't know any Latin but also the reason I
didn't like die of stress. In high school. It's really complicated.
It's so complicated. But one time I got into an argument.
I was in the Gay Straight Alliance, as all of
us straight kids were. My gays Straight Alliance in the
nineties was entirely so called straight people. All of us
(08:15):
are Gary anarchis now and the teacher he told a
homophobic joke and I was like, you can't say that shit,
And then like the whole room gets quiet, and I'm
waiting for the rest of my friends to stand up
for me, and everyone's just quiet.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
That sucks.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
It was a bad time anyway. Sacrifice but tie so
they can't get any volunteers to do the killing. The
logo of this group is a headless man, which again
just feels very French with this whole Celtic thing, but
I don't know, it might be a coincidence. Is a
headless man holding a burning heart in one hand and
(08:51):
a dagger in the other. And my friend says about
this logo quote, the agreed upon significance of the headless
figure is escaping authority, godhead, king, et cetera, as well
as escaping reason. And so there's this argument that part
of the point of sacrifice is because it's an unreasonable
(09:12):
thing to do. But tie's whole thing about sacrifice. To
quote my friend mar when I asked them to explain
this stuff to me again quote, sacrifice is an act
of creation through the means of loss or non productive
excessive expenditure. So basically, like, in order for something to
be sacrificed, you make it sacred. The etymological root of
(09:33):
sacrifice is to make something sacred, you get rid of
it in a non productive way and you take it
out of the utilitarian economy, and it at first you're like, yeah, no, totally, yeah,
you set your shit on fire, Like congratulations, don't have
that shit anymore. But think about all of those memes
that you and I probably in particular, look at with
dreamy thought where it's like, what if not everything you
(09:54):
did was productive? What if you just read a book
this afternoon? What if you you know, And we're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's for other people, but hustle culture is for us,
you know.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
I do.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, But those people are right, the people who tell
you that not everything you should do should be productive
and like fit into the capitalist economy, And actually you're
happier and more sacred if you like, do shit that's
not within that. A lot those people are right and
I'm wrong because I spend all my time working, but
(10:25):
I also have the best job that anyone's ever had,
So it's alla toss up. Anyway. When we refuse the
cult of productivity, we are closer to divinity, is the
argument here, And it's interesting because then this also filters
down to ideas like non productive sex, like gay sex,
or like any sex where you're not trying to have
(10:45):
kids can fit into this, and so can sacrificing animal
or human life, which I am not condoning. I am
not being like the way to step outside of capitalism
is to start sacrificing people, but if you're truly Celtic,
you might Gifting is also a way to make something
non productive because you're not getting something from it, which
(11:06):
is actually probably cooler than killing people. He also has
this class analysis in all of this about sacrifice, like, look,
if you've got power, you can sacrifice so much shit.
You're like so holy because you've got so many goats
that you can just start throwing away goats, whereas like,
if all you got is like one cow, and I
know that an early medieval Irish people, a lot of
them would like. The way they would survive is that,
(11:27):
like I have one cow, and so I eat the
milk or meat. I make cheese from the cow or whatever,
and that's what I live off of. You know, you're
not going to want to kill that cow, but if
you're rich, mean kill cows all day. And so how
do you get away from this like class problem with
your sacrifice? Well, Sophie, but Ti has an answer for you. Okay,
(11:48):
the bourgeois sacrifice people in animals, but the proletarians they
do this expenditure, this like holy expenditure through violent revolution.
It is sacred in this context to smash up your
own city and anger or run around and kill other
rich people.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Okay, I like this stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
When I started thinking about it in this way, started
thinking about this like modern version of it, it helped
me kind of feel like I could understand what the
oldie druids and shit would be doing.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Right right right. That like helps conceptualize what otherwise is
a really dark topic.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Totally and like even because like, well there's two parts
of it. The human sacrifice in particular is very dark.
I also don't totally love animal sacrifice, but it's we
also eat them, so I don't know whatever, but most
people do. But they also, like the Celts are really
and just like throwing gold into lakes and shit, you know,
and it's like kind of hard to wrap my head around,
like I'm gonna make stuff just to destroy it in
(12:52):
a time when there's like we don't really imagine these
societies as like abundant, where they're just like I got
so much stuff, I can like set it on fire,
you know. It meant something to them to make a
thing and then throw it away. And the argument about
whether or not the Celts did human sacrifice is ongoing
(13:13):
and will continue to be ongoing forever. The most likely
answer is yes. But all of the like anecdotal evidence
is made in the context of drumming up a war
against the Celts. So we have all of these romans
being like, oh, those people over there, those people are barbarians.
They sacrifice humans. It's like dark and evil. We probably
(13:33):
need to kill them all. But we also have some
archaeological evidence that they probably were probably killing people. We
talked about this last time. I think you have you know,
like bodies tied up at the bottom of holes and
there's dead people in bog There's like a dead guy
in a bog who got killed three times. He was
(13:53):
bashed with the rock and then strangled and then had
his throat slit, And the archaeological argus human is that
is not just someone who was like really mad, but
probably a sacificat.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
And as a reminder to listeners in Part one, Magpie
talks about this a lot, but like, there's no written
records by actual druids.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, at all, and it's so frustrating, and that was
part of their whole deal is you don't write stuff down.
And probably they were doing human sacrifice at reasonable scale,
but we just like straight up don't know it. There's
also this argument that people make, which is very believable
to me, that like a lot of the rest of
the world around that time, the people they had in
(14:36):
contact with, like Rome, they were moving away from human
sacrifice at this point, and they were starting to get
like more like representative sacrifice where you're like, oh, it's
like kind of like a guy where it counts as
a guy or whatever. But there was one type of
human sacrifice that they did that I'm just gonna throw
out there without any argument. In favor or against, which
(14:59):
is our episodes about Sown, which is coming up like
right around now. Kings who weren't doing right by their
people might have been sacrificed at their sown festival, like
cut off their nipples and slit their throat. That was
a thing. Yeah, ow I know, but it's just it's
the king. It's different.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
And then Sophie our joint favorite film, The Wickerman yep
based on certainly multiple thousands of year old attestations and
probably just based on the truth. They probably made big
people out of wicker and then put people inside those
things and then set them on fire. And also you
(15:42):
could just make a guy out of straw. You don't
feel like building the whole Wickerman, you can build a
straw man straw man argument with a whole new purpose.
Caesar said that the gods preferred it that the Celts
preferred that they sacrifice victims who had been caught in
the act of theft or some other crime, but that
innocent people would do if there was no criminals around
(16:03):
the barn. And there's like no reason to disbelieve Caesar
about that. But there's also no reason to believe Caesar
about that but do you know what we also worship
at the altar of.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Well, if it's us, I would have to say it's
clean drinking water, potatoes and dogs.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yes, yeah, I think that the best thing to do
is you take a potato and you carve it into
the likeness of a god m and then you deep
fry it and then you eat it.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Fun fact, dog backwards spells God. Anyways, coincidence, I think.
So here's ads and we're back.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And so if you're thinking some of those ads seem
like I just be throwing money away, but not all
of them, because some of them are probably genuinely good,
but some of them feel like they might be throwing
money away, Well, have I got news for you. It
would be very Celtic of you to throw money away. Specifically,
they would just like probably just make thousands of bronze
(17:19):
axe heads just to put them into holes and sacrifice
them to the Thonic gods, the gods of the earth,
by just throwing the stuff that they made into a hole.
And the reason we think that these aren't like detritis.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
I want one, I know, bronze axead I know, but
I would keep it.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
I know. Maybe they sacrifice them to the future. Maybe
they were gifts from the Celts to us.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, God, I have a friend who has like a
Roman coin, but I'm like, no, I want a Celtic acxhead,
like a genuine Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
But they're just like throwing these epic things like away
as a form of sacrifice. Is that understanding?
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Yeah? And the reason we think that they when I
say we, I mean the scholars I read think that
these have been sacrificed specifically and aren't just like a
cash to comped back to or some other reason is
that a lot of these axe heads were made with
so much lead in the bronze that they were kind
of useless for battle, and it was like a way
to just like make them cheaper, unless they were like
(18:22):
we know that the Romans like having too much lead
in their drinking water. What if we put it directly
in their bloodstream? But no, they mass manufactured individually, one
at a time. They mass manufactured axheads to bury into holes. Yeah,
and they were really into throwing shit into rivers and bogs,
at least the Irish Celts and probably the rest of them.
We probably see bogs as holy places. You actually get
(18:45):
ear plugs like stretched ear gauges like big old like
you have to stretch your ear hole. Huh. The Celts
did those, and we have some of the originals of those.
What are bogs, Let's go with swamp and don't ask
me to tell you the difference between a swamp a
fen and a bog in a marsh. It's a wetland. Okay, great,
(19:06):
someone out there there are many people who are mad
that I don't know the difference on the top of
my head, but I don't.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
You know what crime your river? And then I'll throw
some shit in it.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
I'll throw an accent into the river.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Of your tears, motherfucker. Oh sorry, this is a happy podcast.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, And so they would like there's all these spots
where they're like, oh, this seemed to be a common
spot that people would throw things because they would find
all this stuff in these in these various bogs and things.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
That's really cool. Actually, I know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
We know about the stuff they gave to like the
Thonic gods. The earth gods is my new favorite word.
It's the word that looks like Lovecraft would write. It's
like c thho and I see yeah, oh, I see
whatever it only spelled correctly, don't listen to me, and
we know that it's much easier to give stuff to
the ground gods. Right, you can like throw it in
a hole. But if you start like throwing axes in
(20:01):
the air, like the gods don't take those. They come
back down and hit people, which, you know whatever. The
Francesco was an axe built specifically to do that. It
was a throwing act where it would bunce on the
ground and cause havoc within the enemy troops. Fuck yeah, yeah,
so they might have like sacrificed stuff to fire, but
we wouldn't really have as much record of that. But
people were into the sky gods as well. One Greek
(20:26):
explorer says that he landed on an island it's probably
Britain or one of the islands off Britain, and found
it full of people who are like sort of a
Greek myth in some ways. But he found some people
he called this Greek myth the Hyperboreans, the people of
the far North, and it's this like sort of mythological
fantasy race of happy people who live on a sunny
(20:47):
island beyond the North, which is why it doesn't feel
like it could be Britain. I was there a couple times,
and you literally have to descend through layers and layers
of clouds in order to go into that accursed land.
But he went there and he probably met some Britons
or other Celts, and he talked about how the god
of the moon came every nineteen years to these folks,
(21:08):
and that is probably a reference to at that I
guess latitude or longitude or whatever the fuck there's an
eighteen point six one year lunar cycle that happens that
far north. So like the moon and stars and shit
are back into this right arrangement every nineteen years. And
the Celts worshiped the sky by fucking knowing the sun
(21:31):
and the moon and the stars like inside and out,
which meant tracking things and studying things and remembering things.
And they did all of that without a written culture.
Like I think they might have had something about this
learning how to remember things if you practice remembering things
all the time, because like I can't imagine having a
star chart in my head. Besides like, oh that one's
(21:53):
the Seven Sisters. There's a Ryan, you know, but like
knowing like ah, yes, this is relates to this means
that we are in like the following cycle, because they
had a whole lunar calendar and shit like that. And
it was probably the Druids doing this study and remembering,
and it is possible that they went passing on that
information since like two thousand BCE, but we don't know.
(22:16):
We only have evidence of the group called the Druids
starting around four hundred BCE okay, and slowly near the
end of the BCE, folks started meeting and talking to
actual Druids, and the ancient Greeks were like, oh, these
guys are the wise philosophers of their people. They are
(22:36):
cool and smart and good. We like them. They're like,
basically just as advanced as us. Fuck yeah, Druids. That
is the last time anyone will say anything nice about
the Druids until people get into weird mining the past
to try and make them cool again. Hundreds or thousands
of years after they died out. Everything written about them
(22:57):
is possibly touched by bias. Aratio wrote that the Druids
must be consulted by the Celtic kings and their wisdom
must be followed. Another guy wrote that the Druids study
nature and moral philosophy, and they are the judges of
their people more generally, like, there's also druids who are kings,
which sort of goes into the like the druids or
(23:18):
a caste of people, right like, or they're like an
educated elite of people, and some of them men of kings,
and some of them are advisors to kings, and some
of them are like, I don't know it probably hermits
and shit, I like to imagine.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Yeah, when Julius Caesar he shows up later to invade
Gaul in the first century BCE, and he's one of
the main sources of druids, and he wrote about them. Quote.
They hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements,
about the size of the universe and the earth, about
the nature of the physical world, and about the power
(23:53):
and properties of the immortal gods, subjects in which they
give instructions to their pupils. They also taught, in contrast,
I believe to Greek or to Roman teachings, I don't
know whatever, that the soul and the earth are both immortal,
and so basically like essentially reincarnation, your soul continues and
(24:14):
shows up in a new body. I've always had a
math problem with believing that. Mm hmm, but you know whatever,
they had a lunar calendar. They record the days as
starting with the night before, which a friend of mine
told me is the Jewish tradition also, and they start
months at the new moon, not the full moon. And
there is a single surviving account of a Druidic ritual
(24:37):
written by I think plenty of the Elder in the
first century AD. He didn't see this firsthand, and he
didn't cite his source. And a lot of people call
bullshit on this.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Right right, I mean fair, Yeah, that's shaky. What does
it say.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
It's an interesting ritual, it's like, and this is the
ritual from which all of the like when you imagine
a sort of I don't know actual I haven't talked
to neopagans about Druidic beliefs, but when you imagine the
sort of cliche one it's based on this, Yeah, he
wrote quote. The Druids hold nothing more sacred than the
mistletoe and the tree on which it grows, provided that
(25:18):
it is an oak. They choose groves of oak for
the sake of the tree alone, and they never perform
any sacred rite unless they have a branch of it.
They think that everything that grows on it is sent
from heaven and by the God himself. Mistletoe, however, is
rarely found on the oak, and when it is, it
is gathered with a great deal of ceremony, if possible,
(25:41):
on the sixth day of the moon. They choose this
day because although the moon has not yet reached half size,
it already has considerable influence. They call the missletoe by
the name that means all healing. They prepare a ritual
sacrifice and feast under the tree, and lee in two
white bulls whose horns are bound. For the first time
(26:04):
on this occasion, a priest attired in a white vestiment
ascends the tree and with a golden sickle cuts the mistletoe,
which is caught in a white cloth. Then next they
sacrifice the victims, praying that God will make his got
his gift propetuited properly good. Sorry, I just don't pronounce
(26:25):
that word. Propetuus propitious, I don't know. You know, means
good to those to whom He has given it. They
believe that if given in a drink, the mistletoe will
give fertility to any barren animal, and that it is
a remedy against all poisons. That's Pliny the Elder, or
I think the Elder it's the source I read just
(26:47):
as Pliny, but I think it's Pliny the Elder. I
want one A golden sickle. Yeah, I want a golden sickle.
Pretty bad, be pretty cool. Imagine gold has always been valued.
What I feel is so much cheaper than right, like
a golden sickle is.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Like absolutely, i'de like, yeah, I don't know. I I
think that, like, you know, Trump's put like gold shit
all over the White House and it looks cheap and
ugly as hell. Yeah, but like seriously janky, but like
you know, a house and then like somebody has like
a cool like brass or gold knob on a cabinet.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Love it? Yeah? No, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
And but like back then, like I feel like gold
was much more accessible and wasn't this like when they're
talking about it. I feel like it's not like, you know,
the way that we talk about something that's like unachievable.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I guess, yeah, like gold is like three thousand dollars
an ounce where we record this, don't ask why I
know the price of gold off the top of my head,
and like my Prepper show is called Live like the
world is dying. I don't advocate buying gold anyway, but yeah,
like a sickle of it you're talking talking about, like
like I'm not getting a sickle of gold anytime soon.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
That's like, that's like a lot.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Okay. I would get like a titanium and do it.
Get it anidized like most of the jewelry I wear
as gold anidized fucking titanium.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Yeah, anyways, my bad, I have the shit.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
No no, no no, but it's it's kind of interesting,
like so you get this like the white robe, the mistletoe,
the like sacred oak. Pliny writes that the word druid
comes from the Greek words for basically the person who
knows the oak, but it probably actually came from the
(28:39):
Celtic words that either mean the same or mean like
the wise person. And if they mean the wise person,
it's because like oak and wisdom have kind of the
same root going on, and it's kind of interesting that
basically it just kind of means druid. Is this ancient
fuck word, So that both the Greek and Celtic are
(29:03):
coming from the proto Indo European words, which rules. And
I said before that there were women druids, and I
hold by that, but it is complicated by the fact
that we don't actually know a lot about the social
class of druid. Druids get used as both like here's
a member of a specific organization of druids. Were probably
(29:24):
a membership, and you know, you go to school or
whatever is led by an arch druid, according to I
think Caesar. But then it's like, it can't be just
one arch druid because he claims it as an arch
druid in Gaul. But then he claims that the actually
Druidism comes from Britain, and so you had to go
there to learn. So there's probably either an arch arch
druid or there's different druidic whatever. I don't fucking know.
But it's also a general term for a wise philosopher,
(29:47):
magician who mediates conflict between people and between armies and
between people and the gods. And so if we go
by this, there are so many women in this role.
We have all of these like quotes about being like oh,
when you go deal with the like barbarians or whatever,
and you get in to a fight, the women are
going to come out and solve this conflict at the end,
(30:08):
which will shock you, Sophie that women are the ones.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Oh my god, are women as problem solvers? I know, Magpie,
I don't know about that.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah. And then also like there's a lot of attestation,
like people specifically being like and when you go to
the Celts, men and women are both equally rulers. Isn't
that wacky? We're in upside downland?
Speaker 1 (30:32):
You know, women can't be bosses, I know.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
And reasonably there's like, you know, Celtic women warriors and
probably not in this like total there's no such thing
as gender in the society thing, but like it's not
what later patriarchal society has like declared the past is.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Like right, dare I say druid fluid ruidh huh?
Speaker 2 (30:55):
That could be a good gender. People could pick up
on that one. Cool and well, later, once the druidsm
been driven underground by Roman conquest, druid gets used as
a word kind of like people would use the word
which a couple hundred years later, So just like a
lone practitioner of magic who's kind of sketchy but kind
of cool be a druid and there's also this thing
(31:16):
that happened that some people called Druidism and some people don't.
The Celts had sacred isles where only women lived, which
is cool, and these women weren't trapped. They could go
to the mainland to fuk if they wanted, So it
was just women wanted to live alone on an island.
(31:38):
I've read about two of these isles, and it's like
reference that there's probably a ton of these isles in
different places around Celtic world. Also, the Celtic world again
is like actually, since I wrote this script, I've been
reading more and more about it. The Celtic world is
like really when you're like, oh, Celtic culture was like this,
Like earlier I quoted about how Celtic culture was super
egalitarian compared to Roman culture, and it's like, well, no,
(31:59):
some of the Celtic clans and tribes were like basically
voting and had like something that looks like republics or
you know, decentralized good things, and some of them were
like total autocracies or whatever. Like they're just different. And
so you have these aisles all over the Celtic world.
I know of at least two of them, but the
implication there's more, and then there's a story about this that,
(32:22):
you know what, I'm willing to be down to believe
is true. And also I would write this into a
full car movie in a second if it is true.
But it might also be the kind of shit that
people made up to demonize women. I don't fucking know.
My dearest desire is to get a time machine and
go back in time and find out how metal the
past is, because people write about it like it's the
most metal thing in the world. But also sometimes people
(32:44):
do whatever. Okay, let me just tell you what it is.
On this aisle at the base of the river where
the river meets the sea, every year, these sacred women
would take the roof off their temple. Then each of
them would pick up the roofing material like thatch or
whatever the fuck it is, and walk back to the
temple to put it back on. But then one of
(33:06):
them would like nudge another one, and like someone gets
knocked over, and then they rip the fallen woman to
shreds and just rip her limb from limb, and then
everyone parades around with their former friend's body parts, which
is not what we accept within polite society. Currently, Well,
(33:27):
no wonder, England is where all the best foll car
comes from when people are doing this kind of shit.
But what doesn't come from England but is grown right
here in the United States of America is some portion
of our ads and one hundred percent of the potatoes
that you grow at home if you grow them in
(33:48):
the United States. Otherwise they're home grown wherever you are.
You're probably able to figure that out for yourself, but
I just want to be really clear. They're only American
grown potatoes if you grow them in America. Otherwise they're
just sparkling potatoes. And we're back. So Rome is doing
its Rome thing where they think they should be in
(34:10):
charge of everything, and they're conquering Iberia aka Spain and Portugal,
only that doesn't get called that at the time. And
they have to get stuff there, and you can get
across the sea to get there. But it's like when
you want to have like a lot of stuff and
support a military, you kind of want to go up
and over. And for those who have an American sense
of geography, just know that the south of France slash
(34:32):
gall touches that water area there. I'm an American too.
The Mediterranean, that's the word for it. So so there's
these long supply lines that run along southern Gaul, okay.
And the way that I see this presented, even by
historians is largely like all of these like raiding clans
(34:53):
of Gauls and you know, these Celts just sort of like, fuck, yeah,
we're gonna steal your shit because it's like coming through
where we can get to it, and we're a bunch
of raiders and bandits. There were evil barbarians and whatever.
These people are literally Rome is literally invading everywhere, including Gaul, and.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
That I'm saying they're fucking genociders.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, it's like steal their loot.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Yeah, fuck yeah, fucket.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And so it's somewhere between banditry and anti colonial resistance,
and honestly, the line has never been totally solid between
those things anywhere in the fucking history. And the Druids
are organizing a lot of this best as I can tell.
They certainly are going to get the credit for organizing this,
And so Rome is like, oh, we no longer like
(35:43):
you Druids. You're no longer like the cool philosophers, like
the Greeks saw you all as you all are evil
murderer horror movie people. So we're going to kill you all.
So Rome goes to war against the various tribes of
Gauls and they win spoiler alert, although they don't like
they never get Scotland and they never get Ireland, but
they kind of get everywhere else and they conquer and
(36:07):
they steal all the gold and silver from all the
temples because you know, fucking Celts are real into sacrificing
their shit, and realizing that the Galls love throwing valuable
shit like gold into lakes, the Romans start auctioning off
the captured This is the most modern part of this
whole story. America would do this. They start auctioning off
(36:28):
the lakes to the highest bidder for entrepreneurs willing to
go through the expense of trying to get the gold
from the bottom of the lake.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
That is so America, I know, very funny.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
And it's interesting too because this whole area in southern
Gaul before they go to war, before Rome like really
goes to war, it's the wild West, Like it's a
colonial force that's expanding westward and is like setting up
these frontier towns and the actual like demographic makeup of
(37:04):
the people in these Roman towns is actually much more
mixed than like Rome itself. So you have people from
far flung parts of the Empire are looking to get ahead,
and so they're gonna go to where shit's sketchy, and
they're gonna go to the edge of the colonial frontier.
We actually covered a very similar thing when we talked
about Japanese colonization of Korea, because you have like the
(37:26):
colonial Japanese were often poorer Japanese who are trying to
come up by go fucking over the Koreans. And you
have the same thing where people from the outskirts of
the Roman Empire are gonna go to southern Gaul and
like be part of that colonizing force and shit, because
it's a good way to get money anyway. This is
(37:49):
just like one of the most like never change history,
never fucking change, because they do it basically in Islamophobia
to justify the Iraq War, only it's the fucking invasion
of Gaul. And like they also do the fucking like frontiers,
like kill all the indigenous North Americans. Shit, it's just
like we have.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Never learned a single fucking thing, is what you're telling me.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
No, no, we probably never will. But you know it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
You're gonna tell me Rome in conclusion, Rome like does
a full on chinacide.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Yeah, no, Yeah, at the end, they're going to yeah,
kill I think I said I spoiled this earlier. They're
going to kill one third of the golf. According to
at least one source, they're going to kill one third
of the Galls and not Galway. I was gonna call Galway.
That's a different place. That's actually where my family's from.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
I know that's Ireland, which we're going to talk about it.
I know at the end here.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
They kill one third of the people and enslave another third.
And like I think we talked about last time, it's
like you would have to kill an awful lot of
people doing human sacrifice to come anywhere near the tiniest
percentage of the evil of killing a third of a
population and a slaving another third.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Oh huh.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
This happens over the course of about one hundred and
fifty years from like two hundred BCE fifty BC really roughly,
and the barbarians just refuse to stay conquered, and Celtic
society starts changing because of the closeness of the frontier, right,
and so you already have the first written attestations about
the Druids say things like, well, things have changed since
(39:18):
in the old days. You know, this is the new
way that things are happening, right, And so that's part
of why we think like maybe they were doing less sacrifice,
but also just they were like adapting to you know,
the old ways were disappearing. And ironically, one of our
first main sources from trans Alpina is a Stoic philosopher
who believe that basically civilization is bad and the barbarians
(39:40):
are good. But I read another person who said that
actually his theory was exactly the opposite. And I fucking
hate historians. Actually I don't. I just wish I had
a year to research each topic so I could have
my own opinion on more of these things. But people
are like, oh, some noble savagery going on whatever. And
he writes that there's three sort of intellectually elite classes
(40:01):
in Celtic society. The bards, who are the singers and poets.
The vates, who are the seers, which is not a
Celtic word, that's a Roman word, who are the seers
who interpret sacrifice and study the natural world, and the
druids who study both the natural world and moral philosophy.
And so when the Vatas do a sacrifice, you need
(40:24):
a druid around to make it actually count. Okay, So
they're like, what's the thing that's like basically a doctor,
but non a doctor, a physician's assistant. You have to
have a doctor on call. Otherwise you're not allowed to
practice medicine. That's the right one version of this. Caesar
disagreed with this assessment. His assessment came a little later,
and so this might be that shit has changed, or
(40:44):
Caesar's line or he is a different part of fucking
Celtic Land. He says that there's only the druids and
the knights among the elites in Celtic society. But either way,
they're like, all right, we got to kill all these people,
and they kind of do, but not all and there's still,
you know, people speaking Bretin. I think I put it
in the script earlier. I think it is Breton in Brittany. Also,
(41:07):
since the last episode, this never happens because usually recorded
at the same time. Since the last episode, someone was
like the Gaelic stuff in Scotland actually they're like, it
really is growing and there's more people who are speaking it.
But Ireland, being a beautiful backwater untouched by the Romans,
was one of the last strongholds of pagan culture, and
(41:28):
it's likely where the druid stayed in power the longest.
We know a bit about pre Christian Irish culture. There's
about one hundred and fifty tribes. Each had a king
or queen. We at least have evidence of queens in
the Sagas, and then elsewhere in the Celtic world there's
lots of evidence of this whatever. And each king had
a druid, a sear, the filid, and a bard. So
(41:49):
the seer sort of the filid is kind of counting
us the vatz essentially, and the druid is the most
powerful of these, and this is the person who sets
the rules for the king. They make gi the geesa
the rules the commands upon the king. Some examples of
this that I've seen are you can't eat horse flesh
before getting into your chariot, although actually I think there's
(42:14):
no evidence of chariots in Ireland outside of the Sagas,
but I'm not sure about that. Okay, you have to
straighten your spear point with your teeth was another geese
that was applied to a king. And then my favorite,
because it's absolutely the bitchest. You're not allowed to talk
to company until your druid has spoken first, based I know,
(42:35):
and the Filid had twelve years of education. And slowly
the Filid got more powerful as the Druids start to
decline and they start taking some of the poetry rolls
from the Bard. Then Ireland becomes Christian over a couple
hundred years in the middle of the first millennium CE,
and suddenly the Filid are just sort of they sort
of probably join the church and keep on going, taking
(42:56):
on the power from the bards as well, although bards
end up in kind of a more of a working
class role. And then also people argue that the Druids
secretly didn't go anywhere, and that people fucking argue about
the shit everyone writes about it like it's true, and
none of it's true. All history is fake. This is
the most frustrating thing I've ever wanted to learn about,
and I'm still really excited about it. By the seventh century,
there's no more distinct order of druids that people are
(43:18):
aware of the filid are a distinct order until the
seventeenth century before the English are like, y'all can't keep
doing that weird heathen shit. We let you get away
with for a very long time, but you gotta stop
now we are English. Please button your top button and
drink tea. And the role of the druids advising and
controlling the kings is taken on by the clerics by Catholics.
(43:39):
But as always you have the fun thing about medieval
Ireland where it's like Christian kind of in air quotes,
because you have women initiating divorce, you have abortion, you
have women owning property of all kinds of Unchristian shit
for the time and shit is like real pagan.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
Real fucking pagan.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
I forgot that I mentioned in one of the other
episodes about how Irish kings during the Christian era would
have to fuck a horse before becoming king. The poor horse,
It's gonna get worse for the horse. I'm gonna read
now the single most metal thing so and possibly the
most pagan and dark, not pagan equals dark, but in
this case, the wildest shit that I've read on the
(44:20):
show in a long time. The rest of what happens
with that horse. This coronation ceremony is related by a
guy named Geraldus Cambrensis from his book from eleven eighty five.
And the people talk about it like it's real. It's
probably real. I'm just always skeptical of everything. Quote. The
whole people of that country gathered in one place. A
(44:41):
white mare is led into the midst of them, and
he who is to be inaugurated, not as a prince,
but as a brute, not as a king, but an outlaw,
comes before the people on all fours, confessing himself a
beast with no less impudence than imprudence. The mayor being
immediately killed and cut into pieces and boiled. A bath
(45:03):
Yeah no, I like I said, it's just bad for
the it's bad for the WORSESO. A bath is prepared
for him from the broth. Sitting in this, he eats
the flesh. This again, seriously, this is like Bastard's level.
Sitting in this, he eats the flesh which is brought
to him, the people staring round and partaking. Also, he
is also required to drink the broth in which he
(45:25):
is bathed, not drawing it in any vessel, nor even
in his hand but lapping it with his mouth and
uh yeah, fuh fuck that Christian.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Yeah, you know, OKAYI is thing I did not like that.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
No, uh, which is funny because I was like, we actually,
I don't know, man, they might have made up with
that ship after the Christians. Who fucking knows. Father Joe
mcveig wrote nineteen ninety three quote, the first Christian missionaries
to Ireland did not attempt a root and branch eradication
of the Celtic Druidic tradition and beliefs. Instead, the new
religion absorbed the Holy Mountains and the innumerable Holy wells
(46:09):
and gave him a Christian name. And so that's just
like syncretism. And throughout the Celtic world, especially in Ireland,
there's evidence that the Druids didn't really go away as
much as like vaguely convert to Catholicism and become priests
the new educated class, while still remaining Druids. A lot
of Celtic Christian saints get called druids. One saint, Saint Bueno,
(46:32):
was a Welsh guy who was said to have raised
seven people from the dead because you know, saints have
to do miracles, uh, huh. His last words as he
was dying was that he saw the Holy Trinity, the Saints,
and the Druids.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
Fucking sick.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
And there's an anecdote that I think I hinted at
in the first episode that I somehow forgot, and it's
my favorite anecdote, this whole thing. When I'm preparing for
a script, as I read, I like torture my poor
friends who just want to hear in my life, and
instead I just like talk to them and I tell
them all of the things that I've been reading, because
that's the answer to how my life is, is that
I read books all day, which rules but leaves me
(47:09):
incapable of acting normal at parties, and so instead at
parties I tell people the following anecdote, which is that
when the Roman army reached Britain and they captured most
of Britain, and they go to this final island and
they're capturing and it's like the biggest stand off fight.
It's the big clibactic moment of the movie. Unfortunately, the
Druids are going to lose. And he writes about seeing
(47:31):
the enemy line there in the trees and among the
enemy soldiers, among the Celtic soldiers are a lot of
women in all black moving through the ranks.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Oh that's cool.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah. And then the Druids are also saying, you know,
scary things, and so there's a question of whether or
not the women in black are like a separate class
in the Druids, or they are Druids. But they also
write that this like so scared the Roman army that
for a while they just stood Dylan didn't defend themselves,
as like arrows rained down upon them. And so it
(48:05):
was a fierce spell and it worked. It cast fear
into the enemy. I think that's cool. Unfortunately, the spell
was not a powerful high enough rank spell to kill
the enemy, and the Celts all died. I don't know, well,
not all of them, but a lot of them. And
that is the Druids. The past is metal as fuck.
(48:27):
I wish I had a time machine. And I don't
know whether I would like them or not, but my god,
they're interesting and they sure fought tooth and fucking nail
against rum.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Love it, thank you, enjoyed it. Spooky week.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Spooky Week is over. Next week I'll talk about something
spookier like capitalism and the people who fight it. Or
whatever the fuck I don't know. And also just to
say here at the end that if you want to
listen to me and Robert Evans and a bunch of
people play really fun role playing games, we're going to
(49:04):
do a takeover of cool Zone Media book Club for
six weeks where we're going to play Pathfinder, which is
like Dungeons and Dragons, but I like it more. And
our game master is none other than Jason Bowman, the
creator of Pathfinder. And I'm very cool, pretty excited about that,
and you could be excited about it too by checking
it out this Sunday on cool Zone Media book Club.
(49:25):
And also, nothing's happening in the regular world right now.
People don't have to listen to like news shows. They
can just listen to history and games. Yeah, okay, great,
bye everyone.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
By Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. More podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on our radio app, a podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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