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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5336365" data-attributes="member: 4937">Most people don't.  And in particular most people that think they are 'druids' are pretty willfully blind to that.Everything that you think you know about druids - the pointy hats, the robes, the beards, the sickles, the holly, the horns on their head, the astronomy, their belief system - is pretty much nothing but propaganda from the Reinnaisance era.  It was just made up.  It was some Northern European scholars jealous of the Southern Europeans who were celebrating their Greek and Roman heritage say, "Oh yeah, well we had some pretty cool ancestors too.  See.. there were these Druids...and they were really into math and astronomy and...".Stonehenge?  Not druids.  The Stonehenge culture is about much older than Druidism as Druids were older than 16th century Dutch and English.  The connection with druidism was invented to make plausible Druids as these philosopher astronomers who were doing these remarkable engineering projects.Everything else you think you know about Druids is probably just D&D.  D&D popularized the notion of 'druid' to the extent that modern Druid religious groups started including it as a check box on forms for why you wanted to convert to druidism.Now, I'm not saying that everything that is believed about druids is implausible.  The best surviving document we have about them is Julius Caesar's propaganda peice justifying his invasion of Gaul and celebrating himself, and its possible that not everything in the document is as wrong, ignorant and outright decietful as the rest of it.  And if that's the case then there are hints that something like the mythology around them that has been invented might have existed.  But really, its all just speculation based on those vague hints in some very limited and very questionable documents.  And to the extent that you take those hints as being truthful reporting, then you have to at least consider that Druidic worship might have involved alot of human sacrifice - a feature of the religion that most later writers wanted to excise for their own propaganda purposes.</blockquote>

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