This painting was done after 40 years of Indian study when I realized that I had no Indian ancestry, but found their phylosophy, life style sweet to my taste. When I learned that my ancestry, French, English, Danish, Welsh, came from the Celtic regions of Europe had similar customs, habits, and history my study emphasis changed course. It was brought to my attention by a woman I call the “lady of the lake” when she reminded me that the books, “Pendragon,” by Catherine Christian, and “The Mists of Avalon,” by Marion Zimmer Bradly, which I had read, both were introductions to my Celtic ancestry. (My unpublished story, “An Answer From Grandfather.”) From that time I became a serious student, researcher, and explorer of Celtic History.
After about 800 B.C.E., in the northern and western part of the patchwork quilt that was Celtic Europe, wise men and women emerged as the Druids , the organizers of wisdom and knowledge of the Northern Native European Tradition .
The Druids were the Celtic authorities who were the, learned, and magisterial class among the Celtic people, who lived in tribes covering Northwestern Europe. The ethical teaching of the Druids can be summed up as: respect for the Gods, do no evil, be strong and courageous. They believed in reincarnation and transmigration of the souls. The Druids were oriented to nature and had reverence for the ancestors. Their pantheon held a great number of deities of primary importance – a variety of gods, mother goddesses, war goddesses, tutelary goddesses. They also had the concept of the triune god, three aspects of a single deity. They did not believe in punishment by the deities after death. The Druids and priestesses were the healers, judges, astronomers, teachers, oracles and learned leaders of the Celtic clans.
The head Druid was the Arch Druid , and his female counterpart was called the “High Priestess of the Grove”. 20 years of study were required to become a Druid , slowly working through the exacting levels of the orders. Because the Druids relied on an oral tradition rather than written records, knowledge about their practices are slight. (Their history like that of the American Indians was sacred and unwritten.) The Druids were well versed in astrology, magic, and the mysterious powers of plants and animals; they held the Oak tree and the mistletoe, especially when the latter grew on Oak trees, in great reverence, and they customarily conducted their rituals in Oak forests. (Much like the Biblical Abraham, who built an alter to his God under the Oaks of Mamre.)
Their economy was pastoral and agricultural. Each tribe was headed by a king and was divided by class. The Druids had three division within their order: the Bards (poets, historians, who wore blue robes; the Ovates (prophets, philosophers), who wore green: and the Druids , who wore white. Christian monks and popes later copied their tonsure and Celtic holidays.
Druidism: The practice of the Druids and ancient Celtic tradition in which the forces of nature were honored, and/or the modern theology said to derive from it. Unlike the revealed desert religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, there is no Celtic creation myth, nor is there a creator god. There is no mediating divine savior. A Celt would pray to his mythic ancestors who's spirits dwell within the universe.
Many thousands of years ago, the Celts emerged in central Europe, allegedly from the descendants and survivors of Atlantis as a distinctive group of peoples with their own language, mythology and art. Then expanded to include parts of central Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and eventually Britain and Ireland. In parts of Britain that the Romans could not invade, Druidism survived the onslaught of the Roman armies. This tradition included belief in the immortality of the soul, which at death was believed to pass into the body of a newborn child. The Druids believed that they were descended from a supreme being.
The Druids led their people in resisting the Roman invasion, but their powers were weakened when Julius Caesar's organized forces destroyed their Oak groves, their sacred places of ritual, desecrating and destroying by brute force the Druids and the Celtic practices.
The various Celtic tribes were bound together by common speech, customs, and practices, rather than by any well-defined central governments. The absence of political unity (like many Indian tribes in the Americas) contributed substantially to the limiting of their way of life, making them vulnerable to their enemies, . . . and Roman Catholicism.
Celtic mythology, which included earth gods, (like the numerous Catholic saints) various woodland sprits, and sun deities still pervade the lore of Celtic ancestry.
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