| We will have complete free tarot card readings here over the next few weeks so be sure to check back.get a free lucky charm here,get free spells here. As to magical arts, exercised by Druids and Druidesses,black magic woman tabs, the ancient Irish MSS. are full of stories about them. Joyce has said, "The Gaelic word for Druidical is almost always applied where we should use the word magical--to spells, incantations, metamorphoses, &c" Not even China at the present day is more given to charms and spells than was Ireland of old. Constant application of Druidic arts upon the individual must have given a sadness and terror to life, continuing long after the Druid had been supplanted.It was a comfort to know that magician could be pitted against magician, and that though one might turn a person into a swan,magic jack or horse, another could turn him back again. |
he fullest account of the druids and their religion is that given by Julius Caesar in his history of his wars in Gaul in 59-51 BC. Caesar is insistent that druidism originated in Britain, although there is no necessity to believe that all the features of the religion as it was practised in Gaul were present in Britain. Interpreting druidism is difficult, for the druids refused to commit anything about their beliefs and rituals to writing, and modern inquirers are obliged to rely on the accounts of the classical authors who have a tendency to concentrate upon the ghoulish, the bizarre and the malign. Later evidence in the early literature of Wales, and more particularly in that of Ireland, can be useful, although what has been preserved went through a process of selection and modification by Christian scribes.
The essence of druidism seems to have been a kind of pantheism, and links have been discerned between it and some aspects of Hinduisim. The names of some 400 gods are known, most of whom seem to have had a very localised cult. The correct performance of ritual was central to the religion, and the prescribed pattern of ceremonies presumably constituted the greater part of the 20-year training undertaken by a apprentice druid. Human sacrifice was practised. When the druids of Anglesey were attacked by the Romans in AD 61, their altars, according to Tacitus, 'were drenched with the blood of prisoners'. As the Romans considered druidism to be a nationalistic religion underpinning British resistance to the Empire, they were determined to suppress it.
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