Druids

[Guest guest]

Hinduism Today

Our Druid Cousins

 

Meet the brahmins of ancient Europe, the high caste of Celtic

society

 

By Peter Berresford Ellis

 

Here Peter Berresford Ellis, one of Europe's foremost experts

of the Celts, explains how modern research has revealed the amazing

similarities between ancient Celt and Vedic culture.

The Celt's priestly caste, the Druids, has become a part of modern

folklore.

 

The Druids of the ancient Celtic world have a startling kinship

with the brahmins of the Hindu religion and were, indeed, a

parallel development from their common Indo-European cultural

root which began to branch out probably five thousand years ago.

It has been only in recent decades that Celtic scholars have

begun to reveal the full extent of the parallels and cognates

between ancient Celtic society and Vedic culture.

 

The Celts were the first civilization north of the European Alps

to emerge into recorded history.

At the time of their greatest expansion, in the 3rd century bce,

the Celts stretched from Ireland in the west, through to the central

plain of Turkey in the east; north from Belgium, down to Cadiz in

southern Spain and across the Alps into the Po Valley of Italy.

They even impinged on areas of Poland and the Ukraine and, if

the amazing recent discoveries of mummies in China's province of

Xinjiang are linked with the Tocharian texts, they even moved as

far east as the area north of Tibet.

 

The Druids were not simply a priesthood.

They were the intellectual caste of ancient Celtic society,

incorporating all the professions: judges, lawyers, medical

doctors, ambassadors, historians and so forth, just as does the

brahmin caste.

 

The scholars of the Greek Alexandrian school clearly described

them as a parallel caste to the brahmins of Vedic society.

 

The very name Druid is composed of two Celtic word roots

which have parallels in Sanskrit.

Indeed, the root vid for knowledge, which also emerges in the

Sanskrit word Veda, demonstrates the similarity.

The Celtic root dru which means "immersion" also appears in

Sanskrit.

So a Druid was one "immersed in knowledge."

 

Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard, one of the leading

linguistic experts in his field, has pointed out that of all the

Celtic linguistic remains, Old Irish represents an extraordinarily

archaic and conservative tradition within the Indo-European family.

Its nominal and verbal systems are a far truer reflection of

the hypothesized parent tongue, from which all Indo-European

languages developed, than are Classical Greek or Latin.

The structure of Old Irish, says Professor Watkins, can be

compared only with that of Vedic Sanskrit or Hittite of the Old

Kingdom.

 

This applies not only in the field of linguistics but in law

and social custom, in mythology, in folk custom and in traditional

musical form.

The ancient Irish law system, the Laws of the Fénechus, is

closely parallel to the Laws of Manu.

Many surviving Irish myths, and some Welsh ones, show

remarkable resemblances to the themes, stories and even

names in the sagas of the Indian Vedas.

 

Comparisons are almost endless.

Among the ancient Celts, Danu was regarded as the "Mother

Goddess."

The Irish Gods and Goddesses were the Tuatha De Danaan

("Children of Danu").

Danu was the "divine waters" falling from heaven and nurturing

Bíle, the sacred oak from whose acorns their children sprang.

Moreover, the waters of Danu went on to create the great

Celtic sacred river--Danuvius, today called the Danube.

Many European rivers bear the name of Danu--the Rhône

(ro-Dhanu, "Great Danu") and several rivers called Don.

Rivers were sacred in the Celtic world, and places where votive

offerings were deposited and burials often conducted.

The Thames, which flows through London, still bears its Celtic

name, from Tamesis, the dark river, which is the same name as

Tamesa, a tributary of the Ganges.

 

Not only is the story of Danu and the Danube a parallel to that

of Ganga and the Ganges but a Hindu Danu appears in the Vedic

story "The Churning of the Oceans," a story with parallels in Irish

and Welsh mytholgy.

Danu in Sanskrit also means "divine waters" and "moisture."

 

Celtic cosmology is a parallel to Vedic cosmology. Ancient

Celtic astrologers used a similar system based on twenty-seven

lunar mansions, called nakshatras in Vedic Sanskrit.

Like the Hindu Soma, King Ailill of Connacht, Ireland, had a

circular palace constructed with twenty-seven windows through

which he could gaze on his twenty-seven "star wives."

 

There survives the famous first century bce Celtic calendar

(the Coligny Calendar) which, as soon as it was first discovered

in 1897, was seen to have parallels to Vedic calendrical

computations. In the most recent study of it, Dr. Garret Olmsted,

an astronomer as well as Celtic scholar, points out the startling

fact that while the surviving calendar was manufactured in the first

century bce, astronomical calculus shows that it must have been

computed in 1100 bce.

 

Peter Berresford Ellis is one of the foremost living authorities

on the Celts and author of many books on the subject, including "Celt

and Roman,Celt and Greek,Dictionary of Celtic Mythology"

and "Celtic Women."