How Metal Is the Past?

The druids, the educated philosopher class of the ancient Celts, didn’t write things down. They could have—some Celts were literate, writing in Gaulish with either the Greek or Roman alphabet—but they didn’t, as a matter of principle and custom. Well, really, we don’t know exactly why they didn’t, because they didn’t tell us, because not a single druid ever wrote anything down.

Julius Caesar, who was busy enslaving and murdering his way through Gaul (modern France), said that the druids didn’t write anything down because they felt that committing things to writing meant weakening one’s memory. It took 19 or 20 years of education to become a druid, leaving them with exhaustive knowledge of law, ceremony, conflict resolution, and the movement of celestial bodies.

They also probably learned how to sacrifice people, but historians are less sure about that. They probably sacrificed people, including burning them alive in giant statues built of straw or wicker, but we don’t know that for certain. Most of the contemporary writing about druids was written by their enemies who were looking for a moral excuse to conquer Gaul.

I have my own theory about why they never wrote anything down, though. One I might be wrong about. I think they didn’t write anything down because to commit laws and best practices to paper is to make them immutable. I’m certain that in the centuries or millennia that druids lived, their teachings changed. Though they were probably capable of feats of memory that would astound those of us who rely on writing, I can’t imagine that there weren’t subtle or radical changes between generations—and I suspect that was by design. I suspect that the druids weren’t afraid to let things change here and there and adapt to circumstance.

Some historians suspect, for example, that the Celts were moving away from human sacrifice already before Rome declared that they were evil barbarians who needed a good conquering.

It’s possible, as overwhelming legions flooded Gaul and Britain from the south, that the Celts started looking to their old ways out of desperation. We’ll probably never know. We don’t know much about what they were thinking, because they didn’t write things down.

We don’t know if they burned people alive in wicker men. We don’t know if the Irish cut the nipples off their king and then slit his throat on Samhain if he was doing a bad ...