8 - Druids

Summary

[T]he vast Solitude & holy Silence[,] except when heightend by the Solemn Murmurs of the rustling Branches[,] strikes at the first Entry with a Sacred horror, an awful veneration as of a present Deity.

We customarily associate the romance of place, the search for isolation and darkness, and their internalisation in the recesses of the psyche, with a later age than the one addressed by this book. Here, I aim to explore the deeply personal responses of two of my protagonists, Peter Sterry and William Stukeley, to imaginary worlds inspired by their notions of ancient British Druidic culture. This should enable us to see, firstly, how the dry, scholarly façade of the prisca theologia could be brought to life; secondly, how two thinkers, each sympathetic to this culture but writing a good half-century apart, might relate to it in differing ways, partly conditioned by their respective times and circumstances; thirdly, how such seldom-discussed contexts can help us to expand, and to question, received views of intellectual life either side of 1700; and finally, how convictions about music's ontological realities helped to create such individual perspectives.

An awareness of the Druids had been gradually gaining ground in English culture at least since the sixteenth century, when Holinshed chronicled their skills in theology, philosophy and music, while Camden and other scholars of antiquity collated allusions from classical texts. That they could be utilised by Protestant polemicists as a metaphor for the papist corruption of true religion serves only to emphasise the extent of their assimilation into the culture during the Tudor period. By the second half of the seventeenth century, this growing body of knowledge was being further expanded by the more focused studies of, among others, Edmund Dickenson and Aylett Sammes. John Aubrey suggested that sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury, generally thought to be of Roman or even Viking origin, might in fact be Druidic temples. Thus the stage was set for Stukeley's extensive research, begun in the late 1710s and continued for the rest of his life, into the Druidic identity of such monuments, and more generally into British Druidry.

Britain, however, was not the only country to claim a Druidic past. In France, scholars from at least the early sixteenth century onward had been piecing together their own Gallic version, one that sited itself even more explicitly in prisca theologia traditions.