Stuff You Should Know - How Druids Worked

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Anyone who likes Led Zeppelin, plays Dungeons & Dragons, or worships the rising sun at Stonehenge on the vernal equinox can tell you druids are cool. But archaeologists will tell you we can’t even be certain druids existed. Buckle in for a history mystery! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's a lot over today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Josh over there again, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the Led Zeppelin edition. The what edition? The Led Zeppelin edition. Is that what you thought of?

Yeah, anytime I see that, I guess it was, it's not the Zozo album cover, but I think it was a poster that you'd see in Spencer's that was, I think, from Led Zeppelin 4. It was a guy with a long beard. He looked like... Oh, sure. He looked like, what was his name? The guy from Lord of the Rings. Gandalf?

Yeah, yeah. He looks like Gandalf, basically. Zeppelin was very, anyone who's ever seen Song Remains the same, they had all sort of mystical druid-esque leanings. Right. They were well known for their druid-esque leanings, but so that's what I think of with druids, and it turns out that that is, in one sense, very much accurate. That is what a druid looks like, but if you're talking strictly about druids that came from

the 17th century onward, like just a few hundred years ago, you would be correct. If you're talking about the ancient druids, the druids druids, the ones that everybody thinks of is like the OG druids. I almost said that. We have no idea what they were like, really, or we have very, very little idea what they were like, and it's based on such potentially slanted evidence that some archaeologists refuse to agree with certainty that druids ever even existed the way that we think they did.

Yeah, and it's funny. The Grabster helped us out with this one, with the research, and I don't know if Ed's been listening to us for too long, or what, because he fell into the Josh and Chuck trap of not even saying what a druid was until page four, so we should just go ahead and say, when we're talking about the ancient druids, it wasn't like a race of people or anything like that. They were Celts, and as defined by some history website I went to, they were members of the learned class of ancient Celts in ancient Britain and France, and they acted as, it

was really more like job-based. They were teachers and judges and priests and philosophers, so that's, I mean, I never knew that it was really just sort of, jeez, I don't even know how to define it, not a class of people, well, sort of a class, but it was kind of job-based, I never knew that. An occupation. Yeah, occupational. Yeah, they had a union, they had pretty decent health insurance, which is ironic because they didn't know what they were doing with medicine at the time.

Yeah, or if you had really good insurance, you could wind up in the wicker man, getting burned alive. Your family would benefit from that, you wouldn't potentially, but that's, I mean, what you just said is basically the most you can say about druids with any level of accuracy. Are we done? Yep. That was it. Short druids, everybody.

Short stuff. Everything beyond that is different varying degrees of conjecture, and I don't want to like beat this horse over and over again, so I think it's really just good to kind of like, just put it out at the beginning, like everything we're talking about from this point on is relatively unproven. Archaeology is being very stubborn and to their credit about what they will agree about druids and what they won't agree about druids. And I think that's great, but everybody else is like, hey, that's good.

You guys sit there and doggedly and methodically figure it out. We're going to just let our imaginations run wild and come up with this conception of druids. Yeah, and one of the big reasons why we don't have a lot of firsthand accounting is because the druids did not, and they had a very good reason, but they didn't write things down. They didn't keep a historical record about themselves. And the reason makes a lot of sense. There was a lot of power in the fact that they remained sort of mystical and that a conquering enemy or foe can't just get a bunch of druidic.

Is that a word? Yes. Druidic writings to figure out what they're all about. So there was a lot of mystery and mystique and because of that, a lot of power in just passing along traditions orally within their own group, it really ended up kind of being giving them a stranglehold on their mystique. Right. Yeah, for sure.

And the thing is though, that's a super important point. They didn't write things down, but almost as important is to say that they weren't illiterate. No. Like the Celts wrote stuff down. And surprisingly, when they wrote stuff down, they wrote it in Greek. So the later Romans who came along, as we'll see, and had a huge influence on Celtic culture, when they encountered the Celts, these heathens, these savage tribes, they, or what the Romans considered them to be, they found that they already wrote in Greek.

But the Celts themselves, Chuck, and I didn't know this, they were basically a multi-ethnic group. They were not just like Germanic or they weren't just like Aryan or North African. They weren't like an ethnic group. They were apparently connected by language, but they were very tribal and they warred with each other pretty much constantly. So each little tribe would have its own kingdom, but they all were united under this culture, this Celtic culture and Celtic language.

Yeah. And even though the Druids didn't write about themselves, early Greeks did, specifically Pasodonius, and here's where, like you said earlier, it's like someone writes about the Druids, maybe based on lore or legend, sometimes maybe first-hand accounts, but then other people write about those accounts and then people write about the accounts of the accounts. And pretty soon, all of the sort of quote-unquote knowledge we have about the Druids is based on, it's like a game of telephone, essentially. And one of the biggest contributors to, I guess, Druidic writing was Julius Caesar.

He wrote a lot about the Druids, but from the perspective of a conquering army. So it's definitely gonna have a slant, and he also based a lot of his writings on Pasodonius to begin with. Right. Yeah. Pasodonius' writings were lost, like all of them were lost. We know he wrote a lot about the Druids because, like you said, all those people came later and referenced his writings before his writings had been lost, but we've never seen his writings,

which is a shame because we probably could have learned a lot about the Celts and the Druids firsthand. But by the time, so Pasodonius was working in the first century BCE, by the time Julius Caesar comes along, I think about 50, 60 years later, he has a different slant than Pasodonius probably would have, because like you said, he was showing up and saying, here are all these people who we are subjugating, and then here's the reason why we're subjugating them. He wasn't writing about the Celts, and he wasn't writing about the Druids to document their culture, he was writing propaganda to support the campaign of Roman imperialism

back home so that everybody saw, oh, it is good that we're going and conquering these people and bringing civilization to these heathen tribes because they're just running around cutting each other's heads off and sacrificing one another to their oak trees and possibly even eating one another. And now it's up to historians and archaeologists to say, okay, how much of that is accurate? How much of that comes from a kernel of truth? And how much of it is outright just fraudulent propaganda, which is a huge job to undertake? Yeah.

And we'll touch more on the human sacrifice stuff, because that's certainly juicy. But so I guess Caesar writes a lot about this, and it's like you said, from that perspective, when things really get wacky is when our old buddy, Pliny the Elder, starts writing. And this is about, what, about a hundred years later, and this is when the writing really amped them up as like very odd, wizard-like people. Yeah. And Pliny, so he was a Roman citizen. He was a great traveler though and a great, a great, I guess, great wingman.

He was a great wingman. He would just support you eat whether you struck out or not. Struck out. Are we on three's company? What's going on? Yeah. If you went to the regal beagle with Pliny, you're going to come away happy one way or another.

Yes. So he, but he was still like, he was a documenter of all the other cultures. That's what he was going to do. But the problem is, is he was still a Roman citizen. So he saw things through Roman eyes. So that means that he saw heathens as heathens, like, yeah, their culture was interesting and it was worth writing down, but it doesn't mean that he had a respect for it or got everything right or understood everything correctly.

But you, the point is you could take Pliny's writings potentially with a little more of a grain of sand than Caesar's. Sure. Salt. But yeah, that's right. Whatever you want to chew on. Yeah. But Caesar's writings have an advantage over Pliny's in that his were more contemporaneous

to Celtic culture. By the time Pliny came along, the Romans had already spread their culture throughout the Celtic lands. That is to say, they stamped out every other culture. Basically. And what I found interesting from research, Chuck, is that there were varying degrees of grudgingness at accepting that culture among the Celtic tribes. In some respects, they were like, oh, yes, I love civilization.

It's way better than the life we were living before. There's so many great trappings to it and it's so much less hard and difficult and muddy. But at the same time, I also don't like how the Romans just kind of like rape everybody. They feel like raping and tax us even though we're considered basically slaves to them. So there was a real weird period where the Romans started to permeate with their culture, the Celtic culture of, I guess, ambivalence toward that permeation. Yeah. So, I mean, these are the historical writings that we have.

As far as actual real archaeological evidence, it's not much better as far as conjecture goes. A couple of examples because there's always this longing to connect the druids and their paganism, their brand of paganism to this ritual sacrifice. Right. Because it's juicy. So, the very famous Lindau man who was Lindau II, Lindau I was a woman, but this was a body that they found in 1984 preserved in peat, in a peat bog.

He was a dude in his mid-20s and had a very violent death as it appears. They found food in his belly, so there's so much conjecture. The conjecture there is essentially that he was ritually sacrificed. That was his last meal, and then he had what's known as three deaths. He was strangled, there are ligature marks on his neck, very well preserved. You should look him up. The garret, the leather strap is still around his neck. Oh, yeah.

He was hit on the head after that, like blunt force trauma style, and then his throat was cut. So the speculation is they gave him a last meal and then gave him possibly three deaths to satisfy three different pagan gods. But it also, he was found naked, so there's speculation that he could have just been robbed of his clothes and robbed of his money, and maybe by someone who was a sicko. Maybe or somebody who is like, get that thing out of my face and put some clothes on, I'm telling you for the last time, and then it went south from there.

Yeah, and you can go see, he travels a little bit, but he's on permanent display in the British Museum, if you want to go say hi. Yeah, if you ever want to be reminded that you're really not a lot more than a bag of skin, go check out pictures of Lindow Man, because that's basically what he is. Yeah, they've also found mass graves from the Iron Age in these areas where the druids were around, and again, conjecture that this was an example of like mass ritual sacrifice, but that's largely been pretty much poo pooed over the years as well. Yeah, it's definitely up for debate whether they were just executed or whether they were

killed in battle, or whether, yeah, they were sacrificed. There's some other archaeology that has really tantalized archaeologists. There's one called the Deal Warrior. Yeah, that's a great name. Yeah, it really is, especially if you check out like how he was found, he was found with a shield, a spear, and a sword, and wearing a crown. And as far as they can tell, there's no other Celtic burial that has been found thus far that had all of these accoutrements.

So this is an extraordinarily important person, but they have no idea who it was, but they want to say druids so bad, they can taste it. And then one of the other burials that was found, they found them in a graveyard somewhere in, I believe, Britain, and he was found with a lot of weird stuff, like what appears to be a board game, but that they think possibly was used for divining the future, like rolling dice or something like that. He was found with divining rods, like they used to find water and that kind of thing. So that indicates some sort of ritual magic.

He was also found with a set of surgical tools. So they're calling this guy the doctor because the archaeologists are being levelheaded. Everybody else is saying, this is the grave of a druid. It's the grave of a druid. Just say it, you stupid archaeologist, and he's like, no, I won't say it. He won't say it, but it could prove to be a really important find. It probably already has proven itself that we just aren't openly interpreting it yet. Yeah, and I should mention if Deal Warrior is not the name of a death metal band, then

someone's doing it wrong. Yeah. All you need is a picture of this guy on your album cover, and this is your first one. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right. Let's take a little break and we'll come back and talk, we'll post some more conjecture right after this.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running

and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck, we're back. It's time for more conjecture. Again, some archaeologists refuse to say that druids definitely existed, that a priestly class of druids in Celtic culture existed.

Just chew on that one for a while. Really undermine your Led Zeppelin poster. Yeah. Well, here's the thing too about the Celts, is we don't know a lot about where their culture began or when it began exactly because druids are Celts. We obviously don't know much about where they began either. We do know how it kind of all ended. And when we say ended, I mean, you can go to modern druidism websites today.

And go wear a flowery dress and frolic barefoot in a field with people in any given country, probably. But that's not exactly the same thing. The actual druids, we know because of writing from the first and second centuries, basically there are laws all over the place that ban druidism. Part of this Roman conquering way, which is like, hi, we're here. So forget everything, forget your way of life. You are now Roman.

Enjoy using toilets. Exactly. And they're like, I do like the toilets a lot. So with Claudius, like a couple of Caesar's, Augustus and Tiberius said, okay, Roman citizens aren't allowed to participate in druidism. And then by the time Claudius came around and by the time his rule ended in 54 CE, the druids had been at least officially stamped out, like not only could you as a Roman citizen not participate in druidism, druidism in totality was banned in the Roman Empire under punishment

of death. And it had the effect of driving druidism underground for sure. Yeah. But it's not like it just went away. They still like, you know, they would go off and do their own thing quietly as much as possible. Right. And so, and I mean, when Claudius is banning this, it's not just like, no, we don't like

this. It's a threat to the Roman control over the Gallic lands and these Celts. That's not the reason that he gave, although that was almost certainly the reason why they outlawed druids, but the reason they gave were things like these people practice an inhuman religion where they sacrifice people to their gods. Apparently, they would go through criminals and prisoners. And then once they ran out of criminals and prisoners, they would start sacrificing their own innocent people.

They just had this bloodlust. So that religion had to be stamped out and repressed. And of course, the Roman citizenry around the world said, oh, yeah, that's great. Get rid of druidism. But like you said, it just kind of went underground, it seems like. And then as rebellion started to kind of crop up around the British Isles and in France against Roman rule, it's pretty much a sure bet that if there were such a thing as druids, they were helping to foment that rebellion and that uprising.

Yeah. And I think I get the idea that the Romans were a little spooked by the druids while they were like vastly superior with their military and their might. They paid a lot of attention to them and like they're not going to make a bunch of hay about something that they don't think is a threat. And I think they were spooked out a little bit like when they were resisting, you know, after these laws were passed, the druids invoked a prophecy saying the end of the world is coming near and the Roman Empire is going to be destroyed by fire.

And I don't think it was just like the Romans just brushed that off. I think they were like, oh, geez, those guys are crazy. And also, how are we going to deal with the big fire? Right, exactly. So that, I mean, I could see being spooked by that, couldn't you? Yeah. Yeah. So they definitely, if they weren't spooked, Chuck, at least they took them quite seriously

and like, again, outright ban them. But not only did they prophecy that they were going to be burned by fire. Like some of these early writings of druids, especially Pliny, made it seem kind of like creepy and magical and wizardy, you know? Like Pliny described druids as holding blood offerings like slaughters of animals and humans and their sacred oak groves. And we should say, I don't think we said this, but the word druid, one of the suggestions for the etymology of it is dru and wid, dru means to know and wid means oak.

So druid may mean knower of the oaks or the people who have the knowledge of these sacred oak trees. And Pliny described these guys in like white beards and long white robes, climbing up oak trees to cut down mistletoe with golden sickles, you know, around saw wane or, you know, the spring solstice or summer solstice or spring equinox and worshiping this whole pantheon of gods that unfortunately the Romans didn't bother to write down the names of. Yeah. And wasn't, isn't there speculation that Merlin from the Arthurian legend was a druid?

Like he survived, you know, the, not just the Roman Romanization of Celtic culture and also the Christianization of Celtic culture, but into the Middle Ages when he was supposedly running around. Yeah. And again, because they weren't writing anything down, you know, when you're a conquering person, you can go in and like raid the archives and get a lot of knowledge. I imagine it was kind of creepy in and of itself to just find that they had no writings at all.

Right. And then you're all of a sudden, I mean, I'm sure there was like questioning and stuff, but then you're just going on whatever they wanted to tell you and any druid worth assault was probably like, you know, probably tease them a bit about how creepy they might be. Sure. Yeah. So that whole not writing things down thing, that's, that's an important point. So one thing it means that we don't have any direct understanding of the druids from

the druids, but the reason why they didn't write things down was twofold. And if they were this priestly elite class that stood between the average Kelt and the gods, they were the ones who knew the secrets of the oak and the wisdom of the oak and all of that. One way they maintain that monopoly or that have the market cornered on that knowledge was to make it so that the only way you could learn to be a druid was from another druid and to pass along this ancient tradition of knowledge, which makes the whole thing way more mystical than even if there was some main religious book or something like that.

It's oral ancient knowledge passed on from druid to druid. That's how they passed it on. And that's why they didn't write anything down. And then elsewhere I saw, I think it was maybe Strabo or someone else said that the reason they didn't write things down was because they felt like by reading, you didn't learn as much as from being immersed in it and in having it explained to you over the period of something like 20 years by another druid because that's about how long it took to be initiated into being a full druid.

A full rank druid? A full rank, a black belt druid. Shall we take another break? Why not, man? All right, let's do it. And then we'll talk a little bit more about whether or not they practice human sacrifice and stone hinge and all sorts of other good things right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So, I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. All right, so we talked a lot so far about – or a little bit, rather, about whether or not they did practice human sacrifice. This is sort of the $64,000 question. And like we said, because the Romans really wanted to propagandize and paint a picture of, listen, we got to do this, these people are barbarians, they're sacrificing and like you said, maybe even eating each other. That cooks up a good case, basically, especially when it's coming from Caesar's pen or whatever

he wrote with. What did Caesar write with? He wrote with the blood of his enemies, which by the way, Chuck, we are one day out from the Ides of March. That's right. We are one day out from Caesar, one day before your birthday. So happy early birthday from everybody and stuff you should know when you're in, Chuck. Thanks, man.

Yeah. So, did they or did they not? That is a big question and the answer is maybe. Right. So, there's a lot of writings about it, but again, you got to take all that with a grain of salt as propaganda, but some of it was super detailed, could just be good writing and good imagination, but there was enough of it to where there is a lot of speculation that they may have done so, maybe not on some huge mass scale, but that doesn't mean that

a few people weren't thrown in a wicker man every now and then and set a blaze. Yeah. And that's worth really just saying overtly. One of the things that whole wicker man, if you haven't seen wicker man, go watch it. Not the Nick Cage version. See both. Okay. Go see both.

There are moments in the Nick Cage one that are so bad, it's pretty wonderful to watch. Right. Yeah. The original one's pretty awesome. I think Peter Cushing in it? Well, Christopher Lee was the main creep, wasn't he? Well, obviously. He's always the main creep.

I was the main creep in his own life. He was great, but so in wicker man, I think it was from 1975, this investigator, I think goes into like this kind of isolated insular kind of Celtic tradition community and ends up finding himself inside a giant wicker man being burned alive. And that's based on legend about the druids that they used to sacrifice people by making giant wicker figures, putting somebody in there and setting it on fire. And that was just one of the ways they supposedly sacrificed people. Another one I read about was that they would slash people in the back with a mortal wound

and then one of the druids or one of their assistants would watch the person's death throws and death agony to divine the future. Like you could tell by the way somebody writhed or wriggled or maybe how they bled what the future would be. And then with Lindow Man, you were saying, remember, he had his neck broken. He was choked, a hit over the head and he was slashed in the throat. They think that possibly the choking thing, the strangulation and the slash in the throat were related to where he would produce like a fountain of blood when his throat was slashed

while he was being strangled. That would tell them something? Possibly. That's the legend. The whole cannibalism thing I saw zero evidence for at all. There is no evidence for cannibalism. Human sacrifice, there are a lot of good cases out there that that really possibly did happen among the Celts.

Yeah, and part of the reason this is so tantalizing all these years later is when they link them to things like Stonehenge and you go to Stonehenge and you're told some story by some snot-nosed kid that's visiting from Indiana that like, you know, the druids used to sacrifice people here and that's why they built it, which is not true at all. It's gotten all mixed up. Stonehenge was around long before the Celts and the druids were doing their thing there. But they may have gone there. I mean, Ed makes a good point.

Like, a lot of times when there were religious temples and things that had been evacuated, another pagan religion might move in just because it's there and it's ready to go. So they may have gone to Stonehenge and performed some ceremonies, but that was not the purpose for Stonehenge. Yeah, we have no idea why they built Stonehenge or even who built Stonehenge. But the first unambiguous appearance of the Celts comes hundreds and hundreds of years after Stonehenge was first built. But yeah, they may have used it.

If you were a druid, wouldn't you like say, yeah, Stonehenge is probably pretty important. It lines up, I think, with the summer solstice, the rising sun and the summer solstice. That was a very important time to the druids as far as we understand. So of course they would pay attention to it and use it. And maybe another way to look at it is that the druid tradition and maybe even the Celts themselves directly grew out of the people in the culture that built Stonehenge originally. Because I think it was Caesar who wrote that the Celtic culture and druids grew out of the British Isles first and then spread westward or eastward into Europe.

Right. Primarily France, right? Yeah. Yeah. Although I've seen references that it made it as far as Turkey, the Celtic culture did, and had extensive trading routes. So they weren't like this isolated group of bumpkins. They were spread out all over the place.

They knew how to trade. They had their own civilization. It just wasn't nearly as advanced as Roman civilization. But they had an established culture by the time Rome showed up. We just don't know quite that much about it as it was right before Rome came. Yeah. And as you said, I think at the very beginning, years and years later, in the 1700s and 1600s, there were people and groups of people that referred to themselves as druids and claimed

that they were practicing these true traditions. But there's really no proof that any of that is true at all. And it's likely that it was just these people many, many years later that just sort of kind of dug up this ancient thing and made it their own. No, it's 100% that way. And even like the neo-druidic groups that you see today don't try to make it out any other way. A lot of them will say, the druidism we practice has been around a few hundred years, and it's

based on ancient folklore and tradition that you will find in Ireland. And that's a really good point too. Like neo-druidism traces its roots back to the 17th century when some historians and antiquarians got interested in some of the ancient Irish stuff. And they think possibly that some of the ancient Irish myths and legends are a form, a kind of a preserved form of ancient Celtic and druidic culture, because the Romans never set foot in Ireland. They never managed to conquer Scotland.

The Picts up there, who you'll remember from the Loch Ness episode, drove them back. And so these two areas where Celtic culture lived was able to kind of live and preserve and continue on until about the 500s when the Christians showed up and finally managed to convert everybody. And then Celtic culture kind of... They managed to convert. That's a nice way to say it. Thank you.

But Celtic culture had an extra 500 years to continue on and then make it into the written word and written language. And so you can go back and look at Irish mythology and a lot of people say, this is here. Here's your example of druidism right here, which it could be a variation of it because these were isolated cultures, but still it probably is some form of druidism. And then that is what the 17th century onward into neo druids based their stuff on. But they don't claim to say, we have unmolested ancient knowledge from the original oral tradition of druids.

They just are kind of basically doing their own thing, you know? Yeah. And it's so rich for literature and movies, it's been definitely just sort of malleable and bastardized just to fit like a screenplay of Celtic folklore and like these kind of creepy blistered out flower children who throw people in a wicker man or there was a movie with Christopher Lambert of the Highlander called Druids, which I'm sure is, I haven't seen it, but I imagine is 100% just cooked up for movies, you know? There's a really good movie from around the time Wicker Man came out called, I think Blood

on Satan's Claw. Dude, it's a terrible title. It is amazing. It's part of like Wicker Man and Blood on Satan's Claw. They're part of something called folk horror. And we would not have folk horror if it wasn't for those antiquarians in the 1700s or 1600s being becoming interested in druidism. We might not even have Led Zeppelin, my friend, if it wasn't for some of those guys.

Well the guy who did Hereditary, the trailer for his new movie just came out and it is 100% straight up like druid centric. I can't wait. Like these teenage campers in Sweden or something, I think it's Sweden, I'm not sure. They find this group of people in a field who are doing creepy things and it just looks really creepy and awesome. I'm assuming A24 is producing it? Probably.

Like A24 could show a movie of somebody spitting into a pail for two hours and I'd be like, I want to watch that. Yeah, they're a good outfit. They are a great outfit. Oh, one other thing, I also saw that the ancient druids, if they did exist as like an elite priestly class, would not have gotten their hands dirty with sacrifice. They would have just overseen it. And then possibly a suborder of druids called vates would have divined what was going on

from the way the blood was spilled or whatever. So what are they, vates? Yes. And then there was also bards. So they were not druids, not full-fledged druids? I don't know. I don't understand it. I've just seen it.

I've seen it delineated like vates, bards and druids and then I've also seen, I think in this article, Ed places druids as kind of like the whole elite class. Right, right. It was definitely a higher class. Right. And I also saw in some archeology article that there's really no evidence that druids, if they did exist as a separate class, existed as a separate class until very late, right before the Romans came.

And they would have just been integrated into everyday life and it would have been like you said, an occupation. Like Todd over there, Todd Merwin, he's really good with the divining rod. So that's what we rely on Todd for. But he wasn't like an elite class and then maybe it developed out of that kind of specialization over time. I love that Todd is your kind of go-to over the years. I do too.

Love Todd. Yep. That's it for druids, although there is a lot more out there and a lot of it's confusing, but a hundred percent of it is awesome, especially if your boat is floated by Dungeons and Dragons type stuff. Oh, sure. And since I said Dungeons and Dragons, it's time for Listener Mail. I thought you were about to say, since I said Dungeons and Dragons, it's Friday night

and I'm in a basement. Love it. Hi guys. I worked, this is on Bed Bugs by the way, we got a lot of replies about short stuff on Bed Bugs, including quite a few from the people in the hospitality industry. Yes. Which is very gross. Hey guys, worked as a guest service agent for a three star hotel in Charlotte, North

Carolina for over three years. It was called Bed Bugs City. Bed Bugs was basically a curse word and it couldn't be used in front of guests. And we heard from a couple of other people in the service industry that you never say that word out loud. They called them BBs at this place, but another guy called them the visitors. Oh my God. So I'm not really sure if it was true or not, but a general manager told me that this particular

hotel chain did not believe in putting mattress covers on their mattresses. The logic being that housekeepers are required to inspect mattresses every time a guest checks out of a room and every time they change the bed. If they were to put mattress covers on the beds and guests would notice them, it would give the guests the idea that Bed Bugs were in that mattress already. Interesting. In addition, the manager explained to me that guests are the ones who bring Bed Bugs into hotels.

I don't know about that. It sounds like blaming the victim to me. Agreed. So if a guest calls after they've checked out of a room to report Bed Bugs, this complaint basically fell on deaf ears. If the guest called to report Bed Bugs during this day, the company is not obligated to refund the nightly rate, but sometimes they might adjust your rate as a sign of goodwill. They don't reimburse people for finding Bed Bugs in the rooms because to them that is

an admission of guilt, so instead they will offer... I can't believe this part. Instead the hotel will offer to wash your clothes, move you to a different room, place the room with Bed Bugs out of service, and then tell you to throw your stuff in the trunk of your car in plastic bags and leave the car in the sun. Gee, very rare occasions, they might even issue a future night stay that can be used at any Bed Bug City across the country. You get what you pay for with the three-star hotel. Yeah, I don't know, man.

Three-star used to be different. It used to be sure, and then the corporate takeover of America undid that difference. So that is from Jay, the letter J. The letter J. This listener mail is brought to you by the letter J. Thanks, Jay. Come on down to Bed Bug City. Thanks, Jay, from Bed Bug City.

We appreciate that peek behind the curtain. If you work in some industry we've talked about and want to tell us all the gross and horrific things that the general public doesn't know about, we love that stuff. You can go on to stuffyshineau.com and look for all of our social links there. You can also go to my website, the joshclarkeway.com. You can send us all an email too. Live podcasts at iHeartPodcastNetwork.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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