The Druids and the Moon

You can watch my Youtube video about this subject in here: [The Druids and the Moon]


The Druids are still a fascinating subject, and the unknown still brings mystery, and what is mysterious and almost mystical nowadays, gives us a certain delight in knowing that beyond our dull lives in a civilized world, there is still magic out there, somewhere.  

It’s still extremely hard to understand what the Druids were up to. We know they studied a variety of arts for 20 years, maybe more, but left no written records of their doings. Fortunately, and unfortunately, we have written roman sources describing the religious, intellectual and social functions of the druids within their communities, but these are the points of view from a society with a different cultural, historical and traditional background, seeing from afar something they had never come in contact with; ancestral practices so deeply carved upon the Celtic tribes, impossible for outsiders to fully understand the true essence of Druidism. 

Even so, during Caius Iulius Caesar wars on Gaul (the very same who played such an important role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire), we have really interesting accounts about the druids, especially duo to Caesar’s friendship with Diviciacus of the Aedui, of course a Romanised name for a person we may never know his true name. Now, there might be a certain confusion here, because there was another Diviciacus during Caesar’s time, and he was also a Gaul, a Gaulish King to be more precise, but we know this Caesar’s friend was a Druid, not by Caesar himself but by Marcus Tullius Cicero, a roman politician who had a very peculiar career before becoming an active figure in the political network of Rome. Cicero had been an Augur, a priest whose purpose was interpreting the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds. So Cicero met this Diviciacus in Rome and had long debates with him, because they were colleagues of some sort and both argued about the art of divination. 

This is one of the most important sources we have about druidism. However, as you might have guessed, it’s only a tiny portion of what druidism is and was. We are talking about druidism practiced in Gaul, from a certain Celtic group within a Celtic group, and obviously other druids did things differently, with certain similarities, but we can’t possibly say that all druids were the same everywhere. Also, these are written roman sources with that beautiful roman political touch of the Roman Republic. 

But the question is, what concrete knowledge did the Celts and the Druids had on the stars and how did they applied such knowledge on their societies? In truth, we aren’t certain (sorry), but we have a variety of studies which gives us a glimpse of such a knowledge which seems with each passing year we come to the conclusion that these societies knew much more than we realised the year before, and the year before that. We can count on the yearly celebrations, harvesting cycles, equinoxes and solstices, we can count on the traditional folklore written by Irish priests, and of course we can count on the studies made by Archaeologists and Astronomers about the orientations of the monuments of antiquity. However, this last one, unlike most people think, such megalithic monuments are not Celtic; they were raised during the Neolithic, so we are talking about roughly 5000-4000 years before the Celts, of course the chronology differs a lot from place to place, still, we know the Druids used such monuments during the Iron 
Age, but did they really knew what that was all about? Were they really using such monuments for the astronomical purposes they had been built so long ago? 

It’s possible that the Druids knew how to use such monuments. Oral tradition since immemorial times survived till nowadays, even though with a lot of changes along the way. But we know the knowledge of the druids was passed along, from generation to generation through the oral tradition, in the attempt to keep the secrets of their wisdom, and they did a damn good job because we are still trying to crack this business. And such a tradition partly survived in the Irish Astronomical Treatises of the Middle-Ages, written in Latin, the very same knowledge the Christians used to continue the studies on the stars. 

But the key to this knowledge seems to be in the Moon. According to the roman sources, the knowledge about the Moon and the observation of its phases was one of the most important subjects for the Druids. The complexity of the knowledge of the Moon cycles is something our modern culture lost, at least the peculiarities of this knowledge. 

First, it must be noted that there are two cycles in the motions and appearances of the moon. The first and best known is that of its phases, which are repeated every 29.5 days approximately. Secondly, is the position of the Moon on the horizon, in fact, if we look at what point of the horizon in which the moon appears, we will see that for about 27.5 days the Moon travels in an arc in the horizon, in a round "journey" between its north and south ends. It is important to note that since both cycles are different, the moon does not always leave in the same phase by the same site of the horizon. 

Now, as the lunar orbit is inclined to that of the earth about 5 °, the points of the horizon where the Moon appears on the horizon does not coincide with the appearances of the sun across the sky. In addition the Moon appearances are not static. And then there is a variety of complex information of the cycles of the Moon which would make my statement too long and complex. What I mean with this is that the Moon cycles are much more complex and we need to be precise in our observations of the moon, because the positions are never the same each year. We had to observe the real cycle of the moon for at least 18 to 19 years, until the whole cycle comes to an end and starts again. 18 to 19 years is very close to the 20-year-study of the Druids. Coincidence? Caesar himself left us an account that it took a novice in Druidry nineteen years of preparations to become a Druid, which coincides with the complete observation of one Moon cycle 

So the Druids had to have a real understanding of the natural world. According Caesar and also Gaius Plinius, a roman philosopher and sort of naturalist of the Roman Empire, the Druids only required to observe the Moon in order to understand the stars and the position of the earth in relation with the stars. 

It's interesting to see that the megalithic monuments are not only aligned to be possible to observe the solstices, but some monuments are actually aligned with certain starts. The starts which are much more visible to the human eye without requiring a tool to enhance the celestial "dome". And these monuments I'm talking about, were not only for initiation rites, but also funerary monuments. Monuments with a variety of functions in prehistoric societies. And as I've said, these monuments are much older than the Celts, so it's a wonder the knowledge these people had, and how this knowledge survived for thousands of years until the Iron Age, and the Druids made good use of such knowledge. 

This may be one of the reasons the Moon has played such an important role in the pre-Christian societies, and why there were so many deities related with the Moon. For instance, since I’ve written about the Romans, we start to see in the Roman funerary stelae (stones slabs) a representation of the crescent moon with the propagation of Celtic tongues and certain customs and traditions mixed with local traditions. 

How Christianity Came into Europe

Note: This post is about History, European History and how the Christian religion came into Europe, also the drawing to illustrate this, was made by me.

Note2: This was a scheduled Post.





How Christianity came into Europe

In 219 BCE the warrior and commander Hannibal of Carthage, a Roman Province in Northern Africa, after his fathers death, gathered the army in his yound age of 16 years old, and went to conquer Rome in revange of his father's death by Roman hands. He went by land into the Iberian Peninsula, Lusitans of Portugal and Spanish from Spain, helped Hannibal, joining his army, they went to the Pyrenees in northern Spain, the border between spain and mordern france, and there the roman troops were waiting for Hannibal's army, 10.000 romans and all slaughtered, Hannibel continue to go and was helped by the Gauls in ancient gaul todays france, after this many other battles were fought, Hannibel killed many romans, and more romans came to him, till he reached northern Italy, Hannibel won all the battles but he did not reach his goal, to burn down rome, which in that time was not yet an Empire, Hannibal turned back to Carthage, strategically he has lost the war. but with this event, the Romans in reprisal start to kill and conquer all those who could oppose their safety, politics, economy and wealth. So it began the wars of rome against the rest of Europe, and it became a vast empire, the first to go down of course, were the people in Northern Italy an ancient tribe of celts and of course the northern Africa where Carthage was, then the rest of Europe. Among the many people the Romans subjected to their will, came the people of Yahushua ( Jesus Christ ), after they have killed Jesus, many created the new Religion of Christianity, and so many more joined this new faith, and the romans and the Jews were the first ones, changing all the wishes of Jesus and turning this new faith into something that would give them power over all, now it would be easier to conquer all without battle, but through faith, a new religion made by lies, and those lies would convince too many to submit themselves to a new order of power, this was not a religion but politics to increase the roman economy, so this was how christianity started to spread, but a germanic tribe called the Wandalns ( Vandals ) invaded rome and brought it down, so the Roman Empire has fallen and as it was falling apart, so all the roman citys and provinces were falling too. The people that were used to live in a roman way, with all the tecnologhy they brought, were now living in a world were all of those works were falling too, such as the aqueducts that used to bring water to all, now that rome had fallen, no one cared about that, and people start to live in a poor way, with no conditions, nor hygiene, so people start to have many problems, and since Europe belonged to no one now, many tribes became countries and those were fighting to have more land and power, and the people now living in a evil world where food was scarce, battles everywhere, the people were in need of something to save them so badly, no one was there to protect them, and now they were being robbed and murdered.
Meanwhile the franks apeared, the Franks were a West Germanic confederation, uniting the peoples in Magna Germania north and east of the Lower Rhine River. The Frankish identity emerged in the first half of the 3rd century out of various Germanic groups, including the Salii, Sicambri, Chamavi, Bructeri, Chatti, Chattuarii, Ampsivarii, Tencteri, Ubii, Batavi and the Tungri, who inhabited the area between the Zuyder Zee and the river Lahn and extended eastwards as far as the Weser, but were most densely settled around the IJssel and between the Lippe and the Sieg. From the third to fifth centuries the Frankish armies raided Roman territory and expanded their influence among the Germanic peoples previously living under Roman rule on the left bank of the Rhine. In 358, the Salian Franks came to some form of agreement with the Romans that allowed them to settle in Toxandria (roughly Noord-Brabant, Antwerpen and Vlaams-Brabant). Each tribe within the Frankish confederation consisted of extended kinship groups centred around a particularly renowned and noble family. The importance of the family bond was made clear by the Salic Law, which ordained that an individual had no right to protection if not part of a family. One particular Salian family comes to light of Frankish history in the early fifth century, in time to become the Merovingians - Salian kings named after Childeric's mythical father Merovech, whose birth was thought to be divine. Clovis, king of the Salian Franks, became the absolute ruler of a united Frankish kingdom in 486. He consolidated his rule with victories over the Gallo-Romans and all the other Frankish tribes and established his capital in Paris. After he had beaten the Visigoths and the Alemanni, his sons drove the Visigoths to Spain and subdued the Burgundians, Alemanni and Thuringians. During the period of Merovingian rule, the Franks reluctantly began to adopt Christianity following the baptism of Clovis in 496 CE. Following Clovis' conversion, a number of Franks rallied around Ragnachar, a powerful figure who had played an important role in Clovis' initial rise to power, but their rebellion was crushed. The remaining pockets of resistance within the population were overcome region by region through a quickly expanding network of monasteries. The Frankish church had to come to terms with an established Gallo-Roman clergy that actively spread anti-Germanic propaganda, which has survived in their writings and works of history; it had to Christianise traditional Frankish sensibilities and effectively suppress them; it had to provide a new theological basis for Frankish kingship, which was deeply rooted in Germanic tradition. While the Goths or the Vandals had been at least partly Christianised since the mid-4th century, traditional Germanic beliefs are thought to have flourished among the Franks until well after the conversion of Clovis to Christianity. So as i've written before, King Clovis of the Franks was cristianized just to get power and lands and noble titles, to conquer them all, and that is how france was born, and for the pope in rome this was great, because clovis was spreading thie christian faith to all Europe, by force, by slaughter, by burning, pillaging and killing. And as i've written before, those peopel that were in a great need of help, now play a big role, they needed a miracle, and came a new faith, promising salvation, all they needed! And so easily those became christians too. The Northern countries of Europe were the last to be Christianized because it was hard to go into those places, and because the people there stand in theur old religions and fought to continue to be the people they have always been, to continue their pagan spirit. The Franks tired of getting sieged by the Germanic people, ofered them titles, lands and weath in gold and jewels if they were to be christianized too, in greed for power, they all accepted, but more people accepted to be christians, so they would not be killed, because those who would not convert, were brutaly tortured and killed.
So Europe was now living in a christianized world, but there were still many to conquer, there were still many pagans who needed taxation, people that had to be christianized, to pay to their Christian Kings and ofcourse to give money to the church, then the Black Death came, an horribel plague that was killing all, in every 10, only 2 survived, the church in its wisdom, used this as a propaganda, it was a sign of God, people had to be christians or would suffer and die of the plague of death! So the people in fear, the rest of the people... were fully christianized. This was a summary of what happened, almost 1500 years to christianized all the Europeans, people that used to be free.. have a free will, a free spirit and mind.