A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations/Druids


*DRUIDS, the priests or ministers of religion among the Gauls. They were chosen out of the best families, and divided into different classes -bards, who were both poets and musicians- priests and divines- and moral philosophers, who were instructors of youth and sometimes judges. They wore long white robes and chaplets, carried wands, with a mystic symbol round their necks, called the druid's egg. They admitted no images in their religious worship, which was performed in groves of oak; but they paid peculiar honours to the misletoe.

Mr. Bryant maintains that the sun was the grand object of their worship, and that Stonehenge exhibits the remains of one of their vast temples, consisting of massy stones in a circular form in the open air, sometimes poised on each other in the manner of rocking stones.[1]


Original footnotes edit

  1. Ency. Brit.