Quotes About Druids

Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks…Stand like Druids of old.

The unnatural principle of human sacrifice was carried by the British Druids to a ruthless pitch. The mysterious priesthoods of the forests bound themselves and their votaries together by the most deadly sacrament that men can take. Here, perhaps, upon these wooden altars of a sullen island, there lay one of the secrets, awful, inflaming, unifying, of the tribes of Gaul. And whence did this sombre custom come?

It could well be that somewhere in Miami really knowledgeable people—druids, perhaps—were nodding their heads and murmuring, "Ahhh, Jupiter is in a retrograde moon of Saturn," and pouring another cup of herb tea while they lounged around in Birkenstocks. Or

Thus it was that the words of wisdom spoken by the Druids were found to be true – that vengeance, though sweet at first, becomes a bitter cup and proves to be its own executioner. Therefore no vengeance is more estimable than one which is not taken.

Those who gathered such knowledge also paid deference to Bíle, the sacred oak. Because they were not allowed to speak his holy name, they called the oak draoi and those learned in such knowledge were said to possess oak (dru) knowledge (vid) and thus were known as Druids.

They borrowed in one life, promising to pay back in the next. They believed in a purgatorial type of hell where they would be purged of their sins, afterward passing on to the happiness of unity with the gods. The Druids taught that all men would be saved, but that some must return to earth many times to learn the lessons of human life and to overcome the inherent evil of their own natures.

Most druids fall into two groups: sticks or stones. Wood has some wonderful properties, but it has a tendency to react too much with the user for my particular taste. Because they retain some of their own innate essence, using wands becomes almost a partnership. You have to be very nature-oriented to use them to their best advantage.

Although Erc was bitterly disappointed, there was another route to prestige. He possessed gifts of the mind sufficient to gain admittance to the order of Druids, the intellectual class of Celtic society. Members of the order were not practitioners of a specific religion, nor were they priests in the Christian sense of the word. The Greeks were more nearly correct by describing Druids as poet-philosophers.

Druids influenced the natural world: weather, plants, and some animals. Wizards played with nonliving things. But witches used the mind and body.