The organisation of the Celtic sacerdotal caste and the Druidic revolution 

The Sacerdotal function: 

Basically the sacerdotal function was divided into 3 groups: Bards, Vates and Druids.  

I. Bards:

Bard is a loan word from the Celtic languages, the root going back to the Gaulish *bardos, stemming from the Proto-Celtic *bardo- and ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European *gʷr̩hₓ-dʰh ₁ -ó-s, meaning poet or literally praise-maker. It is the same function that you can see fulfilled by skalds or rhapsodes in other Indo-European societies. You probably already know about bards, they ensured the link between common folk and priests, giving legitimacy to the elite castes and rulers, creating the collective memory of a people by chanting their feats of strength, and cursing the wrong-doers.

II. Vates: 

 The term correspond to a Proto-Celtic word which can be reconstructed as *wātis. We still find it in Irish in fáith "prophet, seer", and a comparison is possible with the role in the Vedic religion. Although little is known about them, vates were seers and sacrificators, and it seems like their practice of sacrifices was solely justified on mantikê, divination, by looking at the viscera of living things, yes, but more often by divine inspiration or prophecy, that druids didn't accomplish to fully halt during their time, and that spread again after the Roman conquest and the disappearance of the latter.

Vates probably were the first priests that officiated close to the kings, when they began to lose their worship prerogatives.

III. Druids:

Druids were in fact not in charge of every religious business. At first, they were just legitimizing sacrifices, since mindless blood spilling seems a bit contrary to their philosophy, where they managed to make their presence and approval mandatory. Law and Justice were their exclusive domain though, where they displayed a wisdom adhered to by all. It was the occasion for them to moralise human sacrifice, replacing innocent victims by death penalty criminals, that were sacrificed, after being held as prisoners, in religious festivities that took place every 5 years. 

They were the keepers of knowledge in general, especially in mathematics and sciences. But they rivalled bards in regards to controlling the historical narrative, and got an edge over them due to their knowledge of writing, which they refused to divulge. It served them well for establishing calendars and archiving memorable events. They probably conserved the constitutions of the states, diplomatic agreements, public and private contracts. This large range of expertise also allowed them to take control of the education of the youth who was once the exclusivity of the bards. The chief druid was selected by the group, but in the case of multiple contenders for the position, they settled the matter in the form of armed combat, reserving the choice to the gods.

The Druidic Revolution: 

Every year, they met in the same place, the center of the country, for a session that had two objectives: examine religious matters and render judgments in legal disputes. We can see that in numerous domains, bards, vates and druids were competing with each other. Yet soon the latter would bring a new type of belief that would be irreplaceable. While bards were glorifying the order established through the history of famous and mighty people, the druids proposed to men a less rigid future. For them, souls are immortal and called to live again in other bodies. But most of all they moralized a religion where man was a mere toy of the gods, or of their representatives on earth. Now man was able to win his place in heaven by exercising irreproachable and virtuous behavior.

Because of those multiple overlapping priestly roles and worldviews, we can catch sight of some contradictions within Gallic belief, for example the sacrificial killing of a man by a warrior to escape death, and the belief of a paradise granted to fallen warriors on the battlefield. The first one has to be from a very ancient origin, while the second can be without doubt attributed to druids. We saw above that they started to rigorously control a practice which was probably anarchic and started by any chieftain or fortunate individual.

By imposing their presence during the ceremonies, they could verify their legitimacy, but above all they took the place of the priest, the sacrificator being lowered to a kind of specialised butcher. They were now the true intermediary between the believers and the gods, which were honoured in this manner. By the way, most of the sacrificial remnants found in archeology were of an animal nature. Unlike the vates, who made their oracles by observing birds and killing sacrificial victims, druids started proposing other techniques of mantike, such as one based on numerology and probably others, from the observations of natural phenomena and more particularly of celestial bodies.

At the personal and often prophetic interpretations of the vates, they opposed a somewhat scientific reading of the universe, which is at the same time the image and the essence of divinity. Those who know a bit about Hermetic principles can probably see a pattern here. The best example of the astronomical observations being applied to everyday life is given to us by the calendar of Coligny, which determins auspicious days and harmful days over long periods of time.

Differences with other Indo-Europeans peers: 

Unlike the Greeks or the Romans, we noticed that they didn't employ divination before battle, like by examining the guts of a sacrifice, because in reality the Celts asked the gods their opinion way before any armed combat would take place, without fearing a sudden change of outcome. That is truly contrasting with the Hellenic sort of capricious view of the Gods. Words from Diodorus of Sicilia on the vates inform us that before the organisation of the sacerdotal body under the aegis of the druids, the seers didn't have an institutional place but acted privately, some close to the kings and nobles, and others among the plebs.

Gauls developed a true divinatory art, built on the observation of all manner of bird behaviours, not only on their flight. Diodorus call it Oïnoskopia. Also, they developed a knowledge of plants; for divination purpose through dreams, they consumed acorn or verbena for this, but more specifically to heal and escape their carnal envelope and reach domains where spirits and divinities reside. They had exclusivity on a special kind of divination, through numbers in a Pythagorean manner, it is certainly what the Romans called conjectura.

The Pythagorian influence hypothesis and other deeds of the Druids: 

Those forms, based on an encyclopedic knowledge, contrast radically against other more violent forms, from a much more ancient origin, of the vates. The fears of the falling, breaking of the celestial vault, of the sky falling on their heads, were primitive fears which the druids began to fight, with their habitual method, meaning without destroying them but by replacing them by more scientific reasoning. Strabo has conserved the druidic version of the end of the world: "The souls and the universe are indestructible, but one day the fire and the water will prevail over them". The formula seems a bit paradoxical at first glance, it means that it will be the end of a cycle and the birth of a new one. When the universe will dissolve into its primal components, it will be able to create itself again with them. This cyclical conception of life and in particular of the universe in general is one of those doctrines, with the soul transmigration one, that lead some to say that the druids were disciples of Pythagoras. The distinction of all things between primary elements reveals another sign of the Milesian influence.

The 4th century BC, which marks the start of the druids' zenith, saw a change in the way the dead were handled: While before, they were deposed with their jewels and weapons, suggesting that the souls were to live a dull chthonian life after death, this view was replaced by a belief in the immortality of the soul, who will know diverse fates, rewarding or punishing, in response to a honorable or condemnable life on earth. It changed the way we handled sepulchres: the body is often incinerated and the corporal envelope dissolves into smoke, while into the sepulchral pit is only dropped a symbolic handful of ashes.

Mythology did not escape the general enterprise of reformation of the druids. Now myths, legends, epic poems and genealogies had to serve as support for all kinds of knowledge, as the elementary one was dispensed to the plebs, scholar treaties were reserved for the disciples and future masters. Conserved as long versified poems in order to ease their memorization, Gallic mythology was rich and diversified, so much so that the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, at the start of our era, did not hesitate to place it at the same height as the Greek mythology. Unfortunately, it has almost fallen into oblivion, since it couldn’t have been copied by Greek historians and geographers.

Going back to the vates, magic was one of their exclusivities, which the druids tried to change more and more toward medicine. It was after the roman conquest, when the druids had nearly disappeared, that importance was given back to the magi and their impostors, evolving into a religious chaos favourable to them. The druids relied on poetry to bestow their historical, geographical, and scientific knowledge on those who were called to succeed them — the whole weight of necessary theological and juridical knowledge.

There is a hapax, "Semnotheoi" in Greek, which probably designates the those of the druids dedicated to philosophy, we usually cluster them with shamans. Without them, there would have been no gallic philosophy, just as there would have been no Persian philosophy without the magi.

Since Antiquity, the origins of the druids and their teachings have been the object of controversy. Some make the druids the masters of Pythagoras and others his disciples. Both are not realistically accurate if we take chronology into account, but it is really probable that the Gauls who invaded Italy, and notably Magna Graecia at the second half of the fifth century BC, had been in contact with Pythagoras' students, which greatly impacted them.

The ideas that were taught by the druids, on the soul, on its immortality, on the metempsychosis (migration of the soul), on purity, find more than an echo, but true parallels with the Pythagorean theories.

At the middle of the first century BC, Gauls told Caesar that the druidic doctrine came from the island of Britannia, that it was imported to Gaul from there, and that it is the reason why those who wish to learn it to perfection travel all the way to Britannia to learn it. This information - or its first half - has to be wrong, for chronological reasons: the Belgian Celts who arrived on the Island at the middle of the 3rd century BC, meaning at the moment at which the druids'reputation was so high that it had already reached Aristotle's ears and the author of the treaty "The Magic", druidic philosophy had already formed a structured corpus of doctrines for decades.

In fact, this popular belief seeks to explain why the disciples didn't hesitate to cross the Manche to get the necessary formation in Britannia, where indeed they could have kept their original purity, benefiting from the protection of insularity, it hints at an interesting supplementary information, that in fact the Celtic invaders of Britannia had druids among them professing the doctrine that seemed afterwards the most pure to their kin.

Druidic philosophy, like the pre-Socratic one, takes the shape of a universal knowledge encompassing morals, metaphysics, mathematics, astronomy and expertise as diverse as geography, botany, zoology, etc. They also partook in architecture and diplomacy.

Those different fields of expertise were not partitioned but stayed interdependent, because none of them yet held the status of an autonomous science. They were hints, ways of looking at the world which gradually progressed towards a more rational view. It provoked a deep rupture into a system of thought, heir of prehistoric times, that had given prominence to superstitions and to the obscure actions of divinities more or less malicious.

The old way of seeing the Gods as capricious entities dominating the terrestrial world in a strictly linear, toy-thing manner only led to fatalism for the humble, or religious activism (with numerous sacrifices) for the fortunate. Druids, on the other hand, made every effort to describe the world accurately, to understand it in a better way and seek its organic primary causes.

Defenders of moral principles, they tried to make the world better by practicing justice, making politics the logical end of their action, to reshaping a Gaul where might had previously been the only justification for power. They participated in the formulation of institutions and controlled their proper functioning.

But this spiritual power, so powerful in its application to daily life, burned the wings of some of its bearers. The example of Diviciac, supreme magistrate of the Aedui, is enlightening: senator, lord of war, leader of the pro-roman party, only in his private discussions with Cicero he gets to remember that he is in fact a druid, to Caesar he never appeared as anything else than a purely political figure, with his qualities and shortcomings.
Priority is given to religion, through the respect of the gods and by that to those who represent them among humans. Nevertheless, man must himself pay attention to his own behavior, which must be guided by the search for the good. But this moral objective doesn’t go as far as totally replacing the ancients' heroic virtues, those of warriors whose distinguished role in society was acknowledged in that way.

Sources: Jean Louis Brunaux – Les Gaulois, Poisodonos of Apameia – Histories, Caesar – Gallic Wars, Diodorus of Sicily – Bibliotheca Historica, Strabo – Geographica, Atheneus 

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