It has been said that the Druids, who in recent years held rituals at Stonehenge in the dawn of the summer solstice, were guilty of a vast and wilful anachronism. The trilithons were raised thousands of years before the original Druids began their ministry. But prehistorical matters are not as simple as that. There have always been priests and seers in England. The Druids, whoever they were, may in any case have simply redeployed the ancient stones for their own purposes. This book is a study of their influence in succeeding centuries.

That they bequeathed no account of their beliefs or practices, and that there are no surviving material artefacts of their religious culture, means that they remain elusive, if not for all practical purposes invisible. Yet their mysteriousness is a clue to their survival. They have been adopted, or adapted, by various generations of scholars to suit various social and cultural theories.

The fullest account comes from Julius Caesar who, in De Bello Gallico, reports that the Druids were priests and law-givers; they engaged in ritual ceremonial but they also presided over territorial disputes. They were partakers in human sacrifice, too, particularly with the building of “wicker men” in which victims were burnt to death. There are, however, problems with Caesar's account, which reads in part like a Roman fantasy of “savage” life.

That has been the situation ever since, in which various interpretations have been placed on the statements of Classical authors that may or may not bear the weight placed upon them. The inconsistent and contradictory conclusions that have been drawn about the Druids in fact serve only to emphasise that accurate knowledge of the distant past is in certain respects impossible.

If this is an uncomfortable matter for prehistorians, it is a source of much interest to the more mundane historians of sensibility. The image of the Druid becomes, in short, an image of the society that projects it. That is why the Druid priests came back to life in the 15th century, having been neglected in the medieval centuries as uninteresting or insignificant personages. The Germans were the first to reinvent them as proof that the Germanic people had a worthy spiritual and cultural ancestry. Then a French writer discovered “lost” manuscripts, which had in fact never been written in the first place, purporting to give a history of Gallic Druidry. In England Druids were praised as the original founders of the University of Cambridge. Edward Coke, at a later date, also discovered that they were the founders of English common law. By this stage they could be enlisted in any cause whatsoever.

It had been assumed that no material evidence of their existence could be found in England, but in the middle of the 17th century John Aubrey almost literally stumbled upon the stone circle of Avebury. There were of course stone circles in areas of Scotland where the Druids had never reached, but what could be more obvious and appealing than a link between standing stones and ancient priests? So a myth, or rather a mythology, was conjured out of what was essentially thin air.

That myth was further compounded by the sudden intuition that, by means of Phoenician traders, Hebrew lore had been brought to England in early times. The Druids then became the followers of the kabbalah, and much else besides, in the period when England was repopulated after the Great Flood. It was a heady mixture, irresistible to those who wished to turn prehistory into a form of mystery play. The same impulse is at work today in those who enjoy the melodrama of the Templars and the Holy Grail. No coincidence can be left unexamined, and no story left unrehearsed.

The 18th century was the real age of the Druids, when they became enmeshed in a circuit of belief that included magic, astrology and Freemasonry. One chronicler of the period remarked that in Druid belief there was “a mixture of simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstition and antiquarianism ... a compound of things never meant to meet together”. But they did meet, never more so than in the work of William Blake, where standing stones and Druidry mingle in the light of setting suns. “All things,” he wrote, “begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore.”

There were more testimonials. Another disciple of the Druids, John Wood, was the principal architect of Bath. He laid out the Circus of that city as an example of Druidic geometry with stone acorns as the token of the sacred oaks. Ronald Hutton therefore describes the Circus as “the first Druidic temple to be erected in Britain since ancient times”. So can numinous and ethereal myths be converted into practical reality.

This is an ably researched and well-written book. It charts the history of an obsession, representing the strange creation of a wholly fabulous people who by dint of repetition become lodged in popular consciousness. They then become part of history. They become real. Hutton explains this alchemical process very well, in a study notable for its humour as well as its scholarship.

They could not die. They would not be allowed to die. In Hutton's phrase, once more they “took flesh” at the end of the 18th century. The Druidical Society was established on the island of Anglesey in 1772; the members wore a standard uniform of dark blue coat, white waistcoat and breeches, and red stockings. Seven years later a society of Druids was to be found in Cardigan. Then in 1781 the Ancient Order of Druids was established at a public house on the corner of Poland Street and Oxford Street. It is not clear in what, if anything, these people professed to believe. They seem to have been essentially glorified musical clubs, in the tradition of the period, with a fondness for silly rituals. They sang together. They were in every sense societies for the promotion of hot air.

All the movement needed were medieval texts and transcriptions of ancient bardic lore. These were soon being “discovered” at an alarming rate by a self-proclaimed Druid of the old school with the name of Iolo Morganwg. From his hand there issued an avalanche of fake verses and fake oaths. Misinformation was piled upon misinterpretation in a veritable farrago of nonsense and lies. But this fakery fed into British histories and Hutton reveals that, from this time forward, the Druids “featured as major players in any interpretation of that past, in English works of history, literature, art and theology”. In that role they were either icons or whipping boys, the bare canvas on which every age and generation could outline its own beliefs or prejudices.

It was inevitable, of course, that in the wake of the Druid enthusiasts came the sceptics who doubted that there was any connection between the megaliths and the priestly caste. It was emphasised once again that very little, if anything, was known about them. As the science or art of prehistoric scholarship became more rigorous, the Druids were dismissed as an irrelevant distraction. As an essayist wrote in the Edinburgh Review, in 1863, “the place they really fill in history is indefinite and obscure; and the attempt to give a more precise form to these traditions by ingenious conjectures has been for the most part unsuccessful”. This ought to have been effectively the last word on the subject but, in the case of the Druids, there are no last words.

On the midsummer's eve of 1912 five men arrived at Stonehenge wearing white robes and tall white turbans. One of them announced himself to be a “messenger from Tibet” with the name of Ayu Subhadra; he was in fact a Scottish gentleman called George Watson Reid. The modern movement of Druidry had begun. Reid delivered sermons at Stonehenge, over the years, in which he described his cult as the “one root of religious life” calling Mankind back to Nature and to Nature's god. The white turbans gave way to crimson hoods, but the ceremonies remained unchanged. The Druids joined hands and then circled the Slaughter Stone three times, chanting hymns. As the sun rose they sang the Song of Dawn, their voices followed by the striking of a gong as a small charcoal fire was lit in a brazier. It was all harmless fun.

The site of the stones then became the meeting place of other Druidic orders - among them the Ancient Order, the United Ancient Order, and the Ancient Order or Druid Hermetists - who vied for public interest and press attention with ever more spectacular ceremonies based upon nothing more than wishful thinking. Yet, by the curious alchemy of public imagination, the Druids themselves were now seen as the “upholders of tradition, dignity and spirituality” in an increasingly secular world. They had won. In previous centuries they had been impostors and charlatans; now they really had become priests. Blood and Mistletoe is the saga of a miraculous transformation.

Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton
Yale, £30; 492 pp Buy the book

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