The Druids and Their Arrival to Ireland

The Druids and Their Arrival to Ireland

Before the arrival of Patrick, Ireland and its religious environment was significantly different. Ireland was a pagan land with pagan beliefs and rituals, in saying this, pagan people were extremely religious. Davies observes “there was no aspect of life which was not in some way touched by the intricate webs of ritual and belief that gave meaning to the Celtic world”
People were known as the druids, they were the priests of the pagan Celtic tradition. The druids officiated at the feasts and festivals, practiced magic, facilitated the offering of sacrifice, foretold the future and designed horoscopes. They were recruited from the aristocratic class and could only be admitted to the druidic order after many years of studying in druidical schools. Druids were not only priest but advisors, both personal and political and seem to have been at the centre of the Celtic society. Joyce believes “they provided a structure office to embody the spiritual, mystical, earthly and cultural values of a people otherwise they only united by language and origin”
Although any ritualistic worship of the pagan Celtics is lost in obscurity, they did, it is clear, set aside certain feasts and festivals during which they venerated the various gods. Over 400 Gods can be identified with the Celtic peoples. McNeill argues that these are probably in many cases local names given to essentially the same God. Like many other pagan peoples, the Celts had particular Gods to deal with almost all aspects of life, as Joyce says, to “find the divine in all of created nature”, and so had Gods to ensure the fertility of the earth as well as humans. An Dagda was a title meaning ‘the good’ and represented, as Scherman points out, “an older generalised pantheon”. He was good, not necessarily in the moral sense but in the sense of being ‘good for everything’; all powerful. It was believed that when in battle Dagda had all the powers combined that all the other gods had only individually. He was also...

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