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From: FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer@yahoo.com

The mysterious history of the Druids --and the Celts --and the
connections with India

===========================================================================

https://medium.com/@subhashkak/the-religion-of-the-druids-8ecc18f6c7b6

Stonehenge brings to mind ancient rites and priest-astronomers peering
into the sky. It also speaks to the mystery that made people drag huge
stones over large distance and assemble them on the Salisbury Plain.
Although the monument is supposed to predate the arrival of the Celts in England, it is now associated in the popular imagination with the Druids.

My wife and I were in London in December 2012 and the media were pushing
the Maya “Doomsday” story that the world was to end that month. The date for the end had been announced as 12th December and some took the
symmetry further to pick the time of 12 minutes and 12 seconds past
noon. We decided that would be a great time to visit Stonehenge.

It was snowing but otherwise a beautiful morning as we caught our bus to
the monument. By the time we reached the Salisbury Plain, the snow had
stopped and we had a great visit of the grounds. This is also the first
time we saw Druids who were robed and ritually circumambulating the
site. We were struck that they were going anti-clockwise whereas in the
ancient mystery traditions one goes clockwise, in harmony with the
motion of the sun and the stars as one looks south. In any event, the
dread time passed uneventfully, and we were glad that we had something
to brag about.

Druids were priests, teachers, and judges of the ancient Celts. The
Celtic word Druwid is normally understood as “Knowing the Oak Tree”
which has the Sanskrit parallel Druvid द�रुविद�, “One with Knowledge of
the Tree [of Life]”). The root “dru” in both the languages also means “immersion” and so the word could very well have meant “those immersed
in knowledge”.

It is not just the name; there are other deep connections between the
Celts and India. Some scholars believe that the Hindu Brahmin in the
East and the Celtic Druid in the West both derive from the ancient Indo-European priesthood.

For the ancient Celts, Danu was the Mother Goddess, and she is the
daughter of Dakṣa Prajāpati in the Vedas. Danu is still remembered in
the names of several great rivers of Europe such as Danuvius (Danube),
and ro-Dhanu, “Great Danu” (Rhone). The well-known scholar Peter
Berresford Ellis informs us: “Celtic cosmology is a parallel to Vedic cosmology. Ancient Celtic astrologers used a similar system based on twenty-seven lunar mansions, called nakshatras in Vedic Sanskrit. Like
the Hindu Soma, King Ailill of Connacht, Ireland, had a circular palace constructed with twenty-seven windows through which he could gaze on his twenty-seven ‘star wives.’”

The connections between the Celts and the Indians could be through
common descent and cultural diffusion or a mixture of the two. The
diffusion could be through Uttara Kuru, the land between Caspian and
Aral Seas, where we know Vedic kingdoms existed.

The Vedic book Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (8.14) says Uttara Kuru held Vedic consecration for their kings. Ptolemy (100 CE) spells Uttara Kuru as Ottorokorrhas and describes it as beyond the mountains in Central Asia.
The Mahābhārata speaks of the social customs of the Uttara Kurus and the Rāmāyaṇa (Crit. Ed. 42.57) shows knowledge of the region where it says
that beyond it is the land of unending night.

The Gundestrup cauldron

Found in Denmark a hundred years ago, this silver bowl has been dated to
around the middle of the 2nd century BCE. The sides are decorated with
various scenes of war and sacrifice: figures wrestling beasts, a goddess flanked by elephants, a meditating figure wearing stag’s antlers, which
are seen as Celtic deities. That the iconography must have an Indic
element is suggested by the elephant (totally out of context in Europe)
with the goddess and the yogic figure.

According to the art historian Timothy Taylor, “A shared pictorial and technical tradition stretched from India to Thrace, where the cauldron
was made, and thence to Denmark. Yogic rituals, for example, can be
inferred from the poses of an antler-bearing man on the cauldron and of
an ox-headed figure on a seal impress from the Indian city of Mohenjo-Daro…Three other Indian links: ritual baths of goddesses with elephants (the Indian goddess is Lakṣmī); wheel gods (the Indian is Viṣṇu); the goddesses with braided hair and paired birds (the Indian is Hariti).”

Others see the horned figure, which looks strikingly like the
Paśupati-Śiva seal from the Sindhu-Sarasvatī area, as the Celtic god Cernunnos. But these could also be different names for the same deity.

Caesar and the Druids

The most extensive account of the Druids is by Julius Caesar in
Commentāriī dē Bell� Gallic� (Commentaries on the Gallic War, ~55 BCE).

Caesar informs that the elite amongst the Gauls belonged to one of two
classes: Knights, who soldiered and exercised temporal power, and the
Druids, who were in charge of sacrifices. The Druids were teachers and
judges with the power to ostracize from religious rites those who
disobeyed. They studied verse, natural philosophy, astronomy, and the
lore of the gods, some spending as much as twenty years in training.
Their principal doctrine was that of the immortality of the gods and transmigration of souls.

The Druids were suppressed in Gaul by the Romans under Tiberius. In
Ireland they lost their priestly functions after the coming of
Christianity but survived as the intellectual class in non-religious
roles. Druidry is being revived in modern times and that’s how I saw
Druids at Stonehenge.

As for the religion of the Druids, Caesar says:

“They worship as their divinity, Mercury in particular, and have many
images of him, and regard him as the inventor of all arts, they consider
him the guide of their journeys and marches, and believe him to have
great influence over the acquisition of gain and mercantile
transactions. Next to him they worship Apollo, and Mars, and Jupiter,
and Minerva; respecting these deities they have for the most part the
same belief as other nations: that Apollo averts diseases, that Minerva
imparts the invention of manufactures, that Jupiter possesses the
sovereignty of the heavenly powers; that Mars presides over wars.”
[Gallic War 6.17]

Mercury, the principal god of the Druids, was the Roman god of commerce
and gain. Since he was not the principal divinity in Rome (where Jupiter
was the king of the gods), his exalted status amongst the Celts becomes
an interesting question.

Mercury and Vishnu

The Slavs also did not have Mercury as the principal divinity, and
neither did the Balts, so we cannot see either of them as the source of
the Celtic tradition. The other deities of the Druids mentioned by
Caesar are not dissimilar to the Roman ones: Apollo (seen by the Greek chroniclers as being the same as Krishna), Mars (Skt. Skanda), Jupiter
(Skt. Bṛhaspati), and Minerva as a composite goddess (Durgā-like Athena
and Sarasvatī-like goddess of music and wisdom). It is quite possible
the names mentioned by Caesar were not the names used by the Druids
themselves, because, like the Greeks, the Romans sought commonalities in
the divinities across different cultures.

Jaimini Gṛhyasūtra informs us that Mercury (Budh) is Vishnu, who was established as the Great God many centuries prior to the emergence of
the Celts in Europe. According to some scholars, the Celts also used the
name Budh for the planet Mercury; others theorize the name was Lugh or
Lugus. The latter names might be a play on Raghu, the dynasty of Rama,
the avatara of Vishnu. Perhaps the source of this commonality was the
sea trade between India and Europe.

If Cernunnos was like Śiva and what Caesar called Mercury was Viṣṇu, the parallels between the Celtic and Vedic worlds are only reinforced.

Goddess Brigid

Brigid is the Celtic patroness of poetry, arts and crafts, medicine,
livestock, sacred ponds, and the arrival of spring. She is the same as
Uṣá, the Vedic goddess of the dawn and beginnings, one of whose epithets
is Bṛhatī (बृहती) “high”, and the British goddess Brigantia, whose root
is Bṛhant, बृहन�त, “great”. Clearly, she subsumes some characteristics
of Sarasvatī सरस�वती.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)