Cormac, however, says nothing about a god named Bél—who, indeed, is only once mentioned elsewhere, so far as I know[20]—but explains the name as if it were Bil-tene, "goodly fire," from the fires which the druids made on that day through which to drive the cattle.[21]
Post-Christian accounts of the druids as a whole, and or individual druids differ widely. The notes on St. Patrick, in the Book of Armagh, present them in the worst possible light as wicked wizards and augurs and people of incantations,[22] and the Latin lives of the Saints nearly always call them "magi." Yet they are admitted to have been able to prophecy. King Laoghaire's [Leary's] druids prophesied to him three years before the arrival of Patrick that "adze-heads would come over a furious sea,"
"Their mantles hole-headed,
Their staves crook-headed,
Their tables in the east of their houses."[23]
In the lives of the early saints we find some of them on fair terms with the druids. Columcille's first teacher was a druid, whom his mother consulted about him. It is true that in the Lismore text he is called not a druid but a fáidh, i.e., vates or prophet, but this only confirms the close connection between druid, prophet, and teacher, for his proceedings are distinctly druidical, the account runs: "Now when the time for reading came to him the cleric went to a certain prophet who abode in the land to ask him when the boy ought to begin. When the prophet had scanned the sky, he said 'Write an alphabet for him now.' The alphabet was written on a cake, and Columcille consumed the cake in this wise, half to the east of a water, and half to the west of a water. Said the prophet through grace of prophecy, 'So shall this child's territory be, half to the east of the sea, and half to the west of the sea.'"[24] Columcille himself is said to have composed a poem beginning, "My Druid is the son of God." Another druid prophesies of St. Brigit before she was born,[25] and other instances connecting the early saints with druids are to be found in their lives, which at least show that there existed a sufficient number of persons in early Christian Ireland who did not consider the druids wholly bad, but believed that they could prophecy, at least in the interests of the saints.
From what we have said, it is evident that there were always druids in Ireland, and that they were personages of great importance. But it is not clear that they were an organised body like the druids of Gaul,[26] or like the Bardic body in later times in Ireland, nor is it clear what their exact functions were, but they seem to have been teachers above everything else. It is clear, too, that the ancient Irish—at least in some cases—possessed and worshipped images. That they sacrificed to them, and even offered up human beings, is by no means so certain, the evidence for this resting upon the single passage in the Dinnseanchas, and the poem (in a modern style of metre) in the Book of Leinster, which we have just given, and which though it is evidence for the existence of the idol Crom Cruach, known to us already from other sources, may possibly have had the trait of human sacrifice added as a heightening touch by a Christian chronicler familiar with the accounts of Moloch and Ashtarôth. The complete silence which, outside of these passages,[27] exists in all Irish literature as to a proceeding so terrifying to the popular imagination, seems to me a proof that if human sacrifice was ever resorted to at all, it had fallen into abeyance before the landing of the Christian missionaries.
[1] Cæsar's words are worth repeating. He says that there were two sorts of men in Gaul both numerous and honoured—the knights and the Druids, "equites et druides," because the people counted for nothing and took the initiative in nothing. As for the Druids, he says: "Rebus divinis intersunt, sacrificia publica et privata procurant, religiones interpretantur ... nam fere de omnibus controversiis publicis privatisque constituunt, et si quod est admissum facinus, si cœdes facta, si de hereditate, de finibus controversia est iidem decernunt præmia, pœnasque constituunt." All this seems very like the duties of the Irish Druids, but not what follows: "si qui, aut privatus aut populus eorum decreto non stetit, sacrificiis interdicunt. Hæc pœna apud eos est gravissima." Nor do the Irish appear to have had the over-Druid whom Cæsar talks of. (See "De Bello Gallico," book vi. chaps. 13, 14).
[2] "Cach raet bid maith lasin filid agus bud adla(i)c dó do fhaillsiugad."
[3] Thus O'Curry ("Miscellany of the Celtic Society," vol. ii. p. 208); but Stokes translates, "he puts it then on the flagstone behind the door." See the original in Cormac's Glossary under "Himbas." I have not O'Donovan's translation by me.