My mind, filled with myths, symbols, and eccentricities, is ready to ask for mercy, and still I feel it, there are some things yet to be done. For instance, I recollect having promised to give a completion of the history of the Druidesses, that is to say, of women, those myth-like beings by eminence! That kind of instinctive sense, that delicacy of almost intuitive perceptions which distinguished them from the other sex in its material coarseness, could not fail to give them easily the advantage over men. In Celtic lands as in Scandinavia they were the models of all virtues, the oracles of the house. They were occasionally beaten, it is true, but they were also grandly honored, and in Germany especially people burnt incense before them, long before they smoked tobacco in their presence.
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At the time when Christianity came, the women played a prominent and truly glorious part there; all the historians bear witness. Between the fourth and the sixth century Fritigill, Queen of the Marcomanni, Clotilda, Queen of France, and Bertha. Queen of England, had compelled their husbands to bow down before the Cross, and not by witchcraft, as the pagans wickedly maintained, but simply by persuasion. Other women, who belonged to noble families or to the common people at large, a Krimhild, a Thekla, and a Liobat, assisted the missionaries in their dangerous enterprise and actually helped them in cutting down the sacred oak trees.
What had become, during these long continued persecutions, of you, fair Gann, noble Aurinia, majestic Velleda, and of your sisters, the other Druidesses?
They were wandering about in dark forests, proscribed and weeping over their departed glory; they concealed themselves in remote places where the agents of the civil power but rarely appeared. Sometimes, of an evening, they would venture forth, approach a belated traveller on a cross-road, and hold with him mysterious converse. Sometimes, also, the inhabitants of a village, or even of a larger place, would go secretly to their well chosen hiding places to consult them on the good or evil chances of their prospects in life, or on an epidemic that was attacking their cattle. Some people, and among them not unfrequently recent converts, who were still strongly imbued with their former creed, would ask them to name their new-born infants and thus to bring them good luck. Hence they were at first known as Godmothers, and at a later time as Fairies.
It was naturally supposed that like the ancient fairies of the East, these women also derived their power from the stars, for why else should they have been met so constantly on the mountain slopes, when the moon was shining brightly, or slipping suddenly from behind a rock or a tree, where will-o’-the-wisps and fireflies alone were in the habit of being about?
Among these fairies many were kind and naturally benevolent; others, no doubt embittered by their fate, appeared irascible and ill disposed. Woe to the men, or even the cattle upon whom they cast an evil eye!