A Druid's take on St. Patrick

Great Debates
1

I somewhat casually stated to my GF last night my view that St. Patrick was a mass-murdering fuckhead. She’s always curious about things Pagan, being a somewhat-retired Pentecostal, and she challenged me to support my argument. So I collected the following info. I thought I’d throw it up here just to open it up for debate. Maybe we’ll all learn something.
The basic facts are this:

  1. He’s legendary for driving the snakes out of Ireland. The fact is, there never were any snakes in Ireland. The fossil record supports this. It’s an island that seperated from the continent during the ice age. Snakes, unlike other species, have a difficult time migrating to islands (Hawaii being another good example). A simple web search will present you with hundreds of references that will confirm that “snakes” was just a euphemism for Druids/Pagans, since the snake was often used as a symbol in Pagan art.

  2. The Druids held political power in Ireland before he arrived. All the Druid priests/priestesses who refused to convert disappeared. The Catholic church assumed power shortly thereafter.

  3. In any military conflict, the victor always gets to write the history. There is no “other side” to this story. The Druids dared to challenge the Holy Roman Church. They were silenced.

The “official” version
http://www.irelandseye.com/paddy2/patrick.html

Some historical excerpts. Notice how all the Druids are struck by lightning, consumed by fire, or swallowed by the ground. So everyone admits they died. The question is, did God kill them, or Patrick?
http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/idr/idr06.htm

Here’s the (I admit somewhat jaded) Pagan version. As stated above, there is scant information to back it up, as all the victims were members of a pre-literate culture and there were (even by Pat’s accounts) no survivors.
http://crystalsands.wiccan.net/articles/stpat.html

Here’s a fairly objective cite which reiterates the account that the Earth opened up and swallowed the Druids. I believe the Mafia uses a similar excuse when large numbers of people disappear.
http://www.sacredfire.net/celtchrist.html
Here are a couple of reputable cites that back up the “snakes=Druids” thing
http://gouk.about.com/library/weekly/aa031101a.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/stpatrick020314.html

Just an interesting objective account of Druids that I found while researching.
http://www.msu.edu/user/trescami/druidhistory.html

2

Uhh…if one man managed to singlehandedly overthrow the established druidical system then God was probably on his side! :wink:

Anyway, while there is a lot of speculation among your various cites, there’s bugger all hard evidence for anything…it’s also worth remembering that it was the Celtic Catholic Church that became the prevelant religion: they didn’t merge with the Roman Catholic Church until later. I’m not exactly saying you’re wrong, but do you have anything that actually supports your “St. Patrick was a mass-murdering fuckhead” statement?

3

Well if he wasn’t, then his “God” certainly was a “mass-murdering fuckhead” and this would not be the only example. :wink:

4

Patrick didn’t convert the entire island, only large parts of Ulster, and Christianity and Paganism coexisted in Ireland for about 100-150 years after Patrick.

That being said, I have no doubt there was violence, and that druids did get killed by the newly Christian kings. (Of course, it worked both ways. In pagan areas, Christians were killed, and people tried to kill Patrick on several occassions.

5

Claudius in his conquest & the successive Roman administrations over the Isles had greatly diminished the Druidic presence over three centuries. Also, many promoters of the 1700s Druidic revival held that many Druids saw the Christian Gospel as fulfilling their faith & converted willingly. This was accepted by no less a modern Pagan than Gerald Gardner himself.

6

The druids were a horrible barbarous group that were mostly considered to be thugs by the general population. Their extermination had more to do with their own actions than with a religious conflict.

7

FriarTed,

The conquest of Britain did weaken druidic power there, but Rome never conquered Ireland, and the old Celtic religion was still strong. As to your second point, a lot of conversions were willing (or semiwilling…a clan leader would say ‘We’re converting’, and if you were in the clan, you’d better do what he said), but there sometimes was violence. (and what helped in peaceful conversions was that Christian missionaries would reinterpret Celtic symbols in a Christian way. Celtic gods became associated with saints, sacred springs became pilgrimage sites, etc.)

Phuqan, I don’t know that the druids were much worse as a group than anyone else. What evidence do you have that they were “a horrible barbarous group that were mostly considered to be thugs by the general population”

Their extermination by the Romans in Gaul had a lot to do with their being the nucleus of revolts against Roman rule, as well as their practice of human sacrifice.

8

dude, are you actually trying to debunk the “St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland” legend as ever being based in fact?

Seriously?

9

I sincerely doubt that the concept of the “Druids” as a group in Ireland pre-St. Patrick has much to do with reality, either. I suspect there’s a lot of post-1960 neo-pagan mythology surrounding the image of “Druids” - you get a lot of people who think “Druids” built Stonehenge.

10

Well, as usual, I never get the replies I expect to get here, but still an interesting bunch.

I’m not trying to argue about this point, but I’d like to read more about it, cite?

And as Azael pointed out, murder in the name of Christianity is hardly a stretch to believe.

Nope, that wasn’t my main concern, but my “audience” for the original explanation was someone who may or may not have been hip to that fact, so I included it. There’s no doubt that on a scholarly level, this is accepted as fact.

ummm, I think you’re a little out of the loop here. Everyone, Christians, Romans, etc. agree that there were Druids there, they were in charge, and that they were removed from power.

Now of course the fact is that they were not much like the guys in the movies/fantasy novels. They were simply an upper-class, more learned group of Celts that governed a primitive, illiterate society. There was a lot of hocus-pocus (or was it pocus cadabra?) because that’s the easiest way to get points across to large groups of primitive people.

If your argument is that the Druids were just people, not wizards or whatever, I certainly agree. BUT, they most certainly existed, held power, and had wisdom and science that was very much advanced in contrast to their peers. They were real, and they were not stupid. Their philosophy lives on to this day and is still very valid and certainly applicable to modern conditions.

And yes, we’re all aware of the Stonehenge thing. Let’s not go there, it’s not worth either of our time.

11

Cite. Though I suppose you might not believe this version of events if you have your own theory.

12

The druids were commonly referred to as “Serpents of Wisdom”, hence the snake part, as he certainly did drive the druids from Ireland.

13

I ain’t Catholic, but…were the Druids really such great role models themselves? :dubious: :dubious: :dubious:

14

That depends. The issue is rather more complicated than you seem to assume, //\etalhea|).

The first, most obvious point (of which you seem to be vaguely aware already) is that the popular image of ‘druids’ is largely an invention of the ‘Druidic Revival’ of the eighteenth century. This however seems to be news to the authors of all the links you provided in the OP. Actual knowledge of the druids is confined to a small number of original sources, mostly by Roman (non-Christian) authors. Interpretation of that evidence is still disputed by the experts and, with so little to go on, even the experts can still be misled by the subtle influences of modern preconceptions. The bottom line is that anyone making confident statements about ‘the druids’ probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Secondly, most of the evidence derives from Roman contact with what would later become France and Great Britain. Whether the comments about druids in the Roman sources were also meant to refer to Ireland is often unclear, but, even if the Roman writers did assume that the customs they were reporting were common to the whole of the British Isles, it cannot be taken for granted that they actually knew this.

Thirdly, modern popular preconceptions about Irish ‘druids’ are bound up with particular notions about pre-Roman/pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ culture. The assumption is that much of the British Isles was inhabited by the Celts and that druidism was their distinctive religion. The problem with this is that many archaeologists now question the whole concept of ‘the Celts’. Whereas their predecessors used to stress the connections between the native inhabitants of the British Isles (and beyond), these archaeologists now stress the differences. The hardline position is that ‘the Celts’ of the British Isles were invented in the eighteenth century as part of a process that was intimately bound up with the Druidic Revival. One therefore cannot just assume that what was true of the inhabitants of Great Britain was also true of the inhabitants of Ireland. Conversely, it is equally questionable to use evidence relating to Irish paganism to fill in gaps in our knowledge about paganism elsewhere. Too much of what has been written about ‘Celtic’ paganism is an uncritical mishmash of evidence about peoples who may well have seen themselves as being very different.

As it happens, archaeologists and historians have not yet (so far as I am aware) overtly questioned the concept of ‘Irish druids’. What one can say is that the casual use of the term sets off all sorts of alarm bells. By all means use it to describe the religious leaders of pre-Christian Ireland (post-conversion Irish writers certainly used it in that way), but at least be aware that the term is a loaded one. How confident are you that anything you think you know about them is actually true?

As for the story about the snakes, there is no reason to suppose that it was intended to be read metaphorically. It is no more than a standard type of folk tale used to explain a particular local peculiarity. As one would expect, it is associated with a well-known legendary figure, who, in this case, also happened to have been a real person.

15

From the website of the DC chapter of the AOH:

Of course, Patrick is also credited with turning into a deer to escape warriors sent to kill him, bringing an ancient giant back to life and baptizing him, and being held in such respect that the sun refused to set for 12 days after his death.

Is it possible that, instead of being an allegory about the murder of the druids, it’s just one of those legends that say “He’s so holy, he can drive away evil creatures (snakes and spiders)”?

16

Are you REALLY treating this like a serious issue that needs to be debunked? Great day in the morning! It is very well known that this is a folk-misinterpretation of Patrick’s ongoing debates against the Pelagians in Ireland, said Pelagians called “serpents” by their opponents. Indeed, the Catholic Encyclopedia pretty much says this.

How about you go to an Episcopalian and say that St. Patrick was a Roman Catholic in the modern sense of the word. There is quite a bit of controversy over just how closely the Church of Patrick’s day resembled the modern Roman Catholic Church–or even if it should be considered in the same top-down authoritarian light at all.

Second, the “druids” lived on the island for a couple of centuries after Patrick shuffled off his mortal coil. Not only this, but many of them sent their own children to the Church for training and ordination. Y’see, they could see which way the wind was blowing and wanted in on the pie. Were you aware that, unlike in continental Europe, ecclesiastical establishments in Ireland were very often viewed as property of the clan?

“The victor always gets to write the history” very often is used as a cop-out when what one really wants to say is “I can’t find any evidence to contradict this, so I’m just going to scream real loud and convince people with my temper tantrum.”

As for the bedtime story you cite. Yes, it’s an amusing little folk tale. It’s also generally accepted as just a folk tale by the majority of Christians today.

The problem is that you are ranting about material that has been relegated to the stuff of children’s stories and cartoons. Sorry, Charlie, but the parish of St. Patrick that I’ve visited had a far more sober appraisal of their patron. They call him “Apostle to the Irish”.

17

OMG. In fact, there is no evidence St Patrick killed even one “druid”, let alone so many he could be called a “mass murdering fuckhead”.

True, he started the Conversion of Ireland from paganism (not “Druidism”, note). No doubt that some “druids” were thus put out of jobs- although it appears that most simply converted. Besides, the Conversion took a few hundred years- most of the “druids” just died of natural causes, and were replaced by Christian Priests.

In fact, in Ireland, there didn’t seem to any great amounts of “pagan slaying” during the Conversion- it was mostly peaceful. Of course, I am sure that some Christian Irish “Kings” used the fact their neighbor “King” was still a pagan as an excuse to go to war- like they needed an excuse.

Calling St Patrick a “Catholic” is also doubtful. The Church wasn’t divided up back then, there wasn’t really a “Catholic” Church yet.

Nor did “the Druids hold political power” in Ireland pre-Patrick. There were Pagan preists, and there were Druids. How many of which, and what the difference was is not clear. But the Kings & warrior class held the “political power”, the “Druids” held the religious power. The “Druids & the Bards” did handle the “legal system”, it seems.

I suppose that if one really wanted to beleive in Miracles, one could beleive that God made an earthquake, which “swallowed up” some Druids. I have my doubts. But if this Miracle really did happen, I don’t think we could call St Patrick a “mass murdering fuckhead”- at worst you could call God that, but if one beleived in Miracles that would indeed be hubris.

18

Yes, but this is mostly due to Spinal Tap.

19

[Spinal Tap]Who were these Druids, and what would they say to us if we were here tonight?[/Spinal Tap]

20

It’s probably worth adding that the current Archbishop of Canterbury is a Druid, for what that’s worth. :slight_smile: