Why do Druids go to Stonehenge?
(Nimue)
The association between Druids and Stonehenge is complicated to say the least. If you want to get into this in detail then Ronald Hutton’s Blood And Mistletoe is an excellent read.
The short version goes that early historians were working with the Bible as their frame of reference for what the past looked like. Bible history doesn’t give us anything like the length of time actual history involves. Early historians could not imagine just how big the past is. What they did have was writing from Romans, and Romans mentioned the Druids. Therefore, in that relatively small window of time between the beginning of the world and the arrival of the Romans, there couldn’t have been many candidates for building Stonehenge. As the Romans had mentioned the Druids, they were assumed to be it.
When the first waves of people trying to recreate Druidry got started, this was the history they knew. Druids built Stonehenge, so if you wanted to be a Druid, clearly Stonehenge was the place to go do stuff. It isn’t until we get to the Victorians that people began to get to grips with the idea of there being a lot more history than the Bible suggests. This is a prime example of the way in which modern Pagans need to be sceptical about older texts. Old books are not always a better source.
There’s nothing intrinsically Druidic about Stonehenge. The Druids did not build it. However…
One of the things we now know thanks to archaeology is that people re-use sites. There are lots of places in the UK where later peoples have discernibly responded to much older evidence of human activity. Being massive and eye-catching, it probably is fair to assume that Iron Age Britons found Stonehenge interesting. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that historical Druids went there and did stuff.
What we can say with absolute confidence is that modern Druids going to Stonehenge is in line with what people have done throughout history. It’s the same impulse that builds churches on the sites of old Roman temples, that buries the dead in much older graveyards, and keeps showing up at the same shrines long after the original use has been forgotten. Finding the past resonant and wanting to connect with ancestral sites is of itself a solid historical practice for which we have a ton of evidence.
Which leaves us in the amusing position that while the stories about Druids and Stonehenge are mostly rubbish, turning up isn’t. Showing up at historical sites may be the nearest we get as modern Pagans to an unbroken lineage of practice. Included in that is the way no one really knows what the people before them were doing. It’s a funny sort of continuity, but it’s one we can be confident about.
