Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

1 fie L2ildees oj JJrindicaL Days. 2 85
St. Bernard was distressed at what he heard of these
Irish Culdees, who had no Confession, never paid tithes,
and hved like wild beasts, as they disdained marriage by
the clergy. In his righteous anger, he stigmatized them
as " beasts, absolute barbarians, a stubborn, stiffnecked, and
inigovernable generation, and abominable ; Christian in
name, but in reality pagans." This harsh language is not
worse than that employed by the Pope, when he entreated
our Henry 11. to take over Ireland, so as to bring the Irish
into the Christian Church, compel them to pay tithes, and
so civilize them.
One would fancy, with Algernon Herbert, that the
Culdees performed secret rites, and indulged, like their
Druidical fathers, in human sacrifice, from the legend of
St. Gran being buried underneath the church erected by
Columba, to propitiate the Powers, and secure good
fortune. In that case, however, St. Oran offered to be the
victim, so as to avert evil from bad spirits.
If St. Patrick, St. Columba, and other early Irish Saints
had been true monks, why did St. Bernard, in his Life of
Malachy, Archbishop of Armagh, 1
time there was not a monk in Ireland }
1 30, say that up to that
Columba certainly
took Culdeeism to Scotland from Ireland. In the Bog of
Monaincha are two islands. On one was a monastery
for men, their wives occupying the neighbouring Woman's
Isle. Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote of the Com.munity
of Monaincha in the twelfth century, called it the church
of the old religion, and politely designated as " Demons "
all who belonged to that former church.
The Abbey church,
the ruins of which still remain, and which was 38 feet by iS
feet in size, was erected after the time of Giraldus.
Thus R. F. Gould, in his Freemasonry, had some grounds
for saying— " The Druidism of our ancestors must have
been powerfully influenced by the paganism of the Empire