Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

36 Irish Druids.
but
the charlatanerle of barbarian priests and the grossest
Gentile superstition."
While Professor O'Curry had " no ground whatever for
beheving the Druids to have been the priests of any
special positive worship,"—and Vallencey could say, " From
all I could collect from Irish documents, relative to the
religion of the heathen Irish, it appears that the Druidical
religion never made a part of it,"—
popular opinion has
always been in the other direction. Yet Vallencey would
credit Druids with some religion, when he mentions the
Druidical oracular stone,—in Irish LogJi-oim, in Cornish
Logan,— " into which the Druids pretend that the Log/i, or
divine affluence, descended when they consulted it."
Dr. Richey depreciates the Druid, when writing of the
early Irish missionaries :
" They did not encounter any
Archdruid as the representative or head of a national
religion,— they found no priesthood occupying a definite
political position which the ministers of the new religion
could appropriate." The Welsh Archdruid M}'fyr took
higher ground, when saying, " This Gorsedd has survived
the bardic chairs of Greece and Rome— it has survived
the institutions of Egypt, Chald^ea, and Palestine." He
declared, " Druidism is a religious system of positive
philosophy, teaching truth and reason, peace and justice."
He believed of Druids what Burnouf thought of the
Hindoo Rishis, that their metaphysics and religion "were
founded on a thorough grasp of physical facts."
Morien, his
favourite disciple, boldly avows that. Druidism,
like Freemasonry, was a philosophy, founded on
natural law, and not religion in the ordinary sense of that
term. So L. Maclean regarded Ossian's heroes " for the
greater part cabalistic, and indicative of the solar worship.
Phion (Fingal) bespeaks the Phoenician ; Cual, the Syrian
or Dog-star worshipper, of which Conchulain with his