Before England. Before Britain. Before the Romans. 🌿 There was a class of people in this island who held everything in their heads. The Romans called them Druids. 🌳 They were the doctors. The lawyers. The judges. The astronomers. The philosophers. The poets. All in one. In one lifetime. They could walk between two armies about to fight and stop the battle. With a raised hand. ✋ Caesar recorded this. Strabo recorded this. Diodorus Siculus recorded this. Three independent sources. Caesar himself wrote that Britain was the origin of Druidism 🇬🇧 Training took up to twenty years. Medicine. Law. Astronomy. Philosophy. History. The size of the cosmos. ⭐ All of it memorised. Not one word written down. On the sixth day of the moon a Druid in white climbed an oak tree with a golden sickle and cut the mistletoe. Others caught it in white cloth below. It must never touch the ground. They called it the all-healing. 🌿 They believed the soul was immortal. After death it passed from one body to the next. The fear of death was cast aside. 💀 Once a year they marked the barrier between the living and the dead. October the thirty-first. 🎃 Every fire across Britain was extinguished. The Arch-Druid climbed a sacred hill in gold robes and lit a single new fire. They burned the bones of animals in it. The bone-fire. 🔥 We call it a bonfire now. People dressed as monsters to hide from the spirits of the dead. We call it Halloween. The Druids invented Halloween. 👻 In 60AD Rome came for them. Flat-bottomed boats crossed the Menai Strait. The cavalry swam alongside their horses. On the opposite shore women in black robes brandished torches. Druids with their hands raised to heaven. Screaming curses. Tacitus wrote that the Roman soldiers, hardened legionaries, were frozen with terror. 😨 They stood motionless. Shields not raised. Exposed to wounds. Their commanders had to shout at them to remember they were soldiers. They crossed. They massacred. They cut down the sacred groves. And Britain went silent. 🌑 No buildings. No inscriptions. No graves. Their temples were forest clearings. Everything we know about them comes from the people who destroyed them. And yet. 🌳 Halloween. The word bonfire. The oak groves they called sacred still stand. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧 Your support goes straight into educating fellow Britons on the history they were never taught. Be part of us: proudofus.co.uk/support
