I copy all these quotations from a book
written largely to prove that the Druids were savage medicine-men
with no philosophy at all: it is, _The Religion of the Ancient
Celts,_ by Canon MacCulloch. The argument used by this learned
divine is very simple. The Druids were savage medicine-men,
and could have known nothing about Pythagoras' teachings or
Pythagoras himself. Therefore they didn't. All the classical
writers were exaggerating, or inventing, or copying from one
another.--It never occurs to our Canon to remember Iamblichus'
statement that the Druids did not borrow or learn from Pythagoras,
but Pythagoras from them. He quotes with no sign of doubt
the things said by the classical writers about barbaric Druid
rites; never dreaming that in respect to these there may
have been invention, exaggeration, or copying one from another--
and that other chiefly the gentle Julius who--but I have
mentioned _his_ exploit before.

Holding to such firm preconceptions as these,--and being in
total ignorance of the fact that the Esoteric Wisdom was once
universal, and therefore naturally the same with Pythagoras as
with anyone else who had not lost it, whether he and the Druids
had ever heard of each other or not,--it becomes quite easy for
my learned countryment to scout the idea that any such doctrine
or system could have survived among the Britons until the fifth
century, and revived then. Yet Nennius, by the way, asserts that
Vortigern (the king who called in the Saxons) had 'Magi' with
him; which word in the Irish text appears as 'Druids': and
Canon MacCulloch himself speaks of this as evidence of a
recrudescence of Druidism at that time.

With those quotations from the classical writers in view--if
with nothing else,--I think we may call Reincarnation.... the
characteristic doctrine of Druidism. It so appeared to the
Romans; it was that doctrine, which with themselves had been
obscured by skepticism, worldliness, and the outwornness of their
spiritual perceptions, that struck them as the most noteworthy,
most surprising thing in Druidic teaching. It stood in sharp
contrast, too, with the beliefs of Christianity; so that,
supposing it, and the system that taught it, had died during the
Roman occupation of Britain, there really was nowhere from
which it might have been regained. Wales has been, until
very recently, extraordinarily cut off from the currents of
civilization and world-thought. She has dwelt aloof