“The Druids are in charge of all religious matters…. For they have opinions to give on almost all disputes involving tribes or individuals, and if any crime is committed, any murder done, or if there is contention about a will or the boundaries of some property, they are the people who investigate the matter and establish rewards and punishments….”
Julius Caesar
I originally envisioned my first book as a middle-grade boys adventure with the flexibility to make it into a series. However, after several rewrites, I decided it needed something extra, so I added magic to the stories as well as historical ghost characters. Perhaps the most significant change I made was changing his ‘buddy’ from a boy to a girl. At first glance, it might not seem like a drastic change, but it sent me down a very different story path than I originally envisioned.
When I made these changes, I also decided that the boy protagonist would not have any unique abilities or magical powers. So, all I gave him to make him different was perseverance and an overwhelming drive to do the right thing. But, since I’d added magic to the story, I had to come up with a magical system.
I didn’t want the magic system in my books to be all-powerful, so I tied it to the five classical elements of earth, air, water, fire, and aether. From there, I indexed to spells, which led me to Wiccans, which I’ve always associated with mysticism.
I thought about who could be part of this Wiccan group of magicians and decided to make it an all-women organization that originated thousands of years ago (I’ll explain this backstory in greater depth in a later post). The problem with that is that Wicca, as a religion, is relatively new. It’s less than a century old!
So, Wiccans weren’t a good fit. I went back to the drawing board and decided to model this group of magical women after the Druids, which had a long history of strong and educated women, including warrior queens like Boudica. But the historical Druids could not perform magic. My group of fictional Druids predates the real ones by thousands of years. I also had them go ‘underground’ and work in the background because humanity still struggles to embrace strong, educated women.
Much of Druid history is unknown as there are few written eyewitness accounts of them as the Druids prohibited writing about their practices. I include a quote from Julius Caesar about the Druids because much of what we know about them comes from his writing. Most historians, however, believe Julius Caesar embellished his Commentary with stories on the Druids, Gauls, and Germanic tribes to build up his reputation back in Rome.
What we do know is that they were high-ranking officials in the Celtic culture, acting as religious leaders, legal authorities, medical professionals, and such. My biggest learning when researching the Druids was that they lived across much of Europe, not just Britain, as I had always thought. Another surprise learning was that there is conflicting evidence on whether the Druids ever performed human sacrifice, much less built a Wicker Man and stuff it with people only to burn it.
One last piece of information on the Druids you need to know for my books. As I’ve said, women held a respected position in Druid society. From what I can tell, it took western civilization another 2000 years before women had as many responsibilities again. The Irish even had a term for female Druids – Bandruí, which I’ve used to name the secret order of women with magical powers I have written into my series.
When my younger daughter and I traveled to Britain two years ago, we didn’t encounter any historical Druid places. Since I didn’t have an appropriate Druid picture, I decided to show you something from my favorite area of England, Dunster, Porlock, and the Porlock Marshes, where Druids would have lived two millennia ago. Note the thatched roof. We saw quite a few buildings in the area with these types of roofs. It felt like we were in a different, gentler world.
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