other-world.  There was no doctrine of a series of rebirths on this earth as a punishment for sin.  The Druidic teaching of a bodily immortality was mistakenly assumed to be the same as the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul reincarnated in body after body.  Other points of resemblance were then discovered.  The organisation of the Druids was assumed by Ammianus to be a kind of corporate life—­sodaliciis adstricti consortiis—­while the Druidic mind was always searching into lofty things,[1033] but those who wrote most fully of the Druids knew nothing of this.

The Druids, like the priests of all religions, doubtless sought after such knowledge as was open to them, but this does not imply that they possessed a recondite philosophy or a secret theology.  They were governed by the ideas current among all barbaric communities, and they were at once priests, magicians, doctors, and teachers.  They would not allow their sacred hymns to be written down, but taught them in secret,[1034] as is usual wherever the success of hymn or prayer depends upon the right use of the words and the secrecy observed in imparting them to others.  Their ritual, as far as is known to us, differs but little from that of other barbarian folk, and it included human sacrifice and divination with the victim’s body.  They excluded the guilty from a share in the cult—­the usual punishment meted out to the tabu-breaker in all primitive societies.

The idea that the Druids taught a secret doctrine—­monotheism, pantheism, or the like—­is unsupported by evidence.  Doubtless they communicated secrets to the initiated, as is done in barbaric mysteries everywhere, but these secrets consist of magic and mythic formulae, the exhibition of Sacra, and some teaching about the gods or about moral duties.  These are kept secret, not because they are abstract doctrines, but because they would lose their value and because the gods would be angry if they were made too common.  If the Druids taught religious and moral matters secretly, these were probably no more than an extension of the threefold maxim inculcated by them according to Diogenes Laertius:  “To worship the gods, to do no evil, and to exercise courage."[1035] To this would be added cosmogonic myths and speculations, and magic and religious formulae.  This will become more evident as we examine the position and power of the Druids.

In Gaul, and to some extent in Ireland, the Druids formed a priestly corporation—­a fact which helped classical observers to suppose that they lived together like the Pythagorean communities.  While the words of Ammianus—­sodaliciis adstricti consortiis—­may imply no more than some kind of priestly organisation, M. Bertrand founds on them a theory that the Druids were a kind of monks living a community life, and that Irish monasticism was a transformation of this system.[1036] This is purely imaginative.  Irish Druids had wives and children, and the Druid Diviciacus was a family man,