Classical writers speak of Dryades or “Druidesses” in the third century.  One of them predicted his approaching death to Alexander Severus, another promised the empire to Diocletian, others were consulted by Aurelian.[1083] Thus they were divineresses, rather than priestesses, and their name may be the result of misconception, unless they assumed it when Druids no longer existed as a class.  In Ireland there were divineresses—­ban-filid or ban-fathi, probably a distinct class with prophetic powers.  Kings are warned against “pythonesses” as well as Druids, and Dr. Joyce thinks these were Druidesses.[1084] S. Patrick also armed himself against “the spells of women” and of Druids.[1085] Women in Ireland had a knowledge of futurity, according to Solinus, and the women who took part with the Druids like furies at Mona, may have been divineresses.[1086] In Ireland it is possible that such women were called “Druidesses,” since the word ban-drui is met with, the women so called being also styled ban-fili, while the fact that they belonged to the class of the Filid brings them into connection with the Druids.[1087] But ban-drui may have been applied to women with priestly functions, such as certainly existed in Ireland—­e.g. the virgin guardians of sacred fires, to whose functions Christian nuns succeeded.[1088] We know also that the British queen Boudicca exercised priestly functions, and such priestesses, apart from the Dryades, existed among the continental Celts.  Inscriptions at Arles speak of an antistita deae, and at Le Prugnon of a flaminica sacerdos of the goddess Thucolis.[1089] These were servants of a goddess like the priestess of the Celtic Artemis in Galatia, in whose family the priesthood was hereditary.[1090] The virgins called Gallizenae, who practised divination and magic in the isle of Sena, were priestesses of a Gaulish god, and some of the women who were “possessed by Dionysus” and practised an orgiastic cult on an island in the Loire, were probably of the same kind.[1091] They were priestesses of some magico-religious cult practised by women, like the guardians of the sacred fire in Ireland, which was tabu to men.  M. Reinach regards the accounts of these island priestesses as fictions based on the story of Circe’s isle, but even if they are garbled, they seem to be based on actual observation and are paralleled from other regions.[1092]

The existence of such priestesses and divineresses over the Celtic area is to be explained by our hypothesis that many Celtic divinities were at first female and served by women, who were possessed of the tribal lore.  Later, men assumed their functions, and hence arose the great priesthoods, but conservatism sporadically retained such female cults and priestesses, some goddesses being still served by women—­the Galatian Artemis, or the goddesses of Gaul, with their female servants.  Time also brought its revenges, for