The Voice Conventional
Druidic Myths and Freemasonry
© Professor Andrew Prescott, May 2000
of the Centre for Research into Freemasonry, University of Sheffield

Part Two

Sometime between 1665 and 1693, John Aubrey, whose voluminous collections are such a vital source of seventeenth century antiquarian lore and gossip, proposed that Stonehenge and Avebury were associated with the druids. Aubrey's ideas were popularized by Edmund Gibson's edition of William Camden's antiquarian work Britannia. Aubrey's theories helped inspire William Stukeley to undertake pioneering investigations which recorded in detail the remains at Stonehenge and Avebury. 

The role of the druids as guardians of an indigenous religion and culture had become widely accepted in the literature of the period. It was assumed that they embodied the pre-Christian wisdom of the patriarchs, and the suggestion that they readily converted to Christianity was held to bolster this view. John Milton summed up the widely held orthodoxy when he declared that 'writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy of this island'. William Stukeley pushed this view only a little bit further when he said that 'our predecessors the Druids of Britain, tho' left in the extremist west to the improvement of their own thoughts, yet advanced their inquiries, under all disadvantages, to such heights, as should make our moderns ashamed to wink in the sunshine of learning and religion'. 

Up to this point, the druids had been considered largely in their English context. A further dimension was introduced by the work of John Toland. Toland was an Irish freethinker whose 1696 work Christianity Not Mysterious was a controversial assault on the institutions of established religion. Toland has been claimed as a radical freemason by the American scholar Margaret Jacobs, but it seems that the groups with which he was connected had organizational features inspired by freemasonry but were not Masonic as such.

Toland wrote two books on the Druids. In these he used the Druids to satirize the established church and particularly the Irish priesthood. He saw the Druids as deceivers of the people, as can be seen  from this snippet:

"To arrive at perfection in sophistry requires a long habit, as well as juggling, in which last they were very expert: but to be masters of both, and withal learn the art of managing the mob, which is vulgarly called leading the people by the nose, demands abundant study and exercise."

Toland's use of the Druids as a vehicle for anti-clerical satire seems particularly to have annoyed the respectable Anglican clergyman Stukeley, and accounts for his determination to show at length how the religion of the Druids embodied the original wisdom of the Patriarchs. As a result Stukeley's Druids begin to sound almost like priests of the Church of England, who simply had the misfortune to be born before the arrival of the Messiah.

Toland's stress on the Irish connections of the Druids - he extended Aubrey's arguments by adding cairns, standing stones and cromlechs to the list of Druidical monuments - and Stukeley's depiction of Druidism as prefiguring English characteristics meant that from the mid-eighteenth century, Druidism becomes connected with issues of nationality. As the concept of a unified British mainland state settled down after the failure of the 1745 rebellion, so a fascination with the exotic Celtic fringes of this newly unified country became more widespread. This may be read at one level as in itself part of the process of colonialisation, but at another as an attempt by the Scots and Welsh to maintain a sense of continuing cultural identity. 

A crucial moment in this process of Celtic Revival was the publication by James Macpherson of an epic poem called Ossian. Macpherson claimed it as a great poem passed down by oral tradition, which demonstrated the sophistication of Scottish highland culture; it was of course as we now know a forgery. Macpherson sought to portray the Celtic highlanders as the ultimate noble savages, well versed in natural philosophy, valiant, free of malice, kind and considerate, but a terror to their enemies. In his non-Ossianic writings, such as his Introduction to the Ancient History of Great Britain and Ireland [ 1771 ] , Macpherson portrayed the Druids as the people who taught the Celts these qualities. 

It was Wales, however, which most effectively annexed the Druids. Welsh scholars such as the Morris brothers from Anglesey were anxious to emphasize that the Welsh language provided a direct connection with some of these ancient mysteries, and the title page of the publications of the society they established to promote the study of Welsh literature and history, the Honorable Society of the Cymmrodorion, bore the image of a druid. 

The most scholarly attempt to identify Wales with the Druids was however the work of Henry Rowlands, the vicar of Llanidan on Anglesey, which sought to prove that Anglesey was the heartland of the Druidic order in Britain, and supplied an extensive account of Druidic rites on Anglesey and the archaeological remains on the island associated with them. Rowlands work was exceptionally influential, underpinning much of Stukeley's research. Rowlands helped establish the Druids as figures especially associated with Wales, and his work can be taken of an example of the Welsh annexing a tradition which had particularly taken root in England - the reverse of the usual practice.

The fascination with the Druids as indigenous bearers of an ancient patriarchal wisdom which was held to be common to all pre-flood races from Ireland to the far east made it almost inevitable that attempts would be made to connect Druids with freemasonry. The most famous embodiment of these early attempts to investigate how far the Druids might lie behind freemasonry was of course William Stukeley himself, who became a freemason in the hope that it might help him discover the secrets of the ancients. 

Likewise, Jonathan Swift, in an amazing overview of the potential possible links between freemasonry and a thousand and one ancient sects and movements [a kind of primer of almost every subsequent connection which has been claimed for freemasonry] inevitably dragged in the figure of the Druids as the keepers of the ancient flame. 

In 1754, the wayward and drunken Anglesey poet Gornowy Owen joined a Masonic lodge at Walton near Liverpool. He was a friend of the Morris brothers who took such a prominent part in promoting and preserving Welsh literature in the middle of the eighteenth century. Owen wrote to William Morris describing his new hobby. Part of his letter is very interesting in the way in which it explicitly links freemasonry to the national sentiment in the wake of the Hanoverian succession. Owen wrote:

"Here we are [as to nation] Welsh, English, Irish, Scots and Manks, and [as to religion] Protestants and Papists, and [as to politicks] high and low fliers, but all Georgites [within doors at least] and yet, so far are we from national reflections, that the only appellation is brother, and, as I have the honor to be chaplain, I can assure you our form of prayer [which is in English, as being the common language] is such that no Christian would refuse to join in, of what persuasion soever he should be." 

William Morris expressed some doubts about the freemasons, but Owen reassured him, writing back:

"There is no point of learning which harms a man so long as he does not abuse it. The Craft would deserve praise were there no other virtue in it than its capacity to keep a secret...But the chief thing that urged me to look into this secret craft was that I fully believed it to be a branch of my old ancestors, the Druids of yore, and I didn't guess badly. But, tut, tut! I nearly forgot who and what I am, and must restrain myself. But possibly you too are one of the privileged fraternity." 

Owen was an impossible man, but a wonderful poet, and his ideas on epic poetry were to overshadow Welsh literature for almost a century. But Owen's Masonic career also prefigures a lot of other important themes in the development of Welsh culture. The key phrase in Owen's comment about the druids is 'my ancestors of yore'. Owen, as was appropriate to a native of the island of Henry Rowlands, claimed the Druids as specifically Welsh figures and saw any connection between freemasonry and the Druids as a matter which should be of interest to any Welshman. Owen was this for the first time linking druidism, freemasonry and issues of Welsh national identity. This theme was to reemerge forty years later in an astonishing development the results of which transformed Welsh national culture and, it could be claimed, were among the most substantial cultural results of freemasonry in Britain. 

In 1792 a letter appeared in The Gentlemans Magazine describing an event on Primrose Hill in London. It read as follows: 

"Saturday September 21 [1792]. This being the day on which the autumnal equinox occurred, some Welsh bards, resident in London, assembled in congress on Primrose Hill, according to ancient usage...The wonted ceremonies were observed. A circle of stones formed, in the middle of which was the Maen Gorsedd, or altar, on which a naked sword being placed, all the Bards assisted to sheathe it. This ceremony was attended with a proclamation, the substance of which was that the Bards of the Island of Britain [for such was their ancient title] were the heralds and ministers of peace...On this occasion the Bards appeared in the insignia of their various orders...The Bardic traditions, and several odes, were recited. Two of the odes were in English; and the first that were ever in the language recited at a congress of Ancient British Bards. This was with an intention to give the English reader an idea of what, though very common in Wales, has never been properly known in England. The Bardic Institution of the Ancient Britains, which is the same as the Druidic, has been from the earliest times, through all ages, to the present day, retained by the Welsh, and is now exactly the same as it was two thousand years ago."  

The author of this letter was our old friend, Edward Williams, Iolo Morganwg, who on this occasion at Primrose Hill pulled off his most daring coup and the feat for which he was most celebrated, the creation of the Gorsedd of bards. For, despite the claim that this institution had existed in Wales for two thousand years, and that the English had remained ignorant of it, the Gorsedd was an invention of Iolo Morganwg, and dates back no earlier than about 1791. Moreover, a significant component of the origins of the Gorsedd lie, through an indirect but interesting path, in freemasonry.  

Iolo developed the myth of the Gorsedd in his Poems Lyric and Pastoral, which bore the motto of the Gorsedd, created by Iolo, and still used: Truth against the World. Iolo described how .. the bardic, or which is the same thing, the druidic institution originated in Britain, according to Julius Caesar, the ancient Welsh writers, and the traditions still retained by the bards. It is not yet extinct, for we have in Wales a small number still remaining, in an uninterrupted succession from the ancient British bards and druids. A Welsh bard of the present age retains the ancient title of bard, [which is] in English, bard according to the rights and institutes of the bards of the island of Britain. The druidic theology also still remains in Wales, where it was never entirely abolished; yet druidism has been sought for everywhere but in Wales, and the Welsh language, where it is only to be found. 

Iolo goes on to describe how the Welsh bards ... only meet in open air whilst the sun is above the horizon, where they form a circle of stones, according to the ancient custom; this circle they call the circle of concord or confederation. In these days however it is formed only of a few very small stones, or pebbles, such as may be carried to the spot in one man's pocket; but this would not have been deemed sufficient by those who formed the stupendous bardic circle of Stonehenge'. 

Iolo claimed that by the 1770s this order had been reduced to just one person, the poet Edward Evans of Aberdare, and that it was Evans who himself had invested Iolo into the order. On Evans' death, Iolo had been left as the last surviving representative of this institution which, he claimed, pre-dated Christ. In various publications, he outlined the rules, hierarchies and ceremonies of the Gorsedd, which he claimed to have transcribed from an ancient manuscript in Raglan Castle. He described the regalia and costumes to be worn by the different ranks of the order. As he traveled around Wales, he carried the stones to form the circle in his pocket and held meetings of the Gorsedd, which frequently aroused great suspicion: on one occasion a Gorsedd was dispersed by the militia from the nearby town of Cowbridge. Doubts were expressed about the validity of Iolo's claims. Critics declared that the whole Gorsedd was a fraudulent concoction of modern druidism, cabala and freemasonry [and of course they were right].

Nevertheless, in 1819, old Iolo pulled off a coup. The old institution of the eisteddfod had been taken up by Anglican reformers as a means of preserving Welsh literary culture. A leader in this movement was the Bishop of St Davids, who proposed that the Cambrian Society should publish a comprehensive edition of old Welsh manuscripts and printed books under the supervision of Iolo. The 1819 eisteddfod was held in Carmarthen, and shortly before it began Iolo invested the Bishop into the Gorsedd [the ceremony taking place in the garden of the Ivy Bush hotel, which had been the meeting place of the first Welsh Masonic lodge in the eighteenth century]. The full meeting of the Gorsedd took place as part of the eisteddfod, and the two institutions became inextricably linked. 

[ Druid Part Three ]