Customer Reviews

The Druid Source Book: From Earliest Times to the Present Day

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Much work has gone into this study and it deserves to be read. Some reviewers have faulted this book because it draws on 'dated' sources - but, the author explains why he has chosen those sources. They may be 'dated' but that could be seen as a virtue, rather than a drawback. Quite rightly, one reviewer has noted that - traditionally, the key elements of Druidic teaching have been transmitted orally. Thus, whatever may be found in written sources, needs to be fleshed out with reference to the oral tradition. The sources Matthews has drawn on were put together by people able to assess that side of the tradition, far more accurately than than we are today. Druidic Studies suffer from a twofold bane - the speculations of Neo-Druids - who, for want of an informed background, have almost been forced to re-invent the tradition, introducing arbitrary notions of their own. Then we have the sceptical voice of modern scholarship (e.g. Stuart Piggot, who devotes his time and energy to de-bunking Druidism). For the most part, the material Matthews has put together avoids these extremes.Hence the interest of this book.

I believe the previous review is somewhat "misguided" in representing this interesting book. Yes, it does contain "outdated" and "antiquarian" sources, but the author/editor clearly states why he is using these sources and leaves it up to the reader to dwell on what is said but more importantly what is NOT being said to draw their own conclusions if there are to be any. Since there is no written source(s) from the actual time of the Druids (as far as we "know" it was all oral, passed from teacher to student), all we have to go by is what has been written or passed down, but this information and more is already in all of us if we wish to see. No book can really tell you anything absolute about any subject matter, but it can be a guide.
I would recommend this as well as any book by the author of the Foreward, Philip Carr-Gomm, and his late mentor, Ross Nichols.

John Matthews is a highly respected scholar who dedicated a significant portion of his life researching obscure Arthurian legends that have pretty much been lost in the mists of time. During the course of his career, he also wrote this book on the Druids, based upon both scant dark age sources and 'new' 17th-19th century historians' work. If you wish to learn about the Druids and their practices, without all the new age hallucinations and the 'I'm secretly a powerful witch' gibberish, this is the book for you. Some people look down upon this book as it does not form a 'how-to' manual, nor does it pander to the (inaccurate) romantic notions of what the original tree huggers were like. If you want sourced information without the nonsense, you will find this volume useful. But as Mr Matthews make clear, this is a review of actual research, not a manual that so many people seek.

John Matthews presents this as a source book for those wishing to be druids today. He gives the impression that this book will give you accurate information about what the druids were like. However, what he has collected is a number of essays and excerpts that tell you what antiquarians and occultists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries *thought* druids were like. The scholarship is outdated, though it may be of interest to those studying the druidic revival as a sociological or historical event. If you are interested in learning what is truly known about the druids, rather than an imaginative depiction, I recommend Piggott's _The Druids_ or Miranda Green's _World of the Druids_. Those books provide all the essential information and direct you to other sources for further reading. For an insightful study of the image of druids through the ages, see Leslie Ellen Jones' _Druid, Shaman, Priest._