WI: Celtic Druids write down their religious traditions

[danteheadman]

Two groups suffered similar fates under the Roman Empire: the Jews and the Celts. Both were conquered, repatedly rebelled, and had their societies utterly destroyed by Roman forces. But the core religious and cultural elements of Jewish society in antiquity - what became modern Judaism - survived. The Celtic / Druidic way of life didn't.

As far as I can tell, the reason Judaism survived was because Judaism was a textual language. It was written down in the Torah and the rest of Tanakh. When Judean society was destroyed by the Romans, Jewish scholars wrote more of it down (the Mishna and the Talmud). Jews outside of majority-Jewish societies were able to carry their traditions with them across the world.

What if the core ideas of Druidism had been written down? This could either be in some form of early Ogham or in another script; what matters is that it's written down before Druidic society is completely erased by the Romans. Would this have changed anything? Enabled Druidic thought to persist across northern Europe?

 

[Analytical Engine]

Firstly, you have to get around the Druids' opposition for writing down Druidic tenants.

https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/Celts/theCelts2.htm

Julius Cesar reported that Gauls would write ordinary things using Greek letters. Later, the Gauls would use Latin letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid#Societal_role_and_training

 

[danteheadman]

Firstly, you have to get around the Druids' opposition for writing down Druidic tenants.

https://homepages.bluffton.edu/~bergerd/Celts/theCelts2.htm

Jews were also against writing down the Mishna and Talmud. It was explicitly an oral tradition (thus the name "oral Torah") before the destruction of the Temple (and the consequential loss of institutional power among the anti-oral-torah Sadducees).

All the Druids need is for some faction of them to agree to write their oral traditions down once they realize it'll die out if they don't.

Julius Cesar reported that Gauls would write ordinary things using Greek letters. Later, the Gauls would use Latin letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid#Societal_role_and_training

Neat! So they already have a script.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Kind of. I think part of the reason Judaism survived is because Christians and surviving Rabbinic Jewish communities (possibly principally the latter!) had an interest in preserving those ideas in text, to understand their own derived religions.

This is not really the case for a lot of ancient knowledge - there lots of areas where the Romans seem to have had scant interest, and preserved little, less of which survived late Antiquity.

So I'm not sure if it would do good for British Celtic groups to have written down their ideas - no guarantee they would survive.

One of the Alt History fantasies I entertain is one where whatever civilization empire knit together the Mediterranean had a much stronger interest and more developed science of and interest in ethnography, writing down languages, translations, and a much higher capacity to record knowledge, than did OTL's empire (without otherwise any major technological or scientific revolution). There are so many gaps where we could understand better how languages and groups connect and formed, which we can't really because the primary evidence is so limited and the ancients don't seem to have either cared to record them, or if they did, they don't survive.

For ex', we don't know exactly what the linguistic relation of Basque, Iberian and Etruscan are and whether there are any (there appear not to be, but evidence is limited) or how to say many even basic things in the latter two, we don't know what many Indo-European languages were like and how and where they formed (for instance, is Celtic either a language area of shared innovations or a truly "genetic" language family for instance? we can't know on the basis of current evidence), what were many of the pre-Romance and pre-Slavic languages of Europe even like that are now lost to us, etc.

 

[danteheadman]

Kind of. I think part of the reason Judaism survived is because Christians and surviving Rabbinic Jewish communities (possibly principally the latter!) had an interest in preserving those ideas in text, to understand their own derived religions. ...

Christians had exactly no interest in preserving the Oral Torah or any Jewish traditional practice that Greek converts didn't incorporate into their own rituals. For most of Christian history, per Saint Augustine's writings, Jews were tolerated as a "witness people," a static and unchanged living example of Jews at the time of Jesus. Whenever that myth was shattered (i.e. by Christian discovery of the Talmud or other post-Temple Jewish writings) those books were burned and Jews were massacred.

Judaism survived as a living society because of Jews and Jews alone.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Perhaps (do you really have massacres every time a churchman finds out that the Talmud exists?), but I don't see druids even getting that.

Still, even if post divergence Christian divergence stuff was preserved by Rabbinic Jews alone, I don't think you're arguing that knowledge of Hebrew societies and their languages up until the divergence of Christianity and Judaism was only preserved by Rabbinic Jews are you?

 

[Grey Wolf]

Julius Cesar reported that Gauls would write ordinary things using Greek letters. Later, the Gauls would use Latin letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid#Societal_role_and_training

Didn't Marius report this even earlier? The bit I read certainly seemed to imply at least history/tradition was recorded

 

[danteheadman]

Perhaps (do you really have massacres every time a churchman finds out that the Talmud exists?), but I don't see druids even getting that.

So you think that even if they had written down their beliefs, it would have come to naught because of Christianity?

Still, even if post divergence Christian divergence stuff was preserved by Rabbinic Jews alone, I don't think you're arguing that knowledge of Hebrew societies and their languages up until the divergence of Christianity and Judaism was only preserved by Rabbinic Jews are you?

Christians preserved the texts that were already written down beforehand, i.e. the Tanakh, along with their own beliefs about the life and personage of Jesus. The Church Fathers were pretty clear that Jesus constituted a radical break from contemporary Jewish praxis and, consequently, did not record or retain anything about Jewish law and tradition *as currently practiced* by those outside their movement.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

So you think that even if they had written down their beliefs, it would have come to naught because of Christianity?

Kind of most likely. There are other literate traditions which died out, and which were not preserved in text at all. If you consider all the traditions that were present in the Roman world which died out, it doesn't seem like they were clearly traditions not recorded textually while Judaism was, so I'm not sure about the relationship of texts = likely to survive. It seems more like Judaism had a special relationship of toleration (to be clear, also including much intolerance that I'm not trying to gloss over) with following religions which other traditions lacked and that is the reason for a surviving tradition.