Néo drudisme

Alain le Goff, un druide contemporain ?

Le néo-druidisme est une des curiosités de la Bretagne. Il en existe même dans d'autres régions d'Europe et même en Amérique du nord. S'agit d'un vain folklore ? Probablement certains mouvements appartiennent au vaste monde de l'ésotérisme de bazar. Néanmoins, il en existe quelques groupements, bien enracinés dans une tradition historique remontant au XVIIIe siècle, tant dans les îles Britanniques qu'en Bretagne continentale qui méritent le détour.

Voici la présentation du néo-druidisme par Alain Le Goff, grand druide de la Kredenn Geltiek Hollvedel.

Le Druidisme, en tout cas, n’est pas une religion, au moins au sens habituel de ce terme. Car une religion est - par définition - reliée à une révélation, qu’un messie, un prophète, un gourou, va apporter à ses fidèles sous la forme de dogmes et de commandements tout élaborés, et immuables : ce qui n’est pas le cas du Druidisme.

Druidisme signifie " Solide Sapience", en celtique ancien dru-uidia ; il est donc recherche sapientiale, manière d’approcher et d’aimer la Vérité et la Beauté, de comprendre l’univers. Basé sur l’observation des réalités de celui-ci, son éthique est strictement dépendante du respect de ce que nous appelons la Loi de Bon Ordre de l’Univers, c’est-à-dire de l’ensemble des lois et des équilibres naturels. A ce niveau, il doit être souligné que la notion de bien et de mal n’existe pas pour le druidisant. En effet, pour lui, tout ce qui existe est à la fois bon et mauvais : comme le feu qui réchauffe mais brûle, comme l’eau qui abreuve mais noie. Comme l’homme, capable du meilleur et du pire.

Loi du Bon Ordre de l’Univers venons nous d’énoncer. Cette Loi est évidemment constituée de toutes les règles physiques et chimiques qui ordonnent le Cosmos, nos astres et planètes, nos mondes, mais aussi les corps des êtres vivants : végétaux, animaux et humains. Car il y a, à l’intérieur des corps, un ordre biologique qui peut, à tout moment, céder la place, de façon plus ou moins grave importante, au désordre.

Aussi, concernant plus précisément l’humain, un mode de vie raisonnable devra-t-il favoriser cet ordre biologique, et ce pour prévenir au mieux une maladie qui n’est que la manifestation du désordre. Quant à la médecine, elle aura pour vocation de rétablir l’organisme dans les meilleures conditions de bon équilibre.

Dans un entretien accordé à un site breton, Alain Le Goff précisait :

Notre certitude, le druidisme, est le reflet de la "Loi du Bon Ordre de l'Univers", ce que les hindous appellent le Dharma. Nous essayons, ainsi, de décrypter les lois de l'univers pour en faire notre religion, au sens très large du terme, c'est-à-dire notre mode de pensée, de vie, de comportement. Ceci afin d'être en équilibre et en harmonie, en résonance avec le monde, donc d'abord avec la nature.

C'est là notre écologie; c'est une forme de l'écologie, qui n'est - bien entendu - pas l'écologie politique; mais qui veut être en conformité avec les lois de fonctionnement de l'Univers, avec - je le répète - la Loi du Bon Ordre de l'Univers. Le mot "ordre" doit être pris dans son sens d'"organisation", nous sommes des élèves en toutes les " sciences naturelles ", au plus profond, et nous en déduisons des comportements et si possible un type d'organisation sociétal pour un avenir "qui ne chantera certainement pas", ceci en tenant en outre grand compte de notre passé ancestral.

Nous ne sommes pas catastrophistes, nous ne sommes pas millénaristes; mais nous pensons cependant que le comportement actuel de l'humanité dans son ensemble est négatif, qu'elle va vers une cruelle catastrophe, vers un gouffre. Et ce gouffre, tout le monde y tombera, nous y compris; c'est pourquoi il est de notre devoir d'étudier ce que pourraient être des " roues de secours", si nous survivons à cet immense cataclysme naturel qui va nous écraser.
Ces " roues de secours " ce sont les mentalités, les comportements et les recettes de vie que nos ancêtres se sont forgés, il y a 2000 ou 3000 ans, afin de faire face à l'environnement extrêmement difficile dans lequel ils vivaient, et qui équivalait sans doute à celui que l'on va subir à nouveau dans quelques dizaines, quelques cinquantaines d'années ou quelques siècles. Nous voulons rester prêts, nous entraîner - moralement, mentalement, physiquement -, et c'est tout.

Un druide sort de la tombe

L'excavation du site.

Dans un article publié dans l'édition anglophone du Spiegel, la journaliste Angelika Franz rend compte de la découverte en Angleterre de la tombe d'un « guérisseur » (pour ne pas utiliser le terme de « druide »).


Druids belong to the realm of myth -- archaeologists have never been able to prove their existence. But now researchers in England have uncovered the grave of a powerful, ancient healer. Was he a druid?

Un tombe très riche.

There's a joke among archaeologists: Two of their kind, in the future, find a present-day public toilet. "We've discovered a holy site!" cries one. "Look, it has two separate entrances," says the other. "This here," he says, pointing to the door with a pictogram of a woman, "was for priests. This is evident by the figure wearing a long garment."

Archéologues au travail.

The joke rests on a perennial sore point for archaeologists: There are things they simply can't prove. The list includes love, hate, fear, desire and, well, faith. Which hasn't stopped many reports from being written about who loved or hated whom in ancient cultures -- who was threatened by what, who tried to win something else.
Philip Crummy is an archaeologist who tries not to pass off ancient toilets for holy sites. But lately the director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust has been pulling a number of artifacts from the ground near the site of an ancient city, Camulodunum, that would tempt any archaeologist to speculate, at least a little. Crummy has stumbled upon a small cemetery about 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) southwest of present-day Colchester. The dead were all buried between the years 40 and 60 AD. For a cemetery that's a short lifespan; but in Britain it's an important period, because in the year 43 AD the island became a Roman colony.

Les objets ont été dégagés avec soin.

The people buried in this graveyard clearly belonged to the elite of their day. They were laid to rest not in caskets, but in large burial chambers. On the east side of the chambers lay piles of shards -- remnants of pottery shattered on purpose at the site. The immediate impulse is to imagine a funeral feast where the bereaved shattered plates against a wall. "Careful," warns Crummy. "We can't know what happened there exactly."


This find is unusually rich. One dead body was interred with a ball of verdigris, either for medicinal or cosmetic purposes. A small Roman flagon of perfume from Augustan times was also in the chamber. But the funeral items weren't just for superficial things: Another grave had an inkpot. A literary man, we might think, but Crummy recommends caution again. In archaeology an inkpot is just an inkpot. After all nothing would prevent an illiterate from shoving Shakespeare's collected works up on his living-room shelf today.

Des objets retrouvés brisés.

Scalpels, Saws, Hooks, Needles, Tweezers

One of the graves is especially evocative. It probably belonged to a doctor. The interior resembles that of a soldier in a neighboring grave. At least in the eastern part where an eleven-piece dinner set lay, as well as a copper sieve, which had been used to pour out wormwood tea, and a bronze pan for warming up wine.

Un jeu (reconstitué) retrouvé sur le site avec des baguette de divination.

In the western half, archaeologists found a board game. The stones were once laid out along the broad sides of a board -- 13 white and 13 blue. The wooden board had rotted away long ago, but the stones had hardly moved over two thousand years. The ancient undertakers had meticulously piled the burned bones of the deceased on the board. There was also a set of surgical instruments, complete with scalpels, saws, hooks, needles and tweezers -- as well as divining rods made of iron and copper. "Doctor" is the term that Philip Crummy has prudently chosen for the dead person, but less cautious researchers would have chosen another word: "druid." That would have been a sensation.
Druids are problematic, because no one has proved their existence, at least not archaeologically, although they have been written about extensively, even by ancient writers. Today most people would think automatically of Miraculix, the druid in the proto-French village defended by Asterix (and other cartoon Gauls) who buck themselves up with magical drinks. The Asterix cartoonists, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, took descriptions by the Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) as a template. Pliny's writing describes the "druid" caste as white-robed, with golden sickles which they used to cut branches of mistletoe from oaks.

That all sounds very nice, and Pliny is even known to have travelled extensively in the colonized provinces. But he was a Roman, and scholars have always treated Roman descriptions of the world with caution.

What Exactly Was a Druid?

Archaeologists have never found a golden sickle and Caesar never mentioned the precious tool in his "Gallic Wars", the second major historical source of research on druids. In Book 6, Chapter 13 he describes the task of druids: They "are engaged in things sacred, conduct the public and the private sacrifices, and interpret all matters of religion. (...) they determine respecting almost all controversies, public and private." Not a word about white gowns, golden sickles, mistletoe or oak trees. But Caesar's account has to be taken with a note of caution -- he was, after all, a conqueror writing about the vanquished.

So what history tells us about the druids is barely usable. And the more recent extensive literature isn't much help either. Mike Pitts, an expert on druids and the author of an article on the Colchester site in British Archaeology magazine, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of a notion of druidry that completely distorted the real picture. Stonehenge and Merlin have about as much to do with druids as the Asterix and Obelix comic books of Goscinny and Uderzo. "That's exactly the problem," says Pitts. "Despite the many fantasy stories, we don't even know what we're supposed to be looking for."

Les objets retrouvés ont été cassés au moment de l'inhumation.

No Longer Celtic, Not Yet Roman

This is where the Colchester burial site comes in. The doctor of Camulodunum was evidently a rich and respected man. If one assumes that the surgical instruments and divining rods in his tomb weren't just for decorative purposes, healing and soothsaying must have been part of his job description. It's the closest anyone is likely to get to a druid in archaeological terms. Crummy is aware of this, of course. "We know nothing about the dead person. Anything is possible. We don't even know whether the bones belonged to a man or a woman."

Des baguette de divination.

For him other questions are far more exciting. "What we're seeing here are the tombs of an elite that ruled when the Romans came to Britain," says Crummy. The artifacts placed in the tombs reflect that the elite was in a cultural transition -- not entirely Celtic anymore, but not wholly Roman either. The set of surgical instruments is similar to other sets found along the Mediterranean. But the instruments have individual designs that are different from their Mediterranean versions. "What was the relationship between these people and the Roman occupiers?" asks Crummy.

Une reconstitution de la tombe.

"They witnessed with their own eyes how Emperor Claudius rode into Camulodunum at the head of his own army," speculates Mike Pitt. "And there's some probability that they knew Cunobelinus." He was king of the Britons before the Romans came, and he was the inspiration for a mythical figure. William Shakespeare turned him into Cymbeline, the main character of his eponymous tragicomedy.

Une reconstitution de l'inhumation.