Note (return) — Chapter XX

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-fáthi, 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 Gallizenæ, 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