Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Josh over there again and this is stuff you should know. The led Zeppelin Edition, the Wet Edition, the led Zeppelin Edition. Is that what you thought of? Yeah? Anytime I see like that, Um, I guess it was. It's not the Zoso album cover, but I think it was like a poster that you'd see in Spencer's that was like, I think from led Zeppelin four. It was like a guy with a long beard. He looked like, um oh, sure, he looked like what was his name, the guy from Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, he looks like Gandalf. Basically. Yeah, Zeppelin was very You know, if anyone who's ever seen song remains the same, they it all sort of like mystical druid esque, right they were. They were well known for their druid escu leaning. But so that's what I think of with druids, and it turns out that that is in one sense very much accurate. That is what a druid looks like. But if you're talking strictly about druids that came from the seventeenth century onward, so like just a few hundred years ago, you would be correct if you're talking about the ancient druids. The druids. Druids the once that everybody thinks of is like like the O G Druids, they we have no idea what they were like. Really we or we have very very little idea what they were like. And it's based on such um potentially slanted evidence that some archaeologists refused to agree with certainty that druids ever even exists the way that we think they did. Yeah, and it's funny this. Uh, the Grabster helped us out with this one, with the research and he I don't know if Ed's been listening to us for too long or what, because he fell into the Josh and Chuck trap of not even saying what the druid was until page four. So we should just go ahead and say, when we're talking about the ancient druids, Uh, it wasn't like a race of people or anything like that. They were celts and as defined by some history website. I went to UM, there were members of the learned class of ancient Celts and ancient Britain and France, and they acted as um, it was really more like job based. They were teachers and judges and priests and philosophers. So that's I mean, I never knew that it was really just sort of um uh che's I don't even know how to define it. Not a class of people, well, sort of a class, yeah, but it was kind of uh, job based. I didn't know that an occupation yeah, occupational. Yeah, they had had a union, They had pretty decent health insurance was ironic because they didn't know what they were doing with medicine at the time. Or if you you know, if you had really good insurance, you could wind up in the wicker Man getting burned alive, right, your family would would benefit from that, you wouldn't potentially write. But that's I mean, what you just said is basically the the most you can say about druids with any level of of accuracy. Are we done? Yep? That was It's true. It's everybody short stuff. Um. Everything beyond that is is different varying degrees of conjecture, And I don't want to like beat this horse over and over again. So I think it's really just good to kind of like just put it out at the beginning, like everything we're talking about from this point on is relatively UNPROVENUM archaeology is being very stubborn and to their credit about what they will agree about druids and what they won't agree about druids. UM. And I think that's great, But everybody else is like, hey, that's good. You guys sit there and doggedly and methodically figure it out. We're going to just let our imaginations run wild and and come up with this conception of druids. Yeah. And you know, one of the big reasons why we don't have a lot of firsthand accounting is because the druids did not uh and they had a very good reason, but they didn't write things down. They didn't keep a historical record about themselves. And the reason makes a lot of sense. It was there was a lot of power in the fact that they remained sort of mystical and that a conquering enemy or foe can't just get a bunch of druid I is that a word, Yes, druid I writings to figure out what they're all about. So there was a lot of mystery and mystique and because of that a lot of power in just passing along traditions orally within their own group. Uh, it really ended up kind of being given them a stranglehold on their mystique, right, Yeah, for sure. Um. The thing is, though, that's a super important point. They didn't write things down, But almost as important is to to say that they weren't illiterate. Now, like the Celts wrote stuff down. And surprisingly when they wrote stuff down, they wrote it in Greek. So the later Romans who came along, as we'll see and had a huge influence on Celtic culture when they encountered the Celts, these heathens, these savage tribes, they are what the Romans considered them to be. They they found that they already wrote in Greek. But the Celts themselves, Chuck and I didn't know this. Um they were. They were basically a multi ethnic group. They were not just like you know, um, Germanic, or they weren't just like Aryan or um, you know, North African like. They weren't like an ethnic group. They were apparently connected by language, but they were very tribal and they warred with each other pretty much constantly. So each little each little tribe would have its own kingdom, but they all were united under this culture, this Celtic culture and Celtic language. Yeah, and um. Even though the Druids didn't write about themselves, UM, early Greeks did UM specifically Posidonius. And here's where, like you said earlier, it's like someone writes about the Druids, maybe based on uh lore or legend um, sometimes maybe first hand accounts, but then other people write about those accounts, and then people write about the accounts of the accounts, and pretty soon all of the sort of quote unquote knowledge we have about the Druids is based on It's like a game of telephone essentially. UM. And one of the biggest contributors to UM I guess druid I writing was Julius Caesar. He wrote a lot about the Druids, but from the perspective of a conquering army, you know, so that's a it's definitely gonna have a slant. And he also based a lot of his writings on Posidonius to begin with, right, Yeah, Posidonius's writings were lost, like all of them were lost, so we know he wrote a lot about the Druids because, like you said, all those people came later and referenced his writings before his writings have been lost, but we've never seen his writings, which is a shame because we probably could have learned a lot about the Celts and the Druids firsthand. Um. But by the time so Posidonius was was working in the first century b c. E. Um, by the time Julius Caesar comes along, I think about fifty sixty years later, um, he he has a different slant than Posidonius probably would have like, because, like you said, he was showing up and saying, here are all these people who we are subjugating, and then here's the reason why we're subjugating them. He wasn't writing about the Celts, and he wasn't writing about the Druids to document their culture. He was writing propaganda to support the campaign of Roman imperialism back home, so that everybody saw, oh, it is good that we're going and conquering these people and bringing civilization to these heathen tribes, because they're just running around cutting each other's heads off and um, sacrificing one another to their oak trees and possibly even eating one another. Um. And and now it's up to historians and archaeologists to say, Okay, how much of that is accurate, how much of that comes from a kernel of truth, and how much of it is outright just you know, fraudulent propaganda, which is a huge job to undertake. Yeah, and we'll we'll touch more on the human sacrifice stuff because that's certainly juicy. Yeah, but um so, I guess Caesar writes a lot about this. And it's like you said, from that perspective, when things really get wacky is when our old buddy Plenty the elder starts writing. And this is about what about a hundred years later, and this is when things when this is when the writing really amped them up as like very odd wizard like people. Yeah. And Pliny, Pliny, so he was a Roman citizen. He was a great traveler though in a great um a great uhman. He was a great wing man. He would just support you eat whether you struck out or not. Um struck out? He uh three's company. What's going on? Yeah, if you went to the Regal Beagle with Pliny, you're gonna come away happy one way or another. Um so. He but he was like he was a documentary of all the other cultures that's why he was going to do. But the problem is that he was still a Roman citizen, so he saw things through Roman I So that means that he saw Heathens as heathens, like, yeah, their culture was interesting and it was worth writing down, But it doesn't mean that he had a respect for it or got everything right or understood everything correctly. But you you, the point is you could take Plenties writings potentially with a little more of a grain of sand than Caesar's. But but yeah, that's right, whatever you want to chew on. But the but Caesar's writings have an advantage over Plenties and that his were more contemporaneous to Celtic culture. By the time Plenty came along, the Romans had already spread their culture throughout the Celtic lands. They stamped out every other culture basically. And what I found interesting from research, Chuck, is that there were varying degrees of grudging nous at accepting that culture among the Celtic tribes. In some respects they were like, oh, yes, I love civilization. It's way better than the life we were living before. There's so many great trappings to it, and it's so much less like you know, um hard and difficult and muddy. But at the same time, I also don't like how the Romans like just kind of like rape everybody they feel like raping and tax us even though we're considered basically slaves to them. So there was a real like um weird period where the Romans started to permeate with their culture, the Celtic culture of um I guess ambivalence towards that that permeation, yeah, um so, I mean these are the historical writings that we have as far as actual, real archaeological evidence. It's not much better as far as conjecture goes a couple of examples, because there's always you know, this longing to connect the Druids and their paganism, their brand of pagan him to this ritual sacrifice again because it's juicy. So the lynd the very famous Lindau Man who was Lindao to Lindau one was a woman. But this was a body that they found in nineteen four preserved in Pete and a Pete bog h. He was a dude in his mid twenties and had a very violent death. As it appears um they found food in his belly, so they there's so much conjecture. The conjecture there is essentially that he was ritually sacrificed, that was his last meal, and then he had what's known as three deaths. He was strangled. Uh, their ligature marks on his neck very well preserved. You should look him up the garrett. The leather strap is still around his neck um. He was hit on the head after that, like blunt forced trauma style, and then his throat was cut. So the speculation is they gave him a last meal and then gave him possibly three deaths, to satisfy three different pagan gods. But it also he was found naked, so there's speculation that he could have just been robbed of his clothes and robbed of his money and uh maybe by someone who it was a sick oh maybe or somebody who is like, get that thing out of my face and put some clothes on. I'm telling you for the last time. And then it went it went south from there. Yeah, and you can go see he travels a little bit, but he's on permanent display in the British Museum. If you want to go, uh, say hi. Yeah, if you ever want to be reminded that you're really not a lot more than a bag of skin. Go check out pictures of a lindau Man because that's basically what he is. Yeah. They've also found mass graves um from the Iron Age in in these areas where where the druids were around, and again conjecture that this was an example of like mass ritual sacrifice, but that's largely been pretty much poopooed over the years as well. Yeah, it's definitely up for debate whether they were just executed or whether they were um killed in battle or whether the yeah, they were sacrificed. Um. There's some other there's some other archaeology that has has really tantalized archaeologist. There's one called the Deal Warrior. Yeah, that's name. Yeah, it really is, especially if you check out like how he was found. He was found with a shield, a spear, and a sword and wearing a crown. And as far as they can tell, there's no other Celtic um burial that that has been found thus far that had all of these accoutrema. So this is an extraordinarily important person. But they have no idea who it was, but they want to say druids so bad they can taste it and then one of the other burials that was found, they found him in a graveyard somewhere in I believe Britain, um, and he was found with a lot of weird stuff like, uh, what appears to be a board game but that they think possibly was was used for divining you know, the future, like rolling dice or something like that. Um. He was found with divining rods, you know, like they used to find water and that kind of thing, so that indicates some sort of ritual magic. He was also found with a set of surgical tools. So they're calling this guy the doctor. Because the archaeologists are being level headed. Everybody else is saying, this is the grave of a druid. It's the grave of a druid. Just say it, you stupid archaeologist. And he's like, no, I won't say it. He won't say it, but it's a it's it could prove to be a really um important Fine. It probably it probably already has proven itself that we just aren't openly interpreting it yet. Yeah, and um, I should mention if Deal Warrior is not the name of a death metal band, then someone's doing it wrong. Yeah. All you need is a picture of this guy on your album cover. It is your first one. Should we take a break, Yeah, let's all right, let's take a little break and we'll come back and talk. Uh, we'll post some more conjecture right after this. All right, Chuck, we're back. It's time for more conjecture again. Some archaeologists refused to to say that druids definitely existed, that a priestly class of Druids and Celtic culture existed. Just chew on that one for a while, alright, totally undermined your led Zeppelin poster. Yeah. Well, here's the thing too about the Celts is we don't know a lot about where their culture began or when it began exactly. Because Druids are Celts, we obviously don't know much about where they began either. Um. We do know that how how it kind of all ended. Um, And when we say ended, I mean there, I mean you can go to modern druid in Druidism websites today and and go wear a flowery dress and frolic barefoot in a field with people in any given country. Probably, But that's not exactly the same thing the actual druids. Uh, we know because of writing from the first and second centuries. Basically, Uh, there are laws all over the place that banned druidism. Part of this Roman uh conquering way, which is like, Hi, we're here, so forget everything, forget your way of life. You are now Roman enjoy using toilets, right exactly, And I like, I do like the toilets a lot, right. So so with Claudia, I'd like a couple of um Caesar's Augustus and Tiberius said Okay, Romans citizen and aren't allowed to participate in druidism. And then by the time Claudius came around, uh, and by the time his rule ended in fifty four CE UM, the Druids have had been at least officially stamped out. Like not only could you as a Roman citizen not participate in druidism, Druidism in in totality was banned in the Roman empire um under punishment of death. And uh, it had uh the effect of driving Druidism underground, for sure. Yeah, but it's not like it just went away. They still, like, you know, they would go off and and and do their own thing quietly as much as possible, right, and and so I And I mean, when Claudius is banning this, it's not just like no, we we don't like this. It's a threat to to the Roman control over the Gallic lands and these celts Um. That's not the reason that he gave, although that was almost certainly the reason why they outlaw druids. But the reason they gave were things like, these people practice an inhuman religion where they sacrifice people to their gods. Apparently they would go through criminals and prisoners, and then once they ran out of criminals and prisoners, they would start sacrificing their own innocent people. They just had this blood lust, so that religion had to be stamped out and repressed. And of course the Roman citizen around the world said, oh, yeah, that's great, get rid of druidism. But like you said, it just kind of went underground, it seems like. And then as rebellion started to kind of crop up around them the British Isles and in France um against Roman rule. It's pretty much a sure bet that if there were such a thing as druids, they were helping to foment that that rebellion and that uprising. Yeah, and I think I get the idea that the Romans were a little spooked by the Druids. Um, while they were like vastly superior with their military in their might, um, they paid a lot of attention to them, and like, they're not gonna make a bunch of hay about something that they don't think is a threat. And I think they were spooked out a little bit, like, uh, when they were resisting, you know, after these laws were passed, the Druids invoked a prophecy saying the end of the world is coming near and the Roman Empire is going to be destroyed by fire. And I don't think it was just like the Romans just brushed that off. I think they're like, oh jeez, those those guys are crazy. Um. And also, how are we going to deal with a big fire? Right exactly? So that's so that I mean, I could see being spooked by that, couldn't you. Yeah, So, um, they they definitely if they weren't spook chucking, at least, they took them quite seriously and like again like outright banned them. But not only did they did they prophecy that they were going to um be burned by fire like the some of these early writings of drewids, especially Pliny, may did it seem kind of like creepy and magical and wizardy, you know, like like Pliny described druids as holding um blood offerings, like like slaughters of animals and humans and their sacred oak groves. And we should say, I don't think we said this, but the word druid one of the suggestions for the etymology of it is drew and wind, and drew means to know, and wind means oak, So drew wid may mean nowhere of the oaks or the people who who have the knowledge of these sacred oak trees. Um and Plenty described these guys and like white beards and long white robes, climbing up oak trees to cut down mistletoe with golden sickles, you know, around saw wayne or um you know, the spring solstice or summer solstice or spring equinox um, and and worshiping this whole pantheon of gods that unfortunately the Romans didn't bother to write down the names of. Yeah and once, uh, isn't there speculation that Merlin from the Arthurian legend was a druid, like he survived, you know, the not just the Roman Romanization of Celtic culture and also the Christianization of Celtic culture, but into the Middle Ages, um, when he was supposedly running around. Yeah, and again because they weren't writing anything down. You know, when you're when you're a conquering person, you can go in and like raid the archives and get a lot of knowledge. I imagine it was kind of creepy in and of itself to just find that they had no writings at all, Right, and then you're all of a sudden, I mean, I'm sure there was like questioning and stuff, but then you're just going on whatever they wanted to tell you, and any Druid worth assault was probably like, you know, probably tease them a bit about how creepy they might be. Sure, you know. So that whole not writing things down thing, that's that's an important point. So one thing, it means that we don't have any direct understanding of the druids from the druids. But um, the reason why they didn't write things down was two fold. One, if they were this priestly elite class that stood between the average celt and the gods, Um, they were the ones who knew the secrets of the oak and the wisdom of the oak and all that um. One way they maintained that monopoly, or that that have the market cornered on that knowledge was to make it so that the only way you could learn to be a druid was from another druid, and to pass along this ancient tradition of knowledge, which makes the whole thing way more mystical. Then even if there was some main religious book or something like that, it's oral ancient knowledge passed on from druid to druid. That's how they passed it on. And that's why they didn't write anything down. And then elsewhere I saw I think it was maybe stray Bow or someone else said that the reason they didn't write things down was because they felt like by reading you didn't learn as much as from being immersed in it and in having had explained to you over the period of something like twenty years by another druid, Because that's about how long it took to be initiated into being a full druid, a full rank druid, a full rank a black belt druid. Uh, shall we take another break? Why not? Man? All right, let's do it, and then we'll talk a little bit more about whether or not they practice human sacrifice and stonehenge in all sorts of other good things right after this. All right, So we talked a lot so far about or a little bit rather about whether or not they did practice human sacrifice, the sort of the sixty thousand dollar question. And like we said, because the Romans really wanted to propagandas and paint a picture of listen, we gotta do this. These people are barbarians. Uh, they're sacrificing and like you said, maybe even eating each other. That that cooks up a good case basically, especially when it's coming from Caesar's pin um or whatever he wrote with what it's right with hero with the blood of his enemies, Okay, which, by the way, by the way, Chuck, we are one day out from the IDEs of March, that's right, which marked the death of Caesar, one day before your birthday, So happy early birthday from everybody and stuff. You should know, Like, um, so did they or did they not? That is a big question and the answer is maybe. Right. So you know, there's a lot of writings about it, but again you gotta take all that with a grain of salt. Is propaganda. But you know, some of it was super detailed. Um could just be good writing and good imagination, but there was enough of it um to where there is a lot of speculation that you know, they may have done so maybe not on some huge mascale, but that doesn't mean that if you people weren't thrown in a wicker man every now and then in set ablaze. Yeah, and that's I mean, that's worth really just saying overly one of the things that whole wicker Man. If you haven't seen Wickerman, go watch it. Not the knick Cage version both, Okay, Gussie, both their moments in the Nick Cage when they are so bad, it's pretty wonderful to watch. Okay, alright, alright, granted the original one is pretty awesome. I think, like Peter Peter Cushing in it, well, Christopher Lee was the the main creep, wasn't he. Well obviously that was the main creep in his own life. Um, he was great. But so in Wickerman, I think it was from this investigator. I think goes into like this kind of isolated, insular, kind of Celtic tradition community and ends up finding himself inside a giant wicker man being burned alive. They that's based on legend about the the Druids that they used to sacrifice people by making giant wicker figures, putting somebody in there and setting it on fire. And that was just one of the ways they supposedly sacrificed people. Another one I read about was that they would slash people in the back with a mortal wound, and then one of the druids or one of their assistants would watch the person's death throws and death agony to divine the future, like you could tell by the way somebody arrived or wriggled, or maybe how they bled what the future would be. And then with Lindale man, you were saying, remember he was he was had his neck broken, he was choked, hit over the head, and he was slashed in the throat. They think that possibly the choking thing, the strangulation, and the slash in the throat were related to where he would produce like a fountain of blood when when he was when his throat was slashed while he was being strangled, that would tell them something. Possibly, That's that's the legend, the whole cannibalism thing. I saw zero evidence for at all. Yeah, there is no evidence for cannibalism human sacrifice. There are a lot of good cases out there that that really possibly did happen among the Celts. Yeah. And part of the reason this is so uh so tantalizing all these years later is when they link them to things like Stonehenge and you go to Stonehenge and you're told some story by some snot nose kid you know that's visiting from Indiana that like, you know, the Druids used to you know, sacrifice people here and that's why they built it, which is not true at all. It's gotten all mixed up. Um. Stonehenge was around long before the Celts and the Druids were doing their thing there. But they may have gone there, I mean ed makes a good point like a lot of times when they were religious temples and things that had been evacuated another pagan religion might move in just because it's there and it's ready to go. So they may have gone to Stonehenge and to perform some ceremonies, but that was not the purpose for Stonehenge. Yeah, we have no idea why they built Stonehenge or even who built Stonehenge. But the first the first unambiguous appearance of the Celts comes hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of years after Stonehenge was first built. But yeah, they may have used it. If you were a Druid, wouldn't you like say, yeah, Stonehenge is probably pretty important. It lines up I think with the summer solstice, the the rising sun and the summer solstice. That was a very important um time to the Druids as far as we understand, so of course they would pay attention to it and use it. And maybe another way to look at it is that the Druid tradition and maybe even the Celts themselves directly grew out of the people in the culture that built Stonehenge originally, because I think see I think it was Caesar who wrote that the Celts culture and Druids grew out of the British isles first and then spread westward or eastward into Europe, primarily France, right yeah, yeah, although there's I've seen references that it made it as far as Turkey. The Celtic culture did um and had extensive trading routes, So they weren't like this this you know, isolated group of bumpkins. They were spread out all over the place. They knew how to trade. Then they had their own civilization. It just wasn't nearly as advanced as as Roman civilization, but they had like an established culture by the time Rome showed up. We just don't know quite that much about it as it was right before Rome came. Yeah, and as you said, I thinking like the very beginning, like you know, years and years later, like in the seventeen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, there were people in groups of people that referred to themselves as druids and claimed that they were practicing these true traditions. Um, but there's really no like there's really no proof that any of that is true at all. And and it's likely that it was just these people many many years later that just sort of, um, kind of dug up this ancient thing and made it their own. No, it's it's a hundred percent that way. And even like the the neo Druidic groups that you see today, don't try to to make it any make it out any other way. Um. A lot of the a lot of them will say, you know, we we are. This druidism we practice has been around a few hundred years and it's based on ancient you know, folklore and tradition that you will find in Ireland. And that's that's a really good point too. Like like Neo Druids, m traces its roots back to the seventeenth century when some historians and antiquarians got interested in some of the ancient Irish stuff. Um. And they think possibly that some of the ancient Irish myths and legends are a form, a kind of a preserved form of ancient Celtic and Druidic culture. Because the Romans never set foot in Ireland, they never managed to conquer Scotland. The picks up there, who you will remember from the Locknest episode, drove them back. And so these two, these two areas where Celtic culture lived, was able to kind of live and preserve and and continue on until about the five hundreds when the Christians showed up and finally managed to convert everybody um, and then Celtic culture thank you, and then um. But but Celtic culture had an extra five hundred years to continue on and then make it into you know, the written word and written language. And so you can go back and look at Irish mythology and a lot of people say this is this here, here's your example of Druidism right here. Um, which it could be a variation of it because these were isolated cultures, but still it probably is some form of Druidism. And then that is what the seventeenth century onward in Dano Druids based their stuff on. But they don't claim to say we have unmolested ancient knowledge from the original or tradition of druids. They just are kind of basically doing their own thing, you know. Yeah, and it's so rich for um literature and movies. It's just it's been definitely just sort of malleable and bastardized just to fit like a screenplay of um Celtic folklore and like these kind of creepy, blissed out flower children who uh throw people in a wicker man. Or there was a movie with Christopher Lambert of you know, the Highlander called Druids, which I'm sure is I haven't seen it, but I imagine is just cooked up for movies. You know. There's a really good movie from around the time Wickerman came out called Blood the I think Blood on Satan's Claw. Dude, this terrible title. It is amazing that it's part of like wicker Band and Blood on Satan's Claws, they're part of something called folk horror. Yeah. Yeah, and we would not have folk horror if it wasn't for those antiquarians in the seventeen hundreds of being the sixteen hundreds being becoming interested in Druidism. We we might not even have led Zeppelin, my friend, if it wasn't for some of those guys. Well, the guy who did uh Hereditary, his the trailer for his new movie just came out and it is straight up like druid centric. I can't wait. Like these these you know, teenage campers in like Sweden or something. I think it's Sweden, I'm not sure. You know, they find this, you know, group of people in a field who are doing creepy things, and it just it looks really creepy and awesome. I'm assuming is producing it. Probably like four could show a movie of somebody's spit into a pale for two hours and I'd be like, I want to watch that. Yeah, they're a good outfit. They were a great outfit. Uh Oh. One other thing I also saw that um Druids, the ancient Druids, if they did exist as like an elite priestly class would not have gotten their hands dirty with sacrifice. They would have just overseen it. And then possibly a sub order of druids called vates would have divined, you know, what was going on from the way the blood was spilled or whatever. So not, uh what are they vates? Vates? And then there was also bards. They were not druids, not full fledged druids. I I don't I don't know, I don't understand it. I've just seen it. I've seen it delineated like vate, vates, Bards and druids. And then I've also seen I think in this article Ed places druids is kind of like the whole elite class. It was definitely a higher class, right. And then I also saw in UM some archaeology UM article that that there's really no evidence that druids, if they did exist as a separate class, existed as separate class until very late, right before the Romans came, and they would have just been integrated into everyday life and it would have been, like you said, an occupation, like you know, Todd over there, Todd Merwin, Um, he's really good with the divining rod. So that's what that's what we rely on Todd for. But he wasn't like an elite class, and then maybe it developed out of that kind of specialization over time. I love that Todd is your kind of go to over the years. I do too, love Todd. Uh. That's it for druids. Although there is a lot more out there, and a lot of it's confusing, but a hundred percent of it is awesome, especially if you're um flow. If your boat is floated by dungeons and dragons type stuff. Uh. And since I said dungeons and dragons, it's time for listener mail. I thought you were about to say, since I said dungeons and dragons, that's Friday night and I'm in a basement. I love it. Hi, guys, I worked this is on bed bugs. By the way, we got a lot of replies about short stuff on bed bugs, um, including quite a few from the people in the hospitality industry. Yes, which is very gross. Um. Hey, guys, worked as a guest service agent for a three star hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina for over three years. It was called bed Bugs City. Bed Bugs was basically a curse word, and it couldn't be used in front of guests, and we heard from a couple of other people in the service industry that you never say that word out loud. They called them BB's at this place, but another guy called them the visitors. Oh my god. So I'm not really sure if it was true or not, but um, a general manager told me that this picular hotel chain did not believe in putting mattress covers on their mattresses. The logic being housekeepers are required to inspect mattresses every time a guest checks out of a room and every time they change the bed. If they were to put mattress covers on the beds and guests would notice them, it would give the guests the idea that bed bugs were in that mattress already interesting. In addition this, the manager explained to me that guests are the ones who bring bed bugs into hotels. I don't know about that. Sounds like blaming the victim, agreed, So if a guest calls after they've checked out of a room to report bed bugs, this complaint basically fell on deaf ears. If the guest called to report bed bugs during this stay, the company is not obligated to refund the nightly rate. Um, but sometimes they might adjust your rate. It's a sign of goodwill. They don't reimburse people for finding bed bugs in the rooms because to them, that is an admission of guilt. So instead they will offer I can't believe this part. Instead the hotel will offered to wash your clothes, movie to a different room, place the room with bed bugs out of service, and then tell you to throw your stuff in the trunk of your car in plastic bags and leave the car in the sun. Very rare occasions, they might even issue a future night's day that can be used at any Bedbug City right across the country. You get what you pay for with the three star hotel. Yeah, I don't know. Man. Three star used to be different. It used to be sure, and then the corporate takeover of America undid that difference. So that is from J. The letter J. The letter J. This this listener mail is brought to you by the letter Jan Colling down to bed Bug City. Thanks Jay from bed Bug City. We appreciate that peak behind the curtain. UM, if you work in some industry we've talked about and want to tell us all the gross and horrific things that the general public doesn't know about. We love that stuff. You can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and look for all of our social links there. You can also go to my website, The Josh Clarkway dot com. You can send us all an email to stuff Podcasts at I heart podcast Network dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Josh over there again and this is stuff you should know. The led Zeppelin Edition, the Wet Edition, the led Zeppelin Edition. Is that what you thought of? Yeah? Anytime I see like that, Um, I guess it was. It's not the Zoso album cover, but I think it was like a poster that you'd see in Spencer's that was like, I think from led Zeppelin four. It was like a guy with a long beard. He looked like, um oh, sure, he looked like what was his name, the guy from Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, he looks like Gandalf. Basically. Yeah, Zeppelin was very You know, if anyone who's ever seen song remains the same, they it all sort of like mystical druid esque, right they were. They were well known for their druid escu leaning. But so that's what I think of with druids, and it turns out that that is in one sense very much accurate. That is what a druid looks like. But if you're talking strictly about druids that came from the seventeenth century onward, so like just a few hundred years ago, you would be correct if you're talking about the ancient druids. The druids. Druids the once that everybody thinks of is like like the O G Druids, they we have no idea what they were like. Really we or we have very very little idea what they were like. And it's based on such um potentially slanted evidence that some archaeologists refused to agree with certainty that druids ever even exists the way that we think they did. Yeah, and it's funny this. Uh, the Grabster helped us out with this one, with the research and he I don't know if Ed's been listening to us for too long or what, because he fell into the Josh and Chuck trap of not even saying what the druid was until page four. So we should just go ahead and say, when we're talking about the ancient druids, Uh, it wasn't like a race of people or anything like that. They were celts and as defined by some history website. I went to UM, there were members of the learned class of ancient Celts and ancient Britain and France, and they acted as um, it was really more like job based. They were teachers and judges and priests and philosophers. So that's I mean, I never knew that it was really just sort of um uh che's I don't even know how to define it. Not a class of people, well, sort of a class, yeah, but it was kind of uh, job based. I didn't know that an occupation yeah, occupational. Yeah, they had had a union, They had pretty decent health insurance was ironic because they didn't know what they were doing with medicine at the time. Or if you you know, if you had really good insurance, you could wind up in the wicker Man getting burned alive, right, your family would would benefit from that, you wouldn't potentially write. But that's I mean, what you just said is basically the the most you can say about druids with any level of of accuracy. Are we done? Yep? That was It's true. It's everybody short stuff. Um. Everything beyond that is is different varying degrees of conjecture, And I don't want to like beat this horse over and over again. So I think it's really just good to kind of like just put it out at the beginning, like everything we're talking about from this point on is relatively UNPROVENUM archaeology is being very stubborn and to their credit about what they will agree about druids and what they won't agree about druids. UM. And I think that's great, But everybody else is like, hey, that's good. You guys sit there and doggedly and methodically figure it out. We're going to just let our imaginations run wild and and come up with this conception of druids. Yeah. And you know, one of the big reasons why we don't have a lot of firsthand accounting is because the druids did not uh and they had a very good reason, but they didn't write things down. They didn't keep a historical record about themselves. And the reason makes a lot of sense. It was there was a lot of power in the fact that they remained sort of mystical and that a conquering enemy or foe can't just get a bunch of druid I is that a word, Yes, druid I writings to figure out what they're all about. So there was a lot of mystery and mystique and because of that a lot of power in just passing along traditions orally within their own group. Uh, it really ended up kind of being given them a stranglehold on their mystique, right, Yeah, for sure. Um. The thing is, though, that's a super important point. They didn't write things down, But almost as important is to to say that they weren't illiterate. Now, like the Celts wrote stuff down. And surprisingly when they wrote stuff down, they wrote it in Greek. So the later Romans who came along, as we'll see and had a huge influence on Celtic culture when they encountered the Celts, these heathens, these savage tribes, they are what the Romans considered them to be. They they found that they already wrote in Greek. But the Celts themselves, Chuck and I didn't know this. Um they were. They were basically a multi ethnic group. They were not just like you know, um, Germanic, or they weren't just like Aryan or um, you know, North African like. They weren't like an ethnic group. They were apparently connected by language, but they were very tribal and they warred with each other pretty much constantly. So each little each little tribe would have its own kingdom, but they all were united under this culture, this Celtic culture and Celtic language. Yeah, and um. Even though the Druids didn't write about themselves, UM, early Greeks did UM specifically Posidonius. And here's where, like you said earlier, it's like someone writes about the Druids, maybe based on uh lore or legend um, sometimes maybe first hand accounts, but then other people write about those accounts, and then people write about the accounts of the accounts, and pretty soon all of the sort of quote unquote knowledge we have about the Druids is based on It's like a game of telephone essentially. UM. And one of the biggest contributors to UM I guess druid I writing was Julius Caesar. He wrote a lot about the Druids, but from the perspective of a conquering army, you know, so that's a it's definitely gonna have a slant. And he also based a lot of his writings on Posidonius to begin with, right, Yeah, Posidonius's writings were lost, like all of them were lost, so we know he wrote a lot about the Druids because, like you said, all those people came later and referenced his writings before his writings have been lost, but we've never seen his writings, which is a shame because we probably could have learned a lot about the Celts and the Druids firsthand. Um. But by the time so Posidonius was was working in the first century b c. E. Um, by the time Julius Caesar comes along, I think about fifty sixty years later, um, he he has a different slant than Posidonius probably would have like, because, like you said, he was showing up and saying, here are all these people who we are subjugating, and then here's the reason why we're subjugating them. He wasn't writing about the Celts, and he wasn't writing about the Druids to document their culture. He was writing propaganda to support the campaign of Roman imperialism back home, so that everybody saw, oh, it is good that we're going and conquering these people and bringing civilization to these heathen tribes, because they're just running around cutting each other's heads off and um, sacrificing one another to their oak trees and possibly even eating one another. Um. And and now it's up to historians and archaeologists to say, Okay, how much of that is accurate, how much of that comes from a kernel of truth, and how much of it is outright just you know, fraudulent propaganda, which is a huge job to undertake. Yeah, and we'll we'll touch more on the human sacrifice stuff because that's certainly juicy. Yeah, but um so, I guess Caesar writes a lot about this. And it's like you said, from that perspective, when things really get wacky is when our old buddy Plenty the elder starts writing. And this is about what about a hundred years later, and this is when things when this is when the writing really amped them up as like very odd wizard like people. Yeah. And Pliny, Pliny, so he was a Roman citizen. He was a great traveler though in a great um a great uhman. He was a great wing man. He would just support you eat whether you struck out or not. Um struck out? He uh three's company. What's going on? Yeah, if you went to the Regal Beagle with Pliny, you're gonna come away happy one way or another. Um so. He but he was like he was a documentary of all the other cultures that's why he was going to do. But the problem is that he was still a Roman citizen, so he saw things through Roman I So that means that he saw Heathens as heathens, like, yeah, their culture was interesting and it was worth writing down, But it doesn't mean that he had a respect for it or got everything right or understood everything correctly. But you you, the point is you could take Plenties writings potentially with a little more of a grain of sand than Caesar's. But but yeah, that's right, whatever you want to chew on. But the but Caesar's writings have an advantage over Plenties and that his were more contemporaneous to Celtic culture. By the time Plenty came along, the Romans had already spread their culture throughout the Celtic lands. They stamped out every other culture basically. And what I found interesting from research, Chuck, is that there were varying degrees of grudging nous at accepting that culture among the Celtic tribes. In some respects they were like, oh, yes, I love civilization. It's way better than the life we were living before. There's so many great trappings to it, and it's so much less like you know, um hard and difficult and muddy. But at the same time, I also don't like how the Romans like just kind of like rape everybody they feel like raping and tax us even though we're considered basically slaves to them. So there was a real like um weird period where the Romans started to permeate with their culture, the Celtic culture of um I guess ambivalence towards that that permeation, yeah, um so, I mean these are the historical writings that we have as far as actual, real archaeological evidence. It's not much better as far as conjecture goes a couple of examples, because there's always you know, this longing to connect the Druids and their paganism, their brand of pagan him to this ritual sacrifice again because it's juicy. So the lynd the very famous Lindau Man who was Lindao to Lindau one was a woman. But this was a body that they found in nineteen four preserved in Pete and a Pete bog h. He was a dude in his mid twenties and had a very violent death. As it appears um they found food in his belly, so they there's so much conjecture. The conjecture there is essentially that he was ritually sacrificed, that was his last meal, and then he had what's known as three deaths. He was strangled. Uh, their ligature marks on his neck very well preserved. You should look him up the garrett. The leather strap is still around his neck um. He was hit on the head after that, like blunt forced trauma style, and then his throat was cut. So the speculation is they gave him a last meal and then gave him possibly three deaths, to satisfy three different pagan gods. But it also he was found naked, so there's speculation that he could have just been robbed of his clothes and robbed of his money and uh maybe by someone who it was a sick oh maybe or somebody who is like, get that thing out of my face and put some clothes on. I'm telling you for the last time. And then it went it went south from there. Yeah, and you can go see he travels a little bit, but he's on permanent display in the British Museum. If you want to go, uh, say hi. Yeah, if you ever want to be reminded that you're really not a lot more than a bag of skin. Go check out pictures of a lindau Man because that's basically what he is. Yeah. They've also found mass graves um from the Iron Age in in these areas where where the druids were around, and again conjecture that this was an example of like mass ritual sacrifice, but that's largely been pretty much poopooed over the years as well. Yeah, it's definitely up for debate whether they were just executed or whether they were um killed in battle or whether the yeah, they were sacrificed. Um. There's some other there's some other archaeology that has has really tantalized archaeologist. There's one called the Deal Warrior. Yeah, that's name. Yeah, it really is, especially if you check out like how he was found. He was found with a shield, a spear, and a sword and wearing a crown. And as far as they can tell, there's no other Celtic um burial that that has been found thus far that had all of these accoutrema. So this is an extraordinarily important person. But they have no idea who it was, but they want to say druids so bad they can taste it and then one of the other burials that was found, they found him in a graveyard somewhere in I believe Britain, um, and he was found with a lot of weird stuff like, uh, what appears to be a board game but that they think possibly was was used for divining you know, the future, like rolling dice or something like that. Um. He was found with divining rods, you know, like they used to find water and that kind of thing, so that indicates some sort of ritual magic. He was also found with a set of surgical tools. So they're calling this guy the doctor. Because the archaeologists are being level headed. Everybody else is saying, this is the grave of a druid. It's the grave of a druid. Just say it, you stupid archaeologist. And he's like, no, I won't say it. He won't say it, but it's a it's it could prove to be a really um important Fine. It probably it probably already has proven itself that we just aren't openly interpreting it yet. Yeah, and um, I should mention if Deal Warrior is not the name of a death metal band, then someone's doing it wrong. Yeah. All you need is a picture of this guy on your album cover. It is your first one. Should we take a break, Yeah, let's all right, let's take a little break and we'll come back and talk. Uh, we'll post some more conjecture right after this. All right, Chuck, we're back. It's time for more conjecture again. Some archaeologists refused to to say that druids definitely existed, that a priestly class of Druids and Celtic culture existed. Just chew on that one for a while, alright, totally undermined your led Zeppelin poster. Yeah. Well, here's the thing too about the Celts is we don't know a lot about where their culture began or when it began exactly. Because Druids are Celts, we obviously don't know much about where they began either. Um. We do know that how how it kind of all ended. Um, And when we say ended, I mean there, I mean you can go to modern druid in Druidism websites today and and go wear a flowery dress and frolic barefoot in a field with people in any given country. Probably, But that's not exactly the same thing the actual druids. Uh, we know because of writing from the first and second centuries. Basically, Uh, there are laws all over the place that banned druidism. Part of this Roman uh conquering way, which is like, Hi, we're here, so forget everything, forget your way of life. You are now Roman enjoy using toilets, right exactly, And I like, I do like the toilets a lot, right. So so with Claudia, I'd like a couple of um Caesar's Augustus and Tiberius said Okay, Romans citizen and aren't allowed to participate in druidism. And then by the time Claudius came around, uh, and by the time his rule ended in fifty four CE UM, the Druids have had been at least officially stamped out. Like not only could you as a Roman citizen not participate in druidism, Druidism in in totality was banned in the Roman empire um under punishment of death. And uh, it had uh the effect of driving Druidism underground, for sure. Yeah, but it's not like it just went away. They still, like, you know, they would go off and and and do their own thing quietly as much as possible, right, and and so I And I mean, when Claudius is banning this, it's not just like no, we we don't like this. It's a threat to to the Roman control over the Gallic lands and these celts Um. That's not the reason that he gave, although that was almost certainly the reason why they outlaw druids. But the reason they gave were things like, these people practice an inhuman religion where they sacrifice people to their gods. Apparently they would go through criminals and prisoners, and then once they ran out of criminals and prisoners, they would start sacrificing their own innocent people. They just had this blood lust, so that religion had to be stamped out and repressed. And of course the Roman citizen around the world said, oh, yeah, that's great, get rid of druidism. But like you said, it just kind of went underground, it seems like. And then as rebellion started to kind of crop up around them the British Isles and in France um against Roman rule. It's pretty much a sure bet that if there were such a thing as druids, they were helping to foment that that rebellion and that uprising. Yeah, and I think I get the idea that the Romans were a little spooked by the Druids. Um, while they were like vastly superior with their military in their might, um, they paid a lot of attention to them, and like, they're not gonna make a bunch of hay about something that they don't think is a threat. And I think they were spooked out a little bit, like, uh, when they were resisting, you know, after these laws were passed, the Druids invoked a prophecy saying the end of the world is coming near and the Roman Empire is going to be destroyed by fire. And I don't think it was just like the Romans just brushed that off. I think they're like, oh jeez, those those guys are crazy. Um. And also, how are we going to deal with a big fire? Right exactly? So that's so that I mean, I could see being spooked by that, couldn't you. Yeah, So, um, they they definitely if they weren't spook chucking, at least, they took them quite seriously and like again like outright banned them. But not only did they did they prophecy that they were going to um be burned by fire like the some of these early writings of drewids, especially Pliny, may did it seem kind of like creepy and magical and wizardy, you know, like like Pliny described druids as holding um blood offerings, like like slaughters of animals and humans and their sacred oak groves. And we should say, I don't think we said this, but the word druid one of the suggestions for the etymology of it is drew and wind, and drew means to know, and wind means oak, So drew wid may mean nowhere of the oaks or the people who who have the knowledge of these sacred oak trees. Um and Plenty described these guys and like white beards and long white robes, climbing up oak trees to cut down mistletoe with golden sickles, you know, around saw wayne or um you know, the spring solstice or summer solstice or spring equinox um, and and worshiping this whole pantheon of gods that unfortunately the Romans didn't bother to write down the names of. Yeah and once, uh, isn't there speculation that Merlin from the Arthurian legend was a druid, like he survived, you know, the not just the Roman Romanization of Celtic culture and also the Christianization of Celtic culture, but into the Middle Ages, um, when he was supposedly running around. Yeah, and again because they weren't writing anything down. You know, when you're when you're a conquering person, you can go in and like raid the archives and get a lot of knowledge. I imagine it was kind of creepy in and of itself to just find that they had no writings at all, Right, and then you're all of a sudden, I mean, I'm sure there was like questioning and stuff, but then you're just going on whatever they wanted to tell you, and any Druid worth assault was probably like, you know, probably tease them a bit about how creepy they might be. Sure, you know. So that whole not writing things down thing, that's that's an important point. So one thing, it means that we don't have any direct understanding of the druids from the druids. But um, the reason why they didn't write things down was two fold. One, if they were this priestly elite class that stood between the average celt and the gods, Um, they were the ones who knew the secrets of the oak and the wisdom of the oak and all that um. One way they maintained that monopoly, or that that have the market cornered on that knowledge was to make it so that the only way you could learn to be a druid was from another druid, and to pass along this ancient tradition of knowledge, which makes the whole thing way more mystical. Then even if there was some main religious book or something like that, it's oral ancient knowledge passed on from druid to druid. That's how they passed it on. And that's why they didn't write anything down. And then elsewhere I saw I think it was maybe stray Bow or someone else said that the reason they didn't write things down was because they felt like by reading you didn't learn as much as from being immersed in it and in having had explained to you over the period of something like twenty years by another druid, Because that's about how long it took to be initiated into being a full druid, a full rank druid, a full rank a black belt druid. Uh, shall we take another break? Why not? Man? All right, let's do it, and then we'll talk a little bit more about whether or not they practice human sacrifice and stonehenge in all sorts of other good things right after this. All right, So we talked a lot so far about or a little bit rather about whether or not they did practice human sacrifice, the sort of the sixty thousand dollar question. And like we said, because the Romans really wanted to propagandas and paint a picture of listen, we gotta do this. These people are barbarians. Uh, they're sacrificing and like you said, maybe even eating each other. That that cooks up a good case basically, especially when it's coming from Caesar's pin um or whatever he wrote with what it's right with hero with the blood of his enemies, Okay, which, by the way, by the way, Chuck, we are one day out from the IDEs of March, that's right, which marked the death of Caesar, one day before your birthday, So happy early birthday from everybody and stuff. You should know, Like, um, so did they or did they not? That is a big question and the answer is maybe. Right. So you know, there's a lot of writings about it, but again you gotta take all that with a grain of salt. Is propaganda. But you know, some of it was super detailed. Um could just be good writing and good imagination, but there was enough of it um to where there is a lot of speculation that you know, they may have done so maybe not on some huge mascale, but that doesn't mean that if you people weren't thrown in a wicker man every now and then in set ablaze. Yeah, and that's I mean, that's worth really just saying overly one of the things that whole wicker Man. If you haven't seen Wickerman, go watch it. Not the knick Cage version both, Okay, Gussie, both their moments in the Nick Cage when they are so bad, it's pretty wonderful to watch. Okay, alright, alright, granted the original one is pretty awesome. I think, like Peter Peter Cushing in it, well, Christopher Lee was the the main creep, wasn't he. Well obviously that was the main creep in his own life. Um, he was great. But so in Wickerman, I think it was from this investigator. I think goes into like this kind of isolated, insular, kind of Celtic tradition community and ends up finding himself inside a giant wicker man being burned alive. They that's based on legend about the the Druids that they used to sacrifice people by making giant wicker figures, putting somebody in there and setting it on fire. And that was just one of the ways they supposedly sacrificed people. Another one I read about was that they would slash people in the back with a mortal wound, and then one of the druids or one of their assistants would watch the person's death throws and death agony to divine the future, like you could tell by the way somebody arrived or wriggled, or maybe how they bled what the future would be. And then with Lindale man, you were saying, remember he was he was had his neck broken, he was choked, hit over the head, and he was slashed in the throat. They think that possibly the choking thing, the strangulation, and the slash in the throat were related to where he would produce like a fountain of blood when when he was when his throat was slashed while he was being strangled, that would tell them something. Possibly, That's that's the legend, the whole cannibalism thing. I saw zero evidence for at all. Yeah, there is no evidence for cannibalism human sacrifice. There are a lot of good cases out there that that really possibly did happen among the Celts. Yeah. And part of the reason this is so uh so tantalizing all these years later is when they link them to things like Stonehenge and you go to Stonehenge and you're told some story by some snot nose kid you know that's visiting from Indiana that like, you know, the Druids used to you know, sacrifice people here and that's why they built it, which is not true at all. It's gotten all mixed up. Um. Stonehenge was around long before the Celts and the Druids were doing their thing there. But they may have gone there, I mean ed makes a good point like a lot of times when they were religious temples and things that had been evacuated another pagan religion might move in just because it's there and it's ready to go. So they may have gone to Stonehenge and to perform some ceremonies, but that was not the purpose for Stonehenge. Yeah, we have no idea why they built Stonehenge or even who built Stonehenge. But the first the first unambiguous appearance of the Celts comes hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of years after Stonehenge was first built. But yeah, they may have used it. If you were a Druid, wouldn't you like say, yeah, Stonehenge is probably pretty important. It lines up I think with the summer solstice, the the rising sun and the summer solstice. That was a very important um time to the Druids as far as we understand, so of course they would pay attention to it and use it. And maybe another way to look at it is that the Druid tradition and maybe even the Celts themselves directly grew out of the people in the culture that built Stonehenge originally, because I think see I think it was Caesar who wrote that the Celts culture and Druids grew out of the British isles first and then spread westward or eastward into Europe, primarily France, right yeah, yeah, although there's I've seen references that it made it as far as Turkey. The Celtic culture did um and had extensive trading routes, So they weren't like this this you know, isolated group of bumpkins. They were spread out all over the place. They knew how to trade. Then they had their own civilization. It just wasn't nearly as advanced as as Roman civilization, but they had like an established culture by the time Rome showed up. We just don't know quite that much about it as it was right before Rome came. Yeah, and as you said, I thinking like the very beginning, like you know, years and years later, like in the seventeen hundreds and sixteen hundreds, there were people in groups of people that referred to themselves as druids and claimed that they were practicing these true traditions. Um, but there's really no like there's really no proof that any of that is true at all. And and it's likely that it was just these people many many years later that just sort of, um, kind of dug up this ancient thing and made it their own. No, it's it's a hundred percent that way. And even like the the neo Druidic groups that you see today, don't try to to make it any make it out any other way. Um. A lot of the a lot of them will say, you know, we we are. This druidism we practice has been around a few hundred years and it's based on ancient you know, folklore and tradition that you will find in Ireland. And that's that's a really good point too. Like like Neo Druids, m traces its roots back to the seventeenth century when some historians and antiquarians got interested in some of the ancient Irish stuff. Um. And they think possibly that some of the ancient Irish myths and legends are a form, a kind of a preserved form of ancient Celtic and Druidic culture. Because the Romans never set foot in Ireland, they never managed to conquer Scotland. The picks up there, who you will remember from the Locknest episode, drove them back. And so these two, these two areas where Celtic culture lived, was able to kind of live and preserve and and continue on until about the five hundreds when the Christians showed up and finally managed to convert everybody um, and then Celtic culture thank you, and then um. But but Celtic culture had an extra five hundred years to continue on and then make it into you know, the written word and written language. And so you can go back and look at Irish mythology and a lot of people say this is this here, here's your example of Druidism right here. Um, which it could be a variation of it because these were isolated cultures, but still it probably is some form of Druidism. And then that is what the seventeenth century onward in Dano Druids based their stuff on. But they don't claim to say we have unmolested ancient knowledge from the original or tradition of druids. They just are kind of basically doing their own thing, you know. Yeah, and it's so rich for um literature and movies. It's just it's been definitely just sort of malleable and bastardized just to fit like a screenplay of um Celtic folklore and like these kind of creepy, blissed out flower children who uh throw people in a wicker man. Or there was a movie with Christopher Lambert of you know, the Highlander called Druids, which I'm sure is I haven't seen it, but I imagine is just cooked up for movies. You know. There's a really good movie from around the time Wickerman came out called Blood the I think Blood on Satan's Claw. Dude, this terrible title. It is amazing that it's part of like wicker Band and Blood on Satan's Claws, they're part of something called folk horror. Yeah. Yeah, and we would not have folk horror if it wasn't for those antiquarians in the seventeen hundreds of being the sixteen hundreds being becoming interested in Druidism. We we might not even have led Zeppelin, my friend, if it wasn't for some of those guys. Well, the guy who did uh Hereditary, his the trailer for his new movie just came out and it is straight up like druid centric. I can't wait. Like these these you know, teenage campers in like Sweden or something. I think it's Sweden, I'm not sure. You know, they find this, you know, group of people in a field who are doing creepy things, and it just it looks really creepy and awesome. I'm assuming is producing it. Probably like four could show a movie of somebody's spit into a pale for two hours and I'd be like, I want to watch that. Yeah, they're a good outfit. They were a great outfit. Uh Oh. One other thing I also saw that um Druids, the ancient Druids, if they did exist as like an elite priestly class would not have gotten their hands dirty with sacrifice. They would have just overseen it. And then possibly a sub order of druids called vates would have divined, you know, what was going on from the way the blood was spilled or whatever. So not, uh what are they vates? Vates? And then there was also bards. They were not druids, not full fledged druids. I I don't I don't know, I don't understand it. I've just seen it. I've seen it delineated like vate, vates, Bards and druids. And then I've also seen I think in this article Ed places druids is kind of like the whole elite class. It was definitely a higher class, right. And then I also saw in UM some archaeology UM article that that there's really no evidence that druids, if they did exist as a separate class, existed as separate class until very late, right before the Romans came, and they would have just been integrated into everyday life and it would have been, like you said, an occupation, like you know, Todd over there, Todd Merwin, Um, he's really good with the divining rod. So that's what that's what we rely on Todd for. But he wasn't like an elite class, and then maybe it developed out of that kind of specialization over time. I love that Todd is your kind of go to over the years. I do too, love Todd. Uh. That's it for druids. Although there is a lot more out there, and a lot of it's confusing, but a hundred percent of it is awesome, especially if you're um flow. If your boat is floated by dungeons and dragons type stuff. Uh. And since I said dungeons and dragons, it's time for listener mail. I thought you were about to say, since I said dungeons and dragons, that's Friday night and I'm in a basement. I love it. Hi, guys, I worked this is on bed bugs. By the way, we got a lot of replies about short stuff on bed bugs, um, including quite a few from the people in the hospitality industry. Yes, which is very gross. Um. Hey, guys, worked as a guest service agent for a three star hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina for over three years. It was called bed Bugs City. Bed Bugs was basically a curse word, and it couldn't be used in front of guests, and we heard from a couple of other people in the service industry that you never say that word out loud. They called them BB's at this place, but another guy called them the visitors. Oh my god. So I'm not really sure if it was true or not, but um, a general manager told me that this picular hotel chain did not believe in putting mattress covers on their mattresses. The logic being housekeepers are required to inspect mattresses every time a guest checks out of a room and every time they change the bed. If they were to put mattress covers on the beds and guests would notice them, it would give the guests the idea that bed bugs were in that mattress already interesting. In addition this, the manager explained to me that guests are the ones who bring bed bugs into hotels. I don't know about that. Sounds like blaming the victim, agreed, So if a guest calls after they've checked out of a room to report bed bugs, this complaint basically fell on deaf ears. If the guest called to report bed bugs during this stay, the company is not obligated to refund the nightly rate. Um, but sometimes they might adjust your rate. It's a sign of goodwill. They don't reimburse people for finding bed bugs in the rooms because to them, that is an admission of guilt. So instead they will offer I can't believe this part. Instead the hotel will offered to wash your clothes, movie to a different room, place the room with bed bugs out of service, and then tell you to throw your stuff in the trunk of your car in plastic bags and leave the car in the sun. Very rare occasions, they might even issue a future night's day that can be used at any Bedbug City right across the country. You get what you pay for with the three star hotel. Yeah, I don't know. Man. Three star used to be different. It used to be sure, and then the corporate takeover of America undid that difference. So that is from J. The letter J. The letter J. This this listener mail is brought to you by the letter Jan Colling down to bed Bug City. Thanks Jay from bed Bug City. We appreciate that peak behind the curtain. UM, if you work in some industry we've talked about and want to tell us all the gross and horrific things that the general public doesn't know about. We love that stuff. You can go onto stuff you Should Know dot com and look for all of our social links there. You can also go to my website, The Josh Clarkway dot com. You can send us all an email to stuff Podcasts at I heart podcast Network dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.