THE DRUIDS, THE IRISH AND THE NATIVE AMERICANS

The Druids came from the warrior aristocracy of Rome, and acted as arbitrators as well as priests, healers, seers and diviners. In the olde Irish stories, which often reflect pre-Christian Celtic religion, there is little sign of anyone equivalent to the philosopher-priest described by many classical writers; only the figures of the wise man, soothsayer or shape-changer. 

While some modern scholars see Druids simply as Shamans with conventional ritual roles, others claim to have found links between them and the Native Americans. Certainly, there are language similarities which are hard to explain. For example, the Indian word for the Merrimack River is Kaskaashadi, meaning ‘deep fishing,’ which sounds very similar to the Gaelic word Guisgesiadi, which means ‘slow flowing waters.’ In Gaelic Mor-riomach means ‘of great depth.'

Pioscatacua in Gaelic means ‘pieces of snow-white stone', while the Indian word Piscataqua means ‘white stone.'  Nashaway River in Algonquian means ‘land between' and in Gaelic naisguir means ‘land connecting.'

The Indian word Attilah means blueberries, while in Gaelic Aiteal means juniper berries. In New England the word nock is used to denote mountains and hills. Cnoc in Gaelic means hill or rocky outcrop. 

This may suggest that anyone speaking Gaelic-related languages in Europe was originally from America, and that the Gaelic language was the original mother tongue of many Native Americans. All of which points to the direction of pre-Columbian contact between the Old World & New.

Think what this would mean! The people now known as Gaelic speaking Celts (including Irish, Welsh, Scots and Basques) could well be the descendants of a group of people who left Spain between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago and spent 6000 years in America before returning to Europe. 

And if you think that seems a bit farfetched, genetic fingerprinting tends to back the story up. 

The Y chromosome is passed by males from generation to generation, and it’s been proven that most Native Americans have the same Y chromosome as the Irish and the Welsh. The Basques of Southern France and Northern Spain also fit into that group. In other words, the Celts and the American Indians are genetic blood brothers. 

To add to the mystery, author Barry Fell, who is an accomplished decipherer of ancient scripts has managed to identify a great deal of Phoenician, Iberian, Libyan, Egyptian, Viking and Celtic scripts in America, indicating a great deal of trade contact during the Bronze Age, but for one reason or another the navigators withheld this information from the Romans. At the onset of the Dark Ages much was forgotten about trans-Atlantic navigation, with America entering into a long period of isolation.

During this period, according to other studies, the rhesus positive Asians arrived in America and interbred with the rhesus negative Vikings and Celts. Unfortunately a rhesus negative mother who gives birth to a rhesus positive baby develops antibodies against rhesus positive blood and is then unable to successfully have any more children, at least not without the help of modern medicine. Blue eyes, blonde hair, even red hair are all recessive genes, and so the European heritage of American Indians would have been obscured by the genes of the newly arrived Asians, leaving a race of people who have light brown skin, brown eyes and dark, straight hair.

What makes this even more compelling is another interesting script deciphered by Fell, which tells of the arrival in America of the crew of a ship belonging to the Egyptian King Shoshenq and the formation of an Egyptian colony, possibly reinventing themselves as the Shoshone tribe. Personally I find this last a little hard to believe, mainly because the Shoshone were based in places like Idaho and California, and nowhere near the East coast, but if true it adds another race to the genetic bottleneck that would have been forming in America at the time.

When searching for other similarities between the Celts and Native Americans, one need look no further than the traditions of taking enemy warrior scalps or even entire heads in battle. The Native Americans took an enemy’s scalp both as a warning to the enemy and as a morale-booster to the scalper, his party, and other tribesmen. These scalps were passed around, talked about, laughed at, thrown into the fire or fed to the dogs. They were used to decorate a lodge or were tied onto a tomahawk.

The Celts respected the human head to a remarkable degree. Classical writings and Roman inscriptions describe Celtic warriors collecting and solemnly dedicating the heads of the slain. Celtic sanctuaries, such as that at Roqueperteuse in France, not only carry carvings of heads, but display actual skulls in niches. 

Severed heads are represented in stone (as in Celtic sites along Hadrian's Wall, where heads seem to have been removed from statues), and in Celtic inscriptions everywhere. Many stone heads from the Celtic period, some with horns, some with three faces, have been found in the British Isles. Irish and Welsh folklore preserve traditions of heads speaking after death. The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh storeys taken from two ancient books, The White Book of Rhydderch and The Red Book of Hergest, tell of the Bendigheid Bran’s noble head, which presided over his followers feasts for eighty happy years. 

And I must confess that my mind starts to wander at this point, for I can't help but picture the heads of Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan being preserved in an acid solution of brine and vinegar, and in that form continuing to run our country for the next eighty ‘happy’ years. 

When you consider that most politicians are walking, talking physical bodies whose souls have long appeared to have left the earth plane, then the idea of a bodiless soul running the country, using a head only as a means of communication, isn't so far-fetched. 

When you also consider that many people view life only as a spectator sport - complaining, drinking whisky and watching television - then if we placed severed heads in the positions of power instead of soulless bodies, we'd probably all have much better role-models. 

Copyright © Karl Wiggins