Druids?  In this case the receiver is as bad as the thief.  Sir G.L.  Gomme clings to the belief that the Aryans were people of a comparatively high civilisation, who had discarded, if they ever possessed, a savage “past.”  But old beliefs and customs still survive through growing civilisation, and if the views of Professor Sergi and others are correct, the Aryans were even less civilised than the peoples whom they conquered.[1009] Shape-shifting, magic, human sacrifice, priestly domination, were as much Aryan as non-Aryan, and if the Celts had a comparatively pure religion, why did they so soon allow it to be defiled by the puerile superstitions of the Druids?

M. Reinach, as we have seen, thinks that the Celts had no images, because these were prohibited by their priests.  This prohibition was pre-Celtic in Gaul, since there are no Neolithic images, though there are great megalithic structures, suggesting the existence of a great religious aristocracy.  This aristocracy imposed itself on the Celts.[1010] We have seen that there is no reason for believing that the Celts had no images, hence this argument is valueless.  M. Reinach then argues that the Celts accepted Druidism en bloc, as the Romans accepted Oriental cults and the Greeks the native Pelasgic cults.  But neither Romans nor Greeks abandoned their own faith.  Were the Celts a people without priests and without religion?  We know that they must have accepted many local cults, but that they adopted the whole aboriginal faith and its priests en bloc is not credible.  M. Reinach also holds that when the Celts appear in history Druidism was in its decline; the Celt, or at least the military caste among the Celts, was reasserting itself.  But the Druids do not appear as a declining body in the pages of Caesar, and their power was still supreme, to judge by the hostility of the Roman Government to them.  If the military caste rebelled against them, this does not prove that they were a foreign body.  Such a strife is seen wherever priest and soldier form separate castes, each desiring to rule, as in Egypt.

Other writers argue that we do not find Druids existing in the Danube region, in Cisalpine territory, nor in Transalpine Gaul, “outside the limits of the region occupied by the Celtae."[1011] This could only have weight if any of the classical writers had composed a formal treatise on the Druids, showing exactly the regions where they existed.  They merely describe Druidism as a general Celtic institution, or as they knew it in Gaul or Britain, and few of them have any personal knowledge of it.  There is no reason to believe that Druids did not exist wherever there were Celts.  The Druids and Semnotheoi of the Celts and Galatae referred to c. 200 B.C. were apparently priests of other Celts than those of Gaul, and Celtic groups of Cisalpine Gaul had priests, though these are not formally styled Druids.[1012] The argument ex silentio is here of little value, since the references to the Druids are so brief, and it tells equally against their non-Celtic origin, since we do not hear of Druids in Aquitania, a non-Celtic region.[1013]