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Forging Druids in the Renaissance

Forging Druids in the Renaissance

Last updated on: September 3, 2026 at 9:14 pm by Philip Jenkins

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Forging Druids in the Renaissance 2026-09-03T21:14:55-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

To begin with a recent story relevant to my current blog series, which describes how much of Early Modern religious sensibility was invented and literary, and relied on forged documents. In 2025, Ada Palmer published Inventing the Renaissance, which discussed how so much of our modern understanding of the Renaissance uses ideas and methodologies akin to science fiction and fantasy, with all their myths and inventions. Although this is a very sober historical work, I was tickled to see that the book just won a Hugo award, which is the science fiction world’s equivalent to an Academy Award or Nobel Prize (only worth a lot more than either of those – just my opinion).

And now, back to my series!

Europeans in the early seventeenth century were passionately interested in matters of spirituality and faith, including many experimental and innovative forms, and some even invented texts and scriptures to justify their beliefs. In several recent posts, I have already looked at the old/new writings emerging from Spain and Germany, and today it is France’s turn.

The story involves the druids, who have been subject to countless mythologies through the centuries. The main ancient source for them was Julius Caesar’s Gallic War, which became very popular during the Renaissance. The first printed edition of Caesar’s writings dates from 1469. Early in the story of rediscovery, the Forger Supreme Annius of Viterbo added druids to his made-up stories of global history. Crucially, he fitted those druids into a larger context of supposed Near Eastern beliefs and texts, all of which he invented.

all images here are in the public domain

More respectably, many thinkers were speculating about possible links between the druids and the stone monuments that were such an obvious part of the ancient landscapes of Britain, Ireland and France. (To be clear, monuments like Stonehenge were already thousands of years old before the first druid came on the scene). The key British figures in this process were John Aubrey, in the mid-seventeenth century, and William Stukeley from the 1740s. Stukeley’s greatest books were his Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids (1740) and his Abury [that is, Avebury]: A Temple of the British Druids (1743).

As the titles indicate, Stukeley interpreted all those ancient stone circles and monuments as “druid temples” of various kinds, and he invented a huge amount of what we think we know about druids and stone circles. The illustrations for his books are an inevitable feature of all modern popular treatments of the subject.

So the druids were in no sense a new discovery around 1600, but one crucial event decisively shaped the later story, and it fits precisely with the pattern of forgery and invention that we have already traced. It differs from those others in that we are here dealing with an alleged (and bogus) inscription rather than a manuscript or book, but otherwise, the story is identical.

In 1598, a funerary urn was reportedly found near Dijon, in France: it contained a glass vessel with a Greek inscription that supposedly commemorated one “Chyndonax.” (Do follow that link, it has an excellent account with great illustrations!) The object was probably genuine, but the inscription certainly was not, and it was added at the time, or a few years later.

The main interpretation of that find appeared in 1621, which as we have seen, came after the wave of writings concerning such “found” scriptures as the Lead Plates in Granada and the Rosicrucian materials in Germany. In 1621, Jean Guenebauld published his account of the “Awakening of Chyndonax,” in Le Réveil de Chyndonax, prince des Vacies, druides celtiques diionois. This not only purported to read the inscription, but Guenebauld identified Chyndonax as a prestigious druid priest and healer, whose religion was that of the Sun, here identified as the Persian deity Mithras. He translated the inscription into French as:

En ce tombeau, dans le sacré boccage
Du Dieu Mithras, est contenu le corps
De Chyndonax grand Prestre; mechant hors,
Les Dieux Sanneurs le gardent de dommage.

Or, as translated here into English:

In this tomb, within the sacred grove
Of the god Mithra, is housed the body
Of Chyndonax, grand priest; evildoers, away!
The gods of salvation protect him from injury.

Suddenly, Chyndonax became the face of druidry, and druidry was reimagined as a mighty proclamation of a visionary ancient paganism, focused above all on the Sun. That was a mystical assertion, but it was also profoundly patriotic: the druids were at the historic heart of French antiquity and national pride. Dijon itself emerged as a center of Mediterranean culture, rather than a mere provincial French town. Chyndonax is also the distant ancestor of Panoramix, the druid of the wonderful Asterix comics.

And the story left a major legacy. Remember I stressed the significance of William Stukeley as the key founder of modern druidic mythologies, who so regularly identified all those druidic temples of the Sun god? Where did he get that idea? Well, in 1722, Stukeley and some friends formed a society of “Roman Knights” pledged to the investigation of Roman Britain, and each knight chose a special name, with which they signed their correspondence with other members.

Stukeley’s nom de Rome was Chyndonax.

Do check out my bibliography here.

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