(July 19, 2022) "Druid Civilization" or Druid Culture" is the term I use for the long lost European/Mediterranean culture which existed prior to the invasion of the Indo-Europeans. These were the Neolithic farmers who built megalithic monuments and whose culture survived until 500 CE as an Akkadian speaking priestly class as evidenced by the Elder Futhark Runestones. Yet only now is their Akkadian speaking culture being recovered from their archeological texts. 

Genetic evidence shows that these Neolithic farmers migrated out of Mesopotamia starting around 8500 BCE (see images). The Indo-European invasion began around 3500 BCE. This means the builders of Stonehenge spoke Akkadian .

The earliest European/Mediterranean Akkadian writing is the 1800 BCE Minoan Phaistos Disk and the 1700 BCE Minoan Linear A tablets and these are in Akkadian. All later alphabetic writing derives from these Minoan texts. Writing formally labeled as Celtic, Tartessian, Etruscan, Phoenician, Punic, Paleo-Hebrew, Archaic-Greek, and Aramaic are all really an alphabetic form of Akkadian.  These texts show Druid culture was the source for both classical philosophy and the authentic teachings of Jesus.

The word "Druid" is Akkadian and its means "Eternal Form - Channeler" which derives from the Akkadian words DR-ID (duru-id) (Olmsted 2022). Eternal forms are the invisible "platonic" forms into which amorphous matter (dust) flows to manifest itself as a physical object.

The word "Ovate or Vate" associated with "Druid" in Roman texts is another Akkadian word meaning "Motion-Magic.Crafter" from from 'W.T (’û-tû or a'u.tu). This word has the letter ayin as its first letter which does not exist in Latin or Greek so it tends to be either ignored or replaced with the letter "O" in Europe and "A" in the near east. This division between life priests who deal with the creation and growth of life, and magic crafters who deal with translational motions is a common one in ancient Druidic texts.

The Neolithic Druidry revealed by the archaeological texts is not exactly the same as the Druidry described 2000 years later by the Romans. Iron Age Druidry like all cultures had been corrupted by the lordification process from political centralization and by the dualism from the Persian Empire. This led to forced personification and feminine suppression of divine powers (deities) and their division into good and evil. This in turn lead to deity appeasement and worship with sacrifices and submission. 

The Indo-European people from the eastern steppe started invading Europe about 3,500 BCE. They were initially illiterate and had no native stone building traditions so they adopted much of the culture of the Druids. What they did bring was a more militant, godfather type culture with more intensive farming practices using crop/animal rotation to keep the farmlands fertile away from the flooding river valleys.

References

(November 9, 2023) Ötzi was found in 1991 on the Southern slopes of the eastern Italian (Ötztal) Alps . He is the world's oldest glacier mummy.  Radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis date him to between 3350–3120 BCE. Based on the dating he could have been killed by some Indo-European invaders. Here is a quote from the Max Plank Institute Press Release dated August 16, 2023:

This is interesting linguistically because the Alpine region and Eturia just south of the Alps continued to speak and write Akkadian until conquered by the Romans.

References

Max Plank Institute Press Release dated August 16, 2023: https://www.mpg.de/20711365/0804-evan-dark-skin-bald-head-anatolian-ancestry-150495-x

Ke Wang, Kay Prüfer, Ben Krause-Kyora, Ainash Childebayeva, Verena J. Schuenemann, Valentina Coia, Frank Maixner, Albert Zink, Stephan Schiffels, Johannes Krause. (1923) High-coverage genome of the Tyrolean Iceman reveals unusually high Anatolian farmer ancestry. Cell Genomics, 2023; 100377  DOI: 10.1016/j.xgen.2023.100377

(Jan 10, 2023) The Minoan Phaistos disk is significant for these reasons:

1. Its language is Akkadian confirming that was the language of Neolithic Farmers
2. First European writing
3. Source of all alphabets via Minoan Linear A
4. First philosophical debate
5. Shows tolerant nature-based culture
6. Written on a Druid Spiral showing its role as a spiritual symbol
7. Describes most of the Druid Pantheon
8. First explicit mention of Yahu as I' or Y' (Med 3.11) which later became the national god of Israel as Yahweh (meaning "Power of Yahu" in Akkadian, the glottal stop letter ayin was often slurred into a "h" sound over time in Akkadian) 

This disk found at Phaistos on Crete is the earliest writing in Europe dating to 1900 BCE.  The text is a mix of phonetic signs (da, di, du, ad, etc.) and alphabetic signs which are just phonetic signs in which the reader provides the vowel. The spiral was the European wide cultural sign of the Neolithic farmer. Because these farmers built Stonehenge I call these Akkadian speaking farmers the Druid civilization.  This text essentially summarizes the Ancient Pagan Paradigm and shows the tolerance of differing ideas in Druid Culture.

(Feb. 6, 2023) Before there was this Druid theory of European cultural origins there was the Goddess Theory by Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). She was the first to realize that the archaeological evidence pointed to an earlier and different civilization existing prior to the traditional Greek and Hebrew sources of European civilization.  

Yet she failed in defining this earlier civilization for these reasons:

1. This was before the earliest European archaeological texts were translated so she was going in blind using only archaeological finds which can be interpreted many different ways.

2. She was mentally trapped and viewed deities in the Biblical way as lord gods, that is, only as people and not also as powers. 

3. She was monotheistic postulating a single Goddess instead of goddesses.

4. She was caught up in the feminist movement of the era so she simply ignored any evidence contrary to her Goddess superiority concept.  In her magnum opus book in which she presented her views (“The Language of the Goddess from 1989) she even turned the masculine icon of the bull into a feminine “regeneration” icon (page 188).  

In Gimbutas’ last book The Civilization of the Goddess, which synthesizes the work and theses of her previous books (Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 1974/1982 and The Language of the Goddess 1989/1991), she wrote, 

• “The primordial deity for our Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors was female, reflecting the sovereignty of motherhood. In fact, there are no images that have been found of a Father God throughout the prehistoric record. Paleolithic and Neolithic symbols and images cluster around a self-generating Goddess and her basic functions as Giver-of-Life, Wielder-of-Death, and as Regeneratrix.” 

Further in Civilization of the Goddess Gimbutas outlines the symbolic understanding Old European societies had of the universe and the divine. She wrote, 

• “The multiple categories, functions, and symbols used by prehistoric peoples to express the Great Mystery are all aspects of the unbroken unity of one deity, a Goddess who is ultimately Nature herself.”