Down Though Time

I want to take a minute and talk about the Druids. A lot of my family history branches back, and disappears to the time and place of the Druids. And from most of whats been written about them they seem to be barbaric in the way they lived. Articles tell us of them being people that did human sacrifice. If this made them barbaric than so were a lot of people in the bible.
I don't need to sit and go though all of these. There is just one that comes to mind when I think of human sacrifice, John 3:16  For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Was this not the greatest human sacrifice in all of time? 
There is archaeological evidence from western Europe that has been widely used to back up the idea that human sacrifice was performed by the Iron Age Celts.  Mass graves found in a ritual context dating from this period have been unearthed in Gaul. However, another archaeologist Martin Brown, believed that the corpses might be those of honoured warriors buried in the sanctuary rather than sacrifices. The Romans and Greeks were the ones that accused the druids of this practice. But Romans and Greeks were known to project what they saw as barbarian traits onto foreign peoples including not only druids but Jews and Christians as well, thereby confirming their own "cultural superiority" in their own minds. I guess I prefer not to think of them as barbaric but we all need to consider that all of this was long before Christianity spread Europe and the Mediterranean shores. I do know that a lot of their beliefs are handed down today. 
The Druids loved and cherished everything in nature. They loved  trees, watched for signs in nature and animals and saw trees as living beings they gave them healing. They held ceremonies in enchanted groves. And lived by the Ogham that was a tree alphabet.

The word ogham (pronounced OH-am) has been used to refer to:
An alphabet of twenty-five characters used for stone and wood inscriptions in Celtic Ireland and Britain.
A group of twenty sacred trees that give names to the letters of the ogham alphabet.
A calendar of thirteen months named for some of the trees.
A purported system of hand-signing used by Druids that relates to the alphabet.
Most ogham inscriptions come from Ireland and Scotland.

 I'm not sure how or who encoded all of this. I am sure when my grandmother would speak of the oak and talk about the power and healing in a full moon, she had no ideal that someone had it translated. There for I know it was something she was handing down not something she had read. I've only telling you this to give you some ideal of where the things I've learned may have been handed down from. I have also found that the word "Wheel" was a large part of my path to adulthood. It wasn't until later in life I realized that my family roots consisted of two wheels. The druid and the native American medicine wheel. Both representing the universe and it's elements of healing.