I got your real druid right here…
Real Druids are kinda an unknown. We have writings about their practices and beliefs from Roman writers and much later Christian writers. The former were known to be exaggerate and just make shit up when it came to “barbarians” and the enemies of Rome. And the later were often working with incomplete knowledge and also making shit up. This was muddled further by 18th Century work which liked to make ancient cultures even more fantastical. And then you get all the Neo-Pagan revival crap which cast their own beliefs onto ancient cultures, such as the druids, which completely muddied the waters. The fact is, we don’t actually know a whole lot about the real Druids.
Fun fact about druids - in their tradition pretty much every break from the norm, like writing things down or cutting herbs wrong, was punishable by being clubbed to death.
Fun fact two: In France Druids were exterminated by Romans with help of Bards. Bards were basically a competting sect of the same faith with Druids and they sided with Romans to save their own skins and eliminate their rivals.
haha jokes on you pathfinder druids aren’t vegan!
I think it’s odd that they’re not. They’re generally portrayed as liking nature, and nature has no problems with animals killing and eating each other. I’m a vegetarian because I care about the individual animals, and I’m not a fan of nature and I would never become a druid unless it’s part of overthrowing the natural order.
Nature is brutal. It’s UNNATURAL to limit oneself to eating things with less nutrients. Being one with nature means you kill or be killed, and only the fittest survive.
Now the difference of philosophy here is that the structure humans have created is much more unnatural than that. A druid would agree that going out into the woods with a bow and shooting a deer is fine. But going to a restaurant and ordering chicken that was raised in a barn, for the sole purpose of consumption, is wildly unnatural.
To be fair the word has drifted a lot from its inception. If you want the second one you need to do some very in depth research on Celtic social dynamics. Also it’s more fun to have magic Though it would be cool to have an actual magical druid as a religious leader of a group.
Same way that the word Tyrant just meant absolute ruler but in a neutral connotation; kinda like the word king. NOW it means an unjust ruler but it just meant ruler to early Greeks
