As I roam the pagan Internet, I often feel that no group has worse press than the Druids...other than maybe the Satanists. Twentieth-century Druidry has been tagged with a sort of "Masonic-Lodge-brother" rep that is unworthy of the special history of the Druids and its place at the core of neopaganism.
Who were the Druids? Julius Caesar, writing about the Celtic Gauls, says they were one of two classes of "men of some dignity and importance", the other being the warriors. He ascribes to them the responsibility for conducting worship and sacrifice and settling public disputes. Most other classical accounts echo this description. Diodorus Siculus and Strabo both write of a division of the Druid class into bards, diviners (often referred to as "Ovates"), and philosopher/judges (the "Druids" per se), the implication being that there was a progression from one order to another. Caesar indicates that Druidic training lasted twenty years, most spent in the memorization of verses.
The Druids, then, were the living repositories of the law, lore, and faith of the ancient Celts, a widespread and multi-ethnic collection of tribes bound only by a shared language family and the Druidic system. Druids from the European continent were reported to have traveled to Britain for training, indicating, perhaps, that the system originated there...possibly before the arrival of the invading Celts. The gods worshipped by any given tribe might be variable, reflective of ancestry and geography, but always there were the philosopher/judges to carry forward the traditions and the glories of the tuath, the people.
The Druids were exterminated by the twin pressures of the Roman Empire and Christianity, devolving into the bardic traditions of the so-called "Celtic Fringe", particularly Ireland and Wales. The seventeeth century brought a revival among antiquarians who longed for a return to the poetic glories of the Pagan Druids. A Druid revialist movement spread from Wales to some fashionable English circles to ultimately become a brotherhood not much distinct from the Freemasons and mostly noted for their struggles to continue celebrating the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge...a site that, ironically, predates Druidry.
What then is the relevance of the Druid tradition for today's pagan? First, the Druids reverenced the natural world, worshipping in sacred groves and appealing to the wisdom of the trees and the birds, among other beings. They understood that contact was possible with other worlds and that such contact might be made by taking on forms other than the human. Most importantly, it seems to me, the bardic mysteries of the Druids located the Divine in the inner world rather than in the stagnant, inflexible locus of scripture, for the Druids disdained the written word, preferring that each Bard transfigure the lore they received within him (or her...a point not to be neglected) before in turn passing it along to a new--and different--generation. Druidry thus evolved with time, remaining relevant, as I feel it is today.
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