Invented Traditions, Later Given Legal Religious Status

Much of what modern Druidry treats as ancient ritual was demonstrably invented in the eighteenth century by identifiable individuals: the Welsh poet Iolo Morganwg fabricated the Gorsedd of Bards ceremony and a body of supposedly ancient druidic lore in the 1790s, later shown by scholars to include forged manuscripts, yet his invented ceremonial has nonetheless been absorbed into real Welsh cultural institutions, including the National Eisteddfod, and into the ritual practice of later Druid orders, a case historians of religion often cite as a clear example of an invented tradition becoming genuinely traditional through use over time regardless of its fabricated origin.

The Ancient Order of Druids, founded in London in 1781 as a fraternal and charitable society along Freemasonic lines, and later orders including the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids founded in the twentieth century, developed modern Druidry into an organised movement with its own ceremonial calendar tied to the solstices and equinoxes. That movement gained formal state recognition as a religion in England and Wales in 2010, when the Charity Commission registered the Druid Network as a charity on the basis that Druidry meets the legal test for a religion, a status most contemporary Pagan traditions in the United Kingdom still lack.