The Druids
While all of you out there may be saying 'Hey Bonnie was the one related to the Druids.' I know this but I thought that I would still make a section about the druids as they are related to Meredith in more ways than just Bonnie(at least in my opinion) and also the fact that it is a concept in the book that wasn't really expanded on as much as I would have liked.
Druidae is a word of Celtic origin. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer, believed it to be a cognate with the Greek word "drus" meaning an oak. Dru-wid is a combination of the root words "oak" and "knowledge"; "wid" means to know or to see as in the Sanskrit "vid". The oak along with the rowan and hazel were important and sacred trees to the Druids. The title of Druid in the Celtic social system was given to learned women and men who possessed 'oak knowledge' or 'oak wisdom'.
Druids filled the roles of judges, diviner, mystic, doctors, mage and clerical scholar - they were the religious intellectuals of their culture. Mythology describes Druids as being capable of numerous magical powers such as prophesy and divination, control of the weather, levitation, healing and shape shifting themselves into the forms of animals.(They sound a little like our Vampire Diaries vampire don't they?) Druid education was so rigorous that at the conclusion of their training, they were practically walking encyclopaedias.
There has been much debate over the origins of the Druids. Some scholars believe that the Druids originally belonged to a pre-Celtic (non-Aryan) population in Ireland and Britain, from where they spread to Gaul, taking into account that there was no trace of Druidism amongst the Celts elsewhere (Italy, Spain or Galatia [modern Turkey]). However, others argue that the Druids were an indigenous Celtic intelligentsia that were found among all Celtic people but were known by other names.