'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Even leaving to one side the question of whether there is indeed any genuine line of descent from the original druids to the modern variety - something I've never seen convincingly argued - I'm not condemning the modern druids for dropping human sacrifice (though it does make them a bit CofE and pathetic), or for their predecessors having practised human sacrifice (my beef with the Aztecs was the sheer insane scale of theirs). I'm condemning them for denying that the human sacrifice ever happened in the first place in a manner which (as with the denials that cannibalism ever existed in tribes elsewhere) seems to me a rewriting of history in capitulation to judaeo-christian-derived moralities to which they should be paying no heed, or offering an alternative.