Salah

Celtic peoples first enter history in the 6th Century BC, when they are mentioned under the name of "Keltoi" by the Greek writer Hekataeos. By the 1st Century AD, most of the Celtic tribes of Europe had been subjugated by Rome, but their cultural and linguistic legacy persists to the modern day. Recent descendants of the Celts played major roles in the colonization and conquest of the New World, and have fought with great heroism in all of the modern world's wars.

Very little is truly known of the ancient Celts' religion. The names of many of the gods worshipped by the tribes of Gaul are known through Latin or Gallo-Latin inscriptions made in late pre-Roman and Roman times - but the rituals with which these gods were celebrated have long since been forgotten. Likewise, the druids, who were apparently the "priests" of Celtic society, have been obscured by the passage of time and the secretive nature of their order.

All kinds of people - from spiteful Roman statesmen to admiring neo-pagans - have attempted to use, and misuse, what little is known of ancient Celtic religion for their respective agendas. The Romans were quick to point the Celts out as a race of heinous savages who lived to plunder the riches of civilization and brutally kill their captives - while many modern Celtophiles portray them as a race of noble mystics who lived in harmonious understanding with nature.

One of the charges the Greeks and especially the Romans laid at the feet of the ancient Celts is that of human sacrifice. Both the Greeks and Romans had a history of killing human beings for spiritual purposes - human sacrifice as we picture it was not completely outlawed in Rome until the reign of Trajan, and the gladiatorial combats were in fact descended from an Etruscan funerary sacrifice tradition. But by and large, the Greeks and Romans had abandoned the practice by the time they came into contact with Celtic peoples and even when they did sacrifice victims it was only in times of great crisis (e.g. the defeat at Cannae).

The Cimbri and Teutones, who invaded Gaul and northern Italy at the end of the 2nd Century BC, sacrificed captured Roman soldiers to their gods. The victims had their throats cut over giant gold cauldrons - not unlike the famous Gundestrup Cauldron found in Denmark. Incidentally, the Gundestrup Cauldron depicts a scene of a man being drowned in a cauldron. The Pictish stones of the Scottish Highlands, dating from about the 3rd to the 9th Centuries AD, also depict people being drowned in buckets or cauldrons.

The Lusitani of Portugal - a partially Hispanic, partially Celtic people - were said to have butchered pregnant women as offerings to their fertility goddess. The Galatians - descendants of Gaulish mercenaries who settled in Phrygia - were accused of human sacrifice on several occasions - most famously in the aftermath of a great victory over a Greek army, they killed all the most attractive and well-built captives. Lucan, Tacitus, and others record incidents of human sacrifice in Celtic culture. Tacitus tells of the black-robed female druids of Mona, who were drenched in the blood of slain prisoners. The Britons were also accused of human sacrifice during the contemporary revolt of Boudica - female Roman captives were hung, their breasts cut off and sowed onto their mouths, apparently as offerings for the British war-goddess Bouda.

Druids were rumored to deal fatal blows to prisoners with weapons, and then record the man's death throes to use for the prediction of the future. Sacred druidic groves in the forest were alleged to have been splattered with the blood and innards of both human and animal offerings. Julius Caesar recorded the most infamous case of all - the "Wicker Man". Dozens of captives would be crammed into a giant wooden giant, which would then be set on fire. Caesar notes that the victims were usually criminals, but innocent people were used if there weren't enough law-breakers to fill the giant.

At least as early as the 4th Century BC, the Graeco-Roman world considered the slaughter of human victims for purposes of divination or divine appeasement to be an essenital part of their stereotype of the northern Barbarian. By the time Tacitus wrote about the wild women of Mona, and the vengeful horde that marched under the Queen of the Iceni, Roman audiences were expecting to hear scandalous tales of what the Celtic barbari were doing with their captives - just as they were expecting to hear of how the Celts had charged into battle, naked and screaming like madmen, and had fallen under the swordstrokes of Rome's all-conquering legionaries like wheat before a farmer's scythe. It was all part of a "noble savage" legend that was relished by the people of the Empire.

But how much evidence for human sacrifice have the Celts themselves left us? The Gundestrup Cauldron and three or four Pictish stones depicting apparent ritual drownings are the only artistic portrayals of such rituals to be found in all of the ancient Celtic world. And even the true meaning behind these depictions is debateable. The "Cauldron of Rebirth" - a magical means by which souls were transported from this world to the Otherworld, and back again - appears in Welsh literature. Perhaps the Cauldron and these stones in fact depict a reincarnation ritual, a sort of pre-Christian baptism?

In ancient and early medieval times, adultery was a capital offense (at least for women) in Germanic society. Women found guilty of adultery were stripped and had their heads shaved before they were paraded around the village and suffered verbal and physical abuse at the hands of their fellow tribesmen. Such luckless offenders were then bound and thrown in a lake to drown. This explains at least some of the modernly-named "bog bodies", people that were deliberately thrown in a bog - often after being bound and tortured - to drown. If similar customs existed in Celtic culture - then perhaps the Celts were not "sacrificing" people as the Romans thought - but were in fact executing murderers and adulterers? Even Caesar noted that the ideal victim for the Gaulish "Wicker Man" ritual was a criminal.

Pre-Christian and early Christian Gaelic literature is one our best, and arguably purest, glimpses into the culture and worldview of Iron Age Celtic tribes. In all of Ireland's rich and ancient mythical tradition - there is only one reference to human sacrifice. The High King of Teamhair, Tigernmas, set up an idol called Cromm Cruach, and ordered that children be killed as offerings to it. It was, ironically, the druids of Ireland that brought an end to this bloody cult, murdering Tigernmas during a frenzied ceremony around the idol.

But it should be remembered that the first men to commit Ireland's oral histories and mythical cycles to writing were Gaelic Christian monks - they were neither pagans, nor prejudiced Catholic priests. They were men who were Christians in terms of what they believed, but who were still very much a part of Celtic culture and had a great reverence for the old ways. Indeed, Ireland's first Christian teachers saw themselves as druids, and even called Christ "The Chief Druid" and "The King of the Summerland". So these first Irish Christians were in fact prejudiced in favor of the druids, and would not have been too keen to remember - let alone commit to writing - any brutal deeds done by their spiritual forefathers.

We have little more than Graeco-Roman propoganda writings - and a few shabby pieces of native evidence that can be interpreted in many different ways - as proof that the ancient Celts did indeed kill their fellow men as offerings for the gods. It is one of the thousands of ancient mysteries that, at this late hour in human history, we will probably never be able to satisfactorially solve.

Kuon

Good post Salah ah-Din. The question of whether ritual human sacrifice was endemic in Celtic cultures is still open, as you say.

Chookie

I have to disagree here, the Romans in particular practiced human sacrifice both before and long after they first came in contact with Celts. It's been claimed that Remus was sacrificed to sanctify Romulus' pomerium (details here: http://home.scarlet.be/mauk.haemers/..._sacrifice.htm ).

In your first paragraph you put the first contact between Romans and Celts as around 600BC. Yet Trajans column seems to depict Dacians being sacrificed.

While there is no doubt at all that Celtic warriors took heads, there were reasons for this - in early Celtic belief, the soul resided in the head and the souls belonging to the heads an individual took were then at the service of the victor.

While it can't be stated definitively that Celts did or did not carry out human sacrifice, I would suggest that, on balance, they did.

Salah

I never stated that the Romans adopted human sacrifice from the Celts; I am in full agreement that the custom existed long before they came into contact with the first Gaulish tribes to enter Italy in the 4th Century BC. It was around 600-550 BC that the Greeks first wrote about the Celts; the first time they appear in Roman history is during the invasion of Italy by Brennus in 390 BC.

I've read that Trajan was the last emperor to practice human sacrifice. But is was common for prisoners to be butchered wholesale upon surrender - such was the fate of several Germanic peoples throughout th Imperial period. This would be considered an execution, not a sacrifice.

Chookie

I never said you did, I merely pointed out that contact most probably occurred before the date you gave.

It may have been common, but it made no economic sense, after all these prisoners could be used as slaves, gladiators or sold to other polities. OK, if you keep them alive, you have to feed them and guard them, but if they're dead you've got nothing but fertiliser....

Salah

Sorry, I misunderstood you

Salah

More often than not, this is what occured. Two of the greatest historians of ancient Rome, Polybius and Josephus, had first come into the Roman world as POW's. Undoubtedly, most of the Britons, Jews, and Dacians taken in the great wars of the late 1st/early 2nd Centuries met their deaths in the Colusseum, mines, or brothels, rather than on the battlefield or in the village in which they were captured.

But there are some Roman depictions - notably on the column of Trajan and/or Marcus Aurelius - that depict the wholesale execution of captives taken after a battle. One frieze, I think on Marcus Aurelius' Column, shows German warriors being forced to decapitate one another.

Kuon

Salah ah-Din,

I did say in this post I would include some information relating to the Crom Cruach idol. Here is a relevant excerpt from Ronald Hutton's "Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain":

pp. 40 - 41

Chookie

For a long time if was the perceived wisdom that the various bog bodies were evidence of Celts employing human sacrifice which involved the so-called "triple death" (stabbing, strangling and clubbing). Unfortunately for proponents of this theory, bog bodies have also been found in Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Germany (none of these regions is recognised as being Celtic).

The most recent known (Bocksten Man) has been dated to between 1290 and 1430 CE. The majority are Iron Age, and the oldest known is approximately 3000 years older - this one is from South Uist, but I have to question just how "Celtic" the process was, as it's generally not accepted that there were Celts in Scotland (or anywhere else for that matter) circa 1600 BCE.

Salah

Maybe it was a shared Celtic/Germanic custom; the two peoples were fairly similar at the time.