Part Two
From Peter Ellis' book
"The Druids"
(1994)
The argument that archaeology has finally produced evidence of
of human sacrifice is based on the discovery of 'Lindow Man' on
Friday 1 August 1984, workers engaged in peat cutting on Lindow
Moss, near Wilmslow, on the southern outskirts of Manchester,
found a well-preserved human leg. The police supervised the
search for further remains and a complete head and torso were
found. Radio carbon dating eventually placed the body to AD
50-100. The British Museum were called in and in 1986 produced a
preliminary study, 'The Body in the Bog.' In 1989, the leading
Celtic scholar, Dr Anne Ross, together with Dr Don Robins, of the
Institute of Archaeology at the University of London, published a
book, 'The Life and Death of a Druid Prince.'
The facts were that the body was that of a man of about 25/30
years who was in fairly good health apart from a mild
osteo-arthritis. He wore a fox-fur amulet on his arm. The skull
had been fractured at the crown and the jaw broken. The neck had
been dislocated, consistent with hanging. There were lacerations
on the preserved skin tissue. A post-mortem showed that the man
had been hit twice from behind with an instrument such as an axe
which probably rendered him unconscious. He was then garroted by
a knotted cord of animal sinew which had cut into the skin. At
the same time, a sharp blade had been plunged into his jugular
vein. Then he had been dropped into the bog.
Now how had these facts then led to the identification by Drs
Ross and Robins that this was a ritual human sacrifice? And
further, that the victim was a 'Druid Prince'? Indeed, the
conjectures get more imaginative. The fur amulet caused the
authors to suggest that the man's name was Lovernios, that is
'fox' from the Gaulish 'lovernios,' cognate with the Welsh
'llwynog,' Breton 'louarn' and Cornish 'lowarn.'
But what is the basis for such conjectures? The basis is that the
'human sacrifice' report of the Romans is accepted without
question.
The authors argue:
Their (the Celts) penchant for human sacrifice shocked even
the Romans, inured as they were to the horrors and carnage
of the amphitheatre. Surrender to an enemy never figured
largely in the Celtic order of battle. Prisoners of war, as
we learn from Julius Caesar, were usually sacrificed to the
gods. Caesar reports how captives were burnt in giant wicker
cages ...
Caesar, with due respect to him, says NOTHING OF THE KIND. On the
subject of sacrifices he says that criminals were chosen in
the first place. References to Celts not taking prisoners of
war, found in other Classical writings, could well have been
simply a warning to Greek or Roman soldiers not to contemplate
surrender and making them fight without quarter. But that's as
maybe And, as we have seen, the 'wicker man' report was not even
an original one by Caesar but a rehash of Poseidonios.
The authors, Ross and Robins, refer to the traditions found in
Scotland.
'It is in Scotland that the clearest traces of human
sacrifice in connection with Beltain have been noted. This
evidence is supported by Welsh oral lore and there is more
than a hint of it in Ireland. In all cases the victim was
chosen by means of the burnt piece of festival bannock.'
Now this is departing a little from what the evidence ACTUALLY
shows, which I have cited above.
The introduction of a burnt bannock into the proceedings is
simply to reinforce the authors' arguments, because traces of a
burnt bannock were found in the stomach of Lindow man. Indeed, at
no time do the authors present their exact sources or evidence
for the statement.
Also surprising is the statement:
The Celts believed in capital punishment, but they turned it
into a religious act, making an execution into a sacrifice
.... Captives were vowed to the gods before battle, and for
this reason could not be sold or given away. They had to be
offered. Human beings were sacrificed in order to propitiate
the god of blight and crop failure.
Presumably this is the authors' own imaginative interpretation of
Caesar's remark that the sacrifices among the Gauls were usually
of criminals.
Again, the authors are simply accepting the authority of the
Roman general and their own interpretations what he meant.
In contravention to this statement we find the Celtic law systems
are opposed to capital punishment and to slavery in the form
understood by Greece and Rome. Again one has to ask, what is the
evidence for the statement 'the Celts believed in capital
punishment', other than the throwaway line by Caesar? Laurence
Ginnell in is study 'The Brehon Laws (1894) comes to a contrary
statement:
'There is ample evidence of various kinds that the whole
public feeling of Ireland was opposed to capital punishment;
and still more was it opposed to the taking of the law into
one's own hands without the decision of a court.'
This is not to say that there was no capital punishment at all.
'At this day no one is put to death for his intentional
crimes as long as eric-fine is obtained', says the
commentary on the 'Senchus Mor.'
Dr Joyce explains:
'the idea of awarding death as a judicial punishment for
homicide, even when it amounted to murder, does not seem to
have ever taken hold of the public mind in Ireland.'
Indeed, Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, and other early
English settlers in sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland,
commentating on the eric-fine for homicide instead of capital
punishment, denounced it as 'contrary to God's laws and man's'.
According to Dr Joyce:
'There is no record of any human sacrifice in connection
with the Irish Druids; and there are good grounds
for believing that direct human sacrifice was not practised
at all in Ireland . . .'
'The Life and Death of a Druid Prince' is a polemic, but too
loaded with conceptual leaps of imagination to be acceptable as
proven fact. Although as Dr I.M.Stead of the British Museum
comments, 'The archaeologist would be hard put to produce a more
convincing example' (of human sacrifice), more convincing
examples do need to be found before we can truly come to the
conclusions drawn by the authors.
The deduction one is really drawn to is that the idea of
widespread human sacrifice among the Celts was mere Roman
propaganda to support their imperial power in their invasion of
Celtic lands and destruction of the Druids.
Additionally we can argue that we have more evidence of human
sacrifice occurring widely both in Greek and Roman civilizations.
Unlike Celtic literary tradition, Greek literature is full of
traces of human sacrifice customs, particularly the slaughter of
young virgins before a battle.
The best known historical example is the mass ritual sacrifice of
Persian prisoners before Salamis in 480 BC. Among the Romans
there are many specific references to human sacrifices,
notably in 228 BC an during the Second Punic War to propitiate
wrathful war deities. Livy himself records that the Romans made
human sacrifices after the defeat of Cannae in 216 BC. Among the
sacrifices to appease the gods, two Celts were buried alive under
the Forum Boarium. During the lifetime of Plutarc(AD 46-c.120)
human sacrifices were still being made. In the time of the late
Republic an early Empire, children were sacrificed in rites to
conjure the spirits of the dead. During the reign of Claudius,
foreign captives were being buried alive at Rome to ameliorate
the gods of war. Prisoners of war, like the Numidian king,
Jugartha, and the Celtic leader Vercingetorix, with their
families, were held for long periods - six years in the case of
Vercingetorix - in the deep underground prison of Tullanium below
the Capitol before finally being ceremonially sacrificed in
honour of Mars. Even Roman patricians, such as the followers of
Lucius Sergius Catilina (d.62 BC) were ritually slaughtered
here. During the second and third centuries AD, Tatian,
Tertullian and Minucius Felix reported that human sacrifices were
being carried out during festival of Latini.
Above all, when examining Roman sensitivities, one has to
remember the violent and bloodthirsty culture of the Roman
'circus'. The spectacle of prisoners and slaves fighting to the
death before enthusiastic spectators had been recorded in Rome
from the third century BC. By the time of the emperor Marcus
Ulpius Traianus (Trajan AD 98-117), a time when it is recorded
that the Roman empire was at its 'greatest', Trajan himself could
put five thousand pairs of gladiators into the arena and force
them to fight to the death. As an 'interval' to the proceedings,
tens of thousands of criminals were led into the arena and
ritually slaughtered for the further entertainment of the masses.
It was Decimus Junius Juvenalis, the satirical poet Juvenal,
writing during this period, who wrote the famous statement: 'The
people who have conquered the world have only two interests -
bread and circuses.'
In the early empire, during the course of a single day in the
Circus Maximus, three hundred prisoners had to fight each other
to death; twelve hundred men and women, condemned by law, were
slaughtered, most of them killed by wild animals, and, as a
special feature, it was announced that twenty girls would be
forced to copulate with wild beasts. Slaughter of, and by, wild
animals was a particular feature of Roman 'entertainment'. When
Titus Flavius Vespasianus (AD 79-811), who became emperor on the
death of his father Vespasian, finished the Colosseum begun by
his father, a total of nine thousand wild animals were killed in
fights with men and women (venationes) to mark the 'grand
opening'. The number of men and women slaughtered is not
recorded.
Even when Flavius Valerius Constantinus Augustus (C.AD 285-337)
became emperor and a Christian, allowing Christians total freedom
of rights within the empire, in AD 313, he allowed the
continuance of the bloodthirsty spectacles. Even Pope Dionysius
(AD 259-268) is recorded as owning gladiators and attending the
games. Ironically, it was not until the fifth century, when Rome
was invaded by those they called 'barbarians', that those 'bar-
barians' put an end to the bloody and violent spectacles.
Bearing this in mind one has to look at the Romans' expression
of profound disgust and distaste for human sacrifice, as applied
to the Druids, as rather meaningless and an act of high political
cynicism.
Finally, we have to agree with the conclusion of Doctor
Brunaux:
In the present state of research, knowledge of human
sacrifice rests upon the texts that have a tendency to
distort the reality of the facts and to exaggerate their
frequency in order to make them more sensational. In this
area, despite important discoveries, archaeology has nothing
new to contribute. The absence of conclusive evidence,
despite more and more numerous excavations, tends to
confirm the hypothesis that the practice was rare. The
ancient ethnographers had not actually witness any of these
deeds with which they reproach the Celts. While exploring
Gaul, like Poseidonios, they can only have seen skulls
nailed above doors of houses and sanctuaries, for which
there is some archaeological proof.
...........
Well, a good lesson in how some in Rome could turn things upside
down and inside out, to delude their people into thinking others
were the barbaric human killers, while it was they who were
really the greatest human sacrificers of their age and empire
(Keith Hunt).
It is now time to see from Isabel Hill Elder how and when
Christianity came to the British Isles. That will be covered in
the studies "The Druids and Christianity in Britain."
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