Post by Joanna on Jun 1, 2015 17:44:58 GMT -5
The Dark and Bloody Druids
Recent evidence that the Druids likely indulged in cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice – perhaps on a massive scale – adds weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery, archaeologists say. Following a 1st century BC visit to Britain, the Romans returned with horrific stories about these high-ranking priests of the Celts, who had spread throughout much of Europe over a roughly 2,000-year period. Julius Caesar, who led the first Roman landing in 55 BC, said the native Celts “believe that the gods delight in the slaughter of prisoners and criminals, and when the supply of captives runs short, they sacrifice even the innocent.” First-century historian Pliny the Elder went farther, suggesting the Celts practiced ritual cannibalism, eating the flesh of their enemies as a source of spiritual and physical strength. But with only the word of the Romans as evidence – the ancient Celts left no written records of their own – it has been easy for historians to dismiss such tales as wartime propaganda. Until now.
Gruesome Discoveries. Recent gruesome finds appear to confirm the accounts of the Romans, according to Secrets of the Druids, a documentary that aired on the National Geographic Channel. Perhaps the most incriminating evidence is the 2,000-year-old bog-mummified body of Lindow Man (below), discovered in England in the 1980s. Lindow Man’s manicured fingernails and finely trimmed hair and beard suggest he may have been of high status – possibly even a Druid himself. At least one thing appears almost certain about the ancient 20-something: He was the victim of a carefully staged sacrifice. Recent studies have revealed that Lindow Man’s head had been violently smashed and his throat strangled and slashed.
Fountain of Blood. “You’ve got a rope tightened round his neck and at the moment where the neck was constricted, the throat was cut, which would cause an enormous fountain of blood to rise up,” observed archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green, an archaeologist at Cardiff University in Wales and expert on the Druids. Another clue lay inside the body’s well-preserved gut: pollen grains from mistletoe, a plant sacred to the Druids. (The Romans recorded that the Druids cut mistletoe from trees with golden sickles.) Lindow Man’s death is dated to around AD 60, when the Romans launched a new offensive on the island of Great Britain, currently part of the United Kingdom. He may have been sacrificed to persuade the Celtic gods to halt the Roman advance, Aldhouse-Green related. “Something had to be done to stop them in their tracks,” she said in the documentary. “And what better way than sacrificing a high-status nobleman?” The idea jibes with something Julius Caesar wrote: In times of danger, the Celts believed that “unless the life of a man be offered, the mind of immortal gods will not favor them.”
Mass Sacrifice? Other grisly clues come from a cave in Alveston, England. Skeletons belonging to as many as 150 people and dating around the time of the Roman conquest were discovered in 2000. The Druids may have killed the victims – who show evidence of skull-splitting blows – during a single event. It may have been the Roman invasion itself that escalated the ritualized slaughter, researchers claim. Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol, believes the pile of bodies suggests savage resistance to the Romans, either on the battlefield or through deadly ritual. “Maybe the whole thing is a gigantic sacrifice ... an appeasement to the gods in order that they will get ultimate victory against the Romans,” Horton surmised.
And the Alveston cave bones hint at something even more sinister – cannibalism. A human thighbone in the cave had been broken open in exactly the same method people use to get at the nutritious bone marrow of animals. But if the bone is proof of Celtic cannibalism, the practice was probably extremely rare, Horton said. It may be evidence of increasing hunger and desperation as Roman invaders closed in, he added.
Dark and Bloody Practices. According to archaeologist Simon James of the University of Leicester, researchers have struggled in the past to link any archaeological evidence to the Druids, let alone signs of human sacrifice or cannibalism. “There has always been a suspicion that what the Romans were saying was atrocity propaganda. But some recent finds, like Lindow Man, suggest there were dark and bloody goings-on,” observed James, who was not involved in the new documentary. The mistletoe pollen from Lindow Man is the “least bad archaeological evidence we’ve got that fits in with these stories about the Druids,” he remarked, adding, “Maybe mistletoe plants had been dusted on his food ritually, a bit like spraying holy water around, or dunked in his drink.”
If Lindow Man and others were in fact sacrificed in a bid to stop the Romans, their lives were lost in vain. By the early centuries of the first millennium AD, the defeat of the Celts and their absorption into the Roman Empire were almost complete across Europe. Today, their once wide-ranging culture lives on primarily in the traditional languages of Ireland, Wales and Brittany (in France).
Sources: James Owen, "Druids Committed Human Sacrifice, Cannibalism," National Geographic, March 12, 2009;The Life and Death of a Druid Prince by Anne Ross and Don Robins; A Brief History of the Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis; The Druids by Stuart Piggott; and The Druids: A Study in Keltic Prehistory by Thomas D. Kendrick; and Celtic Truths.
