Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Pagan World

For many people in the modern world, finding a Pagan belief system is a positive and life-affirming experience. It’s not uncommon for us to find a joy and lightness in our traditions, something that brings light into once was a dark existence. This is indeed a good thing, and what draws many new people into the Pagan community. Unfortunately, the downside of it is that there can sometimes be an unwillingness to accept that not all Pagan cultures in the past were full of light and love and rainbows.

Our ancestors, hundreds of years ago, lived a completely different existence than we do today, and their relationships with their gods were different than ours is today. This means that their guidelines as to what was acceptable spiritual behavior is not the same as those we see as reasonable in the 21^st century. As much as we may wish to deny it, or claim that it’s anti-Pagan propaganda, the inescapable truth was that for our ancestors, religious worship sometimes included things that modern Pagans find distasteful.

Sacrifice – both animal and human – was not an uncommon practice in the ancient world, and was generally performed in the context of making an offering to the gods. Animal sacrifice is still practiced today by a few religious groups, but for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll be focusing on ritualized human sacrifice in the ancient world. Obviously, this is a complex and vast topic,
and there’s no way we can cover every single aspect of it, so for now, we’ll be looking at the basics of human sacrificial practices among groups such as the Celts, the Greeks and Romans, and Mesoamerican tribes.

Human Sacrifice in the Celtic World

Although the Celts didn’t leave us much in the way of documentation, we can glean a bit about their practices from writings created by foreign observers. In particular, the works of Pliny the Elder, along with Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, give us some insight into sacrifice in the Celtic world. Pliny and Caesar make a very big deal about human sacrifice among the Druids. However, keep in mind that both of these men were Romans, writing about the practices of a people who had been more than a little difficult to conquer. In history, not only does the victor get to retain the spoils of war, he also earns the privilege of writing about it afterwards.

That said, while it’s unlikely that the Celts – and specifically, the Druid priest class – was engaging in the massive wholesale slaughter of human beings that Pliny and Caesar suggest, they did utilize human sacrifice on occasion. Caesar describes Celtic funeral customs in his Commentaries, in which the body of the deceased is cremated, and the clan then adds to the fire “everything they reckon to have been precious to the departed, even living creatures…” He suggests that slaves and other dependents might have been tossed in there as well, to join the deceased clansman in the afterlife.

Perhaps the best-known summary of Celtic sacrifice is the concept of the wicker man, another practice we know about based on Caesar’s writings. He describes “figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames.” Caesar goes on to explain that the men burned inside one of these structures were often criminals – thieves or robbers, specifically – but in the absence of a criminal sacrifice, the Druids “have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.”

Author J.A. McCulloch points out in Religion of the Ancient Celts (1911),

“Human victims were also offered by way of thanksgiving after victory, and vows were often made before a battle, promising these as well as part of the spoil. For this reason the Celts would never ransom their captives, but offered them in sacrifice, animals captured being immolated along with them.”

Foundation Sacrifice

There also existed, among the Celts, the concept of what scholars called foundation sacrifice. This was, essentially, the sacrifice of an individual before the construction of a new building. In some cases, the blood of the sacrifice was sprinkled around the foundation of the structure, and in others, they were actually buried beneath it. There are a number of locations, including Christian churches, in what was once the Celtic world, that still have legends and rumors of foundation sacrifices.

In generally all of these cases, scholars believe that human sacrifice was intended to strengthen the connection between man and the Celtic gods, to bridge the gap between the mortal world and the divine realm. Human remains have been found which support the ideas of Pliny and Caesar, and indicate that these bodies were interred in a ritual context. However, we will likely never know the extent of human sacrifice, and academia seems to be divided on whether or not Roman writers exaggerated the number of deaths taking place as propaganda.

Wicker Man image by larajanepark via Flickr / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

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