Some thoughts on Halloween and the harvest time besides corporate sugar laden confections… Trick Or Treat! Julius Caesar on Celtic Sacrifices The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to ritual observances, and for that reason those who are smitten with the more grievous maladies and who are engaged in the perils of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow so to do, employing the druids as ministers for such sacrifices. They believe, in effect, that, unless for a mans life a mans life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not be appeased; and in public, as in private life they observe an ordinance of sacrifices of the same kind. Others use figures of immense size whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods; but when the supply of such fails they resort to the execution even of the innocent. Diodorus Siculus on Druidic Sacrifices When they attempt divination upon important matters they practice a strange and incredible custom, for they kill a man by a knife-stab in the region above his midriff. After the sacrificial victim fell dead...they foretell the future by the convulsions of his limbs and the pouring of his blood. Strabo on Druidic Sacrifices ‘having devised a colossus of straw and wood, throw into the colossus cattle and wild animals and human beings, and then make a burnt-offering of the whole.” Tacitus on Germanic Sacrifices “Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims.”
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 03:44:09 +0000
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