HUMAN SACRIFICE AMONG THE

IRISH CELTS

F. N. ROBINSON

There exists a somewhat strange difference of opinion concerning the practice of human sacrifice among the ancient Irish Celts. While the majority of writers on Celtic religion and folklore assume the custom to have prevailed, and refer, more or less as a matter of course, to ancient instances or to modern survivals, a number of scholars of recognized authority in various departments of Celtic learning insist that there is little or no evidence of the existence of any such rite. O'Curry's sweeping statement that "in no tale or legend of the Irish Druids which has come down to our time, is there any mention . . of their ever having offered, or recommended to be offered, human sacrifices, either to appease or to propitiate the divine powers which they acknowledged,”1 might be dismissed as coming from an older generation when Irish historical material was more difficult of access; especially since W. K. Sullivan, the editor of O'Curry's volumes, expresses a different opinion in his Introduction, and cites three apparent references to the practice. But a denial of human sacrifice nearly as sweeping as O'Curry's, and defended by argument, is made by Dr. P. W. Joyce in his admirable Social History of Ancient Ireland, published in 1903, a work which is likely for some time to come to take the place of O'Curry's older compilation. Dr. Joyce, for example, designates as a conspicuous difference between the Druids of Gaul and those of Ireland, that the former practised the cult in question while the latter did not.3 Dr. Douglas Hyde, in his widely influential Literary History of Ireland, published in 1899, while citing more evidence for the practice than Dr. Joyce, still disparages the value of some of the testimony by attributing it to "a Christian chronicler familiar with the accounts of Moloch and Ashtaroth." He concludes that the existence of human sacrifice in Ireland is by no means certain, and that the custom, if ever resorted to at all, had fallen into abeyance before the landing of the Christian missionaries. To these opinions of native Irish scholars may be added that of at least one distinguished recent Continental writer on

1 E. O'Curry, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, London, 1873, II, 222.

2 Ibid., I, cccxx ff., cccxxxv ff., dcxl ff. The stories referred to- the Death of Fiachra, the Echtra Airt, and the Dinnsenchas of Tailtiu - will be discussed later.

8 Joyce, Social History, I, 239; see also the arguments at pp. 281 ff.

♦ Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland, New York, 1899, pp. 92–93.

Celtic antiquities, M. Alexandre Bertrand. In his Religion des Gaulois, where he argues that the Druids of Gaul should not be held especially responsible as an order for the practice of human sacrifice in that land, he observes: "On devrait réfléchir, avant d'accuser les druides, qu'en Irlande, le pays druidique par excellence, les sacrifices humains liturgiques étaient inconnus." In the face of such statements as the foregoing, and more to the same purport might easily be added,2-it seems worth while to inquire briefly what the nature is of the evidence for the custom in question. If the scholars cited are right in their assertions, then the current opinion of most students of Celtic antiquities is mistaken and should be corrected. If, on the other hand, there is good evidence for the usual view, such general denials as have been quoted above ought not to be constantly reasserted. It is doubtless difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at decisive proof in settlement of so obscure a problem. But it ought to be easy, by a short examination of the material, to determine whether the evidence for human sacrifice in Ireland is conspicuously different from that which is held to prove the existence of the practice elsewhere. No part of the testimony to be presented, it should be added, is new in the sense that it has not been somewhere mentioned in previous discussions of the subject, though the various items have not all been treated elsewhere together, so far as the writer is aware. And of course no claim is made that the material here discussed is in any sense complete. Ancient Irish literature, whether in the vernacular or in Hiberno-Latin, is still far from wholly accessible, and that portion of it which has been published has not yet been thoroughly canvassed for the light it throws on history and institutions.

It may be observed at the outset that there is, to say the least, no antecedent improbability that the Irish Celts were accustomed to sacrifice human victims. Disregarding the wide diffusion of such a practice among the civilizations of antiquity and among savage tribes of modern times, one can find particularly good evidence of its existence among the Celtic peoples, who were most closely related to the ancient Irish. It was so familiar and well-recognized a feature of the religion of the Gauls that the testimony on

1 Bertrand, La Religion des Gaulois; les Druides et le Druidisme (in the series entitled Nos Origines), Paris, 1897, p. 68, n. It is fair to add that the statement quoted is based upon the authority of M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, Introduction à la Littérature Celtique, I, 51 ff., and that this scholar seems afterwards to have modified his opinion. In his later work, Les Druides et les Dieux Celtiques à Forme d'Animaux (Paris, 1906), pp. 100-102, M. d'Arbois admits that the Irish Druids probably presided at the immolation of first-born infants before the idol of Cromm Cruaich. See below, pp. 189 ff.

2 It is not necessary to accumulate references to similar expressions of opinion. But one additional instance may be cited from a recent contribution to a learned journal. The reviewer of Rolleston's Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race, in the Journal of the Ivernian Society, IV, 189 (1912), declares that "the evidence of human sacrifice in Ireland consists of one single statement in one tract."

the subject need not be cited here.1 Roman and early Christian historians repeatedly expressed their horror at what M. Camille Jullian has aptly called "le plus célèbre de tous les rites gaulois, et en réalité le plus banal de tous."2 The evidence indicates, furthermore, that the human sacrifices of the Gauls were performed for a variety of purposes. Sometimes they were undertaken as offerings to the dead; sometimes as a protection against disease; 4 frequently, it seems, as offerings to the god of war; at other times, again, as a mode of divination, or as a means of procuring the fertility of the soil. In many cases, apparently, the offering took the form of self-devotion, or sacrificial suicide. Even if such costly sacrifices were resorted to only in times of great public or personal need, or were restricted, as M. Jullian suggests,9 to the greater gods alone, they cannot have been confined to a single cult or a narrow territory. Among the Celts of Britain, too, although the evidence is less extensive than for the Continent, the existence of the custom is well attested.10 If, then, the Irish did not practise it, they differed from the peoples nearest of kin to them in a way that historians may well be puzzled to explain.

One other consideration may be presented here for its bearing on the general question of antecedent probability. Certain customs of the modern Gaelic peoples, both of Ireland and of Scotland, look very much like modified survivals of human sacrifice. The ceremonies associated with the Beltane, or May-Day, fire are perhaps most clearly of this character, as the festival is of most assured antiquity on Celtic soil. The oldest account of Beltane, to be sure, that found in Cormac's Glossary,11-contains no reference to sacrifice. It simply mentions two fires which Druids used to make with great incantations, and between which they used to drive the cattle as a safeguard against disease. But according to the testimony of Martin's Description of the Western Islands of Scotland 12 there existed as late as the eighteenth century the

1 The necessary limits of the present article forbid extended discussion or illustration of the Continental practices in question. Convenient summaries of the recorded facts, with references to the classical authorities, will be found in Ch. Renel, Les Religions de la Gaule avant le Christianisme, Paris, 1906, pp. 355 ff.; Camille Jullian, Recherches sur la Religion Gauloise, Bordeaux, 1903, pp. 51 ff. (dealing with the earliest periods); and the same author, Histoire de la Gaule, II, 157 ff. 2 Jullian, Recherches, p. 51.

3 Cf., for example, Cæsar, De Bello Gallico, vi, 14, 19. Historical testimony on this point is supported by archæological investigations. See Naue, translated by Reinach, Revue Archéologique, 1895, II, 40 ff.; also L'Anthropologie, VI, 586, and references cited by MacCulloch, Religion of the Ancient Celts, p. 337, n. 4 Cæsar, DBG., vi, 16.

See, for example, Justin, xxvi, 2; Livy, xxxviii, 47; Diodorus Siculus, v, 32; xxxi, 13; Athenæus, iv, 51; Scholia in Lucani Bellum Civile, ed. Usener, p. 32.

6 Cf. Strabo, iv, 4, 5; Tacitus, Annales, xiv, 30; Diodorus Siculus, v, 31.

7 Cf. Strabo, iv, 4, 4.

8 On suicide for sacrificial purposes cf. Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule, I, 359 ff. 9 Recherches, p. 51.

10 Cf. Pliny, Hist. Nat., xxx, 4, 13; Dio Cassius, lxii, 7; and, for archæological evidence, some of the references cited by MacCulloch, p. 337, n.

11 See Whitley Stokes's edition of O'Donovan's translation, Calcutta, 1868, pp. 19, 23.

12 Published at London, 1716 (reprinted at Glasgow, 1884), p. 105.

tradition that malefactors were burned in the Beltane fire. And if the authority for this statement be questioned, certain Perthshire customs described by Sir John Sinclair,1 and often cited in books on Celtic religion, may still be urged as pointing back to human sacrifice. Sinclair relates how lots were cast among the people by the division of a loaf of cake, the person who received a certain blackened piece being taken as the "devoted" victim and subjected to various penalties. Sometimes the victim was compelled to leap through the fire, or a pretense was made of throwing him into it; and throughout the ceremony he was spoken of as "dead." The whole performance may well be a playful substitute for what was once serious business, just as the horse's bones thrown into the fire in modern Beltane ceremonies at Dublin may be a substitute for the body of a human victim.2 It is commonly held that the man or woman sacrificed in such cases was originally a representative of the spirit of vegetation, and that the purpose of the cult was primarily to secure the fertility of the soil.3 Indeed, Professor Bury has discerned a possible reminiscence of such immolation in the ordeal which St. Patrick's pupil Benignus and the Druid Lucetmael are said to have gone through at Easter on the hill of Slane. In the final test which Patrick proposed, Benignus and the Druid were placed in a hut built half of green and half of dry wood. Benignus, clothed in the magician's garment, was put in the dry part, and Lucetmael, wearing the garment of Patrick, in the green part. Then the hut was set on fire, and as a result of Patrick's prayer the magician was consumed, leaving Patrick's robe unburnt, while Benignus escaped unhurt, though the Druid's robe was destroyed. If Bury's interpretation of the episode be accepted, then the story, which occurs in Maccumactheni's life of Patrick, constitutes very early testimony as to human sacrifice in pagan Ireland. But the element of conjecture in the theory is not to be ignored, and the whole question of the significance of the popular ceremonies under consideration may be freely. admitted to be of uncertain answer. All that is here contended is that the

1 See especially his Statistical Account of Scotland, XI, 620. The passage is printed also by T. Stephens, The Gododin, London, 1888, p. 125, n. For further references on Beltane, with comparison of similar ceremonies, see Elton, Origins of English History, p. 261; Sir John Rhys, Hibbert Lectures, p. 520; L. Gomme, in the Report of the Liverpool Meeting of the British Association, 1896, pp. 626 ff.; and J. A. MacCulloch, Religion of the Ancient Celts, pp. 265-266. MacCulloch, at p. 261, compares a similar Welsh custom of jumping through the "November fire."

2 Cited by MacCulloch, p. 265, from Hone, Everyday Book, II, 595. For testimony concerning the burning of live animals, in some cases on May-Day, on the Isle of Man, see Rhys, Celtic Folklore, Oxford, 1901, pp. 305 ff.

3 See MacCulloch, p. 163; and cf. Frazer, The Golden Bough, III, 319 ff. For a somewhat different view (comparing the Athenian Thargelia) see Rhŷs, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 519 ff., and Celtic Folklore, pp. 309 ff.; and for an attempt to show a phallic element in the May-Day rites cf. W. G. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland, London, 1902, pp. 262 ff.

4 Cf. J. B. Bury, Life of St. Patrick, London, 1905, pp. 108 ff., 302 ff. He compares the transformation of the burning of Sandan into the story of the funeral pyre of Croesus, discussed by Frazer, III, 168 ff.

Gaels possessed, and have maintained until recent times, customs which are commonly explained, wherever they are found, as transformed survivals of human sacrifice. It will probably not be objected that the traditions of the Gaels of Scotland should not be used for the evidence they yield concerning the common inheritance of the Gaelic people.1

In spite of the expectations aroused by the general considerations just presented, the explicit references to human sacrifice in Irish literature appear to be few. But they are not quite so rare as was implied by the writers quoted at the beginning of this paper, and at least seven passages, or groups of passages, deserve consideration here. These all make direct mention of sacrifice, and no such theoretic interpretations are involved as in the case just mentioned of Benignus and the Druid. Even if no one of them records an historical occurrence, they bear testimony at all events to the popular knowledge of human sacrifice, and to that extent are evidences of its existence. The fact that none of the passages in question is of very early date does not matter essentially to the present discussion, since the Irish vernacular texts in any case date from a period considerably after the conversion to Christianity. This fact, indeed, may go far to account for the scarcity of literary references to a custom which must have been vigorously opposed, if not early eradicated, by the Church.

The purposes of the sacrifices mentioned in Irish writings correspond very well in general to those recognized in Gaulish sacrifice or surmised in the transformed rites of the Beltane festivals. The first instance to be considered apparently belongs to an ancient vegetation cult, the famous worship of Cromm Cruaich,2 which St. Patrick is said to have overthrown. In the early lives of Patrick, although the destruction of the idol is lauded as a great achievement, nothing is said of human sacrifice in relation to it. But popular tradition on the subject seems to be preserved in the account of Mag Slecht ("The Plain of Prostrations "), in the so-called Dinnsenchas. This collection of topographical legends is found in the Book of Leinster and later manuscripts and was probably compiled in the eleventh or twelfth century. But the component parts, especially the metrical portions, may be in some cases of much older date, and the material often seems to rest upon very early 1 Instances of the sacrifice of human beings to avert pestilence among cattle are reported to have taken place in recent times in Gaelic Scotland, and may be noted here. See G. Henderson, Survivals in Belief among the Celts, Glasgow, 1911, pp. 275 ff. The cases cited are not brought into relation with any festival, and may be too exceptional to have any significance with regard to ancient tradition. But they seem to involve, on the part of the people concerned, the same old belief attributed by Cæsar to the Gauls (DBG., vi, 16), that life must be offered in the purchase of life. For a tale of a modern Scottish foundation sacrifice see below, p. 196, n. 3. 2 The explanation of this name is uncertain. Rhys's interpretation, "The Bent One of the Mound" (or Cenn Cruaich," The Head of the Mound"), is perhaps the best. See his Hibbert Lectures, p. 201. D'Arbois de Jubainville, Cycle mythologique, p. 106, proposed rather to connect Cruaich with cru," blood."