- Ritual and the Druids -
'heathenish practices' is contained in the Dingwall Presbytery Records of 6 August
1778 (Mitchell 1862: 8-10, quoted in MacNeill 1962: 364 and in MacCulloch 1911:
243)·
Pliny, in his famous description of the culling of mistletoe by the druids before a
feast (Naturalis Historia XVI.249), states: 'Having made preparation for a sacrifice
and a banquet beneath the trees, they bring thither two white bulls, whose horns are
bound then for the first time .... Then they kill the victims.' In Ireland a bull-feast,
tarb-feis, was used to determine by mantic means the rightful successor to the king
of Tara. A bull was killed, and a druid ate of its flesh and drank of the broth in which
it had been cooked. The druids sang a 'spell of truth' over him, and in his dreams he
would 'see' the rightful king. Sometimes the prophet had to be wrapped in the hide
of the slaughtered animal. The ritual slaughter of three bulls seems to be taking
place on an inner plate of the Gundestrup Cauldron, where three warriors hold
swords to the throats of huge animals, their immense size in comparison to the men
suggesting their own divinity. Three surly dogs bound beneath the animals (Olmsted
1979: pI. 3D) (Figure 23.4).
The bull, and bovines in general, seem to have been regular sacrificial animals, and
to have been included in the choice of animals thrown into the straw colossi
and immolated, according to Strabo (Geographica IV-4-C.198.5). Brunaux mentions
bovine sacrifice on a large scale revealed in the excavations of places such as Gournay,
in Picardy, France, where the remains were deposited in a central pit (Brunaux 1988:
15, etc.).
There can be little doubt that animal sacrifice took place in Ireland at the great
assemblies, as did human sacrifice. At the druidic site Uisnech, traces of the Beltain
sacrifices have been found. In the centre of the enclosure on the top of the hill a large
bed of ashes was exposed, relics of a series of fires, and charred skeletons of animals
were found among them (Macalister 1931: 166ff.). Ann Woodward states in her
Shrines and Sacrifice (1992: 78):
It can be assumed that many of the sacrificed beasts would have provided meat
for feasting, so the numbers of bodies and parts of bodies that have survived
on Iron Age sites indicate that the practice of animal sacrifice in Celtic society
must have been very widespread indeed.
All the evidence supports this statement. Cunliffe's discovery of the heads and legs
of horses in various contexts at Danebury, Hampshire, is suggestive of the 'heads and
hooves' ritual where the body of the animal was consumed and the hide used to wrap
the seer in preparation for his mantic sleep (1968: 155ff.).
Pigs were choice animals for sacrifice and ritual consumption, and the pig heads
in the Yorkshire iron age graves are indicative of this (Stead 1979: passim), as too is
the scene on the Epona relief (Figure 23.5). A divinatory rite in early Ireland,
recorded by Cormac, bishop of Cashel, in the ninth century, involved a process
known as Imbas Forosnai, 'Knowledge that Enlightens':
the fili chews a piece of the flesh of a red pig, or of a dog or a cat, and puts it
afterwards on a flagstone behind the door, and pronounces an incantation on
it, and offers it to idol gods.
(O'Donovan and Stokes 1868: 94; Ford 1992 : 14-15)