Celtic Mythology and Religion

THE GAULISH RELIGION. 63
given to religious matters. And on this account,
he proceeds, those who are affected with diseases
of a rather serious character, and those who are in
great dangers, either sacrifice human beings, or
make a vow to that effect ; and at these sacrifices
they employ the Druids. They think, he says,
that the Deity cannot be appeased unless human
life is given up for human life, and they have even
national sacrifices of this kind. They make huge
images of wickerwork, inside which they place human
beings alive ; and this they set on fire, and the
victims perish.
but if
Generally the victims are criminals,
criminals are wanting, they have recourse to
innocent persons. These human sacrifices seem
horrible to our modern minds, and to the Romans,
though familiar with the idea of human sacrifice,
for in the time of the Second Punic war, they, themselves,
resorted in their religious terror to the sacrificing
of a male and female Gaul, and it was not until
the 1st century before Christ that the Senate formally
forbade such sacrifices even in Rome—to the Romans
even the Gauls appeared reckless in their massacres,
such occurring, too,
when there did not appear to
be any special danger. Strabo says that it was a
tenet of the Druids that the harvest would be rich
in proportion to the richness of the harvest of death.
Another article of the Gaulish creed is given by
Caesar. The Gauls, he says, assert that they are
all sprung from Pluto (the god of the lower world),
for so the Druids teach. Hence, therefore, they