Talk:Celts and human sacrifice

A few things

This is an OK article, but it defiantly needs to be expanded and improved.

A few issues though, in this sentence "This dovetails with the three-fold death detailed in medieval texts." What does "dovetails" mean?

I presume this must be some American expression, but I've certainly never heard of it before, so it's not very good as a word that has to be internationally understood, can someone come up with a better term here.

One more thing is Tollund Man, he was killed in Denmark, and thus may not have been a Celt (more likely Germanic), so he may not belong here.

--Hibernian 17:52, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I removed this part from the article... "The Celts had three gods: Taranis, the god of thunder, Esus, the god of the underworld and Toutatis, the god of the tribe. Each god demanded a different sacrifice." As it sounds very suspect and unhistorical and was contributed by an anonymous user.--Hibernian 17:55, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "to dovetail" as "to fit together easily or conveniently,"[1] and says nothing about it being an americanism. Wikipedia can't be expected to define every term on the site- that's what Wiktionary is for.  ;-) Regards, Confiteordeo 14:07, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

This article should make it even clearer that human sacrifice by the celts its very contested. For one I remember doing history at school and many of Julius Caesar's writings have been disproved or proven exaggerated so how can you take the man seriously about the celts. Recent articles by national geographic contest that many "sacrifice" victims received many injuries after death those found in bogs would of been crushed by bogs so therfore broken bones etc are most likely caused by that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.44.75.157 (talk) 05:19, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The historical accuracy of the supposed evidence that Celts practiced human sacrifice at all has been seriously challenged by Celtic scholar Peter Beresford Ellis in his book "The Druids" (out of print) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Berresford_Ellis>. His primary critique is that the only written source mentioning Celtic human sacrifice is Julius Caesar, who was at the time conducting a war against the Celts. Julius Caesar's imprisonment and execution of the Celtic leader Vercengetorix (72BC - 46BC), chieftain of the Arverni, leader of the great Gallic revolt against the Romans in 53-52 BC), though not unusual, betrays his bias, if nothing else does. He also offers a point-by-point critique of the assumptions behind the so-called archaeological evidence. Peter W. Moon Peter W. Moon (talk) 03:37, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. There seems to be very little by way of scholarly commentary on this subject either way. I'm going to template this article. --HighKing (talk) 16:20, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

It is absolutely undisputed that the historical Gauls performed human sacrifice.

A) so did every other Iron Age culture in Europe, and probably everywhere else, albeit on varying scales

B) the objection "but the Romans were biased" is silly. The Romans conducted wars against pretty much everyone in Europe, yet they didn't see the need to regularly smear their opponents with blood libel

The people trying to spirit away evidence of Celtic human sacrifice are as a rule Romantic "Celtophiles" who have a picture of the "Celts" as a people of matriarchic tree-huggers. Finally, human sacrifice is, on an anthropological level, indistinguishable from the death penalty. You just tend to call it "human sacrifice" if you do not understand the ideology behind the killings, while you call it "capital punishment" when you do. Druidic human sacrifice was not necessarily more "barbarian" than any other culture executing people. In fact, it may have been, as what irritated the Romans was not the Gauls killing people, but the Gauls burning people alive. So we should say that druidic human sacrifice was not necessarily more barbarian than burnings at the stake up to and including the 1780s in Europe, or contemporary Rio de Janeiro gangland killings, etc. --dab (𒁳) 17:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

This matriarchic tree-hugger thinks we need to document our history and examine it, not hush it up. - Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 19:59, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Needs work!

Looking through the article, it appears that this source and related book is being used as the basis for the article. The article itself suffers from WP:SYNTH and has no references. In it's current form, this article should be nominated for deletion, but perhaps some experts can provide scholarly references and expand the article? --HighKing (talk) 16:32, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

the article shouldn't be deleted, but if nobody wants to work on it, it is perhaps best to turn it back into a section redirect to Human_sacrifice#Celts. --dab (𒁳) 17:46, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure there's enough material to expand this article, but it shouldn't be deleted. Looking over Human_sacrifice#Celts, the section there is actually better than this article, and I think the comparisons to other ancient cultures put it in a better context. A subsection in the Human Sacrifice article would probably attract fewer revisionist POV-pushers than are drawn to an article with this title. I lean towards focusing on that section and redirecting this. - Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 19:35, 9 September 2009 (UTC)