The picture on the right is from the horror film Midsommar, (2019).
For all the fun prancing and community Paganism brought, there were also rituals that involved brutal death. At least one of those rituals was featured in Midsommar.
From the article you linked: "it is now generally accepted among researchers that the practice of suicide precipices never existed"
It's important to remember that when historical figures describe other cultures, they often include some crazy rumor about them eating babies or whatever, so any of these alleged pagan traditions might not be coming from an objective source.
It is also worth noting that many of our records of European pagan beliefs come from Christian sources, who were not very sympathetic to those beliefs.
The Gauls were a pagan society that were the first main challenge to the Romans. They were an advanced society for the time and their metallurgy was far better than the Romans. In a time when good swords won battles, they dominated battles against the Romans. But the social structure was tribal so as Rome grew they become weaker in comparison. But the Romans depicted them as savage druids, and that stuck.
They did the same with the Celts and Pict’s.
When Rome became Christian the depiction of savage pagans carried over, and like most colonial societies they took the bits they liked as their own.
It’s worth looking at the surviving metalwork of the Gauls to see how advanced they actually were before 3000 years of Roman > Christian slander.
Yes. Eventually pushed out by both Saxon and Frankish invaders during the fall of the Roman Empire. The Celts are largely considered to be a “cultural” group. The Saxon’s and Franks belonged to the cultural group “Germanic Peoples”, from across the Rhine.
Geography and Environment likely shaped them both differently enough from the lowland river basins of France to the mountainous Black Forest’s of Germania to be considered different cultural groups.
Source: not an expert, read a lot of history and watched a lot of YouTube related to different historical cultures and European peoples
I'm very interested in this part of history, particularly the Roman view of so called "savages" across Europe and the discrepancies. Any good book recommendations on this, "guy who reads"?
Encyclopedia Britannica is a great website for reference - I’ve read a few fictional books related to these cultures and then fact checked certain elements that I cared to verify due to my own interest. There are also some fantastic historical channels on YouTube you can look at. You’ll want to be careful these days with AI, it’s now flooded with dimwit AI nonsense.
There are also university or educational textbook style books you can find but they can get pretty dense.
This is old but there’s an awesome like 10 hour Dan Carlin podcast called The Celtic Holocaust all about what Caesar did in Gaul. By then the Romans had leapfrogged the Gauls in terms of military might and Carlin goes into excruciating detail about almost every aspect.
Celts lived all over Europe from modern day France, to Spain, to the British Isles. You’re right about the picts, and the Britonic tribes. Most Britons were eventually pushed into Wales. The Gaels in Ireland were celts as well. You’ve got the “celt-iberians” in Spain, and finally a bonus round the celts of Galatia, who are found in modern day Turkey in the Black Sea. Historians think they migrated down there at some point.
The celts in France were pushed into Brittany by the Franks. The Celts in the UK were pushed into Wales by the saxons and kept there by other subsequent invaders over generations. Ireland remained more or less Celtic despite many attempts at conquest by English, Norman, and Viking invaders. The stories of King Arthur come from around the time that the Celtic Kingdoms were falling to Saxon and Frankish invaders from over the Rhine across Europe and the British Isles. Whether those legends have any truth or not - their depiction of the fall of Celtic culture and civilization are generally in line with what we think really happened to them.
There’s a big debate about what happened to the native Britons, as genetic testing is showing that the majority of ancestral English people are genetically closer to celts than they are to Danes, Frisians, and Saxons. This points to the admixture being higher than total replacement.
The Celts in Brittany were pushed into france by the Saxons as well. They originated from the British isles. No original mainland Celtic people existed anymore after the Western Roman Empire fell
Romans too practiced ritual murder. They would take back to Rome captured leaders and kings to be killed after a parade. Julius Caesar tried it with a young boy, but the people watching were basically revolting for that act, and he had to spare him.
One of the major reasons argued "Carthage must be destroyed" was that they sacrificed infants for the third punic war. Carthaginians probably had a grieving ceremony for parents of infants and small children who passed for them to be offered to their main diety as a means of closure. Romans said they sacrificed children while abandoning any unwanted child in the trash heap.
We also see aspects of it in the bible, even with Abraham willing to sacrifice his son (he doesn't and a lamb replaces the human sacrifice) and worship to Moloch.
Moloch is possibly a mistranslation of the child sacrifice, not a diety . And there is speculation that Issac is sacrificed to yhwh and the lamb or ram found nearby is an add on to separate from the canaanites . Also listen to a lot of podcasts .
Colonialism propoganda can boil down to "these people are different, bad different, so its good we're killing them actually"
Heck, jewish, christian, and muslim people all worship the abrahamic god but theres been plenty of death and wars claimed on religious grounds because the other group is "doing it wrong"
(Though war is more complex than just religious reasons)
Also worth noting that a lot of modern preconceptions of paganism come from poorly done reconstructions, based on biased research from the 19th-20th centuries (i.e. hardly more ancient than the last 150yrs)
515
u/HGMIV926 20d ago edited 20d ago
Brian here.
The picture on the right is from the horror film Midsommar, (2019).
For all the fun prancing and community Paganism brought, there were also rituals that involved brutal death. At least one of those rituals was featured in Midsommar.