The Guardian carries an article about the preserved body of a man found in a peat bog in 1984 being taken from the British Museum back to near where he was found for a temporary stay at Manchester Museum. It says: Lindow Man is to return to close to the spot where he met an appalling death almost 2,000 years ago, skull smashed in, strangled, stabbed, and finally dumped face down into the bog pool which preserved the evidence of his last terrible hours.

He has been one of the star exhibits at the British Museum since his discovery in 1984 by peat cutters at Lindow Moss in Cheshire, transfixing visitors who gaze into his leathery, contorted face and startlingly preserved hair and eyelashes. The museum is now sending him on a year-long loan to Manchester Museum.

I think the date of his death tells us that this man was either a celt or involved with celtic society and the existence of these ”bog people” has been a mystery to scientists since they were first discovered. Thinking of the old rhyme that goes “Three times dead, smash him in the head”, I notice that our man here had been ”killed” three times. He had been strangled, ‘’smashed in the head” and stabbed. I”ve long had a theory that willing sacrifices were offered to water by the celts (just think of all the weapons and other valuable items offered to lakes, the story of Excalibur and so on) and this chap was probably one such sacrifice.

The article goes on to say:

Like many of the others found across Europe he was a healthy man in the prime of life, although he had the beginnings of osteoporosis in his spine, and intestinal parasites. The remains of his one surviving hand have neatly trimmed nails and fingertips with no sign of the wear of hard manual labour.

The jury really is still out on these bodies,” curator Jody Joy said, “whether they were aristocrats, priests, criminals, outsiders, whether they went willingly to their deaths or whether they were executed - but Lindow was a very remote place in those days, an unlikely place for an ambush or a murder.

A remote settlement that probably found survival very difficult. A grown man with no signs of manual labour who was not ambushed or murdered. I seem to remember reading in ”The Golden Bough” by Frazer about Scapegoats and the ”King for a Year” idea of early societies. It all seems to point to a willing sacrifice who was treated as a very special person and then sacrificed at a time when the tribe was in dire straits.

OK, so I”m just guessing.. but if this is right the real tragedy is not how this man died but what exactly happened to the tribe to cause his death? As a side-note, I don”t remember many tales of sacrifice occuring within Celtic Myths - perhaps there used to be evidence and perhaps we are looking once again at early monkish censorship?

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