Bodies in the bog

From the Daily Mirror, headlined “Murdered 2,500 Years Ago”:

Tortured, maimed and disembowelled, the two savagely slaughtered bodies were a grisly sight for the Irish peat bog workers who unearthed them.

One of the dead men was found in County Meath, Ireland. The other was discovered three months later, just 25 miles away in Co. Offaly.

With soft flesh, fingernails, masses of red hair, teeth and eyeballs still intact, it seemed that the corpses had been freshly buried. And detectives thought they had stumbled across IRA victims. But when state pathologist Marie Cassidy saw the water-logged graves, she suspected the remains were much older than they seemed.

Archaeologist Ned Kelly thinks that they were sacred victims:

“My belief is that these burials are offerings to the gods of fertility by kings, to ensure a successful reign,” says Ned. “And that bodies are placed in the borders surrounding royal land or on tribal boundaries to ensure a good yield of corn [small grain–CSC] and milk.

More from the Irish Times here and from the BBC here.

It’s just one more piece of their tradition that today’s Celtic Reconstructionist Pagans have thrown overboard.

(Thanks to Mirabilis.ca.)

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