Celtic Headhunters

Celtic Headhunting

Our knowledge of the pre-Christian Celtic world is based almost exclusively on two sources – the archaeological remnant of their civilization, and the writings of their Greek and Roman contemporaries. The former is frustratingly incomplete, the latter is full of biases, stereotypes, and romanticism reminiscent of the “noble savage” mythologies of more recent centuries. The popular Roman historians especially delighted in depicting the Celtic peoples of Gaul, Britain, Spain, and Northern Italy as barbarians, headhunting warriors who charged into battle drunk and naked, eager to harvest prisoners to sacrifice to their brutish forest-gods.

Archaeology and the remnants of Celtic mythology suggest that the myth of Celtic barbarism – like most racist stereotypes throughout history – stems from an exaggeration of actual features of Celtic culture, or of a misinterpretation of its rituals and society. The Celtic tribes that many a Roman general faced between the 4th Century BCE and the 1st Century CE were indeed a hard-fighting, hard-drinking people. They were Europe’s finest metal-workers, and their society was fairly complex and organized, a fact that even Caesar lets on in his De Bello Gallico. Their spirituality was a nature-oriented mysticism that has much in common with Buddhism, while the secretive, and strictly oral nature of their druidic community severely limits our comprehension of their knowledge of the world around them (said by their contemporaries to have been remarkably impressive).

That said, the Celts were a warrior people. Despite the occasional appearance of female leaders in their history, theirs was fundamentally a chauvinistic, male-dominated society in which positions of power and influence were determined by one’s success in combat, whether defending his tribe from invasion, or launching cattle raids against a neighboring people. While human sacrifice was not as prevalent in their society as Roman propaganda claimed, they nonetheless adhered to some dark customs that would seem revolting to modern sensibilities. Not the least of these is what modern researchers have termed the “Cult of the Head”.

Headhunting in Classical Sources

Several Greco-Roman historians alluded to Celtic headhunting, though none of them did so as much well as Diodoros Sikulos at the close of the 1st Century BCE – when Rome had already conquered all of her Celts outside of Britain. The custom of severing an enemy’s head, and then displaying it as a trophy, was probably practiced by other peoples of ancient Italy, but neither on the same scale nor with the same degree of morbid rituality as by the Celts. Celts first penetrated the Italian peninsula in the late 5th Century BCE, and it did not take long before they had brushes with Rome – these first, ugly encounters culminated in the Celtic sack of Rome in 390 BCE, an event that was ever afterwards implanted on the Roman psyche.

The Romans were disturbed by the Celts’ apparent ill-discipline in battle – they sang, laughed like madmen, howled like wolves, and even drank strong liquor as they rode, or swaggered into battle. Some fought naked to the waist, others wearing chainmail – a form of armor the Romans adopted after seeing its effectiveness in Gaulish hands. Likewise, their long, straight swords and their flat, broad shields were to influence the Roman arsenal, along with their tall plumed helmets and their saddles, the most effective in use at that time. More disturbing to Roman sensibilities were their physical characteristics; the Gauls tended to be several inches taller and fairer of skin and hair than their new Italian neighbors. Many of them wore their long hair in dreadlocks, while their tribal leaders shaved every inch of their body except for their upper lip – letting their mustaches grow out to ridiculous proportions. But most disturbingly of all, was their post-battle ritual. After a victory the Gauls would use their swords to decapitate the enemy casualties, and would take the heads as part of the spoils from their triumph. Warriors rich enough to own a horse would tie the head onto their saddle, proudly displaying it as they rode home, while others would place the head at the end of their spear. Several accounts mention them singing light-hearted victory songs while doing this.

Severing part of an enemy’s body to display as a token of valor or fortune, or even just out of a spirit of sadistic fun, is a widespread custom – from ancient Egyptian soldiers who hoarded enemy penises to American soldiers who collected various parts taken from dead Japanese troops in World War II. But only a few historical warrior-cultures have attached so much honor and mystical reverence to these trophies as these Gaulish headhunters did. Diodoros tells us that these heads were kept long after the battle. Retainers were charged with washing off the blood and filth of battle, before embalming the head in cedar oil.

Diodoros further emphasizes the value of these disembodied heads. He claims that a Gaul will not sell the embalmed head of his enemy for any price, claiming that he has no need of gold when he has such an obvious emblem of his courage and skill as a warrior. The heads were kept, carefully preserved in chests, and were removed to be put on display for guests in the warrior’s house. This reverence for the enemy’s severed head is much more than the mere tribal barbarism the Romans took it to be. It was obviously a ritual of both cultic and social significance. In fact, it can be closely compared to a culture otherwise very far removed from the ancient Celts – the samurai of medieval Japan, who were prone to collecting enemy heads and treating them with the utmost respect (even brushing their teeth) before putting them on display.

The Gaul who enthusiastically hacked off the head of his latest kill wasn’t acting out of a fit of barbarian rage. In fact, he was honoring a longstanding Celtic tradition, and harvesting a powerful token of his own martial potency. It was a desire for bragging rights, not rabid bloodlust, that motivated him to carry out this gruesome gesture. This fact, of course, would have been of little comfort to the dead or dying, and soon to be headless, Roman legionary laying at his feet, nor to the terrified comrades of said unfortunate who will face this Celt – proudly brandishing his latest trophy – in the next battle.

Talking Heads and Headhunting in Celtic Mythology

If our only evidence for Celtic “headhunting”, however ritualized, even “refined” in its nature, was the (biased and slanderous) accounts of Roman writers, we would do well to cast doubts as to whether such a custom actually existed. However, the claims of Diodoros Sikulos, Livy, and others, seems to be profusely verified in Celtic culture itself.

Several open references to the post-battle collection of enemy heads appear in Irish mythology. Cuchulainn, the infamous warrior of Ulster (known as the “Irish Hercules”), was mentioned at least once returning from a battle with clutches of severed heads in his hands as well as hanging from his chariot. It is predominately on the claims of Irish literature (put to writing in the Christian era, but pre-Christian in its original origins) that modern “Celtologists” base their claim that the ancient Celts believed that the human soul resides, not in the heart, but in the head. This is reinforced by a macabre incident in The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, in which Conaire Mor is beheaded by an enemy warrior, but his head retains the ability to speak after the battle.

Another talking head is that of Bran the Blessed, a warrior in Welsh mythology. He is mortally wounded in battle and asks his retainers to cut off his head and bury it at London, where he can always watch over Britain. They obey, but for the duration of their voyage home from Ireland his head continues to eat and make conversation.

The last request of the mythical figure Bran seems to bear correlation with a historical aspect of the Celtic head-cult. Severed heads seem to have had some form of protective value. Bran’s head was buried at London so as to guard the city, Diodoros’ Gauls hung heads from their doorposts, and at least two surviving pre-Roman Celtic temples (one in Britain, the other in what would have been southern Gaul) have shrines decorated with realistically-carved skulls at their entrances. It would seem that the head, representing the soul of the deceased, became some form of “guardian angel” to those who posthumously claimed it?

Conclusion

It is clear that the pre-Christian Celts placed a totemic value on severed heads that bordered on fetishism. The fact that Celtic “headhunting” was far more than a mere expression of their “barbarian” nature is one attested to even, and likely unwittingly, by the authorities of the Classical world. If the head was indeed the residency of the human soul, then claiming an enemy’s head was the ultimate expression of triumph and supremacy – and of the belligerent, self-conscious, and arrogant nature of the Celtic warrior-cult.

The evidence may well suggest that this disembodied head, very possibly the residence of one’s former enemy, took on a new life as a protective spirit to its master and his kin, or, in Bran’s case, a protective spirit to an entire Celtic community. If this is indeed the case, it was a great tragedy for the ancient Celts, Gauls and Britons alike, that the heads of their enemies failed to slow down the merciless advance of the Pax Romana – a Roman “warrior-cult” that reduced most of the Celtic world to destruction or servitude.

I'm guessing the bodies that were displayed rather than buried were those of the nobility and the best warriors: a gesture of humiliation and a warning to other tribes