LINDOW MOSS

CHESHIRE, ENGLAND

The well-preserved body of a young, red-haired man with a ginger beard was found here in waterlogged peat. He had been in his early twenties in around 300 BC when he had been poleaxed, garroted, and had his throat cut. He had not just been killed, but killed three times over—the Celtic magic number—and this indicates a ritual killing (see Symbols: Rule of Three). Apart from a band of fox-fur around his left arm, he was naked, which also implies ritual.

Investigation revealed that his killers first hit him twice over the head with ax blows that stunned but did not kill him. Then they carefully tied a cord tightly around his neck, knotted it, and neatly cut off the cord ends from each side of the knot. Then they pushed a stick under the cord and twisted it like a tourniquet, garroting him until his neck broke. Then they cut his throat, opening his jugular vein. After the killing, the young man’s naked body was put face-down in a crouched position in the bog.

His condition is intriguing. He was well-built, 5 feet, 6 inches (1.68m) tall. He had a fijll head of hair, grown to medium length, and a short beard. He had well-manicured fingernails, showing that he was not a laborer. His moustache was neatly clipped. Archeologists think he was an aristocrat or a Druid. He had eaten a griddle cake shortly before his death. This was a carefully prepared, carefully executed killing, with the character of a sacrifice rather than a normal murder. Lindow Man is one of the most evocative examples of human sacrifice to have been found in Britain.

A poorly preserved human head was found in a peat bog in Lancashire in 1958. This has recently been re-examined by computer tomography, and its owner, Worsley Man, was murdered, executed, or sacrificed in the same way as Lindow Man. Worsley Man met his end between AD 70 and AD 400, in other words during the Roman occupation of Britain. It is a reminder that Celtic practices went on “under the Romans,” just as they had before.

Irish folk-tales often contain the motif of the Threefold Death, where a human being suffers three different deaths. In one legend, a king is wounded, the house inside which he is trapped burns down around him, and he finally drowns in a vat of liquor as he attempts to escape from the flames. What happened to Lindow Man is that a Threefold Death was planned and carried out deliberately, perhaps to make some prophecy come true.