the Galatian Celts.  Drinking out of a skull the blood of slain (sacrificial) enemies is mentioned by Ammianus and Livy, and Solinus describes the Irish custom of bathing the face in the blood of the slain and drinking it.[821] In some of these cases the intention may simply have been to obtain the dead enemy’s strength, but where a sacrificial victim was concerned, the intention probably went further than this.  The blood of dead relatives was also drunk in order to obtain their virtues, or to be brought into closer rapport with them.[822] This is analogous to the custom of blood brotherhood, which also existed among the Celts and continued as a survival in the Western Isles until a late date.[823]

One group of Celtic human sacrifices was thus connected with primitive agricultural ritual, but the warlike energies of the Celts extended the practice.  Victims were easily obtained, and offered to the gods of war.  Yet even these sacrifices preserved some trace of the older rite, in which the victim represented a divinity or spirit.

Head-hunting, described in classical writings and in Irish texts, had also a sacrificial aspect.  The heads of enemies were hung at the saddle-bow or fixed on spears, as the conquerors returned home with songs of victory.[824] This gruesome picture often recurs in the texts.  Thus, after the death of Cuchulainn, Conall Cernach returned to Emer with the heads of his slayers strung on a withy.  He placed each on a stake and told Emer the name of the owner.  A Celtic oppidum or a king’s palace must have been as gruesome as a Dayak or Solomon Island village.  Everywhere were stakes crowned with heads, and the walls of houses were adorned with them.  Poseidonius tells how he sickened at such a sight, but gradually became more accustomed to it.[825] A room in the palace was sometimes a store for such heads, or they were preserved in cedar-wood oil or in coffers.  They were proudly shown to strangers as a record of conquest, but they could not be sold for their weight in gold.[826] After a battle a pile of heads was made and the number of the slain was counted, and at annual festivals warriors produced the tongues of enemies as a record of their prowess.[827]

These customs had a religious aspect.  In cutting off a head the Celt saluted the gods, and the head was offered to them or to ancestral spirits, and sometimes kept in grove or temple.[828] The name given to the heads of the slain in Ireland, the “mast of Macha,” shows that they were dedicated to her, just as skulls found under an altar had been devoted to the Celtic Mars.[829] Probably, as among Dayaks, American Indians, and others, possession of a head was a guarantee that the ghost of its owner would be subservient to its Celtic possessor, either in this world or in the next, since they are sometimes found buried in graves along with the dead.[830] Or, suspended in temples, they became an actual and symbolical offering of the life