of their owners, if, as is probable, the life or soul was thought to be in the head.  Hence, too, the custom of drinking from the skull of the slain had the intention of transferring his powers directly to the drinker.[831] Milk drunk from the skull of Conall Cernach restored to enfeebled warriors their pristine strength,[832] and a folk-survival in the Highlands—­that of drinking from the skull of a suicide (here taking the place of the slain enemy) in order to restore health—­shows the same idea at work.  All these practices had thus one end, that of the transference of spirit force—­to the gods, to the victor who suspended the head from his house, and to all who drank from the skull.  Represented in bas-relief on houses or carved on dagger-handles, the head may still have been thought to possess talismanic properties, giving power to house or weapon.  Possibly this cult of human heads may have given rise to the idea of a divine head like those figured on Gaulish images, or described, e.g., in the story of Bran.  His head preserved the land from invasion, until Arthur disinterred it,[833] the story being based on the belief that heads or bodies of great warriors still had a powerful influence.[834] The representation of the head of a god, like his whole image, would be thought to possess the same preservative power.

A possible survival of the sacrifice of the aged may be found in a Breton custom of applying a heavy club to the head of old persons to lighten their death agonies, the clubs having been formerly used to kill them.  They are kept in chapels, and are regarded with awe.[835]

Animal victims were also frequently offered.  The Galatian Celts made a yearly sacrifice to their Artemis of a sheep, goat, or calf, purchased with money laid by for each animal caught in the chase.  Their dogs were feasted and crowned with flowers.[836] Further details of this ritual are unfortunately lacking.  Animals captured in war were sacrificed to the war-gods by the Gauls, or to a river-god, as when the horses of the defeated host were thrown into the Rhine by the Gaulish conquerors of Mallius.[837] We have seen that the white oxen sacrificed at the mistletoe ritual may once have been representatives of the vegetation-spirit, which also animated the oak and the mistletoe.  Among the insular Celts animal sacrifices are scarcely mentioned in the texts, probably through suppression by later scribes, but the lives of Irish saints contain a few notices of the custom, e.g. that of S. Patrick, which describes the gathering of princes, chiefs, and Druids at Tara to sacrifice victims to idols.[838] In Ireland the peasantry still kill a sheep or heifer for S. Martin on his festival, and ill-luck is thought to follow the non-observance of the rite.[839] Similar sacrifices on saints’ days in Scotland and Wales occurred in Christian times.[840] An excellent instance is that of the sacrifice of bulls at Gairloch for the cure of lunatics on S. Maelrubha’s day (August