How Metal Is the Past?

or: on sacrifice and horror and history

The druids, the educated philosopher class of the ancient Celts, didn’t write things down. They could have—some Celts were literate, writing in Gaulish with either the Greek or Roman alphabet—but they didn’t, as a matter of principle and custom. Well, really, we don’t know exactly why they didn’t, because they didn’t tell us, because not a single druid ever wrote anything down.

Julius Caesar, who was busy enslaving and murdering his way through Gaul (modern France), said that the druids didn’t write anything down because they felt that committing things to writing meant weakening one’s memory. It took 19 or 20 years of education to become a druid, leaving them with exhaustive knowledge of law, ceremony, conflict resolution, and the movement of celestial bodies.

They also probably learned how to sacrifice people, but historians are less sure about that. They probably sacrificed people, including burning them alive in giant statues built of straw or wicker, but we don’t know that for certain. Most of the contemporary writing about druids was written by their enemies who were looking for a moral excuse to conquer Gaul.

I have my own theory about why they never wrote anything down, though. One I might be wrong about. I think they didn’t write anything down because to commit laws and best practices to paper is to make them immutable. I’m certain that in the centuries or millennia that druids lived, their teachings changed. Though they were probably capable of feats of memory that would astound those of us who rely on writing, I can’t imagine that there weren’t subtle or radical changes between generations—and I suspect that was by design. I suspect that the druids weren’t afraid to let things change here and there and adapt to circumstance.

Some historians suspect, for example, that the Celts were moving away from human sacrifice already before Rome declared that they were evil barbarians who needed a good conquering.

It’s possible, as overwhelming legions flooded Gaul and Britain from the south, that the Celts started looking to their old ways out of desperation. We’ll probably never know. We don’t know much about what they were thinking, because they didn’t write things down.

We don’t know if they burned people alive in wicker men. We don’t know if the Irish cut the nipples off their king and then slit his throat on Samhain if he was doing a bad job. We don’t know if sacred women would enter an ecstatic state and rip one among them apart and parade with their friend’s dismembered body held aloft. We don’t know if the Celts dug thirty meter holes just to bind people and throw them in. We don’t know if “woodhenge” (think stonehenge but made of wood) was made sacred by the sacrifice of a three-year-old boy.

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Maybe the single biggest question I’m left with, as I study history for my podcast, is: “just how metal was the past?” Did Lady Bathory bathe in the blood of virgins for her skin-care routine? Did astrologers in late medieval European cities sacrifice children, did the black masses involve the killing of innocents? Did Irish kings really fuck horses at their coronation? Were there nudist cults living in caves in medieval Ireland?

If you move beyond Europe, you find these questions even more, well, questionable. What were people up to? What are the limits on human behavior?

Because there are two competing social forces at work when we ask these questions. First, it’s worth understanding that for the most part, the people making these accusations were the ones writing them down. It’s court records, papal investigations, and war propaganda that catalogs all the evils of the ancient and medieval worlds.

The Romans were drumming up anti-Celtic fervor in order to justify conquest. Later, medieval Ireland was presented as a backwards, barbaric place in order to justify 800 years of colonization. Further east, Lady Bathory was owed money by the king, and the church’s investigation of her evil ways justified the king defaulting on that debt and confining her to her castle to keep her from exerting economic or political power. And those astrologers in the medieval cities, they were on trial for helping women poison their husbands in an era before divorce.

Meanwhile, the presentation of non-Europeans as barbaric and backwards was used to justify colonial expansion, slavery, genocide, and just any number of horrors.

Never mind, of course, that many of the most horrific acts we can point to in history were committed by European kings and governments. Never mind the “hand economy” that Belgium set up in Congo, never mind the two genocides committed against the Irish (first by Cromwell’s invasion, later by setting them live off of only one crop, the potato) or the absolute existential horror that is the deforestation of an entire country. Never mind that Lady Bathory, who may or may not have bathed in blood (my guess is that she didn’t), absolutely saw her father, the ruler of the area, have a woman sewn up into the stomach of a living horse as punishment for theft.

Never mind that violence at scale is only perpetrated by systems, not individuals. Never mind the endless creative ways that Europeans have found to execute criminals. The first man to lead a revolt against the enclosure of the commons was an itinerant worker who named himself Captain Pouch. He was drawn and quartered, which you can look up if you’d like.

Historians—and us—have every reason to be suspicious of wild claims of wild deeds perpetrated by the people of the past. Anyone who has lived through or read about the satanic panic knows that teenagers are a lot more likely to smoke pot and fuck in the woods than they are to sacrifice children to satan. Anyone who has read about the witch trials in Europe or Colonial America knows that mass hysteria killed a lot more people than witchcraft could ever manage.

On the other hand, well, people are capable of some crazy shit.

Lady Bathory saw her father sew a woman into the stomach of a horse. Is it so hard to believe she might have bathed in the blood of virgins once she came to power? (I don’t think she did, to be clear.) Those astrologers who poisoned husbands for a living, it’s more likely that the remains found in their yards were from abortion and not sacrifice, but it’s also not hard to believe that they helped people practiced infanticide. I have no trouble believing the attestations that Irish kings sacrificed horses and bathed in their blood for their coronation, and an even easier time believing there were nudist sex cults living in caves on the island. The Gauls were probably headhunters like the Greeks claimed, and the Celts were probably burning their criminals in wicker men (because even Caesar admitted most of their “sacrifice” was capital punishment, though personally I find the two ideas interchangeable even in the modern world).

My suspicion is that the imperial propaganda (and/or misogynistic propaganda, in the case of the astrologers) was, as often as not, rooted in reality. It was just very selective about where it looked, because the colonizing cultures were practicing just as horrific things at home. My suspicion is that all people do all sorts of wild shit, and propaganda comes from knowing how to crop the photo. Like how modern Islamophobes talk about how “Muslims throw gay people off of rooftops” (flattening the diverse positions on homosexuality in the Muslim world and conflating an entire religion to the rare actions of a few people) while those same Islamophobes are working actively to strip us of our rights and plenty of them are killing us.

My suspicion is that the past was metal as fuck, and our awareness of the lies of the satanic panic and our awareness of the lies of imperial propaganda is leading us to assume that people weren’t getting up to wild—and often evil—shit when in fact they often were. This is just my suspicion, though, and one of the driving forces of my research, because I can’t get the curiosity out of my head.

Also, if my ancestors actually cut the nipples off of kings and slit their throats, that actually seems like something to be proud of.