Human sacrifice - A warning from the Irish bog

One of them is a little known but spectacular Neolithic portal tomb with a collapsed but enormous cap stone.

There are many such neolithic monuments in Ireland the most famous being the passage tombs, including Newgrange situated in the valley of the Boyne.

I used to tell the children that they had a link with these early farmers who flourished 6,000 years ago. Recent DNA research seems to have fatally punctured this account in that modern Irish people, including the children supposedly benefitting from my expertise, have no connection with these early farmers and monument builders.

They seem to have vanished from the DNA record. The lack of a capstone on our megalith may point to a society in terminal decline.

Buried for centuries in the bogs of Ireland are the well-preserved bodies of people from the later bronze and iron age who were obviously murdered.

They frequently still have the rope that choked them to death attached to their throats. Scholarly speculation suggests that these were no ordinary people but high- ranking persons, possibly kings or priests.

They were human sacrifices ritually slaughtered as old certainties of economic production and ritual failed. Seamus Heaney in his poem

Tollund Man links these bodies with ones found in the bogs of Denmark alluding necessarily to the Troubles raging in Ireland.

‘Out here in Jutland

‘In the old man-killing fields

‘I feel lost,

‘Unhappy and at home.’

Examples of these bog bodies are somewhat ghoulishly on display in the National Museum in Dublin.

Whether there is a causal link between these murders and the collapse of a civilization is impossible to tell but whatever the perpetrators were trying to achieve did not occur.

I am not a psychiatrist but I suspect that an individual who murders someone never gets away with it. His guilt rots away at his inner psyche buried but never forgotten.

I suspect the same is true of a murderous society. Huge trees seem to be blown over by the wind but the real culprit is the tiny fungi which have rotted away their heart wood over many years.

One would have thought that the idea and practice of human sacrifice would have died out completely. This is not the case. Nearer our own time there are numerous instances of similar attempts to use murderous cruelty to solve perceived problems.

Hitler’s obsession with the ‘Jewish problem’ and his murderous attempts to solve it did not lead directly to the complete collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.

His mindset of world domination was part of the same disregard for the rest of humanity that led directly to his total failure. Ironically there was a ‘Final Solution’ but not the end of the Jews as Hitler had envisaged but the humiliation of the end of his Third Reich.

After the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 the British government saw the solution to the problem as the execution of the rebel leaders.

The last of them was James Connolly, who was unable to stand because of a broken leg sustained in the fighting, was nevertheless executed by firing squad.

Another Irish poet expressed the complete disgust of the bulk of the Irish population:

‘Too long a sacrifice

‘Can make a stone of the heart.’

Yeats 1916

There was a complete volte face of their political views of many Irish people. Just six years later, this reaction to this act of revenge was partially responsible for the most powerful empire in the world abandoning 26 counties of its oldest colony.

By the 1960’s Britain had left almost all its overseas territories. The remaining six counties of Ireland have continued under British rule but have been a running sore of unresolved problems ever since.

Mass shootings, tragically mostly of children in schools, seem to be an everyday occurrence in the United States. The mass ownership of guns is an alien concept to most European countries where gun ownership is the preserve of law enforcement and criminal gangs.

The constitutional right to gun ownership is linked to two historical circumstances, the need to conquer the native population with a view to appropriating their lands and the control of a slave population.

The near extermination of the native population cleared the way for white ownership. The unspeakable cruelty of the American form of chattel slavery was intended to solve a labour problem but necessitated the use of armed force to quell any rebellion on the part of the slaves.

The rise of Trumpism and its threat to American democracy can be linked to the essential violence of the foundation of the state.

In 1972 thirteen people were mowed down like grass in Derry. The purpose of this massacre was to put an end to the problems the British soldiers were experiencing.

The predictable rise in IRA recruitment had the opposite effect. The ‘Troubles’ were extended by decades with many British soldiers among the dead.

I am sure the children on my field trips would agree that the’ bog men’ sacrifices were utterly pointless only demonstrating the terrible cruelty of those times.

I am writing at a time when two wars are never out of the news. Putin has attacked Ukraine in an effort to bolster his own prestige.

His hope for a quick victory has become bogged down in a war of attrition that may lead to his own downfall. The terrible massacres perpetrated by Hamas has led to the promise by the Israeli government of a war of revenge on a helpless Palestinian population.

In my view, these two forms of modern human sacrifice have no more chance of bringing about their intended outcomes as the Irish bog sacrifices.