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All early peoples sacrificed human beings. One has only to remember Agamemnon's sacrifice to angry Artemis of the most beautiful thing he possessed, his daughter Iphigenia. But this was a story of the Greek Iron Age, no more present to the Romanized world into which Patrick was born than public executions are to ours. For us, it is a strain to find any surviving elements of sacrifice—cut flowers, Christmas trees, vigil lights, and the Mass may be the last vestiges—but in the Roman world animal sacrifices were still offered.

It seems that at some point in the development of every culture, human sacrifice becomes unthinkable, and animals are from then on substituted for human victims. The story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis may constitute symbolically just such a turning point in the history of the Jews—when Abraham's God tells him it is no longer required that he sacrifice his only son but may substitute a ram instead. The Irish had not reached this point and were still sacrificing human beings to their gods when Patrick began his mission.

They sacrificed prisoners of war to the war gods and newborns to the harvest gods. Believing that the human head was the seat of the soul, they displayed proudly the heads of their enemies in their temples and on their palisades; they even hung them from their belts as ornaments, used them as footballs in victory celebrations, and were fond of employing skull tops as ceremonial drinking bowls. They also sculpted heads—both shrunken, decapitated heads and overbearing, impassive godheads—and a favorite motif was the head of a tri-faced god, for three was their magical number, and gods and goddesses often manifested themselves as three.

Why do human beings do these things? The psychological mechanism is not far to find, since there is probably not a reader—even the most convinced atheist—who has not offered from time to time an old-fashioned quid pro quo prayer: if you let me pass this exam, I will return to church; if you make sure my wife doesn't learn of my infidelity, I will give my next bonus to charity. The theology—the view of god—that lies behind these imprecations is of an arbitrary trickster, a bad parent who can be coaxed, flattered, and manipulated. If belief in such a god is strong and primitive enough, it is easy to see how it can lead to human sacrifice: Here, take him, not me! The impassive godhead demands someone's blood. Let it not be mine! And if we study the faces of the Celtic gods, we can have no doubt that only blood could satisfy most of them.

But we delude ourselves about the complex history of religious feeling if we think that all sacrifice—human included—can be reduced to this base motive. Whatever the Irish felt, we feel. For all the terror of the Celtic cosmos and the blood thirstiness of the Celtic gods, no human society could hold together for long if it understood sacrifice only along the lines of the savage tribe in King Kong, offering terrified beauties to the Beast.

This caricature is belied by the most direct evidence of human sacrifice that we have found to date—the prehistoric corpses of Tolland Man, Grauballe Man, the Borremose Man, dug out of Danish bogs in the 1950s, and an even more intriguing discovery recently made in a remote English bog. The Danish bodies may be Celtic; the English one—a man discovered in 1984 and dug out of the peat of Lindow Moss, an ancient bog south of Manchester—certainly is, and may even be Irish.

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