Human Sacrifice

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Hello, I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and welcome to today's episode of the Gone Medieval podcast from History Hit. Making sacrifices to the gods is a common feature of many religions, both past and present. Sometimes these are symbolic, and other times actual, physical offerings. Throughout history, certain societies even made a habit of making the ultimate sacrifice, that of giving up human lives for the sake of their gods.

But were these horrific acts of murder in the way that we might think of them from a 21st century perspective? And do we have any evidence that human sacrifice actually took place in early medieval Europe? To find out, I've invited Dr. Marianne Mohan to the podcast today. Welcome, Marianne.

Thank you very much, it's lovely to be here. Mariana is an archaeologist specialising in the Viking Age and actually a colleague of mine from the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo where she works on a project called Human Sacrifice and Value.

So nice, lighthearted topic you're working on, really, isn't it? It really is. It's a conversation starter. It's always great when I drop my son off at nursery and people are like, so what do you do? Well, I work with human sacrifice. Yeah. It tends to kill most conversations. Well, seeing as we were sort of in quite a heavy topic, let's start with what might seem quite simple, but actually has a little bit more to it, just as a starting point. What do we actually mean? by human sacrifice.

That's actually the worst question of all, really, isn't it? And that's the project that I'm working on, which is pretty big. It's international and we have lots of excellent people working on it. And that's the question that we're always asking. What do we mean by sacrifice? What do we mean? by human sacrifice, I'm actually leaning towards not using the word sacrifice because I think it comes with a lot of cultural baggage in terms of it being a very Western and Eurocentric word.

in what we mean with it. So when I talk about sacrifice, I try and choose other words such as sanctioned violence, for instance, or even necessary violence or violence that is considered necessary to a society because... When we talk about sacrifice, that word itself means to make sacred. It comes from the Latin root of meaning to make sacrifice. And when you use sacrifice, you talk about a killing as a way of communicating with the divine.

but actually I think if you cast a broader glance across what types of socially sanctioned killings have happened throughout history and prehistory, you will get a much broader view of that type of violence.

So what sort of circumstances then do we find when people sacrifice human lives? I think if you look at the reasoning behind that kind of violence, you will find that, for example, in many societies it's been used as a form of social control. The elites have staged very elaborate rituals which have ended in the death of not their own, but usually the poorer peasant classes.

Everyone can say that. And it has been a very efficient form of social control. Then you also have, as I said, that sacred part. They're communicating with the gods, they're pleasing the gods. placating the gods as well so it can be done for those reasons as well but it can also be a form of judicial

punishment as sort of righting a wrong. And we see that with a lot of the material from Northern Europe, that they can very often be interpreted into a judicial system, at least if we use the classical written sources that we have available.

so you know sacrifice is very broad category and it can mean a lot of different things and it can cover a lot of different aspects but I think for one of the things that you usually find sort of at the bottom level of reasoning behind that kind of act is that it is considered necessary. and it is usually considered necessary for the greater good of society.

So there's actually quite a lot more to it than we might think in a very modern perspective. It's not a simple, simple case. Now, we're going to get back to that a bit later on. And we're going to focus mainly on Western and Northwestern Europe today in the early medieval period.

There are other parts of the world where human sacrifice appears to have or at least be more famous in where it's taken place. Can you just sort of set the scene a little bit and tell us about some of those other places? Absolutely. There's loads of societies that have been described as doing human sacrifice and where it's been described as being a very integral part of, for example, religion. And I suppose some of the most famous ones would be the Meso- and Central American society.

and great civilizations from before the Spanish conquest. So the Incas, for example, and they are amongst the very famous societies that have... allegedly acted out sacrifice now i'm not going to go into really whether or not i think it happened or not because it's quite complicated that and you have to go into sort of the colonial heritage of the sources that we have and that sort of thing but Judging from the source material that came with the Spanish conquest, for example, the Incas.

did enact child sacrifice on a grand scale and in a way that was very clearly geared towards social control. So it was a case of... the elite demanding tribute in the form of beautiful, perfect children that they then sacrificed and buried on mountaintops so that they would be visible and remembered, which, you know, is very...

clear form of asserting their power i would say but then you also have the aztecs they are very very famous for enacting huge amounts of sacrifice again i think there is a conversation that ought to be had there about the colonial heritage of the that we rely on and whether or not we are talking about sacrifice or whether or not we're talking about a form of social sacrifice social sanctioned violence and even warfare but it has

traditionally been interpreted as a society that relied on and used sacrifice. So going to medieval Europe then, and we do have some sources to suggest that sacrifice may have taken place. Can you talk us through some of those written sources first of all? Absolutely. So we have the most famous written source that tells us about human sacrifice in medieval Europe, I suppose, in the Viking context, which is what I know best.

He is an Arab traveller named Ibn Fadlan, who describes in his account a meeting with a tribe of the Russes, he calls them, generally believed to have been Swedish travellers, by the River Volga. And he describes in great detail how he was witness to the burial of a chieftain who had recently died. And he describes how over 10 days, the community set aside his wealth and used a third of it to create clothing for the burial.

third of it to make alcohol for the parties around the burial and a third of it went to his family and then he describes at great length also the wealth that was sacrificed with this chieftain. Not only was he buried on a ship that was finally set fire to at the end of the rituals, he had fine clothing buried with him, food and alcohol. Then there was a series of animal sacrifices and also a slave girl.

And it's the slave girl, I think, that's captured so much of our imagination when it comes to that story. Right at the start of the story, he describes how the community approached all the dead man's slaves and asked, which of you will die with him? And one of the slave girls raised her hand and fought.

volunteered and then after that she was lifted up to the status of wife and she was given slaves of her own for the 10 days she was given as much alcohol as she wanted he describes how she seems happy she's singing she's drinking she's given beautiful things to But then at the end of it, she is violently murdered and placed next to the dead man in his ship and burned on his funeral pyre.

And does he give any reasons for this at all? He's an outside observer, really, so he doesn't really know their religion so well, but does he give any sort of clue to why this happens? He doesn't, and it's very interesting. But he's not the only Arab writer from that time.

mentions the practice of human sacrifice in relation to burials and that is very interesting as we can get back to in a minute but we do find some indication also in the archaeological record that this could have happened so in total as far as I know there are five Arab sources that describe the practice of varying slaves along with high status members of society when they died. So it does seem to have been an observed practice from these outsiders.

So this really has been associated with the Vikings because of the connections between the Rus that are describing these sources and the Vikings. There's a long conversation of whether or not they are one or the same, but obviously we do have some very strong connections with the Vikings. Viking Age Scandinavia.

And there are some other sources as well that relate to Scandinavia that also suggest that sacrifice was taking place. Can you describe those for us as well? Yeah, absolutely. So there's actually a few sagas that mention it, not many.

But what's very interesting is that there is a mention in a saga called Gauterex Saga of a slave that was allowed to sacrifice himself so that he could follow his master to Odin's realm, which I think is very, very interesting because it shows sort of a wholesale buying into religion.

religious system where that slave was so keen on dying with his master because that way he could purchase a higher status for himself in the next life, which I think tells us something about a very different way of, I suppose, enacting your religion because the afterlife in Viking society is very... tangible and you know it was worth a gamble trading in

your existence as a slave to potentially step up in the next life. But there's saga evidence, which is obviously not all that reliable, although it is very interesting in this instance, especially as it relates to the Ibn Fadlan story in many ways as well, where that slave girl purchased a higher status. herself but then there's also another two mentions that are

quite relevant. So there's Adam of Bremen, who is obviously famous for his account of Viking society. And one of his most famous passages, at least if you work with anything to do with ritual and religion in the Viking age, is his description of the Temple of Ipsala and the rituals that went on there. he says that every ninth year I believe they would sacrifice nine living creatures all of them male including men

And that they would kill these men and animals and hang them from trees in the sacred grove nearby. And this was a recurring and very bloodthirsty and important ritual. So there's that. But then there is also a very similar tale, if not actually possibly the same in another source, which is a couple of years later, which is written by...

Titmar of Mersenberg, who also writes about a very similar enactment of human sacrifice. So you do have a certain amount of written evidence. And I think when you take all those sources together, it does seem that human sacrifice was... a part of the ritual landscape of the Vikings.

Yeah, because those are roughly similar. So the two Western sources are 11th century, I think, and then you've got... They are 11th century and they're written by Christians, so you have to take it with a pinch of salt. They're very much from an outside perspective, but there isn't...

per se, much reason to suppose that they would have just made this up. Yeah. I think if you got similar sort of information from lots of different sources, slightly different times, that perhaps at least, even if they're not precisely... accurate that as you say it's part of the sexual landscape yeah that's exactly it and i think also if you have all these sources from different times and the relay sort of yeah as you say it's not

exactly the same but they do relay a tradition of human sacrifice and when you take that and you correlate it with the archaeological evidence which is messy and unclear as it always is but it does give indication to believe that we can see these practices echoed or that we can use it as support. So I think when you have several written sources and it's supported in the archaeological evidence we have enough reason to say that yes we do think.

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So let's go and interrogate these other sources a little bit, which I know this is a tricky one. But if we look at the archaeology, what sorts of possible sources do we have of sacrifice? Obviously, I work on this as well. So we discussed this quite a lot just for the sake of our audience. might not it's a very tricky question and i think that basically every grave has to be examined on a separate basis because we are talking about burial evidence in the main here

I think is the most reliable. So obviously the Viking Age is known for having a fair amount of double burials or multiple burials as they should more. accurately be called. There are quadruple varials even. They're not uncommon. And I think it would be vastly unfair to say that all double graves are potential sacrifices because that is clearly not the case. There are several famous double graves that I don't think fits in.

to the sacrificial scheme. But then there are also many that I think do. So some of the most famous ones is the so-called Elkman in Birka.

where you have the burial of a very clearly very wealthy man buried with fine grave goods and in an elaborate manner. But then there's the body of a younger man that has been more or less... thrown into the grave and he's positioned so that he's lying across the body of this other man and it looks like he was treated with very little respect so that's one indication

And there are actually a few others at Bidke which might or might not fit into the same system. But then also in Denmark, there's a fair few graves that do lead to suppositions that they might have been sacrificed. So you'll find, for example... burials of a male body with, again with grave goods, lying.

on his back in a grave and then a few centimetres above in another layer there's a body of a decapitated man facing down with no grave goods and there's something about the lack of respect in the treatment of that body that would lead you to suppose that something's been going on there but then as i said i think all graves need to be assessed on an individual basis because a lot of the time you'll find double graves where there is no indication of difference between the bodies that you'll have

grave goods, the bodies will be treated the same and it seems that in many cases it might even be a case that graves have been reopened for deposition of other bodies later on. So it's a complicated one. But I think we do have enough to say that, yes, at times this has happened. It's a really tricky one, isn't it? Because, yes, you might have this violence. And it's usually that interpretation that one person has been giving less respect, fewer grave goods and so on.

if you look at Ibn Fadlan, the slave girl is obviously treated really well, apart from in the final act, but she is given all these objects. So again, you can see the complication. coming in there it is very complicated although she does give her things away according to the story she is not buried with any of those fine things in the final act she takes off her jewelry and she gives it to her executioner ironically Which I think indicates that this was a choice that she...

wasn't all that unhappy in making again with a purchasing higher status type thing but that's a whole different discussion although it's a very interesting one but then you have also very famous graves like the Ulspark grave in Norway which has traditionally been interpreted in light of Ibn Fadlan

And there is nothing there to indicate that one of them was a sacrifice. Yeah, so this is the grave of the two women and the Oseberg ship, which is an extremely wealthy ship. Yeah, it is the wealthiest known grave from the Viking Age. Actually, it's spectacular, the ship. beautiful and there is so much stuff in that grave which is like it's mind-blowing

I would say in many ways it is very clearly a sacrificial grave, but it isn't a human sacrifice grave. It is animal sacrifice that you get. So there's 15 horses and four dogs and two... oxen and these have all been killed right before the burial was closed up so you can imagine the bloodbath and the bloodshed but then there's also two women

buried in that ship and they both clearly have their separate grave goods and there is no indication that either of them died from violence. But because of Ibn Thadlan we have tended to describe it as a queen and her slave. The problem is that nobody can decide who the Queen is and who the slave is, which I take to mean that we can't really say.

that that's the right interpretation. Absolutely. It's just wanting to have that interpretation on it, isn't it? Yeah, it would be lovely if it was that easy, but it just isn't. No, exactly. And also, of course, with these double graves, there are all sorts of circumstances where...

two people who live in close connection to each other could die in the same circumstance. You know, anything like illness, disease, fire, it wouldn't leave a mark. But I think the criticism a lot of people say is, you know, why would they both die at the same time? But I think... It's not that unlikely. I mean...

life expectancy has changed rather a lot over the last thousand years and there was all sorts of dangers like you say there was illness there was accident there was even battle you get the occasional double grave of male seeming warriors for example and it's not that unlikely really when you think about it but then also a lot of the very famous graves were executed a long time ago and not that much attention was paid to whether or not they were deposited at the same time

So recently I was trawling through the archives, as you do for fun when you're an archaeologist, of some of the graves from the Viking Age town of Kaupang in Norway. And there's this really famous quadruple grave there.

fascinating grave and everybody describes it as a sort of a tableau event a burial of two women and possibly an infant although we're not quite sure because the material is quite badly preserved and then a male as well between these two women all placed in a boat and is usually sort of sketched out in those illustrations as they're happening that was you know one deposition these two women positioned at either end of the boat and the man in the middle and the infant at one of the women's hips

And we're usually shown this as a, yeah, like I say, as an event. But actually, if you trawl through the archives, there is a note, a tiny little note in the old excavation records from the 1950s, which says that disturbance was caused by the secondary deposition of the male body. Ah.

That changes it quite a lot, actually. It really does, doesn't it? But then you can't talk to anybody anymore because this was in the 1950s. So there's nobody around that you could ask the question of, what do you mean? Are we sure this is secondary? We're not sure.

secondary but it does throw sufficient doubt to say that maybe it was secondary and so you're left with these really bad records and having to try and make up your mind on what you think. That's I suppose the problem with a lot of the graves being excavated such a long time ago is that this is insufficient.

records of everything and we just have no idea most of the time and as you just quite nicely pointed out there viking age burial rituals are actually really complex and there is a lot of opening of graves there's a lot of reuse of mounds so you do get these quite well-known cases where have an original grave and then later on somebody comes to either take something out or put it back in again

So I think, yeah, we definitely do need to take some of those early descriptions with a pinch of salt and wonder. A bit like when you arrived at the beginning, you mentioned looking at other parts of the world from this sort of Western standpoint and the post-colonial sort of perspective. It's almost like we need to do the same thing. We need to think about how they've been interpreted, I guess, in previous time.

Absolutely. And I think for me, that's as much fun really as interpreting the archaeology in itself, because I think there's always a multiple layer process there. You have to look at the archaeology, but then you also have to look at the narratives that we've spun around them and how that has historically taken root, I think.

is fascinating just as fascinating in its own right and actually just as a side shoot because this is my bugbear at the moment is the colonial heritage of sacrifice studies because it is really really interesting when you really look at it that most of the society's accused of human sacrifice are societies on the receiving end of fairly aggressive well should we call it expansion tactics or

colonialist tactics so you know the large swathes of africa known to sacrifice india known to sacrifice south america and mesoamerica known to sacrifice and all of these are societies that have been written about by outsiders who were there to conquer is fascinating yeah so they have some really good reasons haven't they for sort of describing those people as very very brutal and awful

practices. Absolutely. And it is fascinating. And in many cases, especially with the British, I'm afraid to say, colonialist period, there was even a rhetoric that used human sacrifice against the people that they colonised in the sense of saying that, look, we are bringing...

civilisation because these people are barbarians, they sacrifice and they are cannibals, but we can bring them Christianity and so it is a good thing that we are taking over their countries. So there's a layer there of something that needs to be untangled, I think. Absolutely and that is a really crucial point to consider so it's great that your project is really getting to grips with that.

Now, I just wanted to go back to something we talked about earlier. So you already mentioned the idea of sacrificing different things. So with the Augsburg ship, the fact that there were so many animals and other things being given up. So I wanted to talk about this link between different forms of being. For us, this idea of sacrificing a human life is just so completely taboo and something unthinkable.

But can we assume that societies in the past separated out sacrificing humans from sacrificing other things like a horse or your favourite dog? Yes, and I think that is a crucial question. It's something, again, that we tangle a lot with in my project because there is... is this underlying idea in western knowledge production that a human sacrifice is the pinnacle of sacrifices is the best thing you can offer but again i think that is very

Western-centric is very current, that way of thinking of the sanctity of human life, I suppose, which isn't a universal and is very clear. And it isn't even a universal now, because, you know, if you really think about what a sacrifice means, and I think...

it means is letting somebody die for the greater good then you can think about that in a current political sense as well and suddenly you see that actually no all human lives are not worth the same because you know on a certain level we are willing to sacrifice others for

or let's say the perpetuation of our lifestyle, but I'm not going to get overly political here. I just think it's fascinating. And so that idea of universal human worth is very, very recent. It's very, very... tenuous to be honest and i just don't think it's something that we can assume that other people have shared so when you look at viking age growth for instance no human sacrifice is not apparent a lot of the time but animal sacrifice is and whether or not

a slave was worth more than say an animal, I think that's very tricky to answer because the sources are very confused on it. But what we do have is legal texts that describe quite clearly the difference between what they call people and slaves.

And so there is a very, very distinct difference there that says that... being human doesn't guarantee you being a person and i think understanding that is crucial to understanding how the vikings went about and understood their world for instance so a horse could most definitely be worth more than a slave that you didn't particularly value and even what we call inanimate objects.

were not inanimate objects back then. So a sword could have a personality, it could have wishes, it could have desires, it could be talked about as a person, and it frequently was. And you can also see evidence in many burials of weaponry that has been destroyed. And I think...

Perhaps that in itself was also a sacrifice. So there's the famous burial on the Isle of Man, the Balatir grave, for instance, which contains the body of a man. And then he has a lot of weaponry with him, but all the weaponry buried with him. say no has been deliberately destroyed and then above him there's a mound and at the top of the mound there is the body of a female a woman

aged between 18 and 30 years old, and she shows signs of having died a very violent death, of having actually her skull, half of it chopped off. So she was clearly... killed in a violent way but when we talk about that grey we tend to talk about it as one in which human sacrifice is apparent because of that female body but actually

The link between this body found right at the top of the mound and the body in the bottom of the mound, I think, is a little bit tricky. And I think it would need a little bit more consideration and perhaps re-examination before we could say anything for certain. But aside from that, I think it is still a sacrificial grave on the basis of the weaponry, which shows such clear signs of destruction.

So, yeah, so all the different elements, different things that are being sacrificed, not just the human and such, which I think is a really interesting point. So we assume, don't we? I mean, you talked at the beginning about this idea that...

This is a form of social control as well. So it's not all about religion then. It's not all about what the gods want. You've also talked about the fact that the slave girl, for example, in even the Fudlan story could sort of essentially buy herself a way into a better life. So you got... The idea of religion maybe playing one part, but actually also the belief in what you might need for the afterlife. Really, how much do you think religion is a part of it?

That's a really good question, but also I think at this point I need to throw my hands up in the air and say that I talk a lot about how, you know, knowledge is created under certain circumstances and that, you know, the studies of archaeological studies in itself is fascinating, but also... I am a product of my time. I am a product of post-religious society. And I just basically don't think that religion in itself is a motivator. I always think that there's an underlying reason.

Because religion is promoted for a reason. And that reason is very often social control or social cohesiveness or all of those things that religion brings with it. A sense of community, a sense of reason.

order and all of those things now if you look at for example Christianity you will see that it is a religion that it has been promoted by elites because it is an elite friendly religion for instance but also the same with the anchors they chose their rituals in a sense of what would gain control and what would restore order but then there's also the flip side of that and it's the people buying into that system so you

pay your way into religious system you find your place and you enact the rituals and i think that after a certain time you find that you have to believe in it because if you have say sacrificed your children to buy into that system You can't doubt it because that would be a terrible, terrible thing to do. So it's a very sophisticated form of social cohesiveness, I suppose, community building. It really is very clever.

So when we ask how much of it is religion, I tend to ask, but why religion? What purpose did that religion serve? And obviously, on a day-to-day basis, people going about their daily lives in the Viking Age didn't question why they...

believed in the religion they did but I think there's quite a lot to be gained by not underestimating the people who came before us. It's not like we are more sophisticated in our ways of thinking and they will have been aware that they were also part of a wider society.

Manjana, that I think is a brilliant way to end this on quite a philosophical way. Sorry about that. No, no, that's excellent. You've really made it very clear that we need to think of this from quite a different perspective than I think most people would at the surface at least think of. the idea of sacrifice. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you all for listening. This has been Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And if you don't already subscribe to the podcast, please do so and tell your friends and family to do the same. And I will be back again next week with a new episode.