The ancient Celts were notorious for taking heads that didn’t belong to them.
At Entremont in Provence, a Celtic tribe, the Salii, constructed a sanctuary based on the cult of the severed head. When the Romans routed the tribe, some time after 125 BC, they found assorted statues and actual remains of human heads. […] A child’s gentle head, a woman’s head veiled and ear-ringed, several primitively carved representations of heads — twelve on a single perpendicular column — added up to a weird and distressing (even to the Romans) atmosphere of extreme religious practice. (Frank Delaney, The Celts, 1986)
Don’t want to let Halloween go just yet? Read the newly released (free!) article from my Patreon archives, on the history of the Jack-o-lantern!
Ghost Turnips and Jack of Lanthorns 🎃 ->
