Wicker man
Based on Wikipedia: Wicker man
Imagine a towering figure made of woven willow branches, perhaps thirty feet tall, shaped like a giant human. Now imagine it stuffed with living people and set ablaze while priests chant and flames lick the sky. This is the wicker man—one of the most horrifying images to emerge from ancient history.
But here's the thing: we have almost no reliable evidence it ever happened.
The Single Source Problem
Nearly everything we think we know about wicker man sacrifices comes from one man: Julius Caesar. In his Commentary on the Gallic War, written in the first century before the common era, the Roman general described how the druids—the priest-philosophers of Celtic society—would construct enormous wickerwork figures, fill them with living humans, and burn them alive as offerings to their gods. Criminals were preferred, Caesar noted, but when criminals ran short, innocent people would do just fine.
Caesar was many things. A brilliant military strategist. A gifted writer. A ruthless politician. What he was not was an impartial observer of Celtic culture. He was, at the moment of writing, actively waging a genocidal war against the Gauls. Modern historians estimate he killed or enslaved over a million people during his Gallic campaigns. A man does not slaughter a million people and then write a fair and balanced ethnographic study of their religious practices.
The Greek geographer Strabo, writing slightly after Caesar, offers a similar account—a large figure of wood and straw filled with men and animals, then burned. He adds an agricultural detail: the ashes were believed to help crops grow. But Strabo was likely drawing from the same source Caesar used, a Greek historian named Posidonius whose original work has been lost to time. We're not looking at two independent witnesses. We're looking at two people copying from the same source we can no longer check.
The Propaganda Machine
To understand why the wicker man story might be exaggerated or invented entirely, you need to understand how Romans thought about the people they conquered.
Rome had a propaganda problem. They were building an empire through brutal military conquest, enslaving entire populations, and extracting wealth from subjugated peoples across the Mediterranean world. This needed moral justification. The solution was elegant in its simplicity: the people being conquered were barbarians. They practiced unspeakable customs. They were barely human. Conquest wasn't cruelty—it was a civilizing mission.
The word "barbarian" itself tells this story. To Greek ears, foreign languages sounded like meaningless noise—"bar bar bar"—and so foreigners became "barbaroi," people who speak nonsense. Romans inherited this prejudice wholesale.
Celtic peoples made excellent barbarians for Roman purposes. They fought ferociously. They had unfamiliar religious practices involving sacred groves and a priestly class called druids who memorized vast bodies of knowledge rather than writing it down. They were, from a Roman perspective, dramatically Other.
Modern scholars examining the ancient sources have grown increasingly skeptical. As one historian put it, the Greeks and Romans "were eager to transmit any bizarre and negative information" about the Celts because it benefited them to do so. Their desire to depict Celtic peoples as barbarians may have "led to exaggeration or even fabrications."
What the Ground Actually Tells Us
Here's where it gets complicated. Archaeological evidence does show that Celtic peoples practiced human sacrifice—sometimes. Bog bodies recovered from Ireland, Britain, and northern Europe show clear signs of ritual killing. The famous Lindow Man, found in an English peat bog in 1984, had been struck on the head, strangled with a cord, and had his throat cut before being placed in the water. This was not a casual murder. This was ceremony.
Animal sacrifice was more common, and some animals were indeed burned. The evidence for burning humans alive in giant wicker structures, however, remains elusive. No archaeological excavation has ever uncovered the charred remains of a wicker man sacrifice. We have Caesar's word, Strabo's secondhand account, and silence from the ground.
This doesn't prove it never happened. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as archaeologists like to say. Wicker burns completely. Human bones burned in open-air pyres scatter and fragment. We might simply not have found the right site yet. Or the practice might have been rare enough—or localized enough—that we never will.
But it does mean we should hold our certainty loosely.
The Fire Never Died
Whatever the historical truth, the image of the wicker man proved impossible to kill. Accounts from eighteenth and nineteenth century France describe large wickerwork figures being burned at various festivals. In Brie, a wicker giant burned every Midsummer Eve. In Paris, until 1743, a wickerwork soldier was burned each July third on the Rue aux Ours while crowds sang the "Salve Regina," a medieval Marian hymn—a strange fusion of pagan imagery and Catholic devotion.
At Luchon in the Pyrenees, the practice took a darker turn. Each Midsummer Eve, a tall wickerwork column decorated with leaves and flowers was stuffed with live snakes and set ablaze. Young men with torches danced around the burning pillar while townsfolk and clergy—clergy!—sang hymns. An English tourist who witnessed this ceremony in 1890 described a figure "shaped like a mummy" standing about twenty feet tall.
The Church, it seems, had made its peace with fire.
The Modern Rebirth
Then came 1973, and everything changed.
The British horror film The Wicker Man told the story of a devout Christian police sergeant who travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate a missing girl, only to discover the islanders practice a reconstructed form of Celtic paganism. The film's climax—which I will not spoil except to say it involves a very large wicker structure—burned its way into the cultural consciousness and never left.
The film is brilliant, unsettling, and deeply strange. It spawned an inferior American remake in 2006, notorious mainly for a scene of Nicolas Cage screaming about bees. But the original endures as a masterpiece of folk horror, a genre that explores the darkness lurking in rural traditions and ancient beliefs.
More importantly, the film revived the wicker man as a living symbol. The Burning Man festival, held annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert since 1986, takes its name from the practice of burning a large wooden effigy. The Wickerman Festival, held in Scotland from 2001 to 2015, made the wicker man its central image. Neopagan groups have incorporated wicker man burnings—without the human sacrifices—into their ceremonial calendar.
Fire as Spectacle, Fire as Memory
Something about the image resonates. A giant human figure, built to burn. The crowd gathered around it, faces lit by flames. The structure collapsing inward as the fire consumes it.
Fire is one of humanity's oldest technologies, and burning things together is one of our oldest rituals. Bonfires mark celebrations from Guy Fawkes Night in England to the Burning of Judas across Latin America to the Cremada del Dimoni—the "Burning of the Devil"—in Badalona, Catalonia, where each May tenth a large wooden devil is consumed by flames. The Badalona tradition has been documented since at least the eighteenth century, and each year's devil is designed to satirize current political and social topics, chosen by popular vote.
We burn what we fear. We burn what we celebrate. We gather around the fire because our ancestors gathered around fires for a hundred thousand years, and something in us remembers.
The Question That Remains
Did the druids really build giant wicker figures, fill them with living humans, and set them ablaze?
Maybe. Celtic peoples did practice human sacrifice, at least sometimes. The Romans weren't making that part up entirely. And fire held profound religious significance across the ancient world—the Greeks had their burnt offerings, the Romans their sacred flames, the Persians their fire temples. A culture that sacrificed humans and venerated fire might well have combined the two.
But "might have" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The only detailed descriptions come from people who were actively at war with the Celts, who had every reason to portray them as monsters, and who may have been copying from a single lost source.
What we can say with certainty is that the wicker man has become real in a different sense. Real as a symbol. Real as a horror movie. Real as the flames that rise each year at festivals around the world, where people gather to watch something human-shaped disappear into fire and smoke and memory.
The druids, if they could see it, might find that the strangest sacrifice of all.