Sacral Kingship

The Temple of the Stars begins a series of texts on the practice of ritual murder in the British Isles, with a focus on the Gouk Stone, sacral kings and Holme I (Seahenge) / Holme II.

The ritualistic killing of humans is a practice which has occurred cross-culturally for millennia. Ritualised murder dates back 5,000 years—at a minimum—amongst the earliest agricultural societies of Europe.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Danish farmers during this period would ritualistically offer up a variety of symbolically important objects, stone axes, flint tools, jewellery, food, and human offerings. One of the earliest known examples of this practice is the discovery of the remains of two young women—approximately 16 and 18 years of age—found at the site of Sigersdal near Copenhagen, Denmark. One of the women still had a rope around her neck, indicating she had been the victim of a sacrificial ritual dating back to approximately 3500 BC (1). This practice of offering both material goods and human lives was a significant component of the religious and cultural traditions of these early European agricultural communities.

Ritualised killing often brings to mind gruesome imagery, something of a dark and taboo tribal past. One may imagine temples steeped in blood with rowdy “savages” revelling in senseless murder. However, the truth of the matter is that in a European setting ritualised murder was often something much more intimate, small-scale and cosmically aligned.

The Gouk Stone is a Bronze Age monument close to Hatton of Fintray, Aberdeenshire. The stone delineates a ritualised landscape spanning an area of approximately 63 miles. Ritualised landscapes/areas/spaces can be defined as such, due to their lack of fortification or permanent human settlement (2). These monuments served as back- and foresights, aligning with the rising and setting extremes of the sun and moon when viewed from one another (3).

Gouk is an Old English word for “cuckoo”, the cuckoo being a bird of great symbolic and spiritual importance with regard to male virility for our early British ancestors and across Eurasia (4). There are 130 cuckoo place-names in the Ordnance Survey Gazetteer of Great Britain, 25 known standing stones in Britain that are named after the cuckoo and in addition there exists eight cuckoo place names with a standing stone nearby. Oral tradition maintains that the Gouk Stone marks the location where a ‘general’ of that name was slain (5).

Men of high status bearing the name or a name similar to that of ‘cuckoo’ was a running motif in pre-Christian society. A Pictish champion in the the Irish Fenian Cycle, was named in Scottish Gaelic Ciuthach, similar to the Gaeilge cuthaig meaning ‘cuckoo’ (6). Legend stated that no man could kill him as he could only be slain with a magical sword whilst his back was to Creag Ciuthach, a standing stone on Lewis (7). An Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (“Cattle Raid of Cooley”) contains the much similar death of Cúchullain. Cúchullain was ritually killed whilst tied to a standing stone after taking a drink from a nearby lake (8).

Such ritual areas were so tied to local chieftains, that the chieftains shared the very name of the sacred stones. Chieftains—whom in modern parlance would be called “kings”—were ritualistically married to a goddess of sovereignty and fertility. Such deities were often the personification of the planet Venus (9). Venusian deities are often also found to be related to cuckoos (10). Such marriages between King and Goddess can be seen cross-culturally, most notably amongst the Sumerians who would ritualistically marry the king to the Goddess Inanna (11).

The fate of the chieftains in early Irish mythos was commonly sacrificial in nature (12):

A number of ‘kings’ were slain by their successors suggesting they were ritually killed (Macalister, 1917, p. 326) and of the fourteen known pre-Christian ‘kings’ of Tara, seven were killed during a festival on Samhain (samhfhuin, ‘end of summer’ (Delamarre, 2003, p. 267)) in a ritual manner, for religious reasons and none of the others killed at any other stated time (Ramnoux, 1954. Eight were killed at the end of a fixed term of seven years or of some multiple of this term, although there is considerable disagreement of the exact duration (Dalton, 1970, p. 3). The ritual existed until the mid-ninth century AD (Dalton, 1970, p. 16).

The practice of sacrificial kingship was not limited to the ancient Irish or the ancient Scottish. Evidence of such practices can also be found in England. The mythos and praxis surrounding these beliefs would appear to originate from a belief with commonalities which was shared amongst our Isles.

Holme I and II were contemporary, adjacent Early Bronze Age (EBA) oak-timber enclosures exposed inter-tidally at Holme-next-the-sea, Norfolk, England, in 1998. Holme I enclosed a central upturned tree-stump, its function and intent unknown. Holme II is thought a mortuary structure. Both are proposed here best explained as independent ritual responses to reverse a period of severe climate deterioration recorded before 2049 BC when their timbers were felled. Holme I is thought erected on the summer-solstice, when the cuckoo traditionally stopped singing, departing to the ‘Otherworld’. It replicated the cuckoo’s supposed overwintering quarters: a tree-hole or the ‘bowers of the Otherworld’ represented by the tree-stump, remembered in folklore as ‘penning-the-cuckoo’ where a cuckoo is confined to keep singing and maintain summer. The cuckoo symbolised male-fertility being associated with several Indo-European goddesses of fertility that deified Venus - one previously identified in EBA Britain. Some mortal consorts of these goddesses appear to have been ritually sacrificed at Samhain. Holme II may be an enclosure for the body of one such ‘sacral king’.(13)

The available evidence strongly suggests that sacral kings persisted in northern Scotland, from at least the Bronze Age through to the late-Pictish period. These chieftains were believed to be the champions and consorts of a local goddess of sovereignty and fertility, the chieftain himself becoming a part of this sacred cycle and the gatekeeper of the well-being and continued survival of the local tribe. In becoming such an important part of the fate of his people, he himself would be ritually disposed of in order for the cycle of fertility and victory to continue. As above, so below. A death to guarantee the continuation of life. This sacral kingship is but one aspect of ritual sacrifice found in the British Isles.

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References

1. Andersen, H. H. (2012). “Bog find from Sigersdal.” Journal of Danish Archaeology, 1(1), 39-42.

2. Robb, J. (1998). “The ‘ritual landscape’ concept in archaeology: A heritage construction.” Landscape Research, 23(2), 159-174.

3. Nance, D. (2021). “An investigation of an Aberdeenshire ritual landscape: A site of human sacrifice associated with Venus.” Northern Scotland, 12(1), 14-37.

4. Nance, D. (2019). “Gouk stones and other cuckoo place-names: Prehistoric cult sites.” Archaeologia Aeliana, 48, 1-16.

5. The Old Statistical Accounts of Scotland III (OSA). (1792). Edinburgh: William Creech.

6. Nance, D. (2021). “An investigation of an Aberdeenshire ritual landscape: A site of human sacrifice associated with Venus.” Northern Scotland, 12(1), 14-37.

7. Watson, W. J. (1914). "Ciuthach." The Celtic Review, 9(36), 291-304.

8. Gregory, A. (1903). Cuchulain of Muirthemne. London: John Murray.

9. Maier, B. (1989). “Sacral kingship in pre-Christian Ireland.” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 41(1), 12-39.

10. Armstrong, E. A. (1958). The folklore of birds: An enquiry into the origin and distribution of some magico-religious traditions. London: Collins.

11. Frymer-Kensky, T. (1992). In the wake of the goddesses: Women, culture and biblical transformations of pagan myth. New York: Free Press.

12. Nance, D. (2021). “An investigation of an Aberdeenshire ritual landscape: A site of human sacrifice associated with Venus.” Northern Scotland, 12(1), 14-37.

13. Nance, D. (2024). “Holme I (Seahenge) and Holme II: Ritual responses to climate change in Early Bronze Age Britain.” Antiquity, 98(367), 23-41.