Occult Artifacts:The Gundestrup Cauldron

The Druidic Gundestrup Cauldron was preserved for 2000 years in a peat bog in Denmark. Intricately carved and made of solid silver, the cauldron looks like a classic piece of wizard's equipment. It seems to have been put in the bog as a form of sacrifice, after being used in ceremonies for many years. The carvings on the cauldron present a wild and hallucinatory panorama: there is a horned god; figures which are half human, half animal; and scenes of animal and perhaps human sacrifice.

The Gundestrup Cauldron is one of the most important objects ever discovered in a bog. 

Made of silver, the cauldron depicts in a series of seven raised plates various scenes that illustrate deities and, perhaps, human sacrifice. It was found in the Raeve bog in 1891 near Gundestrup, Denmark. Interestingly enough, this bog is near Borre Fen (where Borremose Man and Borremose Woman were later found).

P. V. Glob in his book The Bog People describes one of the inner plates (below): It "probably depicts a man being sacrificed over a cauldron. Warriors in procession on either side of the tree of life which springs from the cauldron in which the sacrificial blood is collected. The lower row of warriors are on foot, perhaps prisoners of war about to be sacrificed, but the men of the upper row are on horseback and are thought to represent the sacrificed men translated into new glory.... The vessel represented could also be regarded as a rejuvenation back, rather than a cauldron for sacrifices, but this would not conflict with the general interpretation we have just suggested."

Julius Caesar on Celtic Sacrifices

The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to ritual observances, and for that reason those who are smitten with the more grievous maladies and who are engaged in the perils of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow so to do, employing the druids as ministers for such sacrifices. They believe, in effect, that, unless for a man's life a man's life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not be appeased; and in public, as in private life they observe an ordinance of sacrifices of the same kind. Others use figures of immense size whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods; but when the supply of such fails they resort to the execution even of the innocent.