Bog Bodies Uncovered: Solving Europe's Ancient Mystery by Aldhouse-Green Miranda

Author:Aldhouse-Green, Miranda [Aldhouse-Green, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2015-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

X-ray of the Yde Girl’s upper body showing the pronounced and disabling curvature of her spine, a condition that would have caused her to walk painfully and with a lurching gait.

There is another possible reason why some of the bog bodies were mutilated. In his book Greek and Roman Necromancy,15 the classical historian Daniel Ogden discusses the treatment accorded some corpses, which included savage post-mortem mutilation. This was apparently done to victims of murder in order to protect the perpetrators from the ghostly retribution of their vengeful spirits, to hobble their ghosts, an idea I briefly introduced earlier in the book (see Chapter 5). Abusing the body in this way was perceived to weaken a ghost so that it did not possess the strength to retaliate. Is it possible that something broadly similar was behind at least some of the mutilations carried out on bog victims? Even if these people were killed for religious purposes (as argued particularly in Chapter 10), killing is likely to have been hedged about with taboos and anxieties, perhaps not least because of worries about revenge. Such fears of the untimely dead might even explain why they were given special watery interments: because their unquiet spirits matched the dangerous marshes in which they were placed.

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