The video above shows the underground chamber of the Nekyomanteion, aka the Necromanteion, the "Oracle of the Dead," which the ancient Greeks believed was the door to Hades -- the Greek underworld, not the Hell of Christianity.
"The Necromanteion ... was an ancient Greek temple of necromancy devoted to Hades and [his wife, the goddess of he underworld] Persephone." (Wikipedia). "According to tradition, it was located on the banks of the Acheron river in Epirus, near the ancient city of Ephyra. The site was believed by devotees to be the door to Hades, the realm of the dead."
Note: Technically, Nekyomanteion is a term for "the prophecy-place of the dead," but it is also used as a place name.
"Although there were many oracles in ancient Greece, there is only one known oracle of the dead (1)," according to Atlas Obscura. "It was an entryway to the underworld, and a place where the shades of the dead could - under special circumstances - reveal the future to the living. It was the place that Homer sent Odysseus to seek advice from a long-dead oracle, and where he was horrified by visions of Hades, and it also appears in a sordid chapter of Herodotus' Histories."
Odysseus visits Hades (plus later encounter with Scylla and Charybdis). From the great 1997 miniseries The Odyssey. Highly recommended.
"Communicating with the dead, however, was not limited to the famous characters in the writings of the ancient Greek authors," according to Ancient Origins. "Regular citizens [also visited] the Necromanteion to seek counsel with the dead. They would first enter a dark chamber before performing certain elaborate rituals intended for their own protection and to gain the ability to communicate with the deceased. After this, a priest would lead them into a deeper chamber, where a ritual animal sacrifice would be performed, before passing through three gates which symbolised their entry into the Underworld. The celebrants would now be able to speak to the spirits of the Underworld."
(1) The Atlas Obscura is incorrect when it says that there was only one Greek oracle of the dead. According to the Ogden paper cited above, there were four major oracles: "Acheron in Thesprotia [the oracle discussed here -- named after the river], Avernus in Campania [Italy], Heracleia Pontica on the south coast of the Black Sea, and Tainaron at the tip of the Peloponnese's Mani Peninsula."
Note: As mentioned in the footnote above, the oracle on the Acheron river was located in Thesprotia. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), the Thesproti were "a people mentioned in Homer's Odyssey with a king of Ephyra in the Archeron valley." They formed "a tribal state which entered the Epirote Alliance and the Epirote Confederacy, sided with Rome in 170 BC, and survived under the Roman settlement."
"Shimao ... is a Neolithic site in Shenmu County, Shaanxi, China. The site is located in the northern part of the Loess Plateau, on the southern edge of the Ordos Desert. It is dated to around 2000 BC, near the end of the Longshan period [next video], and is the largest known walled site of that period in China, at 400 ha [app. 988 acres]. The fortifications [double stone walls] of Shimao were originally believed by to be a section of the Great Wall of China, but the discovery of jade pieces prompted an archaeological investigation." (Wikipedia)
This is a spectacular Stone-Age site. According to Archaeology World, "The digging had revealed a 230 feet high pyramid surrounded by more than six miles of protective walls and an inner sanctum containing jade artifacts, painted murals, and gruesome evidence of human sacrifice." Around 80 human skulls, mainly of young girls, were discovered buried in six pits beneath the city's eastern wall.
This isn't a recent find. According to a 2013 AFP report, the sacrifices may have been conducted as part of religious or foundation ceremonies related to the construction of the city walls:
"There may have been an outbreak of mass violence or ethnic conflict in the region at the time since 'ancient people were prone to use their enemies or captives as sacrifices...'"
Video from 2018. Shimao was discovered in 1976.
"Shimao now is the largest known Neolithic settlement in China and none of the ancient Chinese texts mentions a city residing so far north of the 'cradle of Chinese Civilization'. It had an expanse of [approximately] 1000 acres and is larger than the Central Park of New York City. Its art and technology had influenced the northern regions and the future dynasties of China." (Archaeology World)
"Along with other discoveries at prehistoric sites, Shimao is forcing historians to rethink the origin of the Chinese civilization.
"According to the leader of the dig at Shimao, 'Shimao is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of this century.'"
"At an ancient site of human sacrifice in China, war captives may have been kept as slaves for years before they were killed, a new study finds." Source: Live Science (2017).
Archaeological excavations in China have revealed "that an extraordinary number of ritual human sacrifices were conducted during the Shang dynasty, which spanned from the 16th century B.C. to the 11th century B.C. It is the earliest dynasty in China for which archaeologists have evidence. For instance, sacrificial pits are common across the entire site of the last Shang capital, Yinxu, which researchers discovered in 1928 in central China's Henan Province. Scientists have estimated that over the course of about 200 years, more than 13,000 people were sacrificed in Yinxu, usually males ages 15 to 35, and that on average, each sacrificial ritual there likely claimed at least 50 human victims. The biggest sacrifice found so far killed at least 339 people."
There doesn't seem to be any doubt that the ancient Israelites were originally polytheistic. Back in the Iron and Early Bronze ages, Yahweh was a tribal weather/storm/warrior deity and the Israelites worshiped a multitude of gods:
"At that time the Israelites [originally Canaanites themselves] worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal, but in time El and Yahweh became conflated, El-linked epithets such as El Shaddai came to be applied to Yahweh alone, and other gods and goddesses such as Baal and Asherah were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion." (Wikipedia)
None of this is too surprising. The famous Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac shows that the Israelites once practiced human sacrifice, a distinctly pagan ritual. In the current version of the story, God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test of faith, but when Abraham starts to carry out the order God stops him and Abraham sacrifices a ram instead. Some scholars believe that the original version of this tale may have ended differently:
"Francesca Stavrakopoulou has speculated that it is possible that the story 'contains traces of a tradition in which Abraham does sacrifice Isaac.' R.E. Friedman argued that in the original ... story, Abraham may have carried out the sacrifice of Isaac, but that later repugnance at the idea of a human sacrifice led the redactor of JE to add the lines in which a ram is substituted for Isaac. Likewise, Terence Fretheim wrote that the text bears no specific mark of being a polemic against child sacrifice." (Wikipedia)
One way or another, the story shows that the Israelites once carried out ritual child sacrifices.
It would have been nice if this clip had actually shown the results of the examination of the infant skeleton.
The ancient Israelites also conducted animal sacrifices, a practice which is still recreated on special occasions in Israel today.
Video from 2016. Rituals like this are clear evidence of ancient Israelite paganism.
I'm not sure who produced this hilariously lurid documentary or when it was made.
"For a long time, it was commonly held by Mayanist [sic] experts that the 'pacific' Maya of Central America and southern Mexico did not practice human sacrifice (1). However, as more images and glyphs have come to light and been translated, it appears that the Maya frequently practiced human sacrifice in religious and political contexts." Source: Thought Company.
"Sacrifices played a vital part in Maya ritualism. Animals such as iguanas, crocodiles, turtles, dogs, peccaries, jaguars, and turkeys were occasionally sacrificed, and ... these offerings involved either whole animals -- alive, freshly killed, or cooked -- or in some cases only their hearts. But the supreme sacrifice was human life itself, and all too frequently humans were consigned to be slaughtered in the course of elaborate rituals." -- Maya, the Riddle and Rediscovery of a Lost Civilization, Charles Gallenkamp, Third Revised Edition, 1985, p. 109.
(1) "The prevalent theory on the ancient Maya at the beginning of the 20th century held on to the notion that they had a predominantly peaceful society, idealizing the indigenous culture much like a noble savage. This view [was based on] poorly documented analysis of iconography and the content of Maya script." Source: Wikipedia.
Comment: The myth of the Noble Savage living a peaceful life in harmony with nature and his neighbors has the distinction of being wrong in every case that I'm aware of. It may not be the worst idea ever conceived, but it's definitely one of the most inaccurate.
"Most of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica such as the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec and Aztec cultures practiced some kind of taking of human trophies during warfare. Captives taken during war would often be taken to their captors' city-states where they would be ritually tortured and sacrificed. These practices are documented by a rich material of iconographic and archaeological evidence from across Mesoamerica." Source: Wikipedia.
Photo credit: "El Tajin Ballcourt Mural (Tom Aleto)" by Thomas Aleto from Riverside, PA - Tajin Sacrifice Scene. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. I think Aleto teaches anthropology at Bloomsburg University.
"The blood eagle is a ritualized method of execution, detailed in late skaldic poetry. According to the two instances mentioned in the Sagas, the victim (in both cases a member of a royal family) was placed prone, the ribs severed from the spine with a sharp tool and the lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of 'wings'. There is a continuing debate about whether the ritual was a literary invention, a mistranslation of the original texts or an authentic historical practice." Source: Wikipedia.
The Blood Eagle was a particularly nasty form of sacrificial execution, but did the Vikings actually put people to death this way? As far as I can tell, the only primary documentary evidence for the practice comes from sources such as the Orkneyinga Saga, the Heimskringla, the Tale of Ragnar's Sons, and a handful of references in other texts.
Note: The Tale of Ragnar's Sons describes (among other things) the execution of King Aella of Northumbria, a scene also depicted in Vikings.
Jarl Borg in Vikings is an entirely fictional character, I believe. Aella, on the other hand, was apparently a real king, though the sources for his life are limited and very little is known about his reign. According to some accounts, he was executed by the Vikings after they invaded Northumbria following the king's execution of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, another figure who may or may not have actually existed. How Aella died is a matter of conjecture, though, because the sources contradict each other:
"While Norse sources claim that Ragnar's sons tortured Ælla to death with a blood eagle, Anglo-Saxon accounts maintain that he died in battle, at York, on 21 March 867." (Wikipedia)
"Well into the last century, most historians of the Vikings accepted that the blood eagle was deeply unpleasant but very real. According to the eminent medievalist J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, its possible victims were not only Ælla of Northumbria but also Halfdán, the son of Harald Finehair (or Fairhair), king of Norway, and the Irish King Maelgualai [Mael Gualae] of Munster; in some interpretations, it is supposed that even Edmund the Martyr may have suffered the same fate."
One possibility is that the Blood Eagle was a real execution method sensationalized by later writers. For instance, the Welsh scholar and translator, Gwyn Jones, argues in A History of the Vikings (1968) that this "inhuman rite" was "unhappily no fiction ... but owes its eminence in pseudo-lore almost entirely to fiction ..." (footnote pp 119-220, 1968 edition)
It's also possible that the Blood Eagle is entirely fictitious. This seems to be the current consensus, but there's a lot of disagreement. Revisionist historians have challenged the idea that the Vikings were just a mob of cruel barbarians wearing horned helmets, but their depictions of "cuddly" Vikings went too far in the other direction. One of the main problems with our picture of the Vikings is that much of what we know about them was written by their enemies.
If the Blood Eagle is a literary invention, there's a good chance that this grisly method of execution was dreamed up by Christian writers trying to demonize the pagan Vikings. According to Wikipedia, "[t]here is debate about whether the blood eagle was historically practiced, or whether it was a literary device invented by the authors who transcribed the sagas. No contemporary accounts of the ritual exist, and the scant references in the sagas are several hundred years after the Christianization of Scandinavia." Considering the Christians' history of inventing martyr stories set in the Roman Empire, I wouldn't be surprised if they concocted similar atrocity stories about the Vikings.
Video from 2010.
When I first started to research this subject, I assumed there was a high probability that the Blood Eagle was a real thing because the Vikings are thought to have conducted human sacrifices and the Blood Eagle is, in a way, just another form of ritual sacrifice. As it turns out, though, the question of whether the Vikings actually killed people for religious purposes isn't all that straightforward.
There is some archaeological evidence that the Vikings may have sacrificed humans. For instance, "[a]t Trelleborg [Sweden] a sacrificial site was found from the time before the Viking fortress was erected in 980-81. In five c. 3 metre-deep wells human and animal skeletons were found, together with jewellery and tools. Of the total of five human sacrifices, four were young children aged between 4 and 7. " Source: National Museum of Denmark.
Blood sacrifice, including human sacrifice, was an intrinsic part of pagan religions. The historical sources for Viking human sacrifice are questionable, though, because they all seem to come, once again, from Christian accounts:
According to the National Museum of Denmark, "[t]here are several horrifying accounts of human sacrifices from the Viking period. The German bishop, Thietmar of Merseburg, describes how the Vikings met every nine years at Lejre on Zealand [Denmark] in January 'and offer to their gods 99 people and just as many horses, dogs and hens or hawks, for these should serve them in the kingdom of the dead and atone for their evil deeds.'"
A similar ritual (at a different location) is also depicted in Vikings.
"The German monk Adam of Bremen wrote a similar account in 1072 about the sacrificial tradition at [Gamla Uppsala] in Sweden, where the temple was devoted to Thor, Odin and Frey. Here the Vikings also met every 9 years to ensure the goodwill of the gods. 9 males of all kinds of living creatures were sacrificed in a holy grove nearby. According to Adam of Bremen dogs, horses and humans hung from the trees. The number 9 was apparently of magical significance to the Vikings and was involved in a number of rituals." (National Museum of Denmark)
"There has been extensive debate over whether these accounts were real or simply Christian propaganda."
I wouldn't be shocked to learn that the Vikings actually executed royal prisoners using the Blood Eagle. Even if the descriptions in the sagas were written for entertainment, they may have had some basis in fact. At this point, however, it looks like this particular form of execution was a literary invention derived from the skaldic poems and embellished by later Christian writers in yet another attempt to make the pagans look like cruel and bloodthirsty savages:
"One of the features of a skaldic poem is that it’s incredibly convoluted, like a cryptic crossword puzzle. If you have a reference to what appears to be the Blood Eagle in a skaldic verse, it’s quite likely this is a poetic conceit. Roberta Frank, at Yale, argues that the Blood Eagle is just the idea of a carrion bird scratching at the back of the dead. If you create lots of corpses, you are a very good warrior. That’s what is being referred to. But when later writers made prose stories around these skaldic verses, they seem to have interpreted it literally. So it’s quite likely that there was no such thing as this horrible form of torture, but it grew in the telling." Source: National Geographic (2017).
"The programme, 'Bone Detectives: Britain’s Buried Secrets', is a new 8-part series presented by palaeontologist Tori Herridge, mortuary technician Carla Valentine and archaeologist Raksha Dave. The series kicks off on Saturday evening [Jan. 11, 2020] with the fascinating case study of a Wessex Archaeology site on the Isle of Thanet which revealed a startling arrangement of human and animal remains." Source: Wessex Archaeology.
"The site includes evidence for a range of mortuary rites, including exposure, excarnation [defleshing] and curation. A Late Bronze Age burial pit containing the articulated skeletal remains of five individuals provides the key focus for the episode.
"One of these individuals, an elderly woman, had head wounds indicating a deliberate killing. This evidence, supported by her unusual burial posture, suggests that she may have been sacrificed."
"Around a hundred bodies have been found in ... Irish bogs to date, some male, some female, and those of children too. Some were thought to be there by accident, perhaps as a result of falling into the bog and drowning. Others were considered to be formal (and some not so formal) burials, and others appear to be rather more sinister." Source: Irish Central.
The ritual sacrifice dramatized in this video shows the execution of Old Croghnan Man, a bog body currently (?) on display in the National Museum of Ireland, which, among other things, has an exhibit called Kingship & Sacrifice. According to the museum's website, "the exhibition is centred on a new theory that connects human sacrifice with sovereignty and kingship rituals during the Iron Age. Research has indicated that other material connected with these rituals include: items of regalia; items associated with equestrian [horse] procession; weapons; feasting utensils; boundary markers; items associated with corn and milk production, such as quern stones and butter deposits known as ‘bog butter’."
One possible human sacrifice from this period is known as Tollund Man, "a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950, preserved as a bog body, on the Jutland peninsula. The man's physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim. Twelve years before Tollund Man's discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, had been found in the same bog." (Wikipedia)
I think this describes Tollund Man, but I'm not sure.
"Scholars tend to agree that Tollund Man’s killing was some kind of ritual sacrifice to the gods—perhaps a fertility offering. To the people who put him there, a bog was a special place. While most of Northern Europe lay under a thick canopy of forest, bogs did not. Half earth, half water and open to the heavens, they were borderlands to the beyond. To these people, will-o’-the-wisps—flickering ghostly lights that recede when approached—weren’t the effects of swamp gas caused by rotting vegetation. They were fairies. The thinking goes that Tollund Man’s tomb may have been meant to ensure a kind of soggy immortality for the sacrificial object." Source: Smithsonian (2017).
"'At an appointed time all tribes meet ….. in a forest consecrated by their ancestors, surrounded by fear, sacred from the dawn of time. There, on behalf of those assembled, they celebrate the commencement of their barbaric cult with a human sacrifice.'
"This is how the Roman historian Tacitus described the situation among the Semnones, a Germanic tribe, in the 1st century AD. This could provide the explanation of what happened to the woman from Huldremose, Tollund Man and Grauballe Man. More than a hundred bog bodies have been found in Denmark, which date from the period 800 BC to 200 AD. The cause of death has only been established in a small number of cases, where people have been strangled, hung or had their throats cut. Like the woman from Huldremose, the bodies were carefully placed in a bog afterwards, which points toward a sacrifice or another ritual act rather than an attack." Source: National Museum of Denmark.
Closed captions helpful.
"For Europeans dating as far back as the Neolithic period 6,000 years ago, bogs were both resources and possibly ominous supernatural portals, according to Ulla Mannering, an expert in ancient textiles at the National Museum of Denmark." Source: National Geographic (2014).
"The bogs' peat, which could be burned for heating homes, was valuable in tree-scarce Denmark, and an ore called bog iron was made into tools and weapons.
"Among prehistoric people, 'when you take things, you also offer things,' said Mannering.
"This may be why the Danish villagers would deposit 'gifts' of clothes, old shoes, slaughtered animals, battered weapons, and, for a period of 500 years, people into the black abyss of the bogs."
This charming contraption is regularly featured in sensationalistic stories and videos about ancient death machines. According to Wikipedia, "the brazen bull, bronze bull, or Sicilian bull, was a torture and execution device designed in ancient Greece. According to Diodorus Siculus, recounting the story in Bibliotheca historica, Perillos of Athens invented and proposed it to Phalaris, the tyrant of Akragas, Sicily, as a new means of executing criminals." The brazen bull may have had its origins in Carthaginian human sacrifices and ancient bull worship, assuming that it actually existed, of course.
I haven't been able to find much information about the alleged inventor, Perillos of Athens, other than that he was a brass worker who was supposed to have invented and suggested the use of the Bull to the tyrant Phalaris. If true, Perillos must have had a sick mind and he apparently came to a well-deserved end when Phalaris (disgusted by Perillos's sadism) used him as a guinea pig to test his new invention. Perillos was cooked inside the bull for a while, then taken out alive and thrown off a cliff. That's the story, anyway.
The question is: How much of this story is actually true? The history is extremely murky, but as far as I can tell, no archaeologist has ever uncovered hard evidence that the brass bull as described here ever existed. According to NNDB (a kind of Who's Who database that I'd never heard of before), "the story of the bull cannot be dismissed as pure invention. Pindar, who lived less than a century afterwards, expressly associates this instrument of torture with the name of the tyrant [Phalaris]. There was certainly a brazen bull at Agrigentum, which was carried off by the Carthaginians to Carthage, from where it was again taken by Scipio [Africanus?] and restored to Agrigentum."
Pindar was probably just passing on a story he found in the sources. Likewise for Diodorus Siculus, whose reliability as a historian is still a matter of debate. A very scholarly discussion of Diodorus Siculus's historical method in relation to the story of the bull of Phalaris can be found here [PDF]. As for the brass bull at Agrigentum mentioned above, I haven't been able to find any evidence that it was the same bull as the famous Brazen Bull or that the Agrigentum bull was anything more than a statue. The bull was sacred to several ancient cultures.
There's no limit to human cruelty, but I'm guessing that the story of the Brazen Bull is an early example of propaganda designed, in this case, to smear the reputation of Phalaris, a hated tyrant who was eventually overthrown for his viciousness (and supposedly burned inside his own torture device). According to Livius, "Phalaris became the prototype of an evil dictator" and the story of the invention of the brass bull "...was clearly invented to suggest what tyranny was all about, but there may be an element of historical truth."