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.Subsequentgenerations viewed such places as haunted.A century ago, historian John Arnott MacCulloch, havingstudied Norse sagas, claimed that in ancient Scandinavia the idea that the dead were alive in theirbarrows gave rise to the belief that they might become unhallowed monsters of the vampire kind&.Parallels occur in Saxon England and among the early Teutons and Celts. In agricultural societies, in which the underworld was seen as both the abode of death and the seatof fertility, the buried body, like the buried seed, gave rise to new life.In Egypt, the billowing grainflanking the Nile rose annually from the buried god Osiris.In Scottish balladry, Sweet William becomes agreen-red rose and Barbara Allen a briar.And in Slavic folklore, claimed Sir James Frazer, a tree thatgrows on a grave is regarded by the South Slavonian peasant as a sort of fetish.Whoever breaks a twigfrom it hurts the soul of the dead, but gains thereby a magic wand, since the soul embodied in the twigwill be at his service. Yet, the dark side of burial may have been uppermost in the minds of its earliest practitioners.Archaeologist Timothy Taylor suspects that burial might originally have been conceived as a form ofpunishment a kind of ostracism for the community s scapegoats.Those bodies being laid in the backsof caves (or sunk deep in lakes, or interred in earth whose chemical properties deterred decomposition)could never be physically reincorporated into the community; instead, they were exiled to its cold, darkmargins.Over the past few centuries, for example, hundreds of remarkably well-preserved bodies havebeen recovered from the bogs of Denmark s Jutland Peninsula (the same general area where theGundestrup Cauldron was found).Mostly dating from 100 B.C.E.to about 400 C.E., these finds includemany Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, Windeby Girl, Yde Girl who have won a peaty immortalitybecause the stubble on their chins or the plaits in their hair look nowhere near the several thousand yearsold that scientists have determined them to be.The bodies were buried in these bogs for a reason.Andbecause their Iron Age communities overwhelmingly cremated their dead, that reason must havesomething to do with sacrifice or punishment.Forensic anthropologists have figured out that many of those buried here were victims: They hadPage 102 ABC Amber ePub Converter Trial version, http://www.processtext.com/abcepub.htmlbeen hanged, garroted, or otherwise strangled.In addition, many had been beaten and broken perhapsafter death, perhaps before.It is therefore likely that they had violated some taboo.Taylor believes theywere buried in bogs in order to vex the ghost and prevent the progress of the soul. Pinned down bypreservative peat, their bodies could not decay and release their souls in the process.It s easy to see how a superstitious community might come to believe that its scapegoats, itssacrificed outcasts, the sick, lame, or deformed lying out there in those lonely graves might resent theirfate and especially if their corpses weren t decomposing might return one night to seek revenge.IFEBLOODLDead bodies may have been charged with supernatural power, but so were living ones if it resided intheir blood.Those stately columns and orders Doric, Ionic, Corinthian that grace our courts, capitols, andschools are rooted in the traditions of Greek temple architecture.But that means they are also steeped inblood: The pillars evolved from the posts to which sacrifices were once tied, creating scenes thatsecond-century Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria called disgusting murders and burials. In aGreek temple, the holiest of altars was also the most sanguinary, distinguishing the structures as placeswhere, in the words of Nietzsche, the beauty tempered the dread, but this dread was the prerequisiteeverywhere. Sacrifice enshrined the most ancient of bargains.The gods might hurl their thunderbolts, but menpropitiated (and even manipulated) them with offerings of life and its vehicle, blood.Pagans did not needto read in Deuteronomy that the blood is the life to realize the essential truth of that statement.Bloodlose enough of it and you die.That was as obvious to the primitive as it is to the 21st-century physician.Blood, served by the heart, must be the seat of vitality.Roman gladiators gulped the blood of fallen opponents, thereby doubling their strength.AncientEuropeans poured blood into graves to slake the thirst of the dead.In the Odyssey, Odysseus placatesthose in Hades by slitting the throats of sheep and letting the blood soak into the earth.The blood ofmartyrs, of patriots, of innocents and kings all had magical healing powers.In some places, a singledrop of blood is believed to possess power enough to reanimate old bones.The sacred smolders inbone, too but not like it does in blood.The fierce Botocudos of Brazil were said to open wounds in their victims and drink their bloodbefore killing them.The Tongaranka of New South Wales would not bury a body without arranging for amale relative to stand over the grave and submit to a beating with the sharp edge of a boomerang; hisblood then flowed over the corpse
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