Cimbrian seeresses

The account tells that the seeresses led prisoners of war up a platform where they cut their throats and watching the blood stream down into a cauldron they made predictions about the future.

They are compared by scholars with attestations of similar customs among Celts and Germanics, involving cauldrons, platforms and divinations from blood and entrails, and there are also supporting finds in archaeology.

[2] Their origin was probably in a Germanic speaking territory which is identified by the name Himmerland (Old Danish: Himbersysel), and in the ethnonym Κιμβροι which was placed in Jutland in Ptolemy's Geography.

[4] Their southward migrations and a number of notable conflicts in the end of the 2nd century BC, brought them into the spheres of Greek and Roman historians.

[1][9] ἔθος δέ τι τῶν Κίμβρων διηγοῦνται τοιοῦτον, ὅτι ταῖς γυναιξὶν αὐτῶν συστρατευούσαις παρηκολούθουν προμάντεις ἱέρειαι πολιότριχες, λευχείμονες, καρπασίνας ἐφαπτίδας ἐπιπεπορπημέναι, ζῶσμα χαλκοῦν ἔχουσαι, γυμνόποδες: τοῖς οὖν αἰχμαλώτοις διὰ τοῦ στρατοπέδου συνήντων ξιφήρεις, καταστέψασαι δ᾽ αὐτοὺς ἦγον ἐπὶ κρατῆρα χαλκοῦν ὅσον ἀμφορέων εἴκοσιν: εἶχον δὲ ἀναβάθραν, ἣν ἀναβᾶσα ὑπερπετὴς τοῦ λέβητος ἐλαιμοτόμει ἕκαστον μετεωρισθέντα: ἐκ δὲ τοῦ προχεομένου αἵματος εἰς τὸν κρατῆρα μαντείαν τινὰ ἐποιοῦντο, ἄλλαι δὲ διασχίσασαι ἐσπλάγχνευον ἀναφθεγγόμεναι νίκην τοῖς οἰκείοις.

[10]They describe a certain custom of the Kimbrians, that the women join the expeditions, attended by priestesses who were prophets, greyhaired and dressed in white, with flaxen cloaks buckled on and having bronze girdles and bare feet.

[11]The account is usually attributed to Posidonius who travelled in Transalpine Gaul, where some decades earlier the Cimbri had migrated until they were annihilated by the consul Marius at Vercellae in 101 BC.

[2] Simek suggests that the account is the result of the traumatic memories of Roman legionaries from interactions with the Cimbri a century earlier, the knowledge that the Germanic tribes had seeresses and the customs of divination in the state cult of Rome.

[16] Strabo also wrote that the remaining Cimbri in the North had gifted a revered holy silver cauldron to the Roman emperor Augustus,[17] as a sign of their friendship.

The warriors, the chariots, the gorgon head, and the seeress figure on the lid, all point to the krater having been made as an offering to a war god and his priestess.

[20] There are similar accounts in the mediaeval Scandinavian sources, such as Gesta Danorum (I, 27) and Ynglinga saga (XI),[15] where an early king of Sweden, Fjölnir (or Hundingus), drowns in an enormous vat of beer.

[26] It was a vessel used in pagan Scandinavian ceremonies where human or animal sacrificial blood was collected, and they were placed on special platforms called stallar.

The rest was splattered with a twig on the walls and the participants, like holy water, and in the English word bless originates in this practice of sprinkling a person with blood, bleodsian.

[30] Germanic and Celtic tribes were infamous for their cruel executions of war prisoners, and literary sources point to divination having been the main reason.

[32] In spite of the fact that the Franks had converted to Christianity it is reported that after having taken over a bridge, they killed all the Gothic women and children they found and threw them into the river as the first casualties of war, because they still preserved their pagan traditions to predict the future based on human sacrifice.

[33] Davidson compares the seeresses to a report by Tacitus who wrote in Annals XXX, 30, that the Celts in Britain under Boudica used to "drench their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult their god by means of human sacrifice".

[34] The Roman general Suetonius Paulinus conquered the island and cut down the sacred grove on the island of Anglesey to stop the religious practices: Afterwards he imposed a garrison on the defeated and chopped down their groves, devoted to savage superstitions: they considered it right (fas) to make burnt offerings at altars with captive gore and to consult the gods using men’s innards.

In fact Adam of Bremen's account of the pagan sacrifices at the Temple at Uppsala in Sweden only mentions that nine heads of sacrificed people and animals “The sacrifice is of this nature: of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads.” Also during an excavation at Frösön ('the island of the god Freyr') in Sweden, they found mainly the bones from the heads of animals around what used to be a sacrificial tree.

[43] It has been commented in connection to the Cimbric seeresses that the Germanic women had a monopoly on spontaneous divination which sets them apart from the Mediterranean sybils whose predictions were not accepted unless interpreted by male priests.

[46] Scholars such as Morris and Orchard compare these priestesses with the Valkyrie figure "Angel of Death" whose rituals were witnessed by the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan who encountered Swedish Vikings on the Volga.

The Arab envoy witnessed the ship burial of a Viking chieftain who had been accompanied by an entourage of numerous slave girls and one of them volunteered to follow him into the next life.

She gave an intoxicating beverage to the slave girl and took her into the ship, where six men had sexual intercourse with her, after which she was killed by being strangled and stabbed between the ribs repeatedly.

[52] There are parallels with other women offering drinks in Old Norse literature such as Borghild in Völsunga saga who gives ale with poison to her stepson, and Gudrun in Atlamál in grǿnlenzku who serves the Hunnish king Attila a cup that contains the blood of their sons.

[50] Gory pagan rituals such as these were harshly judged when the Germanic cultures had converted to Christianity, and in Wulfstan's 11th century Sermo Lupi he groups Valkyries and witches with murderers and whores.

[50] ... and here are harlots and infanticides and many foul adulterous fornicators, and here are witches and valkyries, and here are plunderers and robbers and despoilers, and to sum it up quickly, a countless number of all crimes and misdeeds.