The threefold death, which is suffered by kings, heroes, and gods, is a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European theme encountered in Indic, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic mythology.
As a young man, the victim falls from a rock during a hunt, is caught in a tree, and drowns hanging head down in a lake.
This was fulfilled when a gang of jeering shepherds of King Meldred drove him off a cliff, where he was impaled on a stake left by fishermen, and died with his head below water.
The tenth-century Arab Muslim writer Ahmad ibn Fadlan produced a description of a funeral near the Volga River of a chieftain whom he identified as belonging to people he called Rūsiyyah.
In his epic poem, Pharsalia, which relates Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, he describes a set of three Celtic gods who receive human sacrifices: et quibus inmitis placatur sanguine diro/ Teutates horrensque feris altaribus Esus/ et Taranis Scythicae non mitior ara Dianae.
("To whom they appease with cruel blood, harsh Teutates, and wild, bristling Esus, and Taranis whose altar is as insatiable as that of Scythian Diana.")
[10] One set of scholia to the Pharsalia, known as the Commenta Bernensia and dating between the 4th and 9th centuries CE, is highly important for an understanding of how these lines relate to Proto-Indo-European culture.
“The later... scholiasts... elaborate on Lucan: they elicit the information that Taranis was propitiated by burning, Teutates by drowning, and Esus by means of suspending his victims from trees and ritually wounding them” [11] This scholium is of huge significance to understanding whether this text contains evidence of the threefold death in Celtic worship.
In recent years an Indo-European pattern of threefold death has been identified and discussed in terms of this tripartite ideology by a number of followers of Dumezil...
He argues, following Dumezil, that three distinct methods of sacrifice, corresponding to the three functional deities, was an important Proto-Indo-European ritual.
Now this Aedh the Black had been a very bloodthirsty man, and cruelly murdered many persons, amongst others Diarmuid, son of Cerbul, by divine appointment king of all.
When such an ordination afterwards became known to the saint, he was deeply grieved, and in consequence forthwith pronounced this fearful sentence on the ill-fated Findchan and Aedh... And Aedh, thus irregularly ordained, shall return as a dog to his vomit, and be again a bloody murderer, until at length, pierced in the neck with a spear, he shall fall from a tree into the water and be drowned...
But Aedh the Black, a priest only in name, betaking himself again to his former evil doings, and being treacherously wounded with a spear, fell from the prow of a boat into a lake and was drowned.
The Prophecy seemed so unlikely that Diarmuid scorned it, even when Banban invited him to a feast... Aedh Dubh was there and stabbed the High King with his spear.
[16] Archaeologist Don Brothwell considers that many of the older bodies need re-examining with modern techniques, such as those used in the analysis of Lindow Man.
[17] Archaeologists John Hodgson and Mark Brennand suggest that bog bodies may have been related to religious practice, although there is division in the academic community over this issue[18] and in the case of Lindow Man, whether the killing was murder or ritualistic is still debated.
As the Romans outlawed human sacrifice, this opens up other possibilities;[21] this was emphasised by historian Ronald Hutton, who challenged the interpretation of sacrificial death.