ms may have been offered to disease demons or diseases personified,
such as Celtic imagination still believes in,[791] rather than to gods,
or, again, they may have been offered to native gods of healing. Coming
danger could also be averted on the same principle, and though the
victims were usually slaves, in times of great peril wives and children
were sacrificed.[792] After a defeat, which showed that the gods were
still implacable, the wounded and feeble were slain, or a great leader
would offer himself.[793] Or in such a case the Celts would turn their
weapons against themselves, making of suicide a kind of sacrifice,
hoping to bring victory to the survivors.[794]

The idea of the victim being offered on the principle of a life for a
life is illustrated by a custom at Marseilles in time of pestilence. One
of the poorer classes offered himself to be kept at the public expense
for some time. He was then led in procession, clad in sacred boughs, and
solemnly cursed, and prayer was made that on him might fall the evils of
the community. Then he was cast headlong down. Here the victim stood for
the lives of the city and was a kind of scape-victim, like those at the
Thargelia.[795]

Human victims were also offered by way of thanksgiving after victory,
and vows were often made before a battle, promising these as well as
part of the spoil. For this reason the Celts would never ransom their
captives, but offered them in sacrifice, animals captured being
immolated along with them.[796] The method of sacrifice was slaughter by
sword or spear, hanging, impaling, dismembering, and drowning. Some gods
were propitiated by one particular mode of sacrifice--Taranis by
burning, Teutates by suffocation, Esus (perhaps a tree-god) by hanging
on a tree. Drowning meant devoting the victim to water-divinities.[797]

Other propitiatory sacrifices took place at intervals, and had a general
or tribal character, the victims being criminals or slaves or even
members of the tribe. The sacrificial pile had the rude outline of a
human form, the limbs of osier, enclosing human as well as some animal
victims, who perished by fire. Diodorus says that the victims were
malefactors who had been kept in prison for five years, and that some of
them were impaled.[798] This need not mean that the holocausts were
quinquennial, for they may have been offered yearly, at Midsummer, to
judge by the ritual of modern survivals.[799] The victims perished in
that