on a
stake and told Emer the name of the owner. A Celtic _oppidum_ or a
king's palace must have been as gruesome as a Dayak or Solomon Island
village. Everywhere were stakes crowned with heads, and the walls of
houses were adorned with them. Poseidonius tells how he sickened at such
a sight, but gradually became more accustomed to it.[825] A room in the
palace was sometimes a store for such heads, or they were preserved in
cedar-wood oil or in coffers. They were proudly shown to strangers as a
record of conquest, but they could not be sold for their weight in
gold.[826] After a battle a pile of heads was made and the number of the
slain was counted, and at annual festivals warriors produced the tongues
of enemies as a record of their prowess.[827]

These customs had a religious aspect. In cutting off a head the Celt
saluted the gods, and the head was offered to them or to ancestral
spirits, and sometimes kept in grove or temple.[828] The name given to
the heads of the slain in Ireland, the "mast of Macha," shows that they
were dedicated to her, just as skulls found under an altar had been
devoted to the Celtic Mars.[829] Probably, as among Dayaks, American
Indians, and others, possession of a head was a guarantee that the ghost
of its owner would be subservient to its Celtic possessor, either in
this world or in the next, since they are sometimes found buried in
graves along with the dead.[830] Or, suspended in temples, they became
an actual and symbolical offering of the life of their owners, if, as is
probable, the life or soul was thought to be in the head. Hence, too,
the custom of drinking from the skull of the slain had the intention of
transferring his powers directly to the drinker.[831] Milk drunk from
the skull of Conall Cernach restored to enfeebled warriors their
pristine strength,[832] and a folk-survival in the Highlands--that of
drinking from the skull of a suicide (here taking the place of the slain
enemy) in order to restore health--shows the same idea at work. All
these practices had thus one end, that of the transference of spirit
force--to the gods, to the victor who suspended the head from his house,
and to all who drank from the skull. Represented in bas-relief on houses
or carved on dagger-handles, the head may still have been thought to
possess talismanic properties, giving power to house or weapon. Possibly
this cult of human heads may have given rise to the idea of a divine
head like those figu