Celtic religious practice was probably sacrificial in its interactions with the gods. Roman writers stated that the Celts practiced human sacrifice in Gaul: Cicero, Julius Caesar, Suetonius, and Lucan all refer to it, and Pliny the Elder says that it occurred in Britain, too. It was forbidden under Tiberius and Claudius. However there is also the possibility that these claims may have been false, and used as a sort of propaganda to justify the Roman conquest of these territories. There are only very few recorded archaeological discoveries which preserve evidence of human sacrifice and thus most contemporary historians tend to regard human sacrifice as rare within Celtic cultures. There is some circumstantial evidence that human sacrifice was known in Ireland and was later forbidden by St. Patrick, a claim which has also been disputed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_polytheism#Sacrifice
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They would construct a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing. Others have effigies of great size interwoven with twigs, the limbs of which are filled up with living people which are set on fire from below, and the people are deprived of life surrounded by flames.
Aren't we Romans wonderful! We stopped those dreadful human-sacrifices by those nasty Druids.
http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/faqs/sacrific.html
Lindow man was almost certainly a ritual sacrifice; he was strangled, hit on the head, and had his throat cut, in quick order, then surrendered to the bog.
In East Yorkshire, at Garton Slack a young man and a woman of about thirty were found huddled together in a shaft, a wooden stake between them pinning their arms together; the woman was apparently pregnant, since a fetal skeleton was found beneath her pelvis. Presumably the two adults were ritually killed for punitive purposes.
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