David Bramwell asks whether a real wicker man ever existed

The Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire is an excellent place to while away an afternoon, particularly for those with a love of Neolithic monuments and ancient history. It boasts the largest collection of Stonehenge artefacts, Iron Age hoards and a curious engraving known as The Wicker Colossus of the Druids from The Complete English Traveller (1772).

In the picture a giant effigy of a man made of wicker and wood stands erect on an almost barren landscape. His body is a prison for what looks to be over a hundred people, there to be sacrificed by the Celtic leaders and philosophers – the Druids – who once ruled Britain before the Roman invasion.

The head of the wicker effigy is unrealistically human with a curiously noble face and leonine beard and hair. A fire beneath has been lit and a small gathering of people stand around. A grieving woman – virtually naked – is being consoled. An axe-wielding man on horseback watches, dressed in an animal-skin onesie.

Another figure could be mistaken for sporting a bishop’s hat. Next to him a man reads from a book. With his staff, robe and heroically long beard, he is more in keeping with our contemporary idea of what our ancient druidic ancestors may have looked like.

This horrifying illustration of a ritualised human sacrifice in a giant Wicker Man has endured through the centuries and been copied many times. The earliest known image of a wicker colossus can be found a hundred years earlier in Aylett Sammes’ Britannica Antiqua Illustrata (1676). It derives from the artist’s imagination. The only known historical source to mention this blood sacrifice is over two thousand years old: Book Six of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War (57BC). In it Caesar writes of the Gauls’ devotion to religious observances and the Druids’ engagement in human sacrifice:

‘Figures of enormous sizes, whose limbs woven together with wicker are filled with living men; which being set on fire, the men being surrounded by the flames are utterly destroyed. The supplication of those who have been arrested in theft, or in robbery, or any other offence they consider to be more acceptable to the immortal gods, but when the abundance of that kind has failed, they even descend to the punishment of innocents.’

Simply on a practical level it’s hard to imagine how the druids would have pulled this off. Wouldn’t a giant wicker figure – full of men and women keen not to be sacrificed and prone to thrashing around somewhat – not only be structurally unsound but quickly collapse from the heat, allowing its would-be sacrifices to scarper?

It’s worth noting that, at the time of writing, Caesar was on a propaganda trail and mission to demonise the ‘heathens’ of Britain. He had little firsthand experience of the Celts and Druids and had certainly never seen a Wicker Man. He is instead relating an account that he had come across in the writings of a Greek politician, Posidonius, who’d spent time in Gaul decades earlier studying the Celts. Even here it is unknown whether Posidonius witnessed these sacrifices first hand; all his works are lost to us. The iconic image of a Wicker Man has been handed down to us from a 450-year-old illustration derived from an unsubstantiated account written over two thousands years ago by an unreliable source.

Since its cinematic release in 1973, The Wicker Man has become shorthand for a place or event deemed darkly pagan, ritualistic or engendering a sense of malevolent foreboding. Padstow’s May Day ’Obby ’Oss festival and the annual bonfire celebrations in the Sussex town of Lewes are definitely ‘a bit Wicker Man’. Then again, on a Saturday night so are towns like Macclesfield, Rotherham and Colchester.

From the Romans to the present day, the portrayal of pagans, heathens, cunning folk, occultists, witches, druids, Satanists – terms that remain interchangeable to the ignorant – has rarely been positive. Throughout the Middle Ages to practise as a cunning man or cunning woman was a risky business. Witchcraft – an ill- defined term then and now – was only decriminalised in the UK in 1951.

Robed figures, standing in circles or pentagons, chanting and waving a bit of incense around, remain a cinematic trope for sinister goings-on. Totems, charms and fetishes left in the landscape by our non-Christian ancestors, if disturbed – as in countless MR James short stories – inevitably end in tears.

‘Witchy’ pagan types may have become popularised through the likes of Harry Potter and Buffy, yet in the wider world they remain maligned or figures of fun. Media stories relating to anything pagan or occult continue to be sensationalised or alarmist. The ‘Satanic Panic’ in the 1980s led to the band Judas Priest being tried in court for allegedly driving a fan to suicide through the use of hidden messages – backmasking – in their music.

Those who choose to meddle with the dark forces are nearly always portrayed as megalomaniacs, obsessed with the accumulation of power, control over others and immortality through ill-gotten means. For nearly two thousand years the message has been clear: pagans are the bad guys.

This is an extract from The Sing-Along-A-Wicker-Man Scrapbook (Nightfinch, £10) by David Bramwell. Buy a copy from Odfellow’s Casino here.

David Bramwell will be our guest for the Halloween “A Drink with the Idler“, 6pm Thursday 31 October. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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