“Romans, in their first encounters with these exposed, insane warriors, were shocked and frightened. They were howling and, it seemed, possessed by demons, so outrageous was their strength, featuring all the terrors of hell itself. [Druids] sacrificed prisoners of war to the war gods and newborns to the harvest gods. Believing that the human head was the seat of the soul, they displayed proudly the heads of their enemies in their temples and on their palisades; they even hung them from their belts as ornaments, used them as footballs in victory celebrations, and were fond of employing skull tops as ceremonial drinking bowls. They also sculpted heads–both shrunken, decapitated.”
Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Random House, 1995