The Cimbrian seeresses were priestesses of the Cimbri. The people they belonged to appears to have been a Germanic tribe that became a Celto-Germanic federation during its migrations from southern Scandinavia into southern Europe where they were annihilated by the Romans. The priestesses are mentioned in Strabo's Geographica concerning sacrifices performed after a victory towards the end of the 2nd century BC. The account tells that the seeresses led prisoners of war up a platform where they cut their throats and watching the blood stream down into a cauldron they made predictions about the future. They also cut up their bellies and studied their entrails.
They are compared by scholars with attestations of similar customs among Celts and Germans, involving cauldrons, platforms and divinations from blood and entrails, and there are also supporting finds in archaeology. Some scholars consider the account to have been fabricated based on traumatic memories of Germanic customs by Roman legionaries and knowledge about the seeresses among Germanic tribes. Memories of such practices performed by pagan priestesses, Valkyrie women, may have contributed to the demonization that Christian scribes targeted towards female ritual practitioners after Christianization.
Background
What may be the earliest mention of Germanic seeresses is in a fragment attributed to Posidonius (c. 135 BC - 51/50 BC). However, it is not clear whether the priestesses' tribe, the Cimbri, were Celtic or Germanic, or a Celto-Germanic alliance, but the Romans considered them Germanic. Their origin was probably in a Germanic speaking territory which is identified by the name Himmerland (Old Danish: ), and in the ethnonym which was placed in Jutland in Ptolemy's Geography. The name may originally have meant 'shining' and referred to a body of water in Himmerland. Their southward migrations and a number of notable conflicts in the end of the 2nd century BC, brought them into the spheres of Greek and Roman historians. Some of them, e.g. Appian in Civil Wars, classed them as "Celts" while others, such as Caesar (De Bello Gallico) and Tacitus (Germania (37) identified them as Germans, but this mainly meant that they came from east of the Rhine, which did not automatically mean they spoke Germanic. The few "Cimbri" names and words recorded by the Romans were all Celtic except for the ethnonym Cimbri itself. The Celtic speakers in the horde would likely have said * or later * when they pronounced a Germanic *, which suggests that the Romans learnt of the name from Celtic speakers.
During their migrations across Europe the Cimbri were in contact with several Celtic speaking ethnic groups, such as the Taurisci, Boii, Volcae Tectosages and the Scordisci. Consequently, they are widely considered to have been a horde with a mix of languages when they were destroyed by the Romans at Vercellae in 102 or 101 BC. At this time, the Romans had many years of close experience with Celtic speakers in Northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul), Southern France (Gallia Narbonensis) and in Noricum, and so there probably many among them who were bilingual in Latin and Celtic. The Romans had little experience with Germans, however, and so the Celtic speakers among the Cimbri were in a better position to communicate with the Romans than were the Germans who only knew their own language.
The migration of the Cimbri was the first known Germanic migration into Celtic territory and it was a precursor of a "seemingly limitless outpouring" of Germanic tribes from Northern Europe pushing south and west in search of new lands, and the Celts were caught between them and the Romans. The result is that what today is Germany changed from a Celtic-speaking territory to a Germanic-speaking one. Julius Caesar may have been correct when he said that Gaul (modern France) had to be conquered by the Romans or it would have become Germanic.
Account
Strabo relates that the Cimbri were accompanied by their wives who were attended by prophesying priestesses (). These grey-haired seeresses walked barefoot and were dressed in white. They crowned the war prisoners with wreathes, and led them to a big cauldron over which there was a wooden platform. They positioned the prisoner above the cauldron and a priestess slit his throat. Watching how his blood streamed down into the cauldron, or studying his entrails, she made a prophecy about the next battle.
Criticism The account is usually attributed to Posidonius who travelled in Transalpine Gaul, where some decades earlier the Cimbri had migrated until they were annihilated by the consul Marius at Vercellae in 101 BC. Posidonius did not travel as a politician nor a general, but as an ethnographer, and so he would not have been biassed against the Cimbri. It has consequently been considered as an important sources for the Germanic seeresses. However, later scholars have cast doubt on the attribution to Posidonius, arguing that Strabo does not explicitly state that the information came from Posidonius. Usually he attributes excerpts from Posidonius with , but here he says ("they say") instead, and so it appears to be from other sources, and it may be an anecdote he heard while travelling. Consequently, a scholar has dismissed it as mere "hearsay" and "[...] exactly the kind of anecdote which would be common currency in Rome". Without an explicit attribution to Posidonius it does not have the same credibility as a trustworthy account of Germanic seeresses, and it may better represent the barbaric customs that the Romans attributed to the Germanic tribes when they waged war. The wars with the Cimbri had horrified the Romans so much that Caesar very often reminded the readers of De Bello Gallico that his war in Gaul was justified because of the Germanic threat from east of the Rhine.
Simek suggests that the account is the result of the traumatic memories of Roman legionaries from interactions with the Cimbri a century earlier, the knowledge that the Germanic tribes had seeresses and the customs of divination in the state cult of Rome.
Cauldrons and platforms The account by Strabo is very similar to one of the scenes depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, which was found in the Scandinavian homeland of the Cimbri, Himmerland. It was manufactured by Celts, probably in modern-day France, in the 1st or 2nd century BC, and it may in fact have served as a receptacle in such a rite. de Vries considers the account to be a representation of a Celtic ritual, but it is likely that the Germanic tribes of the time had similar, and probably related rites. In fact, this sacrificial object may have been imported to Jutland because the Germanic population of the area were not very different from the Celts in religious matters, which was pointed out by Strabo in Geography, 7.1.2., or Celtic religious customs were easily understood. Many other Celtic objects were imported by Germanic tribes at the time. Strabo also wrote that the remaining Cimbri in the North had gifted a revered holy silver cauldron to the Roman emperor Augustus, as a sign of their friendship.
The Vix burial
The cauldrons used by the Cimbri priestesses have been compared to an enormous cauldron that was found in a rich Celtic female waggon burial, the Vix Grave, from the 6th century BC. The woman was around 35 when she died and she had been buried with a great deal of honours and riches. It was a krater which in Greece would have been used for mixing water and wine, and several vessels imported from Greece have been found in Celtic graves, but its size stands out. It was 1.64 m tall, weighed 208 kg, and would have held 1200 L of liquid. It was too large to have been practical for use in serving drinks at feasts and would not have been easy to transport. Its frieze was decorated with warriors, and on the lid was a woman who looked like a seeress with a veil over her head and shoulders, and who had one arm outstretched. The other vessels in the grave were not those used for serving drinks at feasts, but those that would have been used in ceremonial rites for dispensing liquids. It has been proposed by the French scholar Bourriot (1965) that it was a cauldron used for holding blood in the same type of rites as those performed by the Cimbri priestesses. The fact that the Vix lady was young while the Cimbri priestesses were described as "grey-haired" may be explained by the original Greek term πολιότριχες, usually translated as "grey-haired", having an alternate (and original) meaning of "pale-haired",Indeed, the Greek term πολιός polios has the same origin as English "pale". i.e. the hair color known as ash- or platinum-blonde in English, which is (and probably always was) extremely rare except around the Baltic sea. The krater probably belonged to a shrine on Mount Lassois near the burial. The warriors, the chariots, the gorgon head, and the seeress figure on the lid, all point to the krater having been made as an offering to a war god and his priestess.
Suebi A very large barrel that was similar to the cauldron of the Cimbri priestesses is attested from the Suebi of Bregenz in Austria c. 611. It could hold 26 measures of ale and it was used in sacrifices to Wodan (Odin) which implies that it was used for human sacrifices. The legend tells that St Columbanus unfastened its metal hoops.
Scandinavia
There are similar accounts in the mediaeval Scandinavian sources, such as Gesta Danorum (I, 27) and Ynglinga saga (XI), where an early king of Sweden, Fjölnir (or Hundingus), drowns in an enormous vat of beer. Hymiskviða involves cauldrons and prophesying by studying blood (see below), as does the Prose Edda, where Kvasir dies into the vessel as his blood is poured into it, and in it the blood turns into the "poet's mead". The cauldrons of the Cimbrian priestesses agree with what was called in Old Norse. In Kjalnesinga saga, the 'sacrificial bowl' is described as a large copper bowl. It was a vessel used in pagan Scandinavian ceremonies where human or animal sacrificial blood was collected, and they were placed on special platforms called . The participants drank some of the blood. The rest was splattered with a twig on the walls and the participants, like holy water, and in the English word bless originates in this practice of sprinkling a person with blood, . As the Swedes were the most resistant to conversion to Christianity and held on to their old beliefs the longest, the Icelanders mocked them by saying that the Swedes licked their sacrificial bowls.
The platforms, , on which the sacrificial bowls were placed, were likely also used for divinations performed by cultic leaders during the sacrifices. Such rites were performed to acquire guidance from the gods when the people had to deal with dangerous situations. The divinatory sacrifices were provided legitimacy from the gods for the leaders' decisions.
Divination by sacrifice
Germanic and Celtic tribes were infamous for their cruel executions of war prisoners, and literary sources point to divination having been the main reason. Posidonus writes that the Celts used to kill their prisoners in a way so that they could observe and predict the future from the convulsions of the dying, which Davidson compares to the divination performed by the Cimbri priestesses, who studied the flow of blood from the throats of the prisoners.
In early 539, when Theudebert had entered Liguria, the Goths who were settled in Pavia believed that the Franks were there to assist them and offered no resistance, but Theudebert betrayed them and slaughtered them. In spite of the fact that the Franks had converted to Christianity it is reported that after having taken over a bridge, they killed all the Gothic women and children they found and threw them into the river as the first casualties of war, because they still preserved their pagan traditions to predict the future based on human sacrifice.
Divination by blood