Post #341559 by Cammo on Thu, Nov 1, 2007 12:20 PM

Thanks, you Space Hippie you!

Here's a short one, I wrote it Halloween night, between the trick-or-treaters, like 2 or three chapters long....

People of the Bog
Part 1

They’ve been found for years, all over Central Europe. There are still many out there, waiting to be dug up. They are black, mysterious, ancient, and look alive - but they are dead. They are the Bog People.

The first to be uncovered in recent times was the Kibbelgaarn body found in the Netherlands in 1791. More than a thousand have been found since then.

At first, traditional historians loved the Bog People. Their clothing and jewelry were enormously interesting, and many articles were written about how well preserved the bodies were, better than most Egyptian mummies. So well preserved that you could see the color of their hair, how it had been combed, even what kind of hair oil they used – it came off in your hand, still fragrant.

No one really thought much about these bodies, found in bogs from England to Germany, perfectly preserved in deep black peat. They had no way of knowing how old they were, and once out of the peat the bodies began to decay anyway. The professors of the 19th century assumed they were burials of someone who had sinned and been condemned; why else would they be left in a bog, away from the town graveyards?

Why indeed?

And nobody seems to have asked the simplest of questions; why did these ‘criminals’ wear jewelry?

Or – why are they found virtually everywhere in Northern Europe?

And there was something uncomfortable about these people. Something just wasn’t right, it was creepy finding the bodies, often in areas that had a strange, haunted feeling to them. The corpses didn’t make sense, either; sometimes just portions of bodies were found, as if they had been dismembered after death, a traditional way of killing a vampire in Olde Europe. There was something disturbing, even horrifying in a primitive, ugly way, about the Bog People.

There were ancient stories still circulating in 19th century England of revenants, or the hungry dead. These recently buried corpses would rise from the grave, and spread pestilence among their neighbors. Sometimes they would walk the blackest of moonless nights, announcing who would be next to die. Sometimes they would eat flesh, animals, or suck blood. Then they would return to their graves and sleep. Revenants could be stopped only by burning their corpse, beheading, or pulling the heart from the body. Incredibly, historians didn’t see a connection to the vampire legends of Eastern Europe, legends which are identical in almost every detail to tales of revenants. They think that vampire stories were introduced to England in the late 18th century, not before.

They certainly didn’t think the legends were true.

It’s also strange how little we know about Europe, especially the British Isles, in pre-Christian times. No Druid practices have survived, few stories have come down to us, no knowledge of their forms of government or trade, nothing that is absolutely factual. We don’t know anything about Stonehenge. Very little about European ‘Iron Age’ culture. Why?

There’s something really mysterious about it. The people are all still there. How can an entire culture vanish?

Older, crotchety historians explained this by stating that civilization simply didn’t begin until recently. There were no pervasive traditions or collective governments, or long distance travel until fairly recently they say. For many years people believed this, received doctorates from Oxford by writing these opinions. It seemed reasonable and fun to think of yourself as the perfect end product of tens of thousands of years of social evolution.

The problem is, almost everything we’ve dug up in the last 50 years has proven exactly the opposite. It’s gotten to the point now that some young historians are writing papers based on their ransacking museums for their oldest artifacts, ignoring everything that’s been assumed about them, and using up-to-date radiocarbon dating and trans-culture analysis to come up with entirely different answers to the same ‘old’ questions. The new historians say that we don’t know anything about Europe 2000 years ago because we’re stupid, not because there wasn’t anything interesting going on then. In fact, they say, there’s no reason to think that a reasonably modern, unified, intelligent and highly religious culture existed for tens of thousands of years in Europe, going back to pre-ice age times. Or way back, even farther than that.

And Bog People are at the very center of the furious debate. They prove that all of Northern Europe shared identical methods of torture and burial.

Because the new historians have found that almost all the Bog People were tortured to death.