This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: On a mostly flat plain an hour north of Stockholm lies a collection of large burial mounds dating from an ancient culture at least 2,500 years old. These people were not Vikings; they were northern Germanic Goths, pagan polytheists worshiping the precursors of Odin, Freyr and Thor.
In truth, this ancient subgroup of Goths could probably have cared less about astronomy as we know it today. Yet, inexplicably, they were driven to make precise measurements of the sun and moon. They were obsessed with precisely timing nine days of gruesome midwinter human and animal sacrifices.
Despite such barbarism, they apparently believed that if they did not make these great midwinter sacrifices every eight years, the following eight years might bring a catastrophe. The sacrifices usually began at the height of winter from Feb. 6–8. And at least one contemporary Swedish astrophysicist claims to have found these Goths' sacrificial calendar.
"I have discovered the calendar that regulates the dates for the Great Midwinter Sacrifice that took place every eight years," Goran Henriksson, an astrophysicist and former lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden, tells me in Uppsala. In 2014, archaeologists discovered two long rows of poles that marked the northern limit for the rising of the full moon and the direction of the rising sun when it was time to start a sacrificial cycle, Henriksson tells me. "The sacrifice at Old Uppsala took place every eighth year; the starting date was defined by the full moon that occurred between Jan. 28 and Feb. 26 in the Gregorian calendar," Henriksson writes in a paper presented at the 2014 meeting of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture.
By combining historical data and calculations of the dates of full moons, Henriksson has established the exact years of the eight-year cycle, including one that began in AD 852. Uppsala is a contemporary Swedish city only a short distance from Arlanda international airport. But walking through these hills on a windy July afternoon, one can only imagine Visigoth culture as it once was.
These people obviously had an appreciation of the natural world—including the celestial sphere—that completely eludes us at present. Three "royal" burial mounds have been dated to AD 450–550 and oriented in such a way that they could have been used to regulate the sacrificial calendar, Henriksson writes. During archaeological excavations in 2013, two long rows of postholes were discovered, he writes.
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