The pic is related to Boudicca's rebellion (60 AD). According to Tacitus (if I remember well), when the rebels took Londinium, they crucified the roman women they had captured. Crucifying a roman Citizen was considered the ultimate abomination for the Romans.
Hi Shastar, on Deviantart the picture is presented as an illustration to the following story, although I am unable to comment on its authenticity! B
The Red Sisters of Dhiogail and the Rebellion of the Damnonii
by Augustine
While many are familiar with the Celtic queen Boudicca’s ill-fated revolt against her Roman oppressors, there is another, more twisted tale of revolution that happened a century later and far to the north of Britain. At the very extreme of Roman control, in what is today Scotland, one native tribe grew restless under the legions’ yoke. The Damnonii- partly Celtic, partly Pictish- were a small tribe but were feared by both the Romans and other Celts for their ferocity. Whispers told of dark and unspeakable rites carried on in the misty recesses of their wooded domain.
Like other Celts they worshipped a plethora of gods each having its own regional characteristics. The favorite of the Damnonii was their own version of Sulis, the three-formed goddess of sunlight, life-giving and, oddly enough, curses. It was Sulis’ latter form that the Damnonii revered. Here the goddess was called “da dhiogail,’ meaning both “to laugh” but also “to suck dry.” Laughter, especially the sort that was wrung from an unwilling and ticklish captive, the Damnonii druids taught, was the sweetest offering possible to their twisted version of the goddess as it combined both heart-pounding, muscle-straining, gasping life at its most exhilarating and even erotic with the curse of longing for a cessation, even death. Such sacrifices, the shamans assured the tribe would eventually bring sunlight and good weather for their vital crops. Unlike other tribes, however, their Druidic caste was made up entirely of women, the priestesses of Da Dhiogail, recognizable and ominous in their scarlet cloaks.
In 84 AD the Romans under their general Agricola pushed into the territory of Damnonii and established a colony at Lindum. Relations between the new settlers and the natives were strained but and uneasy peace was established between them for some thirty years…until sometime around 115AD Romans settlers began to vanish. Anthropologists suggest several years of poor harvests led to an increase in devotion to the Damnonii’s dark goddess and a resentment of the pushy newcomers. Whatever started it, most of the Romans who vanished were never heard from again…except for the few who were found wandering naked on the moors, their minds gone and their bodies quivering, unable to stand the slightest touch. Inevitably war broke out but the Celts melted away into their forests, moors and hills. Roman settlers began fleeing south, unable to tolerate the unseen terror all around them.
Six years later, unwilling to expend any more to conquer the wild northern lands, the Emperor Hadrian pulled all settler back and built his famous wall, marking the limit of the Empire and leaving the Damnonii to themselves. And here the story might have ended had not a new expansionist emperor, Antoninus Pius refused to accept the new limit. In 140 AD the Romans once again pushed north almost to the old settlement at Lindum. Here they built a new wall and took over a Damnonii village to the south of it, Colania, as their new northern capitol. This time there was no mingling only a tense stand-off. Gradually over the next twenty years the Romans expanded south of the wall and the Damnonii withdrew north of it, seething at their loss of land. Settlers began vanishing again.
It was at this point the Red Priestesses named their youngest Chief Priestess ever, a stunning auburn haired warrior named Coira, or “Seething Pool.” She announced that their goddess demanded the return of their lands and, more darkly, the sacrifice of the foreign intruders. So passionate was Coira in her messages that it seemed to the people she was more than a mere priestess, she was the very embodiment of “Da Dhiogail.” The scattered settlements of the Damnonii gathered, each led by their own contingent of red priestesses, known as the Sisters of Dhiogail. On the night of July 10, 163 AD they struck at all the Roman settlements simultaneously.
The few troops garrisoning the northern settlements were overwhelmed. All who resisted were annihilated and a fine haul of captives was taken. They were brought before Coira and her fellow red sisters and their horrible fate was pronounced:
“You have stolen our lands and murdered our people! Worse, you have offended the great goddess Sulis da Dhiogail! Therefore it is only fitting that you suffer for your crimes in a way that will bring a long-suppressed smile to the goddesses’ face!”
It is unlikely that Coira had ever heard of the failed slave revolt of Spartacus nearly two hundred years earlier or the grim fate of his followers, crucified along the Appian Way, but the fate of the captured Romans would have surely brought a sardonic smile to the Red Sisters’ grim goddess. A month later, when a Roman relief column marched up the Dere Road from Coria back at Hadrian’s Wall- far too late-they were horrified at the many crosses lining the road on either side. But the occupants of these crosses had not been nailed to their posts. No, they had been stripped naked and tightly tied there, regularly fed so they would last quite a while. Under the patrolling supervision of the Red Sisters, huge crowds of the Damnonii people moved along the road in joyful celebration, mercilessly tickling the captives for weeks as they offered up their tormented laughter as a sacrifice to Da Dhiogail.
By the time the soldiers arrived the crowds were gone. A few survivors were taken down from the crosses, their minds broken and their bodies permanently trembling. Yet quite a few of the crosses were empty and there were not nearly enough of them to account for all the citizen who had been in Colania. The natives had once again melted into the surrounding wilderness and every settlement, including the town of Colania was empty and deserted. Cavalry scouts sent out to scour the country side found nothing but reported hearing the earie sounds of screaming and tormented laughter echoing in the deep woods and rugged valleys. They found no one. Worse, a number of the scouting parties failed to come back all together. Fearfully the legate in charge turned his cohort around and marched back to the wall. Never again would the Romans push this far north and the settlements, along with the Antonine Wall succumbed to the harsh environment and the Damnonni themselves vanished into the mists of time.
Yet as long as the legions remained in Britain, nervous sentries atop Hadrian’s Wall would tell stories of the fate of Colania and of the Red Sisters and of the unimaginable horrors that waited on the far side of the Wall. Every once in a while some brave traveler, explorer or even settler would venture past the barrier only to be swallowed up and lost forever. And every once in a while, faint, tormented and hysterical laughter could be heard off in the distance keeping alive the terrifying legend of the Damnonii and the Red sisters of Dhiogail.
The End.
