The Original Wicker Man

 

 "The most acceptable Sacrifice to their Gods, they esteemed Murderers, Thieves and Robbers, and also other Criminals, but for want of these Inoccents often suffered. In some places this Custome was observed, which, I suppose, was common to the Druids of Britain and Gaul; they made a Statue or Image of a Man in a vast proportion, whose limbs consisted of twigs, weaved togherer in the nature of Basket-ware. These they filled with live men and after that set it on fire and so destroyed the poor creatures in the smoke and flames; the strangeness of which custom, I have here thought no amiss to represent to the view.
TheThe ceremony observed in sacrificing of men to their Idols, in a Wicker image as it was strange, so  without any question to be made, it was not begun by chance,but upon some great occasion, and something extraordinary may be fought for in the magnitude of the statue itself, whence it proceeded.
The Heathens, in their festival Fires, which were most usually attended with the sacrifices of beasts, but sometimes of men, as this was always used to represent the occasion of the solemnity, which they did by some visible sign of an apparent signification, a custom not left off at this day, as sometimes by burning the effigies of the person, either to his honour, as in deifying him, or else in public desecration of some high and notorious crime and misdemeanour, sometimes they burnt living persons themselves (even for pleasure, on their public feast days) tNo the honour of their gods, and the mirth and jovialty of their barbarous spectators
Now, there is nothing that does so easily ocur to our first aprpehension, as that they might do it in the remembrance of the phoeniciens who were men of vast and exceeding stature, who for a long time had subdued and kept them under (...) they were those Giants that so long infected the land; wherefore in public detestation of that slavery they once endured under them, this vast figure of a man, made up in wicker or osyer work, might be introduced as in scorn and derision of them, having now lost their power over them, alghough the cause why they were first made (as it often falls out) might be forgotten, and so the representation only remain.
(...) The making them in wicker rather than any other materials, may very easily be attributed to the manner of the boats the britains used on their coasts, thereby, in their own little models, representing the phoenicians navigation, their wicker vessels becoming an emblem of the phoenician ships that enslaved them.
(...) This shall suffice to have been spoken of this custome of the britains in making these wicker statues..."

Aylett Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, or the Antiquities of Ancient Britain, 1676