The pagan Great Midwinter Sacrifice and the ‘royal’ mounds at Old Uppsala Göran Henriksson*

 Some Christians had visited Uppsala and told Adam about the horrible Great Sacrifice, and he wrote that from every living creature, nine male individuals were sacrificed to conciliate the gods. The bodies were hanged up in a sacred grove close to the temple. This grove was considered to be so sacred by the heathens that every tree was believed to have a divine force derived from the death and decay of the victims. For a period of nine days, one man and seven male domestic animals were sacrificed. When the sacrifice was completed, one could see altogether 72 bodies hanging in the holy tree. Birds and rats ate the bodies when they disintegrated (Tschan 1959: 208 [Adam 4.27]). The excavator Bror Emil Hildebrand found some non-cremated human bones and bones from seven different domestic animals: horses, oxen or cows, pigs, rams, dogs, cats, and cocks in the filling material of the eastern mound. This may indicate that the holy tree was situated in the vicinity of the eastern mound (Lindqvist 1936: 206).

https://www.astro.uu.se/archast/Henriksson.pdf