Celtic Twilight, Druid Dawn : THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A DRUID PRINCE <i> by Anne Ross and Don Robins (Summit Books: $19.95; 173 pp., illustrated)</i>

The discovery of a human leg by a peat cutter in a bog near Manchester, England, in 1984 led to the retrieval of the rest of the body, still in its shroud of peat. The mortuary of Macclesfield District General Hospital knew this was no ordinary corpse. Radiocarbon dating confirmed their suspicion. The corpse was around 2,000 years old. So began what authors Anne Ross and Don Robins describe as “an Archaeological Sensation,” in “The Life and Death of a Druid Prince.”

The authors believe their discovery is momentous, a message from their nation’s druidical past. Setting aside the precarious logic that leads them from one hazardous step to the next, this is a fascinating account of the applications of forensic technology to an archaeological puzzle. It is, as well, a curious revelation of Celtic chauvinism in modern Britain.

Peat is an excellent preservative. The corpse, a well-muscled male in his late 20s, had skin that still showed finger prints, manicured nails, and a lack of scars except for the imprint of the rope that took his life. The contents of his stomach were as well-preserved, making it possible to describe the menu of his last meal--finely ground, burnt cereal grains.

The deceased, it appears, had been kneeling when someone struck him several times on the back of the head. Unconscious, he had apparently been bled through a stab wound in his neck, then been garroted and tossed into the water of a lake that later became a bog. Thrice killed, the authors remind us, three being a mystical number among the Celts.

Naked when killed except, perhaps, for a fur armband (a few fox hairs next to his body suggest to the authors that the victim had been wearing a fur talisman). Ross, an expert on Celts, points out that they often had animal totems after which they were named. She deduces that the victim was called Lovernios, which means fox, and proceeds to refer to him as Lovernios for the rest of the book.

Combining their knowledge of the Celtic calendar, festivals, and ceremonies with archaeological chemistry, the authors draw these conclusions: Since Celtic boys were apprenticed to warriors, only those destined for the priesthood were excepted. The corpse’s unblemished skin identifies Lovernios as a priest. He died in summer because of the food in his stomach. And went willingly to this martyrdom because, like his near contemporary in Jerusalem, he believed that if he died for his people, he would be reborn and they would be saved.

The authors do not pause to consider alternatives. The unscarred skin might signal he had been captured from somewhere else; or he might have been just lucky. Likewise, they never consider that there was no evidence of struggle because he had been too frightened to move, or because he was being held, or because he was in shock, or taken by surprise. He might not have been wearing a fur band. The fox hairs could as easily have been swept into the bog with other natural debris.

Instead, the authors are carried away by the momentum of their deductions: Since it was summer, they believe the ritual murder was held on a special occasion, and what more special than the ancient feast of Beltain, held on May 1. May 1, a pagan celebration maintained into the early 20th Century in rural Britain by a rite that included seeking a scapegoat by distributing wafers, one of which was burnt!

The story here is reminiscent of the tale of the martyrdom at Masada that took place at about the same time in Israel. There, too, a hero chose the marked chit, and was left to kill everyone in the beleaguered fortress (under siege by the Romans, as the Celts were), before killing himself. That tale, like this one, was “confirmed” by contemporary archaeologists.

Having named the victim, identified him as a druid and a prince, the authors proceed to pin down the very year of his death, AD 60, the year that Roman troops destroyed the druid’s most sacred grove of trees. The authors suggest that in this darkest moment in druid history, they made their greatest sacrifice--the priest/Prince Lovernios. “His death and his sudden reappearance some two thousand years later, have focused the eyes and imagination of the world upon his life and times . . . the Druids, a long discredited topic, are once again a subject for serious study.” Thus do Ross and Robins explain not only how, but why, the body in the bog represents the greatest moment in Celtic history.

That civilization, they tell us, was not limited to a single ethnic people in the British Isles but included many peoples whose settlements stretched across most of the European continent. They shared a religion that revered nature, her holy ponds and sacred groves and included the worship of a bloodthirsty Goddess who thrived on human sacrifices.

Whether or not the body in the bog is Lovernios, “The Life and Death of a Druid Prince” is an excellent account of how archeologists use chemistry and solid-state physics in combination with folklore and recorded history to reconstruct a murky past. This particular scenario, like the story of Masada, also reflects a longing in these waning days of the 20th Century for proof scientific of an earlier, quasi-mystical civilization.