Read Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Online
Authors: James MacKillop
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (7 page)
The Romans in Gaul, like subsequent imperialists, were indifferent students of the culture and language of conquered peoples. They were not incipient anthropologists ready to make close observation of outlandish and multiform religious practice. As well as being reluctant to record much detail about native religion, the Romans assumed that strange Gaulish deities were actually new guises of the gods they had worshipped in Rome. The artefacts and modes of worship might be entirely different, but the Romans sensed that there was something in
the portrayal of or the powers attributed to a god, that made him identical to, say, Mercury or Jupiter. At Bath in Roman Britain, the indigenous healing deity Sulis was merged with the Roman Minerva, as mentioned previously, so that she became known as Sulis Minerva or Sul-Minerva. The phrase for this view,
interpretatio Romana
, comes from Tacitus’
Germania
, but the mindset was shared by all Romans. Again it is Julius Caesar’s
Gallic War
that focuses what the Roman commentators observed. Drawing on classical records, we now speak of Gaulish Mercury, Gaulish Apollo, and Gaulish Minerva because we lack fuller information on native names for the deities. Gaulish Mars, then, is not a local copy of a Roman god but rather the name we must now ascribe to a Celtic deity whose cult or possible iconography we cannot know.
A systemization so patronizing and short-sighted has two severe shortcomings that are probably immediately apparent to the reader. First, Caesar attributes spheres and functions to the Gaulish gods analogous with a Roman model that may never have existed in the Gaulish context. Second, Caesar implies a Roman-style pantheon of Gaulish gods worshipped throughout the culture, whereas other evidence does not corroborate that there was ever such an ordering or that any gods were worshipped universally.
Before we disparage Caesar’s efforts further, we should acknowledge that his point of view is not alien to that of most modern readers. Our education, our sense of order and logic, derive from classical culture as reinterpreted over the centuries. Further, modern readers are likely to have studied classical mythology, Greek as well as Roman, before investigating the Celtic, as mentioned earlier. If one does not expect that the Celtic god is a duplicate of Apollo or Mars, a modern reader can be forgiven for thinking the Celtic god might be portrayed in some of the same ways, for example to be pictured in sculptures or carvings, venerated in sacred hymns or characterized in sacred narratives. Such corroboration is, alas, hard to come by.
Edward Anwyl noted as long ago as 1906 in
Celtic Religion in Pre-Christian Times
that of the 374 deity names known at the time from inscriptions and other records, 305 occur only once. Texts in the Gaulish language are disappointingly skimpy. One of the longest, the Larzac Inscription, found in a cave in southern France in 1983, employs
only 160 Gaulish words in Latin cursive script, none of them portraying divine figures in narrative.
The multiplicity of names does not necessarily mean that each name refers to a single divinity. We know from Greek tradition that important deities may be known by more than one name. Apollo, for example, is also known as Phoebus, his preferred name in the
Iliad
, just as Athena may be known as Pallas. In later Irish tradition, one name may indicate a trio of deities who are grouped together, such as Mórrígna, which includes the Mórrígan, Badb and Macha. Again among the Irish, one name may also indicate three distinct persons, as there are three discrete Machas, only one of whom is included under Mórrígna (see triplism, pp.
44–6
below). Gods may also be known under pious circumlocutions, such as ‘the god of our people’, or as Christians say, ‘Our Lord’. Joseph Vendryes (1948) reminds us that the Gaulish god called Teutates cited by Lucan (first century
AD
) appears to derive his name from the word for ‘tribe’,
teutā
(cf. Old Irish
tuath
), so that his name might very well mean ‘the god of the tribe’.
An untold number among the multiplicity of Gaulish names undoubtedly indicate local deities, unknown a half hour’s walk from their presumed demesne. The Gauls may well have anticipated later oral tradition in Ireland, Gaelic Scotland, Wales and Brittany that assigns a spirit, spectre or even ‘fairy’ to most prominent caves, promontories, waterfalls, heaths or crossroads. Such phenomena are unlikely to be called ‘gods’ by English observers, as centuries of education in classical models give us more demanding expectations, such as that a ‘god’ be something like an Olympian. We recognize that such creatures as the menacing Scottish kelpie, a ‘water horse’, or the spectral Breton
yannig
, a maritime demon, are of a lesser order, even if we are uncertain about which rubric might contain them. An isolated Gaulish inscription or a cryptic reference in a Roman text does not allow us to know the status of the supernatural figure in that long-extinct culture.
Overlying all these questions is the process modern scholars have named
interpretatio Celtica
, apparently initiated by indigenous populations. When Romans built temples to the gods of their pantheon in occupied territories, resident Gauls and Britons appear to have fused
some of their gods with those of the conqueror. The merging (or confusion) of cults is commonplace elsewhere in the ancient world. The cult of the old earth mother Ge (also Gaia, Gaea) was so closely associated with that of her daughter Themis, consort of Zeus, that the two are sometimes seen as one and called Ge-Themis in modern texts. Among the great world religions the process is called syncretism, as when, for example, the evangelism of Christian missionaries in Guatemala becomes riddled with native animist cults. This appears to be what happened in the name of Mars Vesontius in what is today Besançon in eastern France. Joseph Vendryes argues that the local god was equated with and merged into Mars, displacing the earlier interpretation so that the dedication simply linked Mars to the location (Vesontius/Besançon). So it is with Apollo Grannus of Gaul, Jupiter Parthinus of Dalmatia or Mars Rigonemetis of Lincolnshire, whose name incorporates
nemeton
, the Celtic word for sacred grove. Not all fusions are complete, however. Some other native deities may be merged with the Roman pantheon, as Mars Olloudius or Mars Teutates, or their inscriptions may appear by themselves, as Olloudius or Teutates.
Caesar speaks of six gods among the Gauls and ranks them in order of his perception of their importance: Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, Minerva and Dis Pater (or Pluto). His placement of Mercury as first among the divinities is supported by the observation that he was most honoured among the Gauls, which is additionally confirmed by modern archaeology. There is a brief moment of reassurance here as the Roman Mercury, divine messenger and god of borders, ranks in the lower middle of the pantheon while Jupiter (or Jove), of course, is the supreme Roman deity. Caesar, whom we recognize as something of an agnostic in private, allowed his observations to re-order what he had brought with him.
Gaulish Mercury, according to Caesar, was the inventor of all the arts, a guide on roads and on journeys, and the most influential in commerce and money-making. Unlike his Roman counterpart, his patronage of arts extended to those of war. Iconographic images often represent him much like the classical Mercury: youthful, beardless and equipped with the caduceus (snake-entwined traveller’s wand), the petasus (winged hat) and the purse of plenty; yet in other instances he
could be bearded and dressed in Gaulish costume. In some representations he is triple-faced, and in others triple-phallused. His cult partner might be Maia, whom the Romans identified with an old Italian goddess of the springs, or Rosmerta, a native deity associated with prosperity, fertility and motherhood. In inscriptions he is assigned at least forty-five epithets or cognomens, including Mercury Moccus, from the Gaulish word for ‘pig’, implying an association with hunting.
While the Romans never bothered to record a native name for Gaulish Mercury, modern scholars discern two. The favoured is Lugos or Lugus, found in many inscriptions and implicit in the Roman town name Lug(u) dunum, which is itself the root of the modern place names Lyon, Laon, Loudon, Leiden, Liegnitz, etc. Lugos/Lugus also looks like an anticipation of the Irish hero Lug Lámfhota, whose epithet
Samildánach
means ‘possessing many arts, crafts, trades’, the Welsh Lleu Llaw Gyffes and the calendar feast of Lughnasa. Attractive as this argument is for the continuity of continental and insular Celtic culture, other commentators suggest the name Erriapus for Gaulish Mercury on the evidence of a carved head found in the Garonne region of southern France.
Apollo’s name is immediately associated with poetry, music and the civilizing benefits of culture in modern reference, but his realm was wider in the ancient world. As the only deity of the Roman pantheon borrowed whole and entire from the Greeks, not merely adapted or fashioned into a counterpart, as Mercury was, Apollo’s cult nonetheless underwent a sea change in the journey from Delphi to the banks of the Tiber. The Roman populace favoured Apollo’s healing powers, which they linked to his association with the sun. Modern handbooks of mythology are more likely to shift this power to Apollo’s adopted ‘son’, Asclepius or Aesculapius. Yet it is the power of healing, especially at thermal springs (warmth presuming the power of the sun), that Caesar cites in distinguishing Gaulish Apollo. He is sometimes assigned one of two consorts, Damona in northeastern Gaul and Sirona, whose cult extended from what is now Hungary to Brittany. Gaulish Apollo had as many as fifteen epithets, of which the most conspicuous were Belenus, Citharoedus, Grannus, Moritasgus and Vindonnus, each of them worshipped at healing springs.
Once again, the Romans gave no thought to a Gaulish name for
Gaulish Apollo but they inadvertently preserved evidence to allow us to decipher several native identities. Among the most resonant of these is the cognomen Belenus, as it is indeed also the name of a deity who was worshipped from the Adriatic to Scotland and as late as the beginning of the third century
AD
in the eastern Alps. The Celtic root
bel
- (Gaulish: bright [?], brilliant [?]) also appears in the Irish Beltaine and the Scottish Gaelic Bealltuinn, names for May Day, one of four principal holidays on the Celtic calendar. Belenus, then, must have been a solar character like Roman Apollo. Such wisps of information hardly give us the full identity of Gaulish Apollo but they hint at shadowy but sure outlines just beyond our grasp.
Gaulish Apollo’s sometime consort Damona is the more usual cult partner of Borvo (also Bormanus and Bormo), a healing god of Gaul with shrines scattered from Bourbonne-les-Bains in the upper Marne valley to Galicia in northwestern Spain. At Vichy he is seen seated with a warrior’s helmet and shield, a horned serpent rearing up against him. If these accoutrements signal a patronage of the arts of war, then Borvo too may be Gaulish Apollo.
More tenuous but even more intriguing is Gaulish Apollo’s possible identification with Maponos, the Divine Youth, whose cult flourished in the north of Britain but was also found in Gaul. Like the others, Maponos’s name is found at healing springs, at least in Gaul. In Britain he is equated with Apollo Citharoedus (the harper/cithern player) and attributed with skill in the art of music; this latter talent, of course, was an attribute of Apollo in Greece and Rome. Maponos, most commentators now agree, contributes to the conception of the Welsh divine hero Mabon. Linguist Eric Hamp argues further that an accurate gloss of the title
Mabinogi
, for the four related narratives of medieval Welsh literature, would be ‘the (collective) material pertaining to the god Maponos’ (see
Chapter 13
). If Maponos is indeed a divine persona behind Gaulish Apollo, the shadow he cast was long. The British divinity is additionally the counterpart of the Irish Angus Óg, god of youth, beauty and (qualifiedly) love, especially when he is referred to by one of the many forms of his patronymic, Mac Óc, Mac-ind-Óc, etc.