Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion As Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom

Front matter

THE HIBBERT LECTURES, 1886.

LECTURES

ON THE

Lecture I

Lecture I.

THE GAULISH PANTHEON.

PART I.

The inhabitants of ancient Gaul were the earliest Celts of whose religion we possess any knowledge: the sources of our information are twofold, namely, the testimony of ancient authors and that of votive tablets or other epigraphic monuments. Of the ancients who touch on Gaulish religion, Caesar, in his account of the Gallic War, may be regarded as far the most important for our propose, partly because he wrote at a time when the process of assimilating the gods of Gaul to those of Italy was only beginning, and partly because he, who was pontiff at home, had opportunities of understanding likewise much about Gaulish religion, not the least of which consisted in his having the druid Diviciacus as his constant companion and intimate friend throughout the war; still there are many reasons for accepting Caesar's account of the Gaulish pantheon with great caution. His words, so far as they bear on the individuality and respective rank of what he considered to be the chief divinities of the Gauls, are to the following effect: They worship Mercury, he says, above all others, and of him they have very many images. Their traditions make him the inventor of all the arts and the patron of roads and journeys, and they think him the most powerful in the matter of acquiring money and in the transactions of commerce. After him, they worship Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva: of these they entertain much the same opinion as other nations, namely, that Apollo drives away diseases, that Minerva teaches the elements of the various trades and arts, that Jupiter rules over the sky, and that Mars has the direction of wars. Indeed, it is usual for them, as soon as they have resolved to engage in battle, to vow beforehand to Mars all the spoils they may take in the war; so they sacrifice to him all the animals captured, and bring all the rest of the booty together to one spot. In many of their cities, heaps of these things may be seen piled up in their sacred places. Nor does it often happen that anybody so far disregards the traditional custom as to dare either to conceal any of the booty at home or carry away any of the booty set aside: in case such a crime is committed, the offender is tortured and most severely punished.

Such is the purport of Caesar's words, and it will be well to see how far Gaulish epigraphy is found to corroborate or correct them. Unfortunately for the study of Celtic religion and philology, few of the monuments of Gaul supply us with inscriptions in the national tongue; and probably all of them, whether in Gaulish or in Latin, date after the advent of the Roman conqueror and the initiation of his policy of assimilating the gods of vanquished Gaul with those of Borne. This policy took a very definite form under Augustus. He as pontifex maximus united the religions of the Roman world; but the manner in which Africa and the East were treated could not be recommended in the case of Gaul and Spain; so, when he undertook to restore the position of the Lares and Penates, he included among them the Gaulish divinities, who were henceforth styled Augusti. The result in each instance was that the name of the Gaulish god came to be treated more or less as a mere epithet to that of the Roman divinity, with which he began to be regarded as identical: thus the Gaulish Grannos became Apollo Grannus, and Belisama became Minerva Belisama, and so in other cases. Nay, the Roman god not unfrequently seized on the attributes of the native one even to the extent of assuming his Gaulish costume and non-classical appearance, as is amply proved by the images extant in great numbers in France: among others, Mercury, instead of retaining the aspect given him by Italian art, appears often in a form which has been found to recall rather the beauty and artistic perfection of the Greek Apollo. The Roman policy which reduced the Gaulish divinities to Lares Augusti did not stop at that point; for the cult of the Roman gods as such had been introduced, and, as it established itself over the country, it brought with it also that of Mithras, Cybele, and other non-Italian gods and goddesses to whom the Roman pantheon opened its doors. Further, it is found that the worship of the Roman and quasi-Roman divinities was conducted under the superintendence of men of good birth, who bore the title of pontiffs, augurs or flamens; but those in charge of the cult of the Gaulish Lares Augusti were usually freedmen, who bore the designation of Seviri Augusti, and had to discharge their office free of expense to the state. In a word, the Gaulish gods and goddesses were reduced in rank and forced, so to say, to become more or less Roman; but they were not banished or in any way proscribed.

To come to the monuments, I may say that they are to be found in the local museums of France, Switzerland, and portions of neighbouring lands formerly or still occupied by the Celts: they are moreover numerous, and the accounts of them are to be sought up and down the voluminous transactions of some scores of provincial societies, whose publications are not always easy to consult. So I find that, in the absence of a complete corpus of the ancient inscriptions of France, I cannot do better than set out from one district, the monuments of which, as far, at least, as concerns the subject of this lecture, have been laid before the public in a manageable form by competent archæologists. The district I have chosen is that which was occupied in Roman times by the Gaulish state of the Allobroges. It lay mostly on the eastern side of the Rhone, stretching from that river to the Alps, and from the Lake of Geneva to the Isère. To this must be added a certain tract on the other bank of the Rhone as also probably belonging to the Allobroges, and covering at least most of the present department of the Rhone. The metropolis of the Allobroges was the city of Vienna, now called Vienne: their country consisted in part of some of the most fertile land in Gaul, and in part of very mountainous regions. The Allobroges were Celts, though their name means 'those of another march or district:' they were so called doubtless by some of their Celtic neighbours, but the name which they gave themselves is unknown. The peoples on the eastern bank of the Rhone formed a confederation, at the head of which stood the Allobroges, so that they may be said to have had the control of the navigation of that river and of the important traffic carried on by means of it. The Allobrogic confederation formed in its turn a member of the larger one headed by the Arverni. Lastly, my principal authorities for the inscriptions found in the country of the Allobroges are Allmer's collection of the inscriptions of Vienne, and a succinct account of the gods of the Allobroges by the late M. Florian Vallentin, one of the best known archæologists of the south of France.

Mercury

is the god with whom the monuments lead one to begin, and the first inscription to which I would call your attention was found among some Roman ruins near the village of Beaucroissant in the department of the Isère, and it is said to have read: Mercurio Aug(usto) Artaio Sacr(um) Sex(tus) Geminius Cupitus, ex voto. The place of finding is recorded to have been once called Artay, though the name is unknown there now; but the names Artas and Artay occur near Vienne and Grenoble. This hardly enables one, however, to decide whether the god gave his name to one or more of these places, or the reverse was the case; but one is inclined to the former view by the occurrence of Artio as the name of a goddess in an inscription in the museum at Berne, for one can hardly be wrong in associating with Artio' s name such a Celtic word as the Welsh âr 'plough-land'; whence it would seem by no means improbable, that Mercurius Artaius was the Gallo-Roman title of the god called Mercurius Cultor in an inscription from Würtemberg. This would serve to show that Mercury was associated by the Gauls with agriculture, especially ploughing.

The next inscription to be mentioned was found at Ilières, also in the department of the Isère, and the first portion of it reads : Aug(usto) Sacr(um) Deo Mercurio Victori Magniaco Veilauno. Here the god is styled 'August,' as in the other instance, but the less usual epithet of victor is added, which is to be noticed, as he was no mere Mercury in the Latin sense. Then follow in the inscription two words of Gaulish origin, of which Magniaco would seem to be the name of a place, though it must be admitted to lack the support to be expected from the identification of its modern form as the name of a spot in the neighbourhood. The other, Veilauno, even though it should not prove a misreading of Vellavno, cannot but be regarded as practically identical with it: compare such names as Cassivellaunos, which meant the king or ruler of the hanse or league, and Catuvellauni, of the same import as Caturiges; both peoples being wont, as it would seem, to boast themselves lords of battle or war-kings. It is after the analogy of such compounds that the Gaulish element in the Hières inscription is to be read; that is to say, it makes one compound epithet, Magniaco-vellaunos, meaning, as it may provisionally be rendered, king or ruler of Magniacon or Magniacum, in allusion to some place with which the god's name was associated.

Besides the two foregoing inscriptions in honour of a distinctly Gaulish Mercury, there is monumental evidence that there were temples dedicated to the god at no less than twenty-six different spots in the country of the Allobroges. Some of the twenty-six very possibly belonged to the Greco-Roman Mercury of an imported cult; but the majority may perhaps be assumed to have been those of the native divinity.

So far, then, the monuments agree with the purport of Caesar's words in regard to Mercury; and if we now go beyond the boundaries of the Allobrogic state, we shall find them strongly supported both by the distribution of the inscriptions and the number of the statuettes of the god: the latter prove in some instances of very considerable metallic value—such, for example, as the massive silver Mercury dug up in the gardens of the Luxembourg. M. Gaidoz, in his far too brief account of the religion of the Gauls, speaks of the universality of the worship of Mercury among the Gauls, and calls attention to the number of place-names which bear evidence to it. He mentions the following, but the list might be enlarged: Montmercure, Mercœur, Mercoiray, Mercoire, Mercoiset, Mercuer, Mercurette, Mercurey, Merourie, Mercurot, Mercury. Several such names occur on Allobrogic ground, and the department of the Puy de Dôme, so named from the late Latin word podium, a hill or mountain, contains another podium or puy, known as the Puy de Mercœur; and this last designation, accommodated to the habits of another dialect, yields Montmercure, the name of another place. This completes M. Gaidoz's list, and I would call special attention to the last two as it is noticed that the Gaulish Mercury greatly affected high ground and conspicuous positions. Thus it is supposed that there was a temple dedicated to Mercury on Montmartre: it is known that he had one on Mont du Chat, near the blue lake of the Bourget, in the land of the Allobroges; another on Mont de Sène, in the Côte d'Or; and a third of considerable importance on the Donon, one of the more elevated heights of the Vosges. But far the most celebrated one remains to be mentioned: it stood on the summit of the Puy de Dôme, in Auvergne, and its foundations are said to prove it to have been an extensive and costly building. It was in fact the great temple of the Arverni; and for it was probably destined the colossal Mercury in bronze, stated by Pliny in his Historia Naturalis, xxxiv. 18, to have been made by the Greek artist Zenodorus for the Gaulish state of the Arverni. It stood 120 feet high, and the work took ten years to accomplish. The expense connected with the worship was probably borne by the cities of Gaul in common, and the fame of the temple lasted to the time of Gregory of Tours; for he relates in his Historia Francorum, i. 32, how it was destroyed by Chrocus, king of the Alamanni, which according to the historian happened in the time of Valerian and Gallien. A fragmentary inscription discovered on the spot happens to have been set up by certain negotiatores or men of business, and it serves to show that one of the names under which the god received honour there, was that of Mercurius Arvernus. The focus of his cult has to be sought in Auvergne, but we find from votive tablets that he was also known in Bavaria, in some districts of Rhenish Prussia, and on the banks of the Meuse in the Netherlands. With these must be ranked an inscription at Bittburg, in Rhenish Prussia, to—Deo Mercur(io) Vassocaleti.

But to understand the term Vassocaleti, it would be well to study carefully Gregory's words in the passage already alluded to. He, a native of Auvergne, seems to have been well acquainted with the ruins on the Puy de Dôme, and the following is his account of them: Veniens vero [Chrocus] Arvernos, delubrum illud, quod Gallica lingua Vasso Galate vocant, incendit, diruit atque subvertit. Miro enim opere factum fuit atque firmatum. Cuius paries duplex erat, ab intus enim de minuto lapide, a foris vero quadris sculptis fabricatum fuit. Habuit enim paries ille crassitudinem pedes triginta. Intrinsecus vero marmore ac museo variatum erat. Pavimentum quoque ædes marmore stratum, desuper vero plumbo tectum. Now there seems to be no sufficient reason to sever the Vasso Galate of the manuscripts of Gregory from the Vassocaleti of the Rhenish inscription. One should rather correct the former according to the latter, and then the whole becomes intelligible in the light of Gregory's description of the Gaulish temple. For caleti proves to be the genitive of the adjective which is in modern Welsh caled, 'hard,' in older Welsh calet, Irish calath of the same meaning. The other part of the Gaulish term vasso is to be equated with the Welsh word gwas, 'mansion or palace; Irish foss, 'a staying or rest,' of the same origin as the Greek ἄστυ, 'town or city;' Sanskrit vastu, 'a seat or place,' vas, 'to dwell or remain;' Eng. was, were. So Vasso-calet must have meant the hard mansion or hard palace; perhaps one should rather say the hard temple, since it is believed that the Gaulish noun survived in the old French vas, which meant a chapel, church, temple or cloister. As to the building being called hard, one has only to recall what Gregory has left on record concerning its walls of thirty feet in thickness and the solid nature of the structure generally.

Lastly, I should construe Mercurius Vassocaleti somewhat in a Celtic fashion, as meaning 'Mercury of the Vasso-calet,' or the god who dwelt in that temple. Be that so or not, the Vasso-calet was a very remarkable temple; and what is still more remarkable perhaps is, that the god should have been known by the name of this Arvernian temple of his so far away as Bittburg on the Rhine. But besides the fragmentary inscription already noticed as found on the Puy de Dôme, a complete inscription has been dug up there which supplies us with still another way of designating the god. It is said to read: Num(ini) Aug(usto) et Deo Mercurio Dumiati, Matutinius Victorinus D(ono) D(edit).

Now the name of the mountain, Puy de Dôme, or as it is called by the inhabitants of the district simply le Doum, and the epithet Dumias or Dumiates given to the god whose temple adorned the top of it, cannot well be supposed unconnected, and the question arises as to the nature of the connection between them. Now Dôme or Doum is here probably a Celtic word, and it could in that case hardly be doubted that it should be referred to the same origin as the Irish word duma, 'a tumulus or mound of any kind;' but the Irish duma means an early Celtic form, dumjo-s or dumjo-n, and this stem dumjo we seem to have exactly in Dumiati. The Gaulish word as applied to the mountain may have simply meant the top or summit, in which case the epithet of the god would refer to him as the divinity of the top of the Puy; but other explanations are possible, though I do not think it necessary to detain you with an examination of them.

So much as to the god's epithets; but none of the Allobrogic monuments seem to supply us with any of his Gaulish names, while a curious inscription referring to him comes from Thornbury on the Swale, in Yorkshire, where no name or epithet is given: he is described simply as the discoverer of roads and paths. The words are: Deo qui vias et semitas commentus est. There is, however, no great difficulty in identifying him under a Gaulish name. He was called Ogmios, or at any rate that was one of his principal names, and under that we have a very curious account of his attributes from the pen of Lucian, a chatty Greek, who wrote and travelled in the second century of our era. His words are to the following effect, and though they treat him as Heracles, you will at once see that he was no Heracles in the classic sense of that name: The Celts, he says, call Heracles in the language of their country Ogmios, and they make very strange representations of the god. With them he is an extremely old man, with a bald forehead and his few remaining hairs quite grey; his skin is wrinkled and embrowned by the sun to that degree of swarthiness which is characteristic of men who have grown old in a seafaring life: in fact, you would fancy him rather to be a Charon or Japetus, one of the dwellers in Tartarus, or anybody rather than Heracles. But although he is of this description, he is, nevertheless, attired like Heracles, for he has on him the lion's skin, and he has a club in his right hand; he is duly equipped with a quiver, and his left hand displays a bow stretched out: in these respects he is quite Heracles. It struck me, then, that the Celts took such liberties with the appearance of Heracles in order to insult the gods of the Greeks and avenge themselves on him in their painting, because he once made a raid on their territory, when in search of the herds of Geryon he harassed most of the western peoples. I have not yet, however, mentioned the most whimsical part of the picture, for this old man Heracles draws after him a great number of men bound by their ears, and the bonds are slender cords wrought of gold and amber, like necklaces of the most beautiful make; and although they are dragged on by such weak ties, they never try to run away, though they could easily do it; nor do they at all resist or struggle against them, planting their feet in the ground and throwing their weight back in the direction contrary to that in which they are being led. Quite the reverse: they follow with joyful countenance in a merry mood, and praising him who leads them, pressing on one and all, and slackening their chains in their eagerness to proceed: in fact, they look like men who would be grieved should they be set free. But that which seemed to me the most absurd thing of all I will not hesitate also to tell you: the painter, you see, had nowhere to fix the ends of the cords, since the right hand of the god held the club and his left the bow; so he pierced the tip of his tongue, and represented the people as drawn on from it, and the god turns a smiling countenance towards those whom he is leading. Now I stood a long time looking at these things, and wondered, perplexed and indignant. But a certain Celt standing by, who knew something about our ways, as he showed by speaking good Greek—a man who was quite a philosopher, I take it, in local matters—said to me, Stranger, I will tell you the secret of the painting, for you seem very much troubled about it. We Celts do not consider the power of speech to be Hermes, as you Greeks do, but we represent it by means of Heracles, because he is much stronger than Hermes. Nor should you wonder at his being represented as an old man, for the power of words is wont to show its perfection in the aged; for your poets are no doubt right when they say that the thoughts of young men turn with every wind, and that age has something wiser to tell us than youth. And so it is that honey pours from the tongue of that Nestor of yours, and the Trojan orators speak with a voice of the delicacy of the lily, a voice well covered, so to say, with bloom; a for the bloom of flowers, if my memory does not fail me, has the term lilies applied to it. So if this old man Heracles, the power of speech, draws men after him, tied to his tongue by their ears, you have no reason to wonder, as you must be aware of the close connection between the ears and the tongue. Nrv is there any injury done him by this latter being pierced; for I remember, said he, learning while among you some comic iambics, to the effect that all chattering fellows have the tongue bored at the tip. In a word, we Celts are of opinion that Heracles himself performed everything by the power of words, as he was a wise fellow, and that most of his compulsion was effected by persuasion. His weapons, I take it, are his utterances, which are sharp and well-aimed, swift to pierce the mind; and you too say that words have wings. Thus far the Celt.

According to this account, Ogmios, or the Gaulish Heracles, was the personification of what the Greeks understood by λόγος: he was the god of speech and all that conduced to make speech a powerful agency—eloquence and wisdom, the craft of Hermes, and the varied experience of the travelled old man who had seen many peoples and visited many lands. Now if we wished to discover the equivalent of Ogmjos in the languages of the Celts of the British Islands, we should have to suppose the word submitted to the operation of phonetic processes suggested by other words in their respective vocabularies: thus, according to Old Irish phonology, the, j would go and the word must appear as Ogma, as indeed it does, while in Welsh the changes implied would be rather greater: thus it would first become Ogmijos with j, sounded like English y in the word yes, liable to be modified into đ, or the sound of th in the English word this; moreover, the case-termination must go, and if the word happened to have survived among the Welsh glosses of the 9th century, it would have been found written 'ogmiđ' or 'ogmid.' The next stage would be represented with m softened to v and g to gh, sounded like g in the softest pronunciation of the German word sagen, and soon elided altogether, just as sagen not unfrequently becomes saën in colloquial German, with as little or less trace of the guttural consonant left as in the English equivalent say. The use of the word is first attested in the Black Book of Carmarthen, a Welsh manuscript of the 12th century, and the spelling has since then varied, according to the orthography adopted, from ouit, owit, ouyd, ovyd to ofydd, which is the present orthography, the pronunciation being approximately 'ovüđ,' with its second vowel nearly like a German ü. The exact meaning of the word in the earliest passages where it occurs is not easy to fix; but that of 'one skilled or versed in anything, a teacher or leader,' would suit them all. Later, the duties of an 'ovyđ' were said to be 'to improve and multiply knowledge;' and it is now the name of one of the three kinds of graduates or professors recognized by the Eisteđvod, the other two being bards and druids. Thus if I presented myself as a candidate for a degree without having any claims to be considered a bard or a druid, I should, in case I was not plucked by the presiding druid and his bardic assessors, assume the degree of 'ovyđ,' together with a Welsh proper name. In Welsh the equivalent of the Gaulish word Ogmios has always remained an appellative; but not so in Irish, where Ogma figures as the name of one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, as the gods of the Goidelic pantheon are collectively called in Irish. Nor is this all: he is signalized in Irish mythology as the inventor of writing, that is to say of the Ogam alphabet; for Ogma being much skilled in dialects and in poetry, it was he, we are told, who invented the Ogam to provide signs for secret speech only known to the learned, and designed to be kept from the vulgar and poor of the nation. The motive attributed to Ogma is an invention of a comparatively late age, for there was nothing cryptic about the Ogam alphabet; but the allusion to Ogma's skill in poetry and dialects is important, especially as there was not only a mode of writing called Ogam, but also a kind of pedantic jargon which bore that name. Now Irish legend will have it that the Ogam was so called from the name of Ogma, which is etymologically impossible; so we are left to conclude from the relation in which the words stand to one another, that Ogma was so called from Ogam or that with which he had to do. Supposing that the latter word, the meaning of which is only a matter of inference, signified a letter or a written character, then Ogma would mean he who had to do with writing—the inventor, let us say, of writing; but that is inadmissible, as the Celts probably had no knowledge of writing when the god was first called Ogmios. So we have to look for the key to the meaning of the word Ogam in the direction of spoken rather than of written language. In Scotland, Ogmic writing does not appear to have become known till it was nearly going out of use in Ireland; so one is not surprised to find that in Scotch Gaelic the word Ogam, which is there written oidheam, had no technical meaning, its ordinary significations being that of 'a notion of anything, an idea, inference, meaning, hint;' to which are to be added that of a 'book or pamphlet,' which it is also said to have had. We have probably cognate words in the Greek ὄγμος, 'any straight line, a furrow, a swathe in reaping, a path or orbit;' Sanskrit ajma-s, 'a course, run, expedition;' ajman, which had the meaning of the cognate Latin agmen, as when employed in speaking of waters, of boatmen's oars, and of speech. The various conditions of the problem of fixing the meaning attached to the word Ogam, and the word standing in the same order of priority to Ogmios in Gaulish as Ogam does to Ogma in Irish, seem best satisfied by supposing the common noun to have meant a round or train of words, fluent speech or ready utterance. This harmonizes well with the sketch of Ogmios as the old man Heracles of the Gauls, whose talk and ready wit charmed his hearers. Lucian's picture enables one to portray to oneself the wrinkled, sun-burnt face of the travelled old man, who poured forth the stream of his irresistible eloquence, while his eye flashed with delight and kindly interest. Lucian says that he turned towards his willing captives with a smiling face, and we have the same touch preserved in the Irish legend, when it calls the hero Ogma Grianainech, or Ogma of the Shining Countenance. The combining of the attributes of Heracles and Hermes in one personage, which puzzled the Greek traveller, was no passing whim of the Gauls. The view taken of the god by the Celts was even more comprehensive, for we find him in Ireland wearing not only the character of inventor of the Ogam alphabet, but also that of champion of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Apollo.

This god is placed before us by Caesar simply in the character of a repeller of diseases—Appollinem morbos depellere—and not in that of the sun-god he was believed by the Greeks to be. Nevertheless, it will be seen as we proceed that some of the Gaulish divinities, equated with him on certain of the monuments of Gaul and other parts of the Celtic world, appear to lay a just claim to be regarded as forms of the sun-god. But to come to the monuments themselves, an altar found at a place near Annecy in Haute Savoie testifies to the worship of a Gaulish Apollo called Virotutes or Virotûs. The inscription is imperfect, and now reads only: Apollini Virotuti T. Rutil(ius) Buricus. We have no further information about this god, and it is unfortunate that the interpretation of his Gaulish name or epithet is a matter of mere conjecture. It seems, however, pretty evident that it is a compound of which the first part viro may be the Gaulish equivalent of the Latin verus, Welsh gwir, Irish fir, 'true,' or else of Latin vir, Welsh gwr, O. Irish fer, 'a man.' The preference, if given to the latter, would suggest that the epithet may have meant man-healing or man-protecting, and thus one might be led to expect in the second element of the name of the god a Gaulish word related in point of origin and meaning to the Latin tutor, 'protector or defender;' but the vocabulary of modern Celts fails to render us any aid in this matter: all that can be said is, that there is no evidence that such a word as we want did not exist in Gaulish.