a maritime land this could not fail to present itself in a still more vivid light: he would be seen to rise from the ocean in the morning to career over the waves and to deal slaughter among his enemies, the shades of night and the clouds that would hide his face from man; while at the end of the day the converse phenomenon would present itself in the splendours of his setting in the billows of the west.
All these remarks must be taken for what they are worth, as an attempt to show how it is conceivable that a divinity originally a god of light and the sun should come by degrees to have the character of a Roman Jupiter or of a Celtic Nodens. The theory of the extension whereby a divinity originally a sun-god became also that of the heavens, has, as already explained, its etymological complement in the interpretation of his name Zeus or Jove as the Bright or Shining One, together with the fact that the word remained also an appellative applicable to the sky or the open air. Now, though the Celtic god is not known to us under any form of this name of double import, we seem to detect him under names of other origin, but agreeing with that of Zeus or Jove in connoting sky or atmosphere; one should rather say that sky or atmosphere is otherwise their only signification. To one or two of them I would now call your attention: the most important is the Camulus of the inscriptions alluded to in the first lecture. In Camulus—in early Celtic probably Camulos—we seem to have, as was then suggested, the Celtic equivalent of the German himmel and its congeners; the Irish form was Cumall, the name of the father of Finn, who fills a great place in Irish
