Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/60

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44
I. THE GAULISH PANTHEON.

for letter to the Anglo-Saxon beadu and the Norse 'böđ,' 'war or battle.' This vocable, both in its Celtic and its Teutonic forms, enters freely into the composition of proper names of men; but it will here suffice to mention the Bodvogenus of another inscription. It would mean a man descended from the goddess Bodva; and much the same must have been the import of the Gaulish Bodvognatus,[1] a name to be detected reduced in Welsh to Bodnod. The equation, if well grounded, of the name of the Gaulish goddess with that of the Irish war-fury, would imply that her cult was widely spread, and that she was a considerable figure in the Celtic pantheon, whether she is to be identified or not with the Mórrígu or great queen.

Lastly, the poet Lucan makes us acquainted with another important designation of the war-god, in his well known lines in the Pharsalia, i. 444, &c.:

'Et quibus immitis placatur sanguine diro
Teutates, horrensque feris altaribus Hesus;
Et Taranis Scythicæ non mitior ara Dianæ.'

The name of the first of Lucan's triad occurs in an inscription found in Hertfordshire, which gives the dative Marti Toutati[2] and one cannot help regarding Toutates

  1. Caesar, Bell. Gall. ii. 23.
  2. Hübner, No. 84. An inscription found at York, and another at old Carlisle, suggest the respective spellings Totati (Hübner, Ephemeris Epigraphica, iii. 313, No. 181) and Tutati Cocidio (ibid. p. 128; Hübner, No. 335): they are difficult to read, but Totati is countenanced by the name Totatigens borne by a Gaulish soldier in the Cohortes Vigiles at Rome (Rev. Celt. iii. 272; Berlin Corpus, vi. 2407), while Tutati must be left doubtful, though not only Toutati, but also Tōtati and Tūtati seem to be perfectly legitimate forms. Here it may also be mentioned that Toutati derives some confirmation from a monument