culture-god practically the head and chief of the Gaulish pantheon. Here, again, it is worth the while to compare Celts and Teutons together: in the next lecture it will be attempted to show that the Teutonic counterpart of the Gaulish Mercury and culture-god was Woden; and it is interesting to find that in this matter both families of nations, as represented by the Gauls and the Norsemen respectively, proceeded on the same lines, in that they made the culture hero paramount over the old gods. Even in the far east, the same thing is to be noticed in the case of Indra becoming the head of the Hindu pantheon, and, as it is put in the Rig Veda, sending the other gods away like (shrivelled-up) old men.[1] It is gratifying to come upon such traces of progress in the theology of our early ancestors, whether Celts or Teutons; and still more so to think that in the practice of their heathen religion it meant the establishment, probably, of a milder worship, making in some small degree for humanity and greater regard for human life. The older cult of the divinity that was par excellence the god of druidism, with its direst horrors, would probably have left in the hands of the druids despotic power, which the spread of the worship of the Culture hero or Man-god may be supposed to have indirectly tended to lessen. That is, however, but an inference, and the data only amount to negative evidence to the effect, that the sacrifice of human victims to the Gaulish Mercury is unknown, while the contrary is the case as regards the older divinities, Teutates, Esus and Taranis. This would seem likewise to apply to the Scandinavian Woden, as contrasted
- ↑ Max Müller's Hib. Lectures, p. 280.
