Induced by these and the like considerations to regard Taranis as the name of a goddess, I can of course not identify her with Taranucos or Taranucnos. These names I should regard rather as belonging to Esus, and borne by him as the wielder of the hammer or thunderbolt. Taranis would then take her natural place by his side as his associate; and the mistake, which this way of looking at the question would suppose the ancient scholiast to have committed when he made Taranis into a Gaulish Jupiter (p. 47), becomes easily intelligible. But Zeus was not the only wielder of the thunderbolt even in Greek mythology; both Here and Athene could on occasion make use of that dread missile; and even Typho is known to have handled it, though not with signal success. That the ancestors of the Welsh once associated thunder and lightning with a goddess as well as with a god, is rendered fairly certain by the fact that one of the terms for a thunderbolt is Careg y Gythreulies, the Stone of the She-demon. But when we come to the question of the attributes of Taranis, we are embarrassed by a lack of information; the analogy, however, of Thor helps one to form a consistent theory. For, as in his case, it may be supposed that the associate of Esus was either the Earth in the character of his mother, or else, more probably, some personification of the same origin, but conceived more like Thor's wife Sif, the Scandinavian Ceres of the yellow corn-field.
If, then, the idea has anything in its favour, that Esus—and likewise Thor—was provided by ancient imagination with thunder as a means of defending his friend the shepherd and farmer, it would be natural also that his associate should possess the same means of repelling the powers
