Minerva Belisama;[1] and we have the same name in its Gaulish form of the dative case, βελησαμι, in the Vaison inscription (p. 46), which commemorates the making of a grove for the goddess by Segomaros. A trace of the goddess' name is to be detected in the cognomen read Belismius[2] in a Roman inscription at Carleon on the Usk; and Ptolemy gives a river on the west coast of Britain the name Βελισάμα: it was probably the Ribble. Compare the case of the Dee, which the Welsh always regarded as a goddess, in all probability a goddess of death and war.
Were one to be guided by the apparent similarity of the name Belisama to the first element in that of the god Belatucadros, one might be led to suppose that Belisama's chief concern was war, and that she only resembled Minerva as a war-goddess; but it must be admitted that Caesar's words—Minervam operum atque artificiorum initia tradere—afford no ground for supposing that it was any such a martial Minerva he had in view. Further, if we only turn to Irish literature, we there find traces of exactly such a Celtic goddess as he too briefly mentions: an article in the Irish Glossary, called after the name of Cormac, king-bishop of Cashel in the 9th century, tells us that there was a goddess called Brigit, poetess and seeress, worshipped by the poets of ancient Erinn; that she was daughter of the Irish god known
- ↑ Orelli, 1431, 1969. The two entries seem, owing to an oversight of the editor's, to represent one and the same inscription.
- ↑ Hübner, No. 97. Belismius is the reading adopted by Hübner, but it is not at all certain: see Lee's Isca Silurum, pp. 19—21, pl. viii. 1, where he reads Belisimnus. What one would expect is Belisamius, Belisemius or even Belisimius.
