museum at Saint-Germain, and in that of certain Gaulish coins, on one side of which is seen a squatting figure holding a torque in its right hand.[1]
Such are some of the principal data for our purpose, and from them I infer that, like Dis and Pluto, Cernunnos was the god of the dead or the nether world. As a corollary, we may regard all three as the gods of riches or the lords of the metallic wealth of the world: this rôle of the classical deities is indicated by their names. Thus Pluto, in Greek Πλούτων, is derived from πλοῦτος, 'wealth,' just as Dis, genitive Ditis, is supposed to be a contraction of dives, gen. divitis, 'wealthy;' though the name Cernunnos did not, at least directly, connote wealth of any kind, the attributes of the god, such as the money-bag and the torques, than which no symbols more expressive of wealth were known to the Gauls, amply made up for it; it appears they also conveyed much the same meaning to the minds of the Germans and the Romans.[2]
There are at least two questions which will have occurred to you respecting the Gaulish Dis: why he squatted
- ↑ It is worth mentioning, as bearing on the question of the distribution of the statues of the god, that a mutilated one of him was discovered in the department of the Puy de Dôme in the year 1833: if not again lost, it should be now in the museum at Clermont. I owe this information to a notice by M. Gaidoz in the Rev. Arch. for 1880, iv. 299—301. See also the Rev. Arch. for 1882, xliij. 125, where the wide distribution of the tricephal has induced M. Mowat to declare for the improbable hypothesis, that it was after all but the Roman Janus more or less completely naturalized in Gaul.
- ↑ Mowat, Bull. Épigr. de la Gaule, i. 114-5, where he gives, besides other authorities, Diod. Siculus, v. 27; Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxiij. 10, and others; also sundry coins and inscriptions.
