SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Celtic and Germanic Religion II3
trend of modern scholarship, which denies any real value
to Caesar's little essay on the Gaulish religion, a Belgian
scholar has put his full confidence in the inscriptions and
documents which have been brought to light by archaeological
excavations. One could be sure at any rate of
the reliability of these documents, which the pagan
inhabitants of Gaul themselves had dedicated to the gods.
But these documents are mute; their interpretation is
most difficult and uncertain. They inform us of many
curious deities, which seem to have been utterly unknown
to or disregarded by the Roman conqueror. The names.
Mercury and Mars could scarcely have been applied to
monstrous figures like the god with the three faces or that
other one with stag-antlers on his head. Moreover we
are confronted with new names like Cernunnos or Esus.
When we try to decipher the members of this pantheon
by means of their attributes, nearly always borrowed
from the Roman way of representing their gods, we must
consider the fact that these attributes are quite arbitrarily
connected, at one time with the Gaulic Mars, at another
with Mercury. So the modern scholar I just mentioned
arrived at the quite unforeseen conclusion that the great
variety of deities is only an illusion; in fact the Giluls
had, under different forms and names, adored one great
and universal god. By a rather sweeping method of
amalgamation the chaos had been reduced to a kind of
order, even of the utmost simplicity.
Such a treatment of the available material is a warning
for everyone who attempts a solution clear-cut and
logical as scientific solutions ought to be. So the question
is not whether we can arrive at another and better reconstruction
of Gaulish religion, but rather what may have
been the source of such great misunderstandings. It
seems to me that we cannot understand any such complex
documentation as that about the Gaulish religion
without taking into due consideration the social structure
underlying it. We may be sure that Caesar got informa-