SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

n6 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
far all seems clear and simple. But the name of the town
Lugdunum tells us that the Gaulish name of this Mercury
was Lugos. From Irish sources we know that the great
feast of this god, the so-called Lugnasad, took place on
the first of August. Now it must be evident that the
emperor Augustus could not have arranged this most
important cult in Lyons, if Mercury-Lug had been no
more than a god of merchants.
The identification of Mercury and Lugos may give us
the clue to the solution of the problem. Piecing together
what we learn about the Gaulish god and the Irish Lug,
we may arrive at a better understanding of the character
of this deity. Still we must realize that we cannot expect
much help from comparison with the Roman god. In
Caesar's time the religion of Rome was completely hellenized.
In the Roman Mercury there is much more of the
Greek Hermes than of the original Roman god. How
can we expect to know what kind of deity this Gaulish
god was?
Here I must make a small digression. The Gauls
belong to the Indo-European family. They spoke an
Indo-European language, they must have inherited from
these ancestors a social structure, an ideology belonging
to it, a religion embodying it. Nowadays we do not
believe any more that the Indo-European people still
belonged to a primitive stage of culture; on the contrary
there are so many remarkable correspondences between
different peoples belonging to this common stock that
they must be treated as part and parcel of a common
heritage. Comparative studies of latter years have
revealed to us that already in this remote Indo-European
time a well-balanced system of deities had come into
existence, and that moreover in historical times this
system, more or less altered and developed, lived on
among the descendants of the ancestor-people. This
self-same system must form the basis of the Gaulish
religion too.