Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/169

Rh the knees, and ornamented with crosses and figures, and with a band round the waist. M. Salomon Reinach accepts M. Barthélemy's identification of this figure with Dis Pater or Pluto, but there are difficulties in the way of an acceptance of this view, one of the most serious being the rare use of the mallet as a symbol of the infernal deity. This is only found elsewhere among the Etruscans and in the north of Italy, the larger number of the God-mallet type in Gaul being found in the Rhone Valley; there is no trace of them in Britain, Aquitaine, or Belgium. As usual, the figure undergoes a large variety of transformations, and is found with numerous different symbols, and in different groups, so that it has been at one time identified with Sylvanus, at another with Jupiter, or with the Serapis of Graeco-Egyptian art.

A more probable theory, however, is that put forth by M. Cerquand, and supported by him by a large number of illustrative legends, that this god of the mallet is an Indo-European divinity corresponding to Thor the Hammerer. He points out that the first hammers or mallets were of stone like the first knives, the word hamar signifying at once "stone" and "hammer," and he considers that the hammer or mallet has been substituted for an original stone or thunderbolt, as the hammer of Thor was for the silex of Donar. Two Gaulish pre-Roman coins bearing the emblem of a