Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/171

Rh Without amplifying the argument further, it may be said that the identification of the God of the Mallet as a Gaulish Thor is at least as probable as, and even more consonant with Celtic tradition than, its assimilation with Dis Pater and the remark of Caesar about that deity. Its identification with Charon or Pluto is more evident in such a bas-relief as that of Varhêly in Austria, where we get a woman and child and a three-headed dog associated with this figure, or in that at Marseilles, where the god and female figure have a dog between them and a boat beneath. Elsewhere the mallet has given place to a thunderbolt, and the god has evidently been identified with Jupiter, while in Provence we find the same divinity transformed into Sylvanus. Like other native Gaulish gods it has undergone many varieties of description, and it would be dangerous to build on any one possible form under which it is found a wide-extended theory of belief. Most of these assimilations depend upon beliefs not native to Gaul, but introduced from outside by settlers, who adapted to their needs the traditions of the local cults. As regards the local cults themselves, they are as mysterious to us to-day as they were to the Romans in the first century. The comparison instituted by M. de Barthélemy between this god of the mallet and the mallet-bearing functionary at the Roman games who bore away the bodies of dead gladiators, called by Tertullian Dis Pater, seems too far-fetched to have much bearing on the subject. It does not seem, any more than do the varied literary sources from which M. D'Arbois has derived his argument, to bear the full weight of the deductions drawn from it; nor does his equation of the Gaulish triad of gods Teutates, Taranus, and Hesus, as forms of the god of death, with Bress, Balor, and Tethra, the three Fomorian chiefs, seem quite as convincing as it is ingenious. It necessitates a homogeneity of belief and legend between Gaul