Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/93

Rh all, agrees well enough with the meaning here suggested for Brigantia. The name of the Brigantes was doubtless of the same origin, as was also the old Cornish adjective brentyn or bryntyn, 'noble, free,' a word represented in Welsh by brenhin, 'king,' for an older breenhin, which would imply an early form brigantinos. The idea originally expressed by all these words was that of power or greatness of some kind, whence the derivative ones of freedom, nobility, authority and prerogative; and, so far as we can judge, her names of this origin correctly described the goddess in whom the power of initiating and teaching the arts was supposed to reside, the Minerva of the Celts.

Caesar, in his brief list of the gods worshipped by the Gauls, makes no allusion to Dis; but in a subsequent passage he states, vi. 18, that they believed themselves descended from Dis Pater, a doctrine which, according to him, the druids had taught them. For this reason also they measured the lapse of time not by days but by nights, and calculated the dates of their birthdays, together with the beginnings of their months and years, in such a way as to make the night precede the day.

It is remarkable that the territory of the Allobroges is not known to supply a single inscription equating any Gaulish god with Dis, and so far it would seem as though one might construe Caesar's silence into evidence that the Gaulish Dis was not worshipped. That would, however, be an error, and Caesar's treatment of him is perhaps to be ascribed to the Roman view of Dis as a sombre and inexorable deity honoured on the coasts