Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) by James MacKillop Page A

ferocious animal a person was likely to encounter. Esteemed for its physical strength and heroic defence when cornered, the boar was a prize prey for hunters. The meat of the boar, called ‘the hero’s portion’, was given prestige at banquets – thus the animal could link war and hunting as well as feasting and hospitality. The boar’s skin was thought appropriate dress for a warrior, and a boar’s head appears on the crest of the Clan MacKinnon from Gaelic Scotland.
Deification and personification of the boar would follow. A Gaulish god named Moccus, equated by the Romans with Mercury, epitomized the power of the boar. Yet there was also a Romano-Gaulish sow deity named Arduinna, associated with the Ardennes Forest. Neither of these attracted huge cults and both seem pale compared to the boar figures in vernacular tradition, even in Ireland where the boar became extinct as early as the twelfth century. An encounter with a boar kills the hero of the Irish Fenian Cycle, Diarmait Ua Duibne, an episode echoing Adonis’s fatal boar hunt in classical mythology. Diarmait’s boar is his own half-brother; Diarmait’s father Donn had killed a bastard son whose spirit was transformed into the animal. Orc Triath was an otherworldly boar or pig in Irish tradition; and the similar-sounding Torc Triath was king of the boars in the pseudo-history
Lebor Gabála
[Book of Invasions]. Elsewhere in the
Lebor Gabála
, the purported narrator of the story, the survivor Tuan mac Cairill, who tells of the different invasions to St Finnian of Moville, is transformed into a boar, among other things. Otherworldly boars are found as well in Welsh tradition under the name of Twrch Trwyth and in Brittany as Tourtain. Boars are also featured prominently in the
Mabinogi
, the exemplar of medieval Welsh literature. In the third branch,
Manawydan
, a gleaming white boar leads Pryderi, the blameless hero who appears in all four branches, into an enclosure from which he cannot escape. In the fourth branch,
Math
, the magician Gwydion takes the form of a boar and his brother Gilfaethwy a sow so that together they may produce the tall piglet, Hychdwn Hir.
    Figuring even more prominently than the boar on the Gundestrup Cauldron is an antlered zoomorphic figure, squatting in a position which resembles the half lotus in yoga. We call this figure, rather glibly, Cernunnos [the horned one], as his name is known from only one inscription, but his physical representation is so widespread that he was surely an important god of the continental Celts, or, on the assertion of some commentators, the principal god. With a man’s body and the horns of a stag, he is the lord of nature, animals, fruit, grain and prosperity. Representations of Cernunnos are found from pre-Roman times but are even more frequent during Roman occupation, especially in north-central Gaul. He is always shown with the torc or neck ring, a common artefact of Celtic religion also found around the neck of the warrior depicted in the statue of the Dying Gaul (third century BC ). He may or may not be bearded and is often accompanied by ram-headed serpents. Then again, our knowledge of Cernunnos is so tenuous that he may not be a divinity at all but rather a shaman-like priest with antlers affixed to his head.
Both the stag and the hornless deer, stag or doe, were important cult animals. As monarch of the northern forests, the stag was admired for its speed, grace and sexual prowess during the rutting season. Shed in autumn and growing again in spring, the antlers re-enact the growing season. Their hardness evokes erect male genitalia; carved antlers were used to make phallic amulets. Carvings in the Camonica Valley of the Italian Alps link the stag with sun imagery. In early Irish tradition stags might also be associated with women. Flidais, the Diana-like early goddess of wild things, is also mistress of stags. The war-goddess Mórrígan might also take the form of the stag. In Gaelic Scotland,