The Roman poet Lucan, full name Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39-65 CE) refers to three gods in his pharsalia (de bello civili) worshipped by the Gauls: Taranis, Esus and Teutates. I have discussed the latter two deities in the past but in this essay I wish to focus on Taranis, also known as Taranus and Tanarus.
To understand his functions it would be helpful to examine first the etymology of his name. Taranis derives from the proto-Celtic *torano, which means 'thunder'; this word in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European verb *(s)tenh2, 'to thunder'. Cognates for this are to be found in Celtic languages such as Old Irish (torann), Old Breton (taran) and Middle Welsh (taran).
Interestingly, the name of the god is preserved in the ancient name for the River Po in Italy, Tanarus. The Celts, as many of my readers will know, penetrated into northern and central Italy in the 5th to the 4th centuries BCE. I should point, however, that the term Tanarus is a linguistic construction for the Po by J.T. Koch and R. Matasovic, which is not supported by the classical authors. That said, Roman authors would have been highly unlikely to have mentioned this for obvious reasons! Tanarus certainly lent its name to a tributary of the Po, the Tanaro, which is a slightly different matter. Apart from this one river, the Tanaro, there are no other rivers named after this deity. Neither are there any place names linked to the god on mainland Europe.
Apart from Lucan, no other author in antiquity refers to Taranis/Taranus/Tanarus. Let us see exactly what Lucas said about him:
'Transferral of the warfare pleased you too, Treviri, and you, Ligures, now shorn of hair but once in all of Long-Haired Gaul unrivalled for your tresses flowing gracefully over your necks; and the people who with grim blood-offering placate Teutates the merciless and Esus dread with savage altars and the slab of Taranis, no kinder than Diana of the Scythians.'
There are however, scholia and commentaries which give a little more information about this god, such as commenta Bernensia ad Lucan:
'Taranis Dispater is appeased in this way by them: some men are burned in a wooden trough.' (My translation).
'...the leader of wars and of the heavenly gods, the great Taranis-Jupiter, once accustomed to be appeased with human heads, but now rejoices over livestock.' (My translation).
adnotationes super Lucanum:
'Taranis called Jupiter by the Gauls, who is appeased with human blood.' (My translation).
glossen ad Lucan:
'Tharanis Jupiter. All these were worshipped in the Teutonic regions as Taranus, as a day of the week is called in Teutonic.' [The Latin in this verse is corrupt, so I have used my intuition for this one!] (My translation).
The reference to burning victims in a 'wooden trough' brings to mind the statement made by Caesar in his de bello Gallico:
'Others have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers, they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flame.' (Book 6, chapter 16, translation by McDevitte and Bohn.)
Strabo (64 BCE-24CE) writing in his Geographica Book IV about the Gauls states:
'It is said that they have other modes of sacrificing their victims, that they pierce some of them with arrows, and crucify others in their temples, and that they prepare a colossus of hay and wood, into which they put cattle, beasts of all kinds, and men, and then set fire to it.' (Translation by Hamilton and Falconer).
He does not, however name any of the gods whom the Gauls sacrificed to. Lucan is the only classical author to name the Celtic deities by their original names without resorting solely to an interpretatio Romano, unlike Caesar and Tacitus; this makes his work extremely valuable to us. It must be pointed out though that as Lucan never travelled to Gaul he relied upon secondary sources for his knowledge.
Is there any epigraphic evidence for Taranis? Yes, there are a number of inscriptions from the 4th century BCE to the third century CE containing the god's name, most of which are of a magical or religious nature and inscribed in Latin, Gaulish and Raetic, the latter being a Tyrsenian language, not an Indo-European one. The (extinct) Tyrsenian language group includes Raetic, Etruscan and Lemnian.
In addition to epigraphic and literary evidence we also have iconographic evidence in the form of statuettes and the 'Jupiter columns' found in Roman Germania. The Romans equated their supreme deity, Jupiter with Taranis and consequently there is a certain amount of shared symbolism. Taranis and Jupiter are both associated with the spoked wheel, which may be seen on the Gundestrup cauldron which dates between 200 BCE and 300 CE. However, scholars are divided on the issue of whether Taranis can be assumed to be the wheel god featured in the iconographic evidence as they (correctly) point out that the wheel is a solar symbol, not associated with a thunder god (apart from Jupiter, who encapsulates both aspects).
Some modern day practitioners of Celtic neo-paganism incorrectly assume that Taranis was a pan-Celtic deity. There is absolutely no evidence to support this assumption. No such figure exists in the surviving Welsh and Irish mythological sources. Cognate words in Old Irish and Middle Welsh on their own should not be taken as evidence for the existence of the god himself in those two cultures. The inscription from Chester which refers to Iovi Tanaro (Jupiter-Tanaris) is Roman, not British evidence. No doubt, the dedicator was a Celtiberian from northern Spain as is evident from his name, Lucius Elufrius Praesens of the Galeria voting tribe. His residence was in Clunia, Spain.
Surviving written sources for Irish mythology provide no evidence at all for a thunder deity, and there may be several reasons for that:
. The name and deeds of any postulated thunder god may not have survived the conversion to Christianity. This could because, like thunder gods in other cultures, he was demonised by the Church or simply faded from memory over time.
. The climate of Ireland may not have warranted a god whose function was specific to thunder, due to a lack of any dramatic thunder in that island.
The Welsh mythological sources likewise do not refer to a thunder god but it is clear from the linguistic and placename evidence that such a deity existed despite not surviving in any textual sources. Unlike Ireland, Wales does have place-names suggestive of a thunder deity:
. Moel Taran. (A mountain in Snowdonia, meaning 'Bare hill of the thunder').
. Tarren Taranau. (A mountain ridge in Gwynedd, meaning 'Ridge of the thunders').
. Carnedd y Taranau. (A summit in the uplands of Gwynedd, meaning 'Cairn of the thunders').
The prevalence of hills and mountains bearing the name 'thunder' or 'thunders', all with evidence of pre-Christian cultic activity present in the high, exposed and storm-ridden landscape (prehistoric cairns, barrows, et cetera) as well as the linguistic evidence (Gaulish and Welsh both being P-Celtic languages) can be considered to be suggestive for the existence of the deity Taranis among the ancient Britons, but not the Irish. Old Irish is a Q-Celtic language and the Irish have followed a different line of development to the ancient Britons and Gauls. The strong linguistic, epigraphic and iconographic evidence in Gaul and Roman Germania thus strengthens the argument for a Welsh Taranis.
Another line of enquiry which is pertinent in our quest for a British thunder god is folklore. There are examples from Welsh folklore of giants being associated with mountains, one of which is the story of the giants of Cader Idris and the Dysynni Valley in which the sound of thunder is associated with giants fighting or rolling stones. My late father, who was of 1/4 Welsh ancestry would often tell me when I was a child that the sound of thunder was merely giants in the sky rearranging their furniture. This may have been a faint echo of old Welsh thunder lore. Folklore is often a watered-down and sanitised version of ancient pre-Christian beliefs, tolerated by the Church. 'Giants' fill the place once occupied by the gods; indeed, in many mythologies such as the Norse and Greek, the giants or titans are an earlier race of gods who are often portrayed as the enemies, sometimes the friends, of a newer race of gods.
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