Taranis

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In the museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye stands a bronze figure no taller than a forearm, fourteen centimeters of cast metal recovered from a site at Gourzon in the Haute-Marne. A bearded god is shown there in the manner of a Roman Jupiter, but the objects in his two hands are not the usual pair. In one he grips a forking thunderbolt. In the other he holds, set on edge like a coin balanced for the eye, a spoked wheel. The wheel is the strange thing, the un-Roman thing, and it is the wheel that names him. The Romans called such a figure Jupiter. The Gauls who carried the small wheels by the thousand and offered them at their springs and sanctuaries knew the power behind them as the Thunderer, and the Thunderer’s name, plainly said, was Taranis.

The Thunderer plainly named

The name is among the most transparent in the divine roster of the continental Celts. It is built on the Proto-Celtic root for thunder, toranos, itself descended from the Indo-European base (s)tenh₂-, “to thunder,” and across the surviving Celtic tongues the same word remains in plain daylight. Welsh has taran, thunder; Breton and Cornish the same; Old Irish torann. To speak the god’s name is to say the noise of the storm. Where many a deity must be reconstructed from an epithet or guessed at behind a Roman mask, Taranis arrives already labeled by his own language. He is the Thunderer, and the thunder is his.

This much is the surest ground a student of the Gaulish gods can stand on. The continental Celts left almost no scripture of their own, no body of hymns or theogony set down in their own hand. The priestly learning of the druids, Caesar reports, was committed to memory and not to writing, and whatever doctrine they held about the Thunderer went with them into silence. What is known of their sky-lord therefore comes from two unequal witnesses, and the two pull in different directions: a word and a poet’s line on the one side, a continent of metal and stone on the other. The first is the word itself, the etymology that any Celticist can trace and that the Britannica entry on Taranis sets out without hesitation. The second is a single line of Roman poetry, written by a man who never meant to describe a religion.

That man was Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, the poet Lucan, and the line falls in the first book of his epic of the Roman civil war, the Pharsalia or Bellum Civile, composed in the first century of the common era. Cataloguing the peoples of Gaul who were freed to their old devotions when Caesar’s legions marched away to fight Pompey, Lucan names three of their gods in a single breath of horror. The Latin runs: et quibus inmitis placatur sanguine diro / Teutates horrensque feris altaribus Esus / et Taranis Scythicae non mitior ara Dianae — those who appease unpitying Teutates with dread blood, and Esus of the savage altars who makes men shudder, and Taranis, whose shrine is no kinder than that of Scythian Diana. The triad is real and verifiable, and it can be read in the Latin and English of Lucan’s first book at Topos Text. But it is worth marking at once what kind of testimony this is.

Lucan is not a priest of Gaul. He is a Roman poet writing two generations after the conquest of Gaul, reaching for the most lurid coloring available to make a foreign altar dreadful. The comparison he draws is to the Tauric Diana, the goddess of the Crimean shore at whose temple, in Greek legend, strangers were put to the knife. The naming of Teutates, Esus, and Taranis together is the work of an outsider, and a hostile one. It does not record a worshiped trinity. Most scholars now read it as three names of weight, gathered into a verse for their dark music, not as evidence that the Gauls grouped these three in a single cult. No source before Lucan names them; what little comes after — a gloss in the medieval grammarian Papias, for Taranis — leans on Lucan alone. The Thunderer enters the written record already wearing a borrowed and unfriendly mask.

The wheel and the bolt

Set the literary witness aside, and the god speaks in another voice entirely — not in words but in metal, and not from a single hand but from a great many. Across Gaul, into Britain and Spain, and densely through the Rhineland and the upper Danube, the spoked wheel recurs as a sacred sign. It is worked in stone on altars and reliefs; it is cast small in bronze, silver, and gold; above all it is made into the rouelle, the miniature votive wheel, a disk of four to eight spokes a few centimeters across, produced and offered in quantities that run to the thousands. In the sanctuaries of Belgic Gaul, in pits and along riverbanks, these little wheels turn up by the hoard. Ancient Pages describes them as the common currency of devotion to the wheel-god, worn as amulets and given as offerings to draw down his favor and his protection.

What the wheel meant admits more than one reading, and the readings are not exclusive. It has been taken for the turning vault of the heavens, the great wheel of the sky in its revolution. It has been taken for the disk of the sun, the bright wheel rolling along its track. And it has been taken for the thunder itself — the rolling, rumbling sound that the god’s name already carries, the heavy wheel of the storm grinding across the upper air. The thunderbolt that the god so often holds alongside the wheel binds the senses together: the flash and the noise, the fire and the rolling, the two halves of the storm gathered into one figure’s two hands. Whatever the precise gloss, the wheel is unmistakably the sign of the sky’s power, the emblem of the lord who rides above and lets the weather fall.

The wheel-god of Le Châtelet de Gourzon (Haute-Marne), a Gallo-Roman bronze about fourteen centimeters tall, holding a six-spoked wheel and a thunderbolt. Musée d’archéologie nationale, Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Photograph PHGCOM. via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Here a caution must be entered, and kept in view. The literary Taranis named by Lucan and the wheel-god of the monuments are joined more by inference than by proof. There is no surviving image of a wheel-bearing god that also bears, scratched beside it, the name Taranis. The identification rests on a chain of reasonable links: the name means thunder; the thunder-god of an Indo-European people is naturally a sky-lord; the wheel is the sky-and-storm sign; the Romans equated the wheel-god with their own sky-lord Jupiter, who is likewise a thunderer. The chain holds, and most who study the matter accept it. But it is a chain, an argument built of parts, not a caption read off a statue. The wheel-god and the named Thunderer meet in the mind of the interpreter, and the meeting should be named as such.

Jupiter on the column

When Roman ways settled over Gaul and the Rhine frontier, the native sky-lord did not vanish; he was translated. The practice the Romans themselves named interpretatio Romana — the reading of a foreign god as one of their own — set Taranis beside Jupiter, the obvious match, sky-lord answering to sky-lord and thunderer to thunderer. Inscriptions carry the fused name. An altar at Chester in Britain, dated to the year 154, is read as a dedication to Jupiter under a Taranis-form of the name; on the Continent the equation is steady enough that the wheel sometimes appears in the hand of a figure otherwise wholly Jupiter, eagle, scepter, and all.

The translation was not a swallowing. A Gaulish farmer who set up an altar to Jupiter on the Rhine frontier was not abandoning his sky-lord for a Roman one; he was naming the power he already knew in the public language of the age, the way a man uses the official spelling of his own name. The eagle and the scepter were new furniture. The thunder and the wheel were old. That continuity is why the wheel keeps surfacing in contexts that are otherwise thoroughly Roman, an attribute that belongs to no Italian Jupiter and can only have come up out of the native ground.

The most monumental expression of this fusion stands across the Gallo-Roman north and the German provinces in a type of monument the modern study calls the Jupiter-column. From the middle of the first century into the third, in Germania Superior, Gallia Belgica, and beyond, builders raised tall columns crowned with a single startling group: a god on horseback, thunderbolt in hand, his mount rearing over and trampling down a giant whose legs taper into coiling serpents — the anguiped, the snake-legged earth-power. The Jupiter-column, as the type is described, shows the sky-rider breaking the chaos-monster beneath him, and on some examples the wheel rides openly among the god’s attributes. The image reads on two levels at once. To a Roman eye it recalls the war of gods and giants, the order of heaven crushing the brood of earth. To the local devotion that paid for so many of these columns, it is the sky-lord himself, raised on his pillar above the fields, the Thunderer set high and victorious over the powers below. As the survey of Gallo-Roman religion makes plain, this was not a foreign cult imposed but a native sky-worship dressed in Roman stone.

The dark report

There remains the matter Lucan first raised and the medieval commentators sharpened. To the manuscripts of the Pharsalia are attached a set of marginal explanations, the so-called Berne Scholia, named for the library that holds the principal copy. These notes, written long after the world they describe, set down for each of Lucan’s three gods a manner of killing the victim. For Teutates the victim was drowned, plunged head-down into a vat; for Esus, hanged from a tree and cut; and for Taranis, burned. Several persons, the scholia say, were burned together in a wooden vessel.

These reports must be handled for exactly what they are. They are late — centuries after the rites they purport to record. They are second-hand, glosses on a poet who was himself a hostile outsider, and the scholia do not even agree among themselves across their different manuscript families, sometimes swapping the modes between the gods. The motif of Gaulish human sacrifice was a Greco-Roman commonplace, a thing said of barbarians by the people who conquered them, sharpened in Caesar’s account of the burning wicker figure and passed down the line of writers who never stood in a Gaulish grove. That such offerings were made in some form, the archaeology of the war-sanctuaries does not let one dismiss out of hand. But the specific machinery of the Berne Scholia — this god takes the drowned, that god the burned — is not a fact of the religion. It is a late notice, uncertain and external, and the careful reader gives it no more weight than its distance allows. Notably, the wheel itself, the god’s own surviving sign, carries no trace of such a thing; the rouelles in their thousands are gifts, not gallows.

Among the sky-sovereigns

Placed against the wider field of Indo-European religion, Taranis falls naturally among the sovereign thunderers — the lords who hold the bolt and rule the upper air. There is Zeus of the Greeks with his levin-fire, the Roman Jupiter who received the Gaulish god’s worship under his own name, the hammer-wielding thunder-god of the Norse north, the Vedic and the Slavic storm-lords each in their place. The likeness is genuine and instructive: a family of peoples sharing a deep inheritance produced, again and again, a sky-father whose weapon is the lightning and whose voice is the thunder. But likeness is the right word, and not descent. Taranis is not a copy of Jupiter, nor Jupiter of him; both are growths from a common older stock, cousins rather than parent and child. The comparison illuminates; it does not collapse one god into another.

Among the gods of Gaul themselves he keeps distinct company. He is not the antlered lord of the beasts that Cernunnos is, nor the tribe made divine in the manner of Teutates, nor the woodcutter at the tree of Esus, nor the healing presence of Sequana at her spring. Where the druids of Gaulish religion taught, by Caesar’s report, that the soul did not perish but passed onward — a teaching of reincarnation that gave the warriors of the Helvetii and the Belgae their famous indifference to death — Taranis governs the visible drama of the sky, the weather over the touta and its fields. His is the thunder that any farmer fears and any host marching to war hears as an omen overhead. The Celts who carried their gods eastward, the Galatians of inner Anatolia, took the same inheritance with them; the storm-lord of the open sky is not a local Gaulish invention but a possession of the whole far-flung Celtic world, recognizable wherever the spoked wheel turns up in the ground.

What the wheel kept turning

The afterlife of Taranis is a quiet one compared with the gods who left myths. He has no story that survives, no deed recorded in narrative, only a name that means thunder, a sign that is a wheel, and a poet’s hostile line. Yet the wheel proved durable. It rolled out of the pre-Roman sanctuaries onto the Jupiter-columns, where it kept turning in the hand of a Romanized sky-lord for three centuries. The small rouelles outlasted the empire’s interest in the grand columns, passing into the stock of ornament and charm. And the name itself never died from the living tongues: the Welshman who hears taran in a storm and the Irishman who hears torann are still, without knowing it, speaking the god’s own word.

The difficulty the figure leaves behind is the one already named — that the Thunderer of the verse and the wheel-god of the bronze are two witnesses who never quite shake hands, joined by a strong argument rather than a single labeled stone. Modern study has set Taranis firmly among the great sky-sovereigns and read his wheel as the sign of heaven’s turning power, and that placement is sound. But the gap between the word and the image is part of what he is. He stands as the named Thunderer of the Gauls, the lord whose power the worshiper held in the palm as a little spoked wheel of bronze, the sky’s force made small enough to carry and large enough to crown a column over the fields.

→ Related: Teutates · Esus · Cernunnos · Sequana · Jupiter · Gaul · Druidism · Druids · The Helvetii · The Belgae · The Galatians · Gournay Sur Aronde · Roquepertuse · Entremont · Fontes Sequanae · The Celts · The Dagda · Lugh · The Tuatha De Danann · Sacrifice Ritual · Reincarnation · Soul · Zeus