Teutates

← Encyclopedia

A silver ring small enough for a working hand, turned up from a Lincolnshire field by a metal detector, carries three letters cut into its bezel: TOT. Dozens like it have come out of the same ground — gold, silver, bronze, plain bands meant to be worn every day — and for a long time the letters meant nothing in particular to those who found them. Then a ring surfaced at Hockliffe in Bedfordshire spelling the word out further, DEO TOTA, and beside it the common Roman good-luck formula, utere felix, “use this happily.” The abbreviation had a god behind it. The god was Toutatis, and the people of east-central Britain had been wearing his name on their fingers.

The name is the plainest thing about him and the deepest. It is built straight out of the word for the people themselves.

The god of the touta

Across the Celtic languages a single word names the tribe as a bounded, self-governing whole — the people reckoned as one body, with its own land, its own law, its own dead. In Old Irish it is túath; in Middle Welsh tut, “people, country”; in Cornish tus, “people.” The philologists trace them all back to a Proto-Celtic *toutā, “tribe, tribal homeland,” and behind that to a Proto-Indo-European root *tewtéh₂ that surfaces also in Oscan touto and, far to the north, in the word that gave the Germanic peoples a name for themselves (Wiktionary, Reconstruction: Proto-Celtic toutā). The Gauls called the tribe the touta. From it they made a god: Toutatis, the one of the touta — the tribe’s own divine person, the deity to whom the people belonged and who belonged to them.

This is a different kind of name from the others in the Gaulish heaven. Taranis is the Thunderer, named from the thunder; Esus is the Lord or the Master; Sequana is the river she is. Teutates is none of these. He is not named for a power he wields or a place he haunts but for the social body he guards — the people, made into a person and set over them. That has a consequence the scholars have noticed and worried at. A god whose name simply means “of the tribe” need not be the same god from one tribe to the next. Every touta could have its Toutatis; the word may be less a personal name than a title, an office, a way of saying our god, the protector of this particular community, whoever that protector happened to be. The name appears across Gaul and into Roman Britain in enough scattered forms — Toutatis, Totatis, Tutatis, the Teutates of the Latin poets — that it reads in places less like one cult than like a function the Gaulish world kept everywhere: the guardian who is the people.

He surfaces in the documentary record at his own true distance, and the distance is worth marking from the start. The Gauls left no scripture, no liturgy, no myth of Teutates written in their own hand. What survives is of two kinds, and the two pull against each other. There are the words of outsiders — Greek and Roman writers, some of them the Celts’ conquerors, who named the Gaulish gods to explain them to a Mediterranean audience. And there are the things the Gauls themselves made and inscribed and offered — the rings, the votive plaques, the altars — which speak in the people’s own register even when they say only a name. The literary Teutates and the epigraphic Toutatis are the same god seen from two sides of the conquest.

The triad of the poet, and the difficult Roman face

The literary Teutates owes his fame to one Roman poet. In the Pharsalia, his unfinished epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Lucan — writing around 61 CE, two generations after Gaul was subdued — runs through the peoples of the Roman northwest and pauses on the gods the Gauls placated with blood. He names three: Teutates, Esus, Taranis. The lines are spare and hostile, set down to color the Gauls as fierce and strange, and they are nearly the only place in surviving classical literature where Gaulish gods appear under their native names rather than behind Roman masks. For that reason they have carried an enormous freight of interpretation.

It is tempting, and many have yielded to it, to read Lucan’s three as a worshipped trinity — a Gaulish triad, Teutates, Esus, and Taranis ruling together. The scholar Jan de Vries argued for something like it. But the caution runs the other way. There is almost no evidence outside Lucan that these three gods belong together; in the inscriptions they keep their own company and turn up apart. Graham Webster pointed out the simpler possibility — that Lucan, a poet first, chose the three names for their weight and their harsh foreign music, and that the triad is a fact about a Latin verse rather than about a Gaulish altar (Wikipedia, Teutates). The three are real gods; their grouping is the poet’s.

What happened next to Lucan’s lines is itself part of the story, and it is the source of the strangest fact about Teutates: that he has no single Roman face. Centuries after Lucan, medieval scholars annotating his text — the body of glosses known as the Berne scholia, after the manuscript that preserves them — tried to fit his three barbarous gods into the familiar Roman pantheon by the method the Romans called the interpretatio Romana, matching a foreign deity to whichever Roman god seemed nearest. The trouble is that the scholia could not hold their own answer steady. One set of glosses makes Teutates into Mercury; another makes him into Mars. He is the god of the roads and the marketplace in one breath and the god of war in the next.

That inconsistency is not a copyist’s slip; it is the signature of who Teutates was. A god defined as the guardian of the people has no fixed Mediterranean equivalent, because guarding the people is not a single classical office. In war he is Mars, the protector who fights for the tribe; in the round of ordinary life, trade and travel and the prosperity of the community, he is Mercury. The epigraphy comes down, on balance, for the warrior. Where his name is fixed to a Roman one on stone or silver, it is usually Mars — Mars Toutatis. But the wavering itself is the truth of him. He does not wear one of the borrowed faces well, because his own face was never an office. It was a people.

The people’s own voice: rings, plaques, and a name in the ground

Set the poet aside and turn to what the Gauls and Gallo-Romans left in their own hand, and Teutates comes into a different and steadier focus — not the lurid god of the Pharsalia but a god people loved and leaned on, named in gratitude and worn against the body.

The grandest single witness is a leaf of beaten silver from a hoard found about 1743 at Barkway in Hertfordshire, now in the British Museum. Shaped like a broad votive leaf tapering to a triple finial, it is the largest votive plaque of its kind known not only from Britain but from anywhere in the empire, and it carries a dedication that the Roman Inscriptions of Britain records as RIB 219: Marti Toutati — “To Mars Toutatis, Tiberius Claudius Primus, freedman of Attius, willingly and deservedly fulfilled his vow” (Roman Inscriptions of Britain, RIB 219). The man who paid for it was a freedman with a Roman name, dedicating in Roman form to a god whose first half was Mars and whose second half was the tribe of Gaul. The plaque is exactly the meeting place the conquest produced: a native god kept under a Latin prefix, honored in the manner of the empire by a man at home in both.

A silver votive plaque from the Barkway hoard, shaped like a leaf, dedicated to Mars Toutatis. Heiko Fischer, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Then there are the rings. More than fifty of them — some counts run higher — bear the abbreviation TOT, and they cluster with a sharpness that has made them one of the most telling religious distributions in Roman Britain. They concentrate in Lincolnshire and the surrounding shires east of the Trent, through Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire: precisely the territory of the Corieltavi, the Iron Age people of the British east midlands. The reading TOT for Tot(atis) was first proposed by the epigrapher Emil Hübner and long carried a degree of doubt, until the fuller rings settled it — the Hockliffe ring spelling DEO TOTA, “to the god Toutatis,” and another reading DEO TOTAT, with the divine prefix deo leaving no question that the three letters named a god (British Museum, the Barkway hoard plaque). What the rings show is not the state cult of an empire but the everyday devotion of ordinary people in one tribal region, who carried the guardian of their own community on the hand that did their work. The god of the touta was worn by the touta. Few cults of Roman Britain are so plainly the religion of a particular people in a particular place.

His name is cut elsewhere too — a Gallo-Roman graffito reading TOTATES from Voingt in the Auvergne, the carved bases of columns, scattered altars across Gaul — about ten ancient inscriptions in all, enough to confirm the spelling and the spread without ever filling in a story. The god is everywhere named and nowhere narrated. That is the shape of him: a presence vouched for by the people who invoked him, and silent of myth.

The drowning report, at its true distance

There is one account of how Teutates was served that has fixed itself to his name, and it must be handled with care, because it is the kind of claim the frame of this encyclopedia exists to weigh rather than to repeat.

The Berne scholia, the same medieval glosses that could not decide whether Teutates was Mars or Mercury, also record a mode of sacrifice. To Teutates, they say, a man was given by being plunged head-first into a vat or barrel until he suffocated. The detail is precise and grim, and it has been linked — speculatively — to a scene on the Gundestrup cauldron, the great silver vessel from a Danish bog, in which a large figure holds a man head-downward over a vessel (Wikipedia, Teutates).

Everything about the source counsels distance. The scholia are late — Carolingian glosses aggregating still earlier remarks, set down many centuries after the Gaul they describe, by Christian-era annotators working to gloss a Roman poet’s word for foreign and frightening gods. Human sacrifice was, besides, a standing accusation in Greek and Roman writing about the Celts, a charge that did reliable rhetorical work in marking a people as beyond the pale; Lucan’s whole purpose in the passage was to make the Gauls dreadful. The cauldron scene is itself disputed in subject and even in origin. None of this proves the report false. The Gauls did make offerings, and the question of human sacrifice in their religion is a genuine one. But the drowning of a man for Teutates reaches us as a late, second-hand, interested word about a rite for which no Gaul has left an account in his own voice — and it belongs in that category, flagged and held at arm’s length, not folded in among the things the inscriptions plainly say.

What the inscriptions plainly say is gentler and, in its way, larger. A freedman fulfilling a vow with thanks. An anonymous man or woman of the Corieltavi country slipping a named god onto a finger. The god in these is not the cauldron’s terror but the warden of the common life — the one sworn by, the one called on for the safety of the folk in war and the keeping of the folk in peace.

A name that outlived its world

When the western empire receded and the Gaulish gods went under, Teutates went with them, and for many centuries the name survived only in the rings turned up by plows and the puzzling lines of a Roman poet. The modern recovery of him has come from two directions at once. The metal detectorists and the museums have rebuilt the epigraphic Toutatis — the TOT rings sorted and mapped onto the territory of the Corieltavi, the Barkway plaque read and re-read, the god restored to the ordinary people who actually wore him. And the philologists have rebuilt the etymological Toutatis — the guardian of the touta, kin in his very name to the Irish túath and the whole Celtic vocabulary of the people as a sacred body.

His widest fame, oddly, owes nothing to either. In the Asterix comics of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, the indomitable Gauls swear by their gods in moments of shock and triumph, and the oath that rings out most often through the little unconquered village is par Toutatis — “by Toutatis.” Goscinny and Uderzo drew on real Gaulish names, and this one is authentic: a god attested on the rings and the altars, lifted whole into a twentieth-century cartoon, where millions who never read Lucan know him as a catchword. It is a long way from a votive leaf at a temple to a punchline in a comic strip, and the survival is a strange one. But there is a logic in it few of the other Gaulish gods could match. Teutates was always the god one swore by as one of the people — the divine person of the tribe, invoked because one belonged to it. The Gauls of the comic, holding out against Rome in the name of their own little community, swear by exactly the god whose whole meaning was the community itself.

That is finally what sets him apart among the named gods of Gaul. Cernunnos is the lord of the beasts, Taranis the wheel of the sky, Sequana the healing of the spring. Teutates is the most communal of them — not a power over some piece of the world but the people’s own self, made divine and set to guard them. A god a man could carry on a ring, because he was already what the people were.

→ Related: Taranis · Esus · Cernunnos · Sequana · Gaul · Mars · Mercury · Jupiter · Apollo · The Belgae · The Helvetii · The Galatians · Druids · Druidism · Roquepertuse · Entremont · Gournay Sur Aronde · Fontes Sequanae · The Celts · Lugh · The Tuatha De Danann · Sacrifice Ritual · Soul