Teutates

(European mythology)

A Celtic war god worshipped with human sacrifices in Gaul. His name may derive from the word ‘tribe’ or ‘people’: Gallic, touta; Irish, tuath. On one hand it is suggested that Teutates, as Julius Caesar called him, was the chief of the Gallic pantheon; on the other, that this is not the name of an individual deity but of a general attribute that could be applied to different deities. If a war god, Teutates would have been identified with Mars.

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[teuto-valos, god of the tribe/people; cf. Welsh tud, tribe; Irish tuath, tribe]

One of the three principal divinities of Gaul, along with Taranis and Esus, according to the Roman poet Lucan (1st cent. AD) in his Pharsalia, on the subject of Julius Caesar's conquest, 100 years earlier. As Lucan reports, each divinity was propitiated with human sacrifice; and a 9th-century commentary on Lucan claims that Teutates favoured drowning, especially on 1 November (Samain). Modern commentators on the 4th-3rd cent. BC Gundestrup Cauldron profess to identify Teutates with the figure plunging victims into a vat of water. Speculation on the 4th- cent. BC execution of the man found in Lindow bog in 1984 has suggested he may have been a ritual sacrifice to Teutates or Taranis. A wargod, Teutates may be linked both to Mars, who bears the epithet Mars Toutates from a site in Barkway, Hertfordshire, and to Gaulish Mercury.

Despite the considerable number of inscriptions to Teutates in both Gaul and Britain, he remains a fairly shadowy figure, as his name is most likely a title, making him a tribal protector; such a title might be granted to any number of different divinities. The name of the Irish genealogical hero Tuathal Techtmar may derive from the same stem.

Bibliography

• Paul-Marie Duval, ‘Teutatés, Esus, Taranis’, Études Celtiques, 8 (1958), 41–58; Les Dieux de la Gaule (Paris, 1976), 29–31