Lugus
|
|
Lugus or Lugos was a deity worshipped in Gaul, Britain, Ireland and other Celtic regions. No inscriptions have survived bearing his name (although dedications to the Lugoves, a plural form, have been found in Switzerland and Spain), but his existence can be deduced from ancient placenames and from figures in later Celtic mythology, such as the Irish Lug and Welsh Llew Llaw Gyffes.
| Contents |
Gaulish Mercury
Julius Caesar in his De Bello Gallico identified six gods worshipped in Gaul, giving the names of their nearest Roman equivalents rather than their Gaulish names. He said that "Mercury" was the god most reverenced in Gaul, describing him as patron of trade and commerce, protector of travellers, and the inventor of all the arts. The Irish god Lug bore the epithet samildánach (skilled in all arts), which has led to the identification of Caesar's Mercury as Lugus. Juliette Wood interprets his name as deriving from Old Celtic *lugios, oath, which would support this identification as Mercury is a god of contracts.
Iconography
The assertion that Mercury was most reverenced in Gaul is supported by the number of Gaulish inscriptions to Mercury. His iconography includes birds, particularly ravens; horses; the tree of life; dogs or wolves; a pair of snakes (cf Hermes's Caduceus); mistletoe; shoes (one of the dedications to the Lugoves was made by a shoemakers' guild; Lugus's Welsh counterpart Llew Llaw Gyffes is described in the Welsh Triads as one of the "three golden shoemakers of the island of Britain"); and bags of money. He is often armed with a spear. His is frequently accompanied by his consort Rosmerta ("great provider"), who bears the ritual drink with which kingship was conferred (in Roman mythology, Mercury's consort is Maia, meaning in Latin "she who provides"). Unlike Roman Mercury, who is always a youth, Gaulish Mercury is occasionally also represented as an old man.
Triplism
Gaulish Mercury is associated with triplism: sometimes he has three faces, sometimes three phalluses, which may explain the plural dedications. This also compares with Irish myth. In some versions of the story Lug was born as one of triplets, and his father, Cian, is often mentioned in the same breath as his brothers Cu and Cethen, who nonetheless have no stories of their own. Several characters called Lugaid, a popular medieval Irish name thought to derive from Lug, also exibit triplism: for example, Lugaid Riab nDerg and Lugaid mac Trí Con both have three fathers.
Sacred Sites
High places (Mercurii Montes), including Montmartre, the Puy-de-Dôme and the Mont de Sène, were dedicated to him. In Christian times he seems to have been assimilated to the archangel Michael, and many of the former Mercurii Montes became "St Michael's Mounts".
Continuity in later Celtic narratives
In Ireland, Lug was the victorious youth who defeats the monstrous Balar “of the venomous eye.” He was the godly paradigm of priestly kingship, and another of his appellations, lámhfhada “of the long arm”, carries on an ancient Proto-Indo-European image of a noble sovereign expanding his power far and wide. His festival, called Lughnasadh (“Festival of Lugh”) in Ireland, was commemorated on 1 August. When the Emperor Augustus inaugurated Lugdunum ("fort of Lugus", now Lyon) as the capital of the Roman Gaul in 18 BC, he did so with a ceremony on 1 August. At least two of the ancient Lughnasadh locations, Carmun and Tailtiu, were supposed to enclose the graves of goddesses linked with terrestrial fertility.
Lugus has also been suggested as the origin, not only of Lug and Llew Llaw Gyffes, but also the legendary British king Lud and the Arthurian characters Lancelot and Lot.
Foreign Parallels
It has been suggested that the Germanic deity Wotan was influenced by Gaulish Mercury.
Etymological clues to fundamental nature
Lugus's name has been interpreted as deriving from the Indo-European root *leuk, light, and he has long been considered a sun god. This etymology is problematic because Proto-Indo-European *k did not become *g- in Proto-Celtic, but remained *k. The direct descendent of the Proto-Indo-European word *leuk- (white light) being *Leuk- as in the name of the Celtic God Leucetios. So if one applies the principles of Occam's razor, *leuk is not the most plausible etymology . What is more, *Lugu- can be reconstructed for the name of Lugus and Lugus appears in Celtic myths as a much more complex character than a sun-god. Indeed, the reconstructed lexis of the Proto-Celtic language as collated by the University of Wales [1] (http://www.wales.ac.uk/documents/external/cawcs/pcl-moe.pdf) suggests that the name is likely to be ultimately derived from the Proto-Celtic *Lugios, connoting the semantics of ‘oath' and 'lies'. So this mythological character may fundamentally have been a personification of the supposed assurance deemed inherent in oath-pledging, in trickery as a means of gain, in good craftsmanship, in cleverness, in good kingship and in desirable weather patterns, as conceived in Pre-Christian Celtic Pantheistic Polytheism.
Lugus as Logos and Logoi?
If his name refers more to the meaning of oath rather than lies, as Juliette Wood at Cardiff university has suggested, Lugus may be a personification of loyalty and, by extension, reliability and predictability in human nature and physical systems at large, a token of order as opposed to chaos. This predictability is sometimes called Logos. If this notion is correct, it would account for Lugus's later identification with the Archangel Michael and other Christian concepts. Since ancient peoples often perceived a close link connecting air-flow with wind, wind with words, words with logic and logic with Logos, this would explain the syncretism shown with Mercury-Hermes, whose apparent embodiment of crossing-over activity subsumed these notions in the Greco-Roman. If these qualities are true of the multi-faceted god Lugus,Lugus may have originally personified Air-flow, a hypernym which successively incorporates various hyponyms within hyponyms such as wind, speech, words, lie, oath, loyalty, logic, logos. Since the name would be derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *leugh- ‘to lie’, the name of the god cannot be cognate with the name of the Nordic god Loki, though the character of Loki might make a comparison tempting to draw, since Loki is also a trickster who uses the power of words to his own ends. Incidentally, Loki and Logoi, a minor Greek god personifying words and lies, may be cognates.
Survival of the Name in Toponyms
His name was commemorated in numerous place-names, such as Lugdunum (Celtic *Lugdunon or *Lugudunon, "fort of Lugus"; modern Lyon, France), capital of the Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis. Other such place-names include Lugdunum Clavatum (modern Laon, France) and Luguvallium (modern Carlisle, England).
Other places which are likely named after him include:
- Lusignan, Loudun and Montluçon in France;
- Lugano, Locarno and Lugarus in Switzerland;
- Loudon in Scotland;
- Dinlleu in Wales;
- Legnica in Poland
- Luga in Russia;
- Lugansk in Ukraine
- Leiden in the Netherlands;
- Luggude in Sweden;
- Lugoj in Romania;
- Lugo in Italy;
- Lugo in Galicia, Spain.
- Lusatia, a region in Germany, Poland and Czech Republic
- Lusitania, a Roman province (today part of Portugal and Spain
Bibliography
- Ellis, Peter Berresford, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology(Oxford Paperback Reference), Oxford University Press, (1994): ISBN 0195089618
- MacKillop, James. Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0192801201.
- Wood, Juliette, The Celts: Life, Myth, and Art, Thorsons Publishers (2002): ISBN 0007640595
External Links
- Lugus: the Many-Gifted Lord (http://www.mythicalireland.com/mythology/tuathade/lugus.html), an essay by Alexei Kondratiev
- Lugus: the Gaulish Mercury (http://www.mabinogion.info/Lugus.htm)