Bandua

The dish is silver, small enough to hold in two hands, and it shows a walled crown on a head that scholars have been arguing about for sixty-odd years. The figure stands in rough country. There is a tree behind, worked so its shape insists on wildness, and a heap of rocks that may be meant for the mouth of a cave. Four altars ring the figure. Three of them are burning. The fourth has gone out, and nobody has ever explained why the silversmith left it cold.

Around the scene run the letters BAND ARAVGEL, and that is where the trouble starts, because those letters are the closest thing to a portrait this god will ever get.

The piece sits in the Calzadilla Collection in Badajoz. Where it came from is genuinely uncertain, probably S. Cosmado at Mangualde in northern Portugal, possibly somewhere in Cáceres. Antonio Blanco Freijeiro published it in 1959 and read the divinity as a Tyche, a Fortune, since she carries the cornucopia and the mural crown. She carries none of Fortune’s other gear though. No rudder, no sphere, no wheel. And she is caught mid-libation, which is what minor gods do, not what great ones do.

Everywhere else Bandua appears in stone, and in stone the god looks male.

There are somewhere near fifty of these altars now, up from about thirty when one specialist counted them in 2005, scattered from Ourense down through the Portuguese interior into Cáceres, with a stray or two flung far east into Toledo. They are Latin inscriptions, cut in the Roman centuries by people whose own language was not Latin, which is why the spelling wanders so badly: Bandi, Bandei, Bande, Bandu, Bandue, Banduae. What does not wander is the shape of the dedication. The god’s name comes first, and then a second word naming a place. Bandua Lansbricae. Bandi Oilienaeco. Bandue Veigebreaego. Bandue Aetobrigo. Bandua Roudeaco. Several of those endings carry -briga or -bris, the word for a fortified hill town, so the god is being addressed as the Bandua of that particular fort, and no other.

Picture a man on a granite outcrop above his own roofs, paying a mason to cut nine or ten letters into a block of local stone, wet with the rain that comes off the Atlantic and into those hills nine months of the year. He gives the god’s name. Then he gives the name of his hillfort, because a god without an address would be no use to him. That is the entire ritual gesture, repeated fifty times across four hundred kilometres.

Juan Carlos Olivares Pedreño worked through the whole corpus and found the pattern held with unusual discipline. In the Lusitanian and Galician territory, Bandua is the indigenous god most often named beside epithets that refer to vici, pagi and castella: villages, rural districts, hillforts. Not families. Not clans. Not tribes. This is a god of the second rank of settlement, the level at which people actually lived, and the level Rome eventually hollowed out.

Which leaves the small matter of who Bandua was.

The epithets are grammatically masculine, so the god should be masculine. The silver dish shows a woman. Javier de Hoz cut through this by proposing that Bandue was never a personal name at all, but an ordinary Lusitanian noun meaning something like “divinity”, of the same order as the Latin deus or tutela or lar, which would mean the epithets are doing all the work and there are as many gods here as there are place names. Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel took a different road and reconstructed a divine couple, a male Bandus and a female Bandua, on the model of Gaulish pairs like Bormanos and Bormana. Francisco Marco Simón looked again at the figure on the dish and suggested it might be male after all, a Genius Loci in a tunic. Virginia Muñoz Llamosas concluded that the theonym was masculine, as the epithets say, and that the silversmith simply borrowed a foreign woman’s body to express a function nobody had a local image for. The Romans had a formula for exactly this predicament, sive deus sive dea, whether god or goddess, used when you needed the protection and did not know who you were talking to.

The etymologies fork just as badly. Luis Michelena traced Band- to *bhendh-, to bind or tie, which gives a god of the bond that holds a community together. Blanca María Prósper rejected the form Bandua entirely and worked from *gwem-tu-, a ford or a crossing, making this a god of the way in: the gate, the threshold, the point where you enter the settlement, a western cousin of Janus. Others have pulled the name toward water on the strength of river names and the Galician place name Bande, which sits very close to the densest cluster of altars.

The warrior reading, the one that made Bandua a Celtic Mars, hangs almost entirely on a single altar from Rairiz de Veiga in Ourense reading Martis socio Banduae, to the companion of Mars, Bandua. Hübner listed it among the false or badly read inscriptions, CIL II 215*. Lorenzo and Bouza thought it a misreading. Rivas judged the text disordered and incomplete and out of keeping with everything else in that region. Antonio Rodríguez Colmenero defended it and Olivares Pedreño argued that Rairiz sits precisely on the line where the cult of an indigenous Mars gives way to the cult of Bandua. The god’s most famous attribute rests on a stone that may not exist.

There is one further thread, and it is a long one. Until the Church stamped it out in the later eighteenth century, villages across Extremadura kept the rite of the Toro de San Marcos on the twenty-fifth of April. The stewards of the confraternity walked up to the herd, picked a bull by eye, named it Marcos, and called it. The bull came. It followed them down to the church, stood through Vespers and Mass while women hung garlands and rings of bread on its head and horns, and when the office ended it recovered its temper and bolted for the hills with nobody willing to stand in front of it. Father Feijoo recorded all of this with visible distaste. Julio Caro Baroja studied it and admitted he had never found a satisfying explanation. Olivares Pedreño noticed that the map of the bull rite and the map of the Bandua altars in eastern Portugal and Extremadura sit almost on top of one another, and proposed, with stated caution, that the eighteenth-century bull was the last of the god. Others have pointed out that the twenty-fifth of April was also the Roman Robigalia, and that the confraternities have Franciscan roots, and that a coincidence of territory is not a chain of transmission.

What Bandua could do is narrow and clear. The god held one place and the people in it, and that protection did not travel; a man from Lansbriga had no claim on the Bandua of Aetobriga, and would have thought the question odd. The limit is written into the same evidence. As Rome dissolved the political weight of the castella and moved power into a handful of larger towns, a god defined entirely by the fort he belonged to had less and less to hold. The altars stop. The cult sites pass quietly under the patronage of saints, some male and some female, which is about as fitting an ending as this god could have got.

The Spanish Society for the Sciences of Religions named its journal Bandue, and put the silver dish on the cover. A god whose name may not be a name, whose sex is disputed, and whose function nobody can fix, turned out to be the right emblem for a discipline that spends its life on the same problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bandua?

Bandua is a pre-Roman god of western Iberia, worshipped by the Gallaeci and the Lusitanians in what is now Galicia, northern and central Portugal, and Cáceres. The name survives on roughly fifty Latin votive altars, almost always followed by an epithet naming a specific hillfort or village. Bandua appears to have protected that one named community rather than a family, clan or tribe.

Is Bandua a god or a goddess?

The evidence points both ways and specialists have not settled it. The epithets attached to the name on the altars are grammatically masculine, which argues for a god, but the only surviving image, a silver dish in the Calzadilla Collection in Badajoz, shows a female figure in a mural crown. Proposed solutions include a divine couple named Bandus and Bandua, a masculine deity depicted through borrowed Roman female iconography, and the theory that Bandua was never a personal name at all.

What does the name Bandua mean?

There is no agreed answer. Luis Michelena derived it from a Proto-Indo-European root *bhendh-, “to bind”, giving a god of the bond that holds a community together, while Blanca María Prósper derived it from *gwem-tu-, “ford” or “crossing”, making Bandua a god of thresholds and entrances comparable to the Roman Janus. Javier de Hoz went further and argued that Bandue was an ordinary Lusitanian word meaning roughly “divinity”, specified each time by its epithet.

Was Bandua a war god linked to Mars?

The link to Mars rests on one disputed altar from Rairiz de Veiga in Ourense, inscribed Martis socio Banduae, “to the companion of Mars, Bandua”. Hübner catalogued it among the false or badly read inscriptions as CIL II 215*, and other scholars have called it a misreading, while Rodríguez Colmenero and Olivares Pedreño defended it as genuine. Without that stone the warrior interpretation loses most of its support, and the surviving evidence points instead to a protective, tutelary role.

What is the Toro de San Marcos and how is it connected to Bandua?

The Toro de San Marcos was a rite held in Extremadura on the twenty-fifth of April, in which a bull was chosen from the herd, named Marcos, led into the church for Vespers and Mass, garlanded, and then released; the Church suppressed it in the later eighteenth century. Juan Carlos Olivares Pedreño observed that its geography closely matches the distribution of Bandua altars and proposed that it was a survival of the ancient cult. The suggestion is contested, since the same date carried the Roman Robigalia and the confraternities behind the rite have Franciscan roots.

Related Entries

Endovelicus, Nabia, Ataegina, Enchanted Moura, Genius loci, Lares, Mars, Janus, Teutates, Taranis, Sucellus, Epona