Ogmios

The old man in the picture had been walking a long time. His scalp was bare at the front, the few hairs left to him were white, and his skin had gone the colour of a sailor who has spent forty years in the sun without once thinking about it. A lion’s pelt hung across his shoulders. His right fist held a club and his left a strung bow, a quiver rode at his hip, and every one of those things belonged to Heracles. Almost nothing else about him did.

Lucian of Samosata saw this painting somewhere in Gaul in the second century and could not stop looking at it. He was a satirist by trade and a Syrian by birth, a man who had learned Greek as a second language and made a living from noticing what other people took for granted, and even he was stumped. The god was Heracles. The Gauls called him Ogmios. And behind him came a crowd.

That was the part that would not resolve. A long train of men followed the old god, and every one of them was fastened to him by the ear. The chains were fine work, gold and amber together, closer to necklaces than to fetters, and a firm tug would have snapped any of them. Nobody tugged. They came along at a hurry, singing his praises, pressing forward so the links would not pull tight against their ears. Whatever was being done to them, they wanted more of it.

Then there was the question of where the chains ended. The god’s hands were full, club in one, bow in the other, so the painter had solved his problem by boring a hole through the tip of the tongue and threading the chains through that. Ogmios had his head turned back over his shoulder. He was smiling at them.

Lucian’s first theory was that the Gauls were getting their own back. Heracles had come through their country once, chasing the cattle of Geryon, helping himself as he went, and painting him as a sunburnt pensioner would be a reasonable revenge. He was still working on this when a Gaul standing beside him offered to explain, in Greek good enough to embarrass a professional rhetorician.

The explanation is the reason anyone still knows the name. Greeks give eloquence to Hermes, the man said. We give it to Heracles, because Heracles is stronger. The age is not a joke either. Speech comes into its full power late, which is why honey ran from Nestor’s mouth and why the old counsellors on the walls of Troy sounded the way they did. As for the ears and the tongue, think what one has to do with the other. The arrows are words. Sharp, well aimed, fast, and they go into the soul.

It is one of the strangest moments in ancient writing about the Celts, and close to the only one in which a Celt is allowed to speak at length for himself. Whether the man existed as described is a fair question. Lucian was a professional entertainer, the tableau serves his purposes far too neatly, and the whole essay is a preface to a lecture in which an ageing speaker asks a crowd to bear with him a little longer. But invention on that scale would be odd, and it is not the only evidence.

Two thin sheets of lead survive from Brigantium, the Roman town buried under modern Bregenz on Lake Constance, and both of them are curses. They are written in Latin cursive and were put where curses were meant to go, in the ground, out of sight. Rudolf Egger read the god’s name on both in 1943. The first, from the first century, is a defence: someone wants the men who are about to testify in court against a woman named Brutta handed over to Ogmius and consumed by death. The second, two centuries later, is uglier and far more specific. There Ogmius acts as the servant of Dis Pater and his consort, and he is asked to take a woman’s health, her heart, her kidneys, her eyes, her ears, her lower body and her belongings, so that she will never be able to marry.

This is a long walk from a smiling old man with a crowd of admirers, and the distance has been argued over ever since. Egger pointed out that curse tablets summon the gods of the underworld and nobody else, and that Lucian himself had said the figure looked less like Heracles than like Charon or Iapetus. From there it is a short step to reading the whole picture the other way round: the chains are capture rather than admiration, the followers are the dead, and the god at the head of the procession is leading them somewhere nobody comes back from. Others have found a war god under the paint, or a divine binder in the mould of Odin and Varuna, master of the knots that hold men where they are put. Not all of these can be right, and some scholars have doubted whether the tablets say Ogmius at all.

The simplest reconciliation is also the least comfortable. Speech binds. A curse is a sentence, and the people of Brigantium were trying to get hold of the tongue-chain rather than be led along by it. Nothing in the painting actually says the men following the god are pleased for good reasons.

What he could do, then, was take hold of a person through the hearing and move them, and no source sets a limit on how far. What he could not do was strike at speed or at a distance the way a thunder god strikes. His power ran along a physical line from one mouth to one particular ear, and the line had to be attached first, which means it could be refused, or simply not heard. It cost him something as well. The hole in the tongue is not decoration; the god who binds is himself pierced, permanently, at the exact point where his strength comes out. Old age in this account is not a weakness but the condition of the power working at all, which makes Ogmios the rare god who could not have done any of this when he was young.

Ireland kept something that looks a great deal like him. Ogma of the Tuath Dé is the strong-man of his people, the one who hurls an enormous stone through the wall of the hall at Tara when the newcomer Lug arrives, to see what he will make of it. He is also, in a medieval tract on writing, a man very knowledgeable in language and in poetry, and the inventor of the ogam script. The father of ogam is Ogma, the tract says, and the mother of ogam is Ogma’s hand, or his knife. The same impossible pairing, brute strength and letters, surfaces in two traditions separated by eight centuries and a sea.

Whether the two names are the same name has been fought over for more than a hundred years. Thurneysen held that the sounds do not permit it, that Gaulish Ogmios ought to have arrived in Irish as Óme rather than Ogma, and he said so with enough authority to close the question for decades. The objection has since been chipped at rather than overturned. If the equation survives, Ogmios joins a very short list of gods who can be traced across the whole Celtic world rather than one corner of it, beside Lugus, the smith Gobannios and the goddess Brigantia. One piece of the old evidence has already dropped out: a supposed goddess Ogmia, read off a fourth-century vessel from the Roman fort at Richborough in Kent and repeated in the scholarship for ninety years, turns out to have been a scrap of pottery examined upside down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ogmios?

Ogmios is a Gaulish god of eloquence, known mainly from a description written by the Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. Lucian reports that the Gauls used the name Ogmios for the god the Greeks called Heracles, and depicted him as an extremely old man leading a crowd of willing followers who were chained to him by their ears.

Why is Ogmios shown chaining people by the ears to his tongue?

The chains are an image of persuasion. According to the Gaul who explained the painting to Lucian, the Celts associated eloquence with Heracles rather than Hermes because Heracles was the stronger of the two, and they held that speech reaches its greatest power in old age. The followers in the picture are not resisting; they hurry after the god so the chains will not pull tight.

What did Ogmios look like?

Lucian describes him as bald at the front with the few hairs left to him gone white, his skin wrinkled and burnt dark, looking more like Charon or Iapetus than like Heracles. He nevertheless carries the full Heraclean kit: a lion skin over the shoulders, a club in the right hand, a strung bow in the left and a quiver at his side. The tip of his tongue is pierced, and the chains holding his followers are threaded through it.

Is there any evidence for Ogmios besides Lucian?

Yes. Two lead curse tablets from Brigantium, the Roman town under modern Bregenz in Austria, name him. On the first, from the first century AD, he is asked to consume the men who intend to testify against a woman called Brutta; on the second, from the third century, he acts as the agent of the underworld god Dis Pater to afflict a woman so that she cannot marry.

Are Ogmios and the Irish Ogma the same god?

Nobody has settled it. Both combine great physical strength with mastery of language, and Ogma is credited in medieval Irish tradition with inventing the ogam script, which makes the pairing look deliberate. The linguistic objection, argued most forcefully by Rudolf Thurneysen, is that Gaulish Ogmios should have become Óme in Irish rather than Ogma, and the debate over whether that rules out a connection is still open.

Related Entries

Esus, Taranis, Teutates, Cernunnos, Sucellus, Belenus, Epona, Nodens, Lug, Dagda, Goibniu, Nuada, Brigid, Hermes, Charon, Heracles (Hercules)