Teutates

A silver leaf came out of a chalk pit in Hertfordshire in 1744, half a metre of it, thin enough to flex in the hand, its surface worked into veins running off a thick central spine. Somebody had driven the inscription through from the front in rows of small punched dots. It says what thousands of Roman dedications say: a vow made, a vow paid, willingly and as deserved. The man who paid it was Tiberius Claudius Primus, a freedman of one Attius. The god he paid it to was Mars Toutatis.

Toutatis is not really a name. It is built on the Celtic word for a tribe, *toutā*, the same root that survives in Old Irish *túath*, Middle Welsh *tut* and Cornish *tus*. God of the tribe. Protector of the people. Latin had no diphthong to match the Gaulish one, so Roman speakers approximated it with the nearest sound they had, which is how the poet Lucan came to write Teutates, and how a god whose whole business was the small, local, blood-bound group acquired four spellings and a walk-on part in an epic about the death of the Republic.

Lucan began the *Pharsalia* around 61 CE. In a catalogue of Gaulish peoples celebrating the withdrawal of Caesar’s legions, he names three gods without translating them into Roman equivalents, which practically nobody in Latin literature does: the peoples who placate with grim blood-offering Teutates the merciless, and Esus dread with savage altars, and the slab of Taranis, no kinder than Diana of the Scythians. Lucan had never been to Gaul. He was working from sources that have not survived, and his purpose was to make the Gauls sound barbarous and Caesar sound careless with the edges of the world. The three names may have stood together in real Gaulish practice. They may equally have stood together because they scan.

No Greek or Latin writer mentions Teutates before those lines. Lactantius picks the name up two and a half centuries later while listing pagan atrocities and adds nothing Lucan had not already given him. An eleventh-century lexicographer named Papias does the same. Everything the ancient world has to say about this god fits inside half a sentence of a war poem.

The vivid material arrives much later, and from the margins of the page. Lucan was a school text throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, which generated centuries of teachers writing explanations into the manuscripts. The *Commenta Bernensia*, preserved in copies of the ninth to eleventh centuries but carrying layers at least as old as the fourth, glosses the line plainly: in the language of the Gauls, Mercury is called Teutates, and among them he was worshipped with human blood. Then it supplies the method. A man is lowered headfirst into a full *semicupium* and left there to suffocate.

The word *semicupium* appears nowhere in classical Latin. It parses out as half a barrel, a tub, something a body fits into upside down and not much further. Wet oak, the cold shutting over the ears, the staves creaking as the shoulders wedge. The same passage disposes of the other two gods with equal economy: Esus took his victims hung in a tree and cut apart, Taranis took his burned alive in a wooden vat.

That barrel has attracted a great deal of company. On one interior plate of the Gundestrup cauldron a large figure holds a small warrior head-down over a vessel, a resemblance close enough to be irresistible and loose enough to settle nothing, since nobody knows what that scene depicts and nobody knows what Teutates was supposed to look like. Françoise Le Roux traced the sacrificial vessel through the cauldrons of medieval Irish story, which turn up by turns nourishing, murderous and capable of raising the dead. Jan de Vries noted the Irish habit of heroes drowning themselves in vats when trapped inside burning houses. The man recovered from Lindow Moss, garrotted, struck on the head, his throat opened and his face in the water, has been read as one more instance of the same rite. All of it is suggestive. None of it is evidence.

The commentators could not even agree which Roman god he was. One set of glosses in the *Commenta* makes Teutates into Mercury, Esus into Mars and Taranis into Dis Pater. A second set inside the same work makes Teutates into Mars, Esus into Mercury and Taranis into Jupiter. The scholiast is visibly shuffling contradictory material and picking badly. The stones are steadier. Wherever an inscription pairs Toutatis with a Roman god, that god is Mars.

The stones also sit somewhere revealing. Monuments to him cluster along the military frontier, at Seckau in Noricum, in Rome, on the Hertfordshire plaque and its companions in Britain, while the smaller portable offerings surface in shrines and houses. In Gaul, where he is supposed to belong, he is scarce to the point of embarrassment: one inscribed stylus from Jort in Calvados, five scratched fragments of pottery from Beauclair. Both sites sit on the border between tribal territories, which is exactly where a god of the tribe would be worth naming out loud.

The best evidence is the smallest. Around sixty-eight Roman finger rings inscribed TOT have been found in Britain, in gold, silver and bronze, dating to the second and third centuries, and the great weight of them comes out of Lincolnshire and the country either side of it, the old territory of the Corieltauvi. Emil Hübner proposed in 1877 that the three letters abbreviate Tot(atis). Two rings found in the 2000s that read DEO TOT, to the god Tot, closed the argument for most people. The ordinary version of this is a bronze hoop worn thin and bright on the inside, riding on the hand of a man at a market on the Trent who knew perfectly well whose tribe he was in. Hübner himself offered an alternative, that TOT stood for *tot annos vivas*, so many years may you live, and Martin Henig and Jack Ogden allowed that the letters might be a *vox magica*, a charm meaning nothing at all.

Along the Danube stand altars to Jupiter Optimus Maximus Teutanus, sixteen of them from Gellért Hill in Budapest alone. Upper Germania has a Mercurio Touteno. Dacia has a Mars Toutanicus. The name keeps shifting and the Roman god attached to it keeps shifting with it, which is the strongest argument that Toutatis was never a single god in the first place. Wolfgang Meid and Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel have both taken the view that every tribe had its own Teutates, a protector addressed by office rather than by name. Jürgen Zeidler objects that the suffix is too uniform for independent invention; had each people coined the title separately, we should see tribal-father formations of half a dozen shapes instead of one.

Medieval Irish heroes swear *tongu do dia toinges mo thúath*, I swear by the god by whom my tribe swears, and pointedly decline to say which god that is. The formula preserves the shape of the thing with the name removed. Goscinny and Uderzo, needing an oath for a village of cartoon Gauls, gave Asterix “By Toutatis!” and made the name better known than any altar has managed. They landed nearer the truth than they can have meant to.

What he looked like is a blank. No surviving image identifies itself as Teutates. Émile Thévenot proposed reading him into an armed figure on the carved stone from Mavilly-Mandelot in Burgundy, but the monument carries no label, and an unlabelled warrior in Gaul could be almost anybody. The god is known entirely through what people did for him and what they called him while they were doing it.

His power is coextensive with the group. He guards the tribe, meaning its fields, its herds, its boundary and its fighting men, and he takes payment in the most expensive currency the tribe possesses. He answers to being sworn by. He travels, which is why the name reaches an altar in Rome and a frontier province in the Alps, carried there by men a long way from any *túath* of their own.

His limits are that same fact seen from the other side. A god of the tribe has no purchase outside it. He cannot be appealed to as a universal power, cannot arbitrate between peoples, and has nothing to offer a man who has stopped belonging anywhere. Once a tribe dissolves into a province, the god is left without a constituency. The rings run out in the third century.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Teutates?

Teutates was a Celtic god whose name means “god of the tribe”, from the Gaulish word for a people or tribe. He is named in Lucan’s *Pharsalia* alongside Esus and Taranis as a god the Gauls placated with human sacrifice, and every inscription that pairs him with a Roman deity pairs him with Mars. He is attested in Gaul, Roman Britain, Rome itself and along the Danube frontier.

How did the Gauls sacrifice to Teutates?

According to the *Commenta Bernensia*, a medieval commentary on Lucan that preserves much older material, victims of Teutates were lowered headfirst into a full *semicupium*, a small barrel or half-barrel, and left to suffocate. The same passage says Esus received victims hung in a tree and dismembered, and Taranis received victims burned in a wooden vat. No classical source confirms the description, and it survives nowhere else.

Was Teutates one god or a title used by many tribes?

Scholars are divided. Wolfgang Meid and Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel argue that “Teutates” was a general title for a tribal protector, so that each Gaulish people had its own, an idea supported by the related divine names Teutanus, Toutanicus and Toutiorix, which attach to Mercury, Apollo, Jupiter and Mars inconsistently. Jürgen Zeidler counters that the suffix is too uniform to have been coined independently by many separate tribes.

What are the TOT rings?

The TOT rings are around sixty-eight Roman finger rings found in Britain, mostly in Lincolnshire and the surrounding territory of the Corieltauvi tribe, inscribed with the three letters TOT and dating to the second and third centuries CE. Emil Hübner suggested in 1877 that TOT abbreviates Tot(atis), and two rings reading DEO TOT, “to the god Tot”, support that reading. Alternative explanations have been offered, including the good-luck phrase *tot annos vivas* and a meaningless magical charm.

Why do the characters in Asterix say “By Toutatis”?

“By Toutatis!” is an oath invented for the Asterix comics by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, drawing on the real Gaulish god named by Lucan. There is no ancient record of Gauls using that exact formula, though medieval Irish heroes swear by “the god by whom my tribe swears”, which is the same idea without the name attached.

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