regards both form and posture. Possibly the early date of the altar would warrant our supposing that the bold step had not as yet been taken of attempting any kind of image, at least in northern Gaul, of this unwieldy divinity, whom Gaulish theology had hardly succeeded in anthropomorphizing sufficiently to fit him to figure in a group bearing the stamp of Roman respectability.
All the facts at our disposal tend to show that the chthonian deity of Celts and Teutons was held to have the form of a horned beast, such as a stag, bull, goat or ram, and it is now needless to show why one cannot accept the conventional cornucopia as an adequate explanation of that idea. At the same time it would be rash to say that they had no connection with one another, for the usual account of the Cornu Copiae, or horn of plenty, traces it back to the Greek κέρας Ἀμαλθείας or horn of the goat Amaltheia, from which Zeus was nourished, and in which was to be found all that one could desire. Here we have also a horned beast older than Zeus, and the form of the myth does not compel us to assume that the goat was originally regarded as a she-goat: so it is possible that the Amalthean goat and the horned deities are to be referred to a common origin.
This would, however, not be any answer to the question whence the idea of a horned god of the nether world was derived; one might, for example, look for it in a still cruder manner of regarding him not only as the first offspring of time, but also as the first in point of order in space—that is, as the foundation and upholder of the mass of the universe. In that capacity he may have been originally pictured as a huge elk or a gigantic urus sitting quietly under the weight of the
