Sites Sacred to the Celtic Zeus.
By way of recapitulating the burden of these last remarks, one may on the whole say that the supreme god of the ancient Aryans was originally designated, not the Sky or Heaven, but the Bright Being, a name known in Greek as Ζεύς, genitive Διός, and its congeners, which, while recalling the idea of sky, heaven or atmosphere, referred to him, in the first instance, as the great light and sun of the world of the early Aryans (p. 116). This harmonizes with the fact that Zeus was represented as haunting the elevated points of the countries inhabited by the Hellenic race, whether one regard the highest ground in Greek cities, which was usually crowned with his temple, or the loftiest mountains in their lands, the summits of which were also sacred to him. It might, however, be urged that it was but natural for the high esteem in which the god was held to find its expression in the placing of his image or fane on a site physically high, and especially in the case of him whom the worshipper thought supreme. It might be added in the same direction that this haunting the heights was not peculiar to him or any special kind of divinity, seeing that the Welsh god of the dead, Gwyn ab Nûᵭ, displayed the same predilection for high ground, and that in Gaul a god of a very different nature, the Gaulish Mercury, had his temples crowning the Puy de Dôme, the Donon and other elevations in that country. Still it may be doubted whether this way of looking at the matter could lead us to the true and original reason for associating Zeus with the mountain-tops and the pure ether in which he was supposed to dwell in his celestial city on the
