show
that men were called after the divine animal.[697] Similarly many
place-names in which the word _taruos_ occurs, in Northern Italy, the
Pyrenees, Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere, suggest that the places
bearing these names were sites of a bull cult or that some myth, like
that elaborated in the _Tain_, had been there localised.[698] But, as
possibly in the case of Cuchulainn and the bull, the animal tended to
become the symbol of a god, a tendency perhaps aided by the spread of
Mithraism with its symbolic bull. A god Medros leaning on a bull is
represented at Haguenau, possibly a form of Mider or of Meduris, a
surname of Toutatis, unless Medros is simply Mithras.[699] Echoes of the
cult of the bull or cow are heard in Irish tales of these animals
brought from the _sid_, or of magic bulls or of cows which produced
enormous supplies of milk, or in saintly legends of oxen leading a saint
to the site of his future church.[700] These legends are also told of
the swine,[701] and they perhaps arose when a Christian church took the
place of the site of a local animal cult, legend fusing the old and the
new cult by making the once divine animal point out the site of the
church. A late relic of a bull cult may be found in the carnival
procession of the _Boeuf Gras_ at Paris.

A cult of a swine-god Moccus has been referred to. The boar was a divine
symbol on standards, coins, and altars, and many bronze images of the
animal have been found. These were temple treasures, and in one case the
boar is three-horned.[702] But it was becoming the symbol of a goddess,
as is seen by the altars on which it accompanies a goddess, perhaps of
fertility, and by a bronze image of a goddess seated on a boar. The
altars occur in Britain, of which the animal may be the emblem--the
"Caledonian monster" of Claudian's poem.[703] The Galatian Celts
abstained from eating the swine, and there has always been a prejudice
against its flesh in the Highlands. This has a totemic appearance.[704]
But the swine is esteemed in Ireland, and in the texts monstrous swine
are the staple article of famous feasts.[705] These may have been
legendary forms of old swine-gods, the feasts recalling sacrificial
feasts on their flesh. Magic swine were also the immortal food of the
gods. But the boar was tabu to certain persons, e.g. Diarmaid, though
whether this is the attenuated memory of a clan totem restriction is
uncertain. In Welsh story the swine comes from Elysi