um--a myth
explaining the origin of its domestication, while domestication
certainly implies an earlier cult of the animal. When animals come to be
domesticated, the old cult restrictions, e.g. against eating them,
usually pass away. For this reason, perhaps, the Gauls, who worshipped
an anthropomorphic swine-god, trafficked in the animal and may have
eaten it.[706] Welsh story also tells of the magic boar, the _Twrch
Trwyth_, hunted by Arthur, possibly a folk-tale reminiscence of a boar
divinity.[707] Place-names also point to a cult of the swine, and a
recollection of its divinity may underlie the numerous Irish tales of
magical swine.[708] The magic swine which issued from the cave of
Cruachan and destroyed the young crops are suggestive of the
theriomorphic corn-spirit in its occasional destructive aspect.[709]
Bones of the swine, sometimes cremated, have been found in Celtic graves
in Britain and at Hallstadt, and in one case the animal was buried alone
in a tumulus at Hallstadt, just as sacred animals were buried in Egypt,
Greece, and elsewhere.[710] When the animal was buried with the dead, it
may have been as a sacrifice to the ghost or to the god of the
underworld.

The divinity of the serpent is proved by the occurrence of a horned
serpent with twelve Roman gods on a Gallo-Roman altar.[711] In other
cases a horned or ram's-headed serpent appears as the attribute of a
god, and we have seen that the ram's-headed serpent may be a fusion of
the serpent as a chthonian animal with the ram, sacrificed to the dead.
In Greece Dionysus had the form both of a bull and a horned serpent, the
horn being perhaps derived from the bull symbol. M. Reinach claims that
the primitive elements of the Orphic myth of the Thracian
Dionysos-Zagreus--divine serpents producing an egg whence came the
horned snake Zagreus, occur in dislocated form in Gaul. There enlacing
serpents were believed to produce a magic egg, and there a horned
serpent was worshipped, but was not connected with the egg. But they may
once have been connected, and if so, there may be a common foundation
both for the Greek and the Celtic conceptions in a Celtic element in
Thrace.[712] The resemblances, however, may be mere coincidences, and
horned serpents are known in other mythologies--the horn being perhaps a
symbol of divinity. The horned serpent sometimes accompanies a god who
has horns, possibly Cernunnos, the underworld god, in accordance with
the chthonian ch