of the triad on these monuments is uncertain but since
the supporting divinities are now male, now female, now male and female,
it probably represents myths of which the horned or three-headed god was
the central figure. Perhaps we shall not be far wrong in regarding such
gods, on the whole, as Cernunnos, a god of abundance to judge by his
emblems, and by the cornucopia held by his companions, probably
divinities of fertility. In certain cases figures of squatting and
horned goddesses with cornucopia occur.[103] These may be consorts of
Cernunnos, and perhaps preceded him in origin. We may also go further
and see in this god of abundance and fertility at once an Earth and an
Under-earth god, since earth and under-earth are much the same to
primitive thought, and fertility springs from below the earth's surface.
Thus Cernunnos would be another form of the Celtic Dispater. Generally
speaking, the images of Cernunnos are not found where those of the god
with the hammer (Dispater) are most numerous. These two types may thus
be different local forms of Dispater. The squatting attitude of
Cernunnos is natural in the image of the ancestor of a people who
squatted. As to the symbols of plenty, we know that Pluto was confounded
with Plutus, the god of riches, because corn and minerals came out of
the earth, and were thus the gifts of an Earth or Under-earth god.
Celtic myth may have had the same confusion.

On a Paris altar and on certain steles a god attacks a serpent with a
club. The serpent is a chthonian animal, and the god, called Smertullos,
may be a Dispater.[104] Gods who are anthropomorphic forms of earlier
animal divinities, sometimes have the animals as symbols or attendants,
or are regarded as hostile to them. In some cases Dispater may have
outgrown the serpent symbolism, the serpent being regarded locally as
his foe; this assumes that the god with the club is the same as the god
with the hammer. But in the case of Cernunnos the animal remained as his
symbol.

Dispater was a god of growth and fertility, and besides being lord of
the underworld of the dead, not necessarily a dark region or the abode
of "dark" gods as is so often assumed by writers on Celtic religion, he
was ancestor of the living. This may merely have meant that, as in other
mythologies, men came to the surface of the earth from an underground
region, like all things whose roots struck deep down into the earth. The
lord of the underworld would then