to its present territory.[735] Such myths may survive in legends relating how an animal led a saint to the site of his church.[736] Celtic warriors wore helmets with horns, and Irish story speaks of men with cat, dog, or goat heads.[737] These may have been men wearing a head-gear formed of the skin or head of the clan totem, hence remembered at a later time as monstrous beings, while the horned helmets would be related to the same custom.  Solinus describes the Britons as wearing animal skins before going into battle.[738] Were these skins of totem animals under whose protection they thus placed themselves?  The “forms of beasts, birds, and fishes” which the Cruithne or Picts tattooed on their bodies may have been totem marks, while the painting of their bodies with woad among the southern Britons may have been of the same character, though Caesar’s words hardly denote this.  Certain marks on faces figured on Gaulish coins seem to be tattoo marks.[739]

It is not impossible that an early wolf-totem may have been associated, because of the animal’s nocturnal wanderings in forests, with the underworld whence, according to Celtic belief, men sprang and whither they returned, and whence all vegetation came forth.  The Gallo-Roman Silvanus, probably an underworld god, wears a wolf-skin, and may thus be a wolf-god.  There were various types of underworld gods, and this wolf-type—­perhaps a local wolf-totem ancestor assimilated to a local “Dispater”—­may have been the god of a clan who imposed its mythic wolf origin on other clans.  Some Celtic bronzes show a wolf swallowing a man who offers no resistance, probably because he is dead.  The wolf is much bigger than the man, and hence may be a god.[740] These bronzes would thus represent a belief setting forth the return of men to their totem ancestor after death, or to the underworld god connected with the totem ancestor, by saying that he devoured the dead, like certain Polynesian divinities and the Greek Eurynomos.

In many individual names the first part is the name of an animal or plant, the second is usually genos, “born from,” or “son of,” e.g.  Artigenos, Matugenos, “son of the bear” (artos, matu-); Urogenos, occurring as Urogenertos, “he who has the strength of the son of the urus”; Brannogenos, “son of the raven”; Cunogenos, “son of the dog."[741] These names may be derived from clan totem names, but they date back to a time when animals, trees, and men were on a common footing, and the possibility of human descent from a tree or an animal was believed in.  Professor Rh[^y]s has argued from the frequency of personal names in Ireland, like Curoi, “Hound of Roi,” Cu Corb, “Corb’s Hound,” Mac Con, “Hound’s Son,” and Maelchon, “Hound’s Slave,” that there existed a dog totem or god, not of the Celts, but of a pre-Celtic race.[742] This assumes that totemism was non-Celtic, an assumption based on preconceived notions of what Celtic institutions ought to have been.  The names, it should be observed, are personal, not clan names.