(d) Above a seated god and goddess on an altar from Malmaison is a block carved to represent three faces.  To be compared with these are seven steles from Reims, each with a triple face but only one pair of eyes.  Above some of these is a ram’s head.  On an eighth stele the heads are separated.[95]

Cernunnos may thus have been regarded as a three-headed, horned, squatting god, with a torque and ram’s-headed serpent.  But a horned god is sometimes a member of a triad, perhaps representing myths in which Cernunnos was associated with other gods.  The three-headed god may be the same as the horned god, though on the Beaune altar they are distinct.  The various representations are linked together, but it is not certain that all are varying types of one god.  Horns, torque, horned snake, or even the triple head may have been symbols pertaining to more than one god, though generally associated with Cernunnos.

The squatting attitude of the god has been differently explained, and its affinities regarded now as Buddhist, now as Greco-Egyptian.[96] But if the god is a Dispater, and the ancestral god of the Celts, it is natural, as M. Mowat points out, to represent him in the typical attitude of the Gauls when sitting, since they did not use seats.[97] While the horns were probably symbols of power and worn also by chiefs on their helmets,[98] they may also show that the god was an anthropomorphic form of an earlier animal god, like the wolf-skin of other gods.  Hence also horned animals would be regarded as symbols of the god, and this may account for their presence on the Reims monument.  Animals are sometimes represented beside the divinities who were their anthropomorphic forms.[99] Similarly the ram’s-headed serpent points to animal worship.  But its presence with three-headed and horned gods is enigmatic, though, as will be seen later, it may have been connected with a cult of the dead, while the serpent was a chthonian animal.[100] These gods were gods of fertility and of the underworld of the dead.  While the bag or purse (interchangeable with the cornucopia) was a symbol of Mercury, it was also a symbol of Pluto, and this may point to the fact that the gods who bear it had the same character as Pluto.  The significance of the torque is also doubtful, but the Gauls offered torques to the gods, and they may have been regarded as vehicles of the warrior’s strength which passed from him to the god to whom the victor presented it.

Though many attempts have been made to prove the non-Celtic origin of the three-headed divinities or of their images,[101] there is no reason why the conception should not be Celtic, based on some myth now lost to us.  The Celts had a cult of human heads, and fixed them up on their houses in order to obtain the protection of the ghost.  Bodies or heads of dead warriors had a protective influence on their land or tribe, and myth told how the head of the god Bran saved his country from invasion.  In other myths human heads speak after being cut off.[102] It might thus easily have been believed that the representation of a god’s head had a still more powerful protective influence, especially when it was triplicated, thus looking in all directions, like Janus.