The significance 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 easily be regarded as their ancestor.[105]

3.  The hammer and the cup are also the symbols of a god called Silvanus, identified by M. Mowat with Esus,[106] a god represented cutting down a tree with an axe.  Axe and hammer, however, are not necessarily identical, and the symbols are those of Dispater, as has been seen.  A purely superficial connection between the Roman Silvanus and the Celtic Dispater may have been found by Gallo-Roman artists in the fact that both wear a wolf-skin, while there may once have