Many local tutelar divinities were also worshipped.  When a new settlement was founded, it was placed under the protection of a tribal god, or the name of some divinised river on whose banks the village was placed, passed to the village itself, and the divinity became its protector.  Thus Dea Bibracte, Nemausus, and Vasio were tutelar divinities of Bibracte, Nimes, and Vaison.  Other places were called after Belenos, or a group of divinities, usually the Matres with a local epithet, watched over a certain district.[118] The founding of a town was celebrated in an annual festival, with sacrifices and libations to the protecting deity, a practice combated by S. Eloi in the eighth century.  But the custom of associating a divinity with a town or region was a great help to patriotism.  Those who fought for their homes felt that they were fighting for their gods, who also fought on their side.  Several inscriptions, “To the genius of the place,” occur in Britain, and there are a few traces of tutelar gods in Irish texts, but generally local saints had taken their place.

The Celtic cult of goddesses took two forms, that of individual and that of grouped goddesses, the latter much more numerous than the grouped gods.  Individual goddesses were worshipped as consorts of gods, or as separate personalities, and in the latter case the cult was sometimes far extended.  Still more popular was the cult of grouped goddesses.  Of these the Matres, like some individual goddesses, were probably early Earth-mothers, and since the primitive fertility-cults included all that might then be summed up as “civilisation,” such goddesses had already many functions, and might the more readily become divinities of special crafts or even of war.  Many individual goddesses are known only by their names, and were of a purely local character.[119] Some local goddesses with different names but similar functions are equated with the same Roman goddess; others were never so equated.

The Celtic Minerva, or the goddesses equated with her, “taught the elements of industry and the arts,"[120] and is thus the equivalent of the Irish Brigit.  Her functions are in keeping with the position of woman as the first civiliser—­discovering agriculture, spinning, the art of pottery, etc.  During this period goddesses were chiefly worshipped, and though the Celts had long outgrown this primitive stage, such culture-goddesses still retained their importance.  A goddess equated with Minerva in Southern France and Britain is Belisama, perhaps from qval, “to burn” or “shine."[121] Hence she may have been associated with a cult of fire, like Brigit and like another goddess Sul, equated with Minerva at Bath and in Hesse, and in whose temple perpetual fires burned.[122] She was also a goddess of hot springs.  Belisama gave her name to the Mersey,[123] and many goddesses in Celtic myth are associated with rivers.

Some war-goddesses are associated with Mars—­Nemetona (in Britain and Germany), perhaps the same as the Irish Nemon, and Cathubodua, identical with the Irish war-goddess Badb-catha, “battle-crow,” who tore the bodies of the slain.[124] Another goddess Andrasta, “invincible,” perhaps the same as the Andarta of the Voconces, was worshipped by the people of Boudicca with human sacrifices, like the native Bellona of the Scordisci.[125]