Of these the Deoe Matres, whose name has taken a Latin form and whose cult extended to the Teutons, are mentioned in many inscriptions all over the Celtic area, save in East and North-West Gaul.[136] In art they are usually represented as three in number, holding fruit, flowers, a cornucopia, or an infant.  They were thus goddesses of fertility, and probably derived from a cult of a great Mother-goddess, the Earth personified.  She may have survived as a goddess Berecynthia; worshipped at Autun, where her image was borne through the fields to promote fertility, or as the goddesses equated with Demeter and Kore, worshipped by women on an island near Britain.[137] Such cults of a Mother-goddess lie behind many religions, but gradually her place was taken by an Earth-god, the Celtic Dispater or Dagda, whose consort the goddess became.  She may therefore be the goddess with the cornucopia on monuments of the horned god, or Aeracura, consort of Dispater, or a goddess on a monument at Epinal holding a basket of fruit and a cornucopia, and accompanied by a ram’s-headed serpent.[138] These symbols show that this goddess was akin to the Matres.  But she sometimes preserved her individuality, as in the case of Berecynthia and the Matres, though it is not quite clear why she should have been thus triply multiplied.  A similar phenomenon is found in the close connection of Demeter and Persephone, while the Celts regarded three as a sacred number.  The primitive division of the year into three seasons—­spring, summer, and winter—­may have had its effect in triplicating a goddess of fertility with which the course of the seasons was connected.[139] In other mythologies groups of three goddesses are found, the Hathors in Egypt, the Moirai, Gorgons, and Graiae of Greece, the Roman Fates, and the Norse Nornae, and it is noticeable that the Matres were sometimes equated with the Parcae and Fates.[140]

In the Matres, primarily goddesses of fertility and plenty, we have one of the most popular and also primitive aspects of Celtic religion.  They originated in an age when women cultivated the ground, and the Earth was a goddess whose cult was performed by priestesses.  But in course of time new functions were bestowed on the Matres.  Possibly river-goddesses and others are merely mothers whose functions have become specialised.  The Matres are found as guardians of individuals, families, houses, of towns, a province, or a whole nation, as their epithets in inscriptions show.  The Matres Domesticae are household goddesses; the Matres Treverae, or Gallaicae, or Vediantae, are the mothers of Treves, of the Gallaecae, of the Vediantii; the Matres Nemetiales are guardians of groves.  Besides presiding over the fields as Matres Campestrae they brought prosperity to towns and people.[141] They guarded women, especially in childbirth, as ex votos prove, and in this aspect they are akin to the Junones worshipped also in Gaul and Britain.  The name thus became generic for most goddesses, but all alike were the lineal descendants of the primitive Earth-mother.[142]