From: CeiSerith@...
Message: 19041
Date: 2003-02-22
I think I've missed something here: what is this thing
about "comparable glyphs" on the Gundestrup Cauldron and IVC seals?
The reference is to a seal from the IVC which is often claimed to have parallels to the Cernunnos panel on the Gundestrup Cauldron. (This seal is often depicted in books on Celtic Paganism.) I presented a paper on Cernunnos at a Celtic conference at UCLA a few years back, and dealt with this question. My conclusion is that the similarities are superficial, boiling down to a human being with something growing out of his or her head, sitting with legs folded, and surrounded by animals. The differences are great, however, and even those similarities are not as important as generally presented. For instance, Cernunnos wears stag antlers, while the figure on the IVC seal has the horns of a buffalo. This is greater than appears at first, since in Hinduism there is a great distinction made between wild animals, mriga, and ones that are suitable for sacrifice, pashu. The archetypal mriga is a stag, and the archetypal pashu is a bull. I realize that this may be late, but it certainly is suggestive that there would be a large difference between the symbolism of stag's antlers and buffalo horns. Alf Hiltebeitel (The Indus Valley "Proto-Siva," Reexamined through Reflections on the Goddess, the Buffalo, and the Symbolism of Vahanas. Anthropos 73:7/6 (1978), pp. 767-797) suggests something that would be even more damaging for the equation, namely that based on such details as the waistband the IVC figure wears, there is a very chance that it is female. The presence of animals in both representations is insignificant. One the Cernunnos panel, there are two bulls, a stag, a dog or wolf, a boy riding a dolphin, two lions facing each other, and an unpaired lion. These are often called upon to identify Cernunnos as a "Lord of Animals." There are some very good reasons to doubt this, however. Of all these animals, only three are facing Cernunnos: the stag, the dog, and one of the bulls. The bull can be eliminated immediately, since it duplicates the one found at the other end of the panel, so that in order for the fact that one bull faces Cernunnos to be significant, the fact that one bull faces away would also have to be significant. The stag and the dog, however, appear on a silver cup from Lyons that appears to have a representation of Cernunnos. (The head is unfortunately missing.) They appear, then, to have an iconographic meaning, but the other animals do not. Indeed, if the presence of the animals were to tell us that Cernunnos is a Lord of Animals, then the presence of the boy on a fish would have to tell us that he is a Lord of Boys on Fish. The proposition becomes even less tenable when the other panels of the cauldron are looked at, and we find that a number of animals is the norm. Exactly how many Lords of Animals are there? The logical conclusion is that the animals are fillers, something to take up the space around the images that are significant. This is supported strongly by the fact that it is these supplementary figures that are the most Thracian, and would therefore have been most likely to have been added to the composition by the silversmiths. Two elements of the panel that aren't found on the IVC seal are the torc grasped in Cernunnos' right hand and the ram-headed snake grasped in his right. Since these are both found in the earliest representation of the divinity, that from the 4th century BCE in Val Camonica, and since they appear in many other of his images, they are clearly important parts of his iconography. Yet they don't appear on the IVC seal. All in all, then I simply can't see the two images having anything to do with each other.
David Fickett-Wilbar