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.

The significance