I) Tribal- or Territorial-Goddesses: Protection and Sovereignty

The Celts lived in large communities or tribes - called civitates* or nationes by the Roman historians - led by a chief, for instance Ambiorix, leader of the Eburones, or Ambigatos, king of the Bituriges. There were around sixty different peoples in Gaul, not counting the unrecorded septs* and the tribes of Narbonnensis, around twenty in Ireland and about thirty in Britain.¹²³³ Those septs* shared cultural and religious ideas and were linked by economic ties, but they did not form a political entity or a homogenous whole. The tribes lived on a territory delimited by frontiers which were generally natural, such as a river, a forest, a mountain, etc. Gaulish and British epigraphy reveals that names of single goddesses or epithets of Matres, Matronae are ethnonyms*, i.e. names of tribes, which tends to prove that the Celtic peoples venerated goddesses bearing the name of their sept*. As noted in Chapter 1, the tradition of ‘tribal-goddesses’ was also part of the beliefs of the Germanic peoples, for a significant number of Matres, Matronae, bearing ethnonymic* bynames* are known. For example, the Matronae Hamavehae are the Mother Goddesses of the sept* of the Chamavi the Matres Kannanefates of the Cananefates; the Matronae Vanginehae and the Matres Vagionae of the Vangiones; the Matres Suebae of the Suebi; the Matres Frisavae of the Frisiavi, and the Matres/Matronae Cantrusteihae (Andrustehiae) of the Condrusi.¹²³⁴ What evidence of tribal-goddesses in Britain and Gaul is there, who were they and what were their nature and functions?