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Padus
A Gaulish God: The Fleet One
Padus is a Gaulish god known from a single inscription Pegognaga, Italy and he was the titular deity of the Po (originally Padus) valley and may originally have been a river deity. |
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Gaul: The Fleet One
Padus is a Celto-Italic deity known from a single inscription found at Pegognaga, Montava, Lombardy, Italy. The city was founded near a Roman way station, Flesso where the inscription was found. Both the modern city and the Roman way station lie near the valley of the river Po. This river stretches almost across the entire length of northern Italy in the region that once was controlled by the Cisalpine Gauls.
Originally the Po river and its valley were called Padus a name that was used by the Romans but which was of Celtic origin. Thus it would seem that the Padus invoked at Flesso is the tutelary deity of both the river and the region. The name Padus has a Latinized masculine ending -us and the original Celtic equivalent would have been Pados. However, having a masculine protective deity of a river is an oddity in the Celtic belief system (though it is not unknown) and the original form of the name may have been the feminine Pada. Though this can be little more than a supposition and it may well have been that the river had a masculine deific personification.
The name Padus is difficult to interpretation as it must necessarily be assumed that the original Celtic pronunciation was maintained during the process of Latinization. However, the name may be related to the reconstructed proto-Celtic lexical component *fed- (foot) which yields the proposed proto-P-Celtic form *fésu- itself derived from the reconstructed proto-Indo-European *pedsu. Thus the pad element of padus relates to 'foot' and may be perhaps be interpreted as 'fleet' or 'the fleet one', an apposite name for the god of a river.
If you would like to try the foods of the time of the ancient Celts, then why not have a look at the ancient recipes section of this site. For the foods of the time when some of these tales were written down, take a look at the Medieval recipes section of the site and, in particular, the recipes from The Forme of Cury.
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