A brithonic deitiy… no doubt of it!—It is funny to note that the inscription discovered at Carlisle was to Mars “Toutates" Cocidius ... Teutates is another well-known Celtic deity, mostly cited by Julius Caesar and Lucan. Etymologically this deity’s name can be interpreted as: ‘He who belongs to the Tribe’ comprising also the concept "Father of the Tribe". Could there be a so called celtic tribe then?… Maybe a kind of Wood Settlers under this deity's regency?.
As cited by the author
of this review, probably the woodwoses painted in 1499 by Albrecht Durer
are closely related to them!... Thus, I am pleased to share with you this
excelent article written by Diane
McIlmoyle and reposted under her kind permission. All rights reserved by the
author. © Diane McIlmoyle 30.01.12
- Cocidius altar, Tullie House, Carlisle
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there were people here before the
Romans. But they were here, leaving echoes of their lives and beliefs
through place names, 5,800-year-old tools and 2,000-year-old weapons.
When the Romans first encountered us 2,000 years ago, they wrote down
some of the things they discovered. They said that there was a people in
northern Cumbria called the Carvetii, ‘the deer people’, who
were a sub-group of a large northern tribe called the Brigantes – at
least that’s what the Romans called them; we don’t know what they called
themselves – and we had a number of local gods.
The Romans had an impressively egalitarian approach to the religions
they encountered as they travelled the world. They believed the same set
of gods was present everywhere but just known by different names. When
they came across a native god, they looked in their own pantheon for the
Roman equivalent, which is how Lugus – after whom Carlisle is named –
came to be seen as a different name for their own god, Mercury. Every
native god in turn was partnered with its Roman equivalent and this is
how we get to hear about the northern British god, Cocidius.
There are no less than nine carved images and 25 inscribed
dedications to Cocidius on Hadrian’s Wall, some from Netherby and
Carlisle and others found by Cumberland Quarries (exact site unknown).
There are no less than six inscriptions from Bewcastle fort in Cumbria,
where he is described as ‘Mars Cocidius’, which means the owner
of the altar believed that Cocidius was the native name for the Roman
god of war, Mars. Two silver plaques found at Bewcastle show Cocidius
wearing a helmet and holding a shield and a club or spear.
The Ravenna Cosmography – a 7th-century summary of all towns that had been in the Roman empire – mentions Fanum Cocidius,
which means Cocidius’s Temple. It says that it was between Maia
(Bowness-on-Solway) and Brovacum (Brougham). Given this description and
the number of inscriptions found, it’s tempting to believe that this
site was Bewcastle.
At the eastern end of Hadrian’s wall, Cocidius is linked to forests,
and hence to hunting. In an inscription at Ebchester in County Durham,
he is ‘Cocidius Vernostonus’ – Cocidius of the alder tree – and at Housesteads Fort and Risingham, he is ‘Sylvanus Cocidius’.
Sylvanus was the Roman god of wild forests. An intaglio found at
Habitancum Roman Fort on Dere Street at Risingham shows Cocidius
surrounded by leafy branches, holding a hare, accompanied by a dog. A
further north-eastern image at Yardhope at the tantalisingly-named
‘Holystone Burn’ (the name pre-dates the discovery of the carving in
1980!) shows Cocidius with hat, spear and shield, legs akimbo, arms
wide.
- Cocidius at Yardhope, Northumberland
There used to be another image, known as ‘Robin of Risingham’, but it was blown up by an 18th-century
landowner who was fed up of people visiting it. I find it intriguing to
think of people hunting out the carving in this period, and the name is
suggestive: Robin Goodfellow is a name from folklore linked to forests
(think Robin Hood) and impish creatures (Shakespeare’s Puck). It may be
too much to suggest that the 18th-century people knew that
the carving represented a pagan deity but they may have thought there
was something otherworldly, even magical, about it. A half-size carving
based on a drawing of the original was erected in 1983.
As is often the case with Celtic names, the etymology is frustrating. It could derive from ‘cocco’, the Brythonic word for red, or it could be ‘coit’, the root of the modern Welsh word, ‘coed’,
which means woods or forest. Supporters of the former interpretation
point to rare references to an Irish Gaelic god, Da Coca, ‘the Red God’,
suggesting he is just another version of the same deity, in the same
way that Carlisle’s Lugus is the Irish Lugh (and the Welsh Lleu). The
colour red is readily associated with Mars and war-like qualities
(although this is often overstated) and Cocidius is portrayed with a
weapon and a shield. Supporters of the forest interpretation point to
the inscriptions identifying Cocidius with Sylvanus, the forest god, and
the hunting images. To confuse or elucidate matters – take your pick –
the alder tree – as in ‘Cocidius Vernostonus’, Cocidius of the
alder tree – was well-known for oozing bloody-red sap when freshly cut.
Perhaps it’s not so mad to combine the two, and Cocidius in his original
Celtic form was a hunter of both men and animals.
- Sylvan Men by Albrecht Durer, 1499
And there I would have ended the story of Cocidius, the northern
British god, if I hadn’t come across this image, painted in 1499 by
Albrecht Durer. These wild men, legs akimbo, arms aloft, carrying a
shield and a club, are the very image of Cocidius. They are a
conventional medieval Germanic portrayal of woodwoses – a concept known
to medieval English as the ‘wodwos’ of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1390) – and possibly cognate with the medieval Green Man*, an image seen in British cathedrals from the 11th century onwards. Other woodwose-type wild men are found in other European cultures; in Lombardy, they’re known as ‘salvangs’ – wild men derived from the name of Sylvanus.
I don’t know, and suspect that no one knows, whether these deities
and wild men are all ultimately the same. Perhaps they all just answer a
need felt throughout history to personify a wild, dangerous aspect of
nature, which was a threat to man and beast alike. Whatever the case,
Cocidius was Cumbria’s very own.
* I should point out that there are two inscriptions to a native god, Viridios – which literally means ‘green man’ – found in Lincolnshire.
You can see an altar dedicated to Cocidius at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle. www.tulliehouse.co.uk
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