Epona

This article is about the goddess. For the video game character, see Epona (The Legend of Zelda).
Epona, second or third century AD, from Contern, Luxembourg (Musée national d'art et d'histoire, Luxembourg City)

In Gallo-Roman religion, Epona was a protector of horses, ponies, donkeys, and mules. She was particularly a goddess of fertility, as shown by her attributes of a patera, cornucopia, ears of grain, and the presence of foals in some sculptures.[1] She and her horses might also have been leaders of the soul in the after-life ride, with later literary parallels in Rhiannon of the Mabinogion.[2] The worship of Epona, "the sole Celtic divinity ultimately worshipped in Rome itself",[3] as the patroness of cavalry,[4] was widespread in the Roman Empire between the first and third centuries AD; this is unusual for a Celtic deity, most of whom were associated with specific localities.

  1. ^ Salomon Reinach, "Épona", Revue archéologique (1895:163–95)
  2. ^ Henri Hubert, Mélanges linguistiques offerts à M. J.Vendryes (1925:187–198).
  3. ^ Phyllis Pray Bober, reviewing Réne Magnen, Epona, Déesse Gauloise des Chevaux, Protectrice des Cavaliers in American Journal of Archaeology 62.3 (July 1958, pp. 349–350) p. 349. Émile Thevenot contributed a corpus of 268 dedicatory inscriptions and representations.
  4. ^ Berresford Ellis, Peter (1998). The Ancient World of the Celts. Great Britain: Constable & Robinson. p. 175. ISBN 0-7607-1716-8.