A Wheel Instead of a Thunderbolt

Where Jupiter's Roman iconography carries a thunderbolt, Gallo-Roman monuments most often give Taranis a wheel, a spoked disc he holds or that appears beside him on altars and reliefs across Gaul, the Rhineland and Roman Britain, sometimes in his own right and sometimes paired with a thunderbolt in a hybrid image that reads as a Gaulish god dressed partly in his Roman equivalent's own attributes. Scholars read the wheel as either a solar symbol or a direct image of the thunder itself, the wheel of a chariot rolling across the sky. Dedications naming a Jupiter Taranucus or Taranucnus, splicing the Roman god's own name onto a form of Taranis's, are known from sites across Gaul, Germany and Britain, evidence that the identification with Jupiter was not only a literary convention imposed from outside but a fusion worshippers themselves were willing to make on their own altars. The atlas separately records the Dagda, chief god of the Irish Tuatha De Danann, under the same Jupiter correspondence, on the strength of a modern comparative reading rather than any ancient testimony naming the Dagda alongside Jupiter directly. The two assignments are not reconciled here: Taranis carries the ancient epigraphic and literary case for the pairing, and the Dagda's rests on a later scholarly analogy, a tension the atlas leaves standing rather than resolving by removing either claim.