page_title: Tasgetius
section_title: Name and Celtic badger lore
hierarchical_section_title: Tasgetius / Name and Celtic badger lore
caption_attribution_description: English: Young Eurasian badger (Meles meles)Español: Tejón europeo jovenFrançais&#160;: Jeune blaireau européenPortuguês: Texugo-europeu
context_page_description: Tasgetius, the Latinized form of Gaulish Tasgetios or Tasgiitios, was a ruler of the Carnutes, a Celtic polity whose territory corresponded roughly with the modern French departments of Eure-et-Loir, Loiret, and Loir-et-Cher. Julius Caesar says that as Roman proconsul he made Tasgetius king in reward for his support during the Gallic Wars. His reign would have begun in late 57 BC, following Caesar's campaign against the Belgic civitates in northern Gaul that year; it ended with his assassination in 54 BC. The overthrow of a king appointed by Caesar was one of the precipitating events that led to the pan-Gallic rebellion of 52 BC under the Arvernian leader Vercingetorix.
context_section_description: The name Tasgetius derives from Gaulish tasgos, also tascos or taxos, "badger," an element found in many other Celtic personal names from inscriptions, such as Tascos, Tasgillus, Tassca, and Tasciovanus ("Badger Killer"), as well as in place names. Moritasgus ("Great Badger" or "Sea Badger") was the name of a ruler of the Senones contemporary with Tasgetius, and was also the name of a Celtic healing deity in territory within the Aeduan sphere of influence (see Moritasgus). Another Celtic word for "badger," broccos, also yields a number of personal and place names.
  The substance taxea or adeps taxonina, "badger fat," was regarded as medically potent and traded by Germanic and Celtic peoples to the Greeks and Romans. The 4th-century medical writer Marcellus, who was from Bordeaux and whose book De medicamentis is a unique source for Gallic herbology and lore, includes badger fat as an ingredient in his pharmacological recipes. A short 5th-century treatise De taxone deals with the magico-medical properties of the badger, and prescribes the correct incantations to utter when dissecting the animal. It is perhaps a reference to the badger's medicinal or mythic properties that the Irish saint Molaise descended to hell dressed in badger skins to rescue a leper.
  Although Isidore of Seville understands the word as equivalent to Latin lardum, "bacon, lard," taxea is a secretion of the badger's subcaudal glands comparable in its medicinal use to the better-known castoreum, an ingredient from the scent sacs of the beaver. Only the European species of badger possesses these subcaudal glands, which produce a pale-yellow fatty substance with a gentle musky scent. Like the beaver, the badger was regarded in the classical tradition as one of the hermaphroditic animals.
  Primary among the medical uses of taxea was the treatment of impotence, which casts a different swagger on a phrase from the Latin comic poet Afranius: "The cloaked Gaul, fattened up on badger grease." The Gaulish word tasgos may be related to an Indo-European root meaning "peg, stake," because of the badger's pointed nose; it has been argued that the root can also have a phallic meaning, and that the use of taxea for impotence was thus a form of sympathetic magic.
  Although its cultural significance among the Celts of Gaul is murky, the badger appears much later as a totem animal for Tadhg mac Céin, a legendary insular Celtic king whose name contains an Old Irish form for "badger." In Welsh lore, a number of  games involved "playing badger," including in the first book of the Mabinogion where the game Broch ygkot ("a badger in a bag") is explained cryptically as "let him who is a head be a bridge." The narrative is presented as an aetiology of the game, involving two rivals for Rhiannon, her first husband Pwyll who carelessly loses her to Gwawl, and a magic bag that is Rhiannon's gift to Pwyll. The bag cannot be filled no matter how much food is put in it, and generosity can meet only with insatiability. Gwawl thinks that he can gain some infinite quality by climbing into the bag himself; thus captured, he receives beatings instead.
caption: The European badger, in Gaulish tasgos: source for the pharmacological ingredient taxea
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