Gods of Gaul: The Matrons or the Mothers
One of the reasons the debate about the potential existence of Ostara/Eostre is so intense is because of the discovery of the "matronae Austriahenae". Now I am not here to talk about the old German mythology and the Germanic paganism. I just gave up on trying to understand anything about it X) But I think it is time now to talk about the Matrons that formed such a big part of the polytheism of the people of Gaul, and might be one of the links tying the continental Celtic mythology with the old German one (if you go by the Eostre debate).
The Matronae, also called the "Matrae". In modern French they are usually called the "Matres", though most people prefer to translate all these terms, as either "The Matrons" or "The Mothers".
The Matrons are traditionally depicted holding these various things: a basket of fruits, flowers, children, babies they might be breast-feeding, a cornucopia. All these symbols are very clear as to one of the functions of these "Mothers". Literal and figurative mothers, powers of life and fecundity for both humanity (maternity and motherhood) and nature (abundance and fertility of plants and crops), ultimately representing a female and natural "power of creation". However this does not inform us very much about their nature... Because, if you had not picked up upon it, every goddess of Gaul has, at one point or another, held a cornucopia in her hand, to the extent that it is deemed a "traditional" symbol of a Gallic goddess by default. It was part of the divine gender norms - a goddess was always, one way or another, a deity of prosperity and fertility and abundance, because it was how Gaul perceived the "divine femaleness".
Most people, when talking about the Matrae, mention they are part of these "recurring Indo-European female trinities", and compare them to the triple-goddesses or deity-trios of the Isles Celts, Ancient Greece, Old Scandinavia and more... Which is only half true. It is true that the most common depiction of the Matres presents them as a group of three women. Most of their sculptures are tripartite. However we know that this was not an absolute rule - because several depictions present them as being a duo, and others yet have just a singular "Matre" (in fact it seems that the more Roman Gaul got the more singular the Matres became - which is also why Gallic studies tend to speak of them as just "The Mother Goddess").
Speaking of the Romans, we know the Matronae were syncretize with two divine groups of Rome - all very interesting in that they reflect a same phenomenon the Matronae have been thought of representing themselves... "The multiplication of a singular goddess". See, the Matronae vary between a multiplicity and a singular without much of their imagery changed, and the individual members of the group did not seem to have specific identities. Usually when they are three of them, one will be dressed different than the others and/or have her hair done differently and/or not wear the headwear the other two have, but that will be it. Some have tried to read it as one member of the trio being supposed to be younger and/or newly wed as opposed to the middle-aged, matronly, motherly figures by her side, but even then nothing is truly conclusive.
And whom did the Romans syncretize with the Matrons of Gaul? The Junones and the Suleviae. You maybe heard how the Romans invented the concept of "guardian angel"? It was the "genius" (aka the "genie") in its original sense - a guardian spirit attached to a person from its birth to its death. Well the Romans also had very strict gender norms, and so the women had their own personal female variation of the genius - and they were the "Junones", yes, the plural form of the goddess Juno. Every woman had a tiny Juno by her side just for her separate from the big Juno. As for the Suleviae, this is even more complex... The Suleviae were thought to be domestic spirits or guardian spirits, and existed as the plural form of "Sulevia". Sulevia herself was a Gallo-Roman entity whom we don't know much about - though it is strongly theorized that she is actually "Sulvis Minerva", a famous Gallo-Roman syncretism between the Roman goddess Minerva and the Celtic godess Sulis connected with thermal springs (she notably had a worship center at today's Bath). The identification between the Suleviae and the Matres is notoriously found at Colchester where an inscription was dedicated to the "Matribus Sulevis", "the Sulevi mothers".
For you see, the Matronae were very VERY popular. They were almost everywhere, covering not just the territory of the Gallic tribes but also being present among their neighbors - the Isles Celts, the Germanic tribes - and some were even found by Northern Africa. While no text of Antiquity specifically casts them as "important" goddesses of a high rank (unlike other deities like Belenos or Taranis), they were clearly a massive phenomenon back then. A mass-local cult if you will.
Because here is what is troubling with the Matronae. Every shrine, every depiction, every inscription we have of them gives them a different epithet, usually signifying that they were a "local" incarnation of the Matrons, or rather the Matrons-as-tied to a local cult. Opening up the question: were the Matrons a core-group/a singular deity of the Celtic religion which had many "little avatars" everywhere, the same way a singular Mother Goddess seemingly becomes two or three? Or were they actually numerous nearly-identical minor goddesses? Should the "Matrons" be treated as a multiple-deity or as a category of deities? It doesn't help that the Matrons were also identified with the nymphs of the Greeks, said nymphs being said to heavily populate the beliefs and imaginations of the Gallo-Romans thanks to their natural inclination to see groves and streams and rocks as sacred.
It is well-attested that the Matrons had a certain connection with water (down to some unsteady theories according to which the "matrona" of these deities is only falsely sounding like Latin and is truly a Gaulish word meaning "water-mother"). Most of their shrines and depictions were found near springs and rivers, and these local Matrons were named after said springs and rivers. They were for example found everywhere by the shores of the Rhine. The Moder river was named after them. The Marne river was dedicated to a singular version of the Matronae - Dea Matrona, whose statues were found back in archeological searches. In the city of Nimes there used to be "Matres Nemausicae", protecting the water-stream after which the city was named, before they were replaced by a singular male god fulfilling the same function, Nemausus. While they once existed in cities (where they notably could be the protectresses of craftsmen) it seems that, as Gaul became Roman, the worship of the Mothers was pushed out of urban centers and mainly survived by the countryside where they were rather fountain-guardians and stream-spirits.
Mind you, the Mothers were not always water-themed. Sometimes their epithets rather indicated their belonging to a specific tribe or clan of the Gauls - such as the Matronae Suebae, which were the female patrons of the Suevi tribe. Other times yet their additional name merely recalled or specified the function already hinted at by their visual depictions: such as the Matronae gabiae, "The mothers who give".
On Germanic territory the most famous depiction of the Matrons is the one of the Matronae Aufaniae (or Matres Aufaniae/Deae Aufaniae), very popular and found up to 80 dtimes - though nobody is quite sure what "Aufaniae" stands for. It is very clearly a Celtic word but we can't prove its meaning. It could mean "of the waters" or "of the rivers" since they were found by the Rhine, but it could also be derived from ancient verb(s) meaning "to do, to accomplish, to conclude, to finish", meaning they were "the goddesses that do things and that conclude", as in that help tasks be done and goals be reached. It could also be a Germanic root for "abundance" or "plenty". However what we do know is that the Matronae Aufaniae had a specific day dedicated to them - we have two records of their "holy day" which corresponds with the Roman Ides of July, 15th of July.
The Matronae were not just known through shrines but also thanks to a lot, a LOT of tiny little statues, visibly mass-produced at the time, that people placed everywhere. We found little Matrons as ex-votos by the shrines of specific water-streams, obviously, but we also found them within house shrines, these domestic holy places that the Romans knew as the lararium, dedicated to the Lares. The Mother figures were also found within graves, left with the buried dead - proving that the Matrons seemingly had some protective power over the dead or helped the transition of the living to the afterlife. [This notably caused parallels between the Gallo-Romans Matrons and the Roman goddess Venus, who was for the Empire a mother-goddess connected to both waters and fecundity, and who also had a role in protecting the dead and "matroning" the funerals... One depiction of the Matrons even has them in a seashell, see below]
To conclude, the Matres were very clearly one of the ancient "ancestors" of French folklore's "fées" - the same way these French fairies were also derived of the Greco-Roman nymphs and of the Fates of Antiquity. In France we have an entire archetype of fairies known as "la fée à la fontaine", "the fountain-fairy", which reflects the Matres' connection with fountains and streams. The same way a lot of "miraculous streams" and "healing fountains" of the French countryside were later Christianized, dedicated to saint Marthe or saint Marguerite.
