Cernunnos, God of Mystery
     There are so many things I love about the Cottage of the Night Queen: the mountain beauty which surrounds it, its proximity to one of the Goddessâs holy places in the underworld, and the woodland trails that come up to Her cottage from down in the valley, wandering on through the pines, the deer meadows, and ultimately, on past the cabin, up to the treeless tundra and fields of summit snow. Â
     One evening, as I risked a long walk under the light of a full spring moon, I came to one of those places along the trail where the forest suddenly gave way to open grassland. Rising there from the moon-silvered pasture rose a single Douglas fir, standing by itself in the meadow. Though it lacked the close company of other trees, it was not alone. At its base stood a small gathering of white-tailed does, and a single stag, whose twelve-point spread of antlers gleamed white in the lunar glow. For a moment, I lingered stock-still at the meadowâs edge, unnoticed, but then, the stag saw me. We gazed at each other, neither moving, for a short while. Then, with a silver leap under the moonlit tree, he and his concubines dashed for the cover of the wood. Instantly and silently, they were gone. The encounter held a powerfully numinous quality, and a shiver of something went through me, a feeling that I had been in the presence of the Divine. And that leads me to the topic for this blog entry: the antlered god Cernunnos. Though revered by many witches the world over, his provenance is not well-known. This is a good time, perhaps, for a snapshot of his history among practitioners of the Old Religion. Â
     During the First World War, a renowned Egyptologist, Margaret Alice Murray, found herself unable to remain among the antiquities of Egypt. The war forced her to return home to England. There, she brought her attention to bear on another area of interest, the persecution of witches in the 16th and 17th centuries of European history, publishing, in 1921, her first work outside of Egyptology, titled The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. In this book, Murry argued that many of those women arrested, tortured, and cruelly executed had indeed been witches, and that they had belonged to an ancient fertility cult which devoted itself to the worship of a horned god named Dianus. Â
     In the 1950's, with the repeal of the Witchcraft laws in the United Kingdom, a retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner began to publicize himself as a witch.  Along with Doreen Valiente and a stalwart group of disciples, he and they would go on to lay the foundations for modern Wicca. In their Bricket Wood coven, Valiente would later report, Murrayâs horned god was given a different name: Cernunnos. From whence had this name come?
     While the modern concept of the horned god seems to have roots in various divine figures known to the ancient world, such as Pan and Dionysiusâs close companion Silenus, the first modern association of a horned deity with the name Cernunnos comes from the discovery in 1711 of a Gallo-Roman pillar showing an antlered male figure wearing Celtic neck rings, or torcs. This discovery was made in France, on the Ile de Paris, the site of the ancient Roman settlement of Lutetia. The name Cernunnos accompanies the horned figure in the carving.
     The much more celebrated image which has come to be the definitive model of depiction for Cernunnos comes from an ancient silver vessel discovered in 1891 in a Danish peatbog: the Gundestrop Cauldron.
  Here we have the antlered god with his torcs, sitting cross-legged, and surrounded by animals. There are those authorities who place the creation of this object just before the Christian era and those who think it was fashioned in the first centuries just after.
     Other finds include a pagan altar discovered below the cathedral at Reims, Germany, with the figure of Cernunnos depicted between the images of the gods Apollo and Mercury. Â
     Additional images which ought to be mentioned include the celebrated Val Camonica rock drawing from Italy and the so-called God of Bouray statuette discovered in France.
     As a student of antiquities, what Murray would have found especially compelling about these depictions is that they were not restricted to the European continent. For example, among clay seals found in the ancient Indus Valley site of Mohenjo Daro (India), we find this image showing quite clearly our horned figure seated in the accustomed posture and accompanied by his traditional zoological audience.Â
 Murrayâs conclusion, which has been discredited by some and supported by others, was that there had existed an ancient prehistoric religion, spread out across the Eurasian continent, centered on a mother goddess and her horned consort. According to her, this ancient matriarchal faith had survived through the ages, and was still being observed in the sixteenth century among rural people. It was women among these folk, she theorized, who became the targets of inquisitors and witch-hunters. Â
     There is so much that has been said, and could be said, about why these persecutions were undertaken. The Reformation movement in Northern Europe had broken the powerful and universal institution of the Church into smaller Christian factions which were now fighting with each other. All sides in the theological wars that followed moved to defend themselves against adversaries, real and imagined. Women practicing magic and appealing to supernatural powers other than the God of the Bible were seen as part of a larger conspiracy headed by Godâs adversary, the Devil. Thanks to the discovery of Etruscan tombs in northern Italy during the Renaissance, with their depictions of life after death, the ancient painted images of horned underworld demons began to enter the lexicons of modern peopleâs imaginations. If there were folk who believed in the ancient horned forest deity depicted in those artifacts mentioned earlier from Roman times, and if these beliefs figured into spells and charms practiced by women engaged in healing and magic, inquisitors defending the Christian faith would have closed in on the perpetrators swiftly and with a vengeance. Which is, in fact, what they did. Itâs virtually impossible to know with any certainty what testimonies gotten by torture were honest accounts and which were outright lies offered up to stop the pain. But the theme of âthe black man,â the horned âdemonâ who was met out in the woods and who was said to initiate new witches into the practice, is ubiquitous. This being was interpreted as âthe Divellâ himself, or one of his assistants, and terrible punishments including execution followed for those who claimed to have met their cloven-footed deity out in the forest shadows.
     With the collapse of Christian authority and the rise of experience and experiment as the new means of revelation, western civilization opened up for itself a path away from religion into science. I grew up in the twilight of that modern age of skepticism about the supernatural, until it came to an end with the Christian religious revival in the late 1960âs. Modern science had created wonders and luxuries unknown to our ancestors, and the quality of physical life in the twentieth century greatly improved, yet people found themselves with a hunger for things transcendent and greater than themselves. In the United States, this hunger first expressed itself in the hippy movement with its emphasis on using psychotropic drugs to achieve mystical visions. What followed then was a reaction in which Christianity reinterpreted itself among the young as a faith which had been brought into the world by the first long-haired hippy: âLike, you know, Jesus, man.â Unlike their scientifically skeptical parents who had attended church but felt that miracle stories could not possibly have been literal, these new young baby-boomer converts, who had seen demons and angels for themselves under the influence of psychedelic compounds, had no trouble accepting a more literal interpretation of the Bible. For them, unlike for their parents, demons were not merely psychological conditions, and miracles were not merely normal occurrences which had been exaggerated into legend. No, they were all literally true. These young people grew up to be the politically-powerful evangelicals of today. Meanwhile, others left the hippy movement when they found that it was dissolving and becoming unfashionable and looked for other means of moving forward with their spiritual explorations. Some found meaning in transcendental meditation, various forms of Hinduism, or through Buddhist philosophy. And there were those who found paganism and the Craft.
    The horned god, who had long ago been relegated to a kind of police lineup of demonic suspects, now emerged again, not as Satan or his messenger, but as a divine being in his own right. Since his contemporary emergence, he now seems to be stealing onto the scene again silently, through the quiet ways of nature. Here and there, those disposed to look and listen for his presence are finding him.  Meanwhile, in our contemporary world, technology and military power are merging with literal religious belief in the supernatural, not only in Christianity, but among other forms of monotheism in the world. This, in turn, has led to what appears to beâamong believers in the âOne True Godââan avowed hatred of the natural world, as various believing powers, increasingly influenced by the idea that God is on their side, that Earth is not our home but Godâs grab-bag of wealth for right believers, and that an un-earthly Paradise awaits the Believing Faithful, now move to restore the old medieval verities, using technology to suppress freedoms, or to bomb each other into oblivion. Christian prophecies remind believers that in Godâs new world to come, âevery valley shall be lifted up, every mountain and hill made low.â In other words, the natural beauty of the world will be flattened into a parking lot. In place of a turbulent, sparkling ocean, those who conquer in the name of God will have a tepid âcrystal seaâ in which not a motion of current will be found. There will be no trees in that world except for the monumental, tree-like presence of the prophets Moses and Elijah. (See Isaiah in the Old Testament and the New Testament book Revelation, if this description sounds incredible to you.) Sun and moon will no longer give light. What will be left? A city dripping with wealth, the New Jerusalem with its walls of porphyry and its streets of gold. Among its people will be a culture of absolute obedience and adoration of the Boss, with the Faithful shouting their praises to Him forever and ever and ever and ever . . . .
     I cannot declare with certainty why others have begun their search for a relationship with the Horned God, but I can give my own reasons. I want nothing to do with the noisy New Jerusalem and its Disney-like outer precincts bulldozed for parking. Let those who desire such an oppressive paradise fight each other for supremacy. Though my community needs me here to help resist the blight which is spreading through our world, when I can, Iâm going to the woods. When the situation allows, Iâm going to where quiet reigns, where time is kept by heartbeat, sunrise, and phases of the moon. Where valleys, mountains, and hills are left well alone to be places of beauty, where the trees are real and do not declaim âsacred lawâ which leads men to hate and kill each other. Iâm going to where the water moves in currents, sparkling in the sun and moon, and no edifice of ostentatious wealth stands to remind me whoâs boss and whoâs in control. Iâm going down the trail to find Cernunnos. There, in the quiet presence of the Horned God and the Mother Goddess, I will find, not some perfect paradise, but what is left of the universe which is my home. Strengthened, I will always return to continue the resistance. (Thank you to sovaghoul for catching my original error of placing the repeal of the Witchcraft laws and Gardner's subsequent activity in the late '40's rather than the early '50's.)
