The Modern Faces of the Horned God

[The Madame X]

http://www.lugodoc.demon.co.uk/NEWGODS.HTM


The horned god, whether as hunting deity, wild huntsman or forest
spirit will always be with us. He is a part of us. He can be ignored
or spurned, but he will not go away. Even after so long he still
finds new ways to appear.

Modern paganism encompasses a very broad range of gods and ideas,
but at the centre of the European tradition is the idea of the two
prime forces of nature and their embodiment as the goddess and the
god. Most European pagans hold these two archetypes somewhere in
their personal mythology.

The Triple Aspected Goddess is the goddess implied in ancient
European mythology, who appears (sometimes simultaneously) as the
maiden, the woman warrior and the crone. She is known in the Irish
tradition as Danu. (The Irish Celtic gods were known as the "Tuatha
de Danaan", or the tribe of Danu.) A similar figure appears in the
Norse myths as the three fates, and the folk image of the three
witches appears everywhere from Greek myth right up to
Shakespeare's "Macbeth".

To accept all of her aspects is to accept all of nature, youth and
age, growth and decay, life and death. She is the generative power
of nature and the female principle: the supreme deity.

She is served by her consort The Horned God. He is the horned god of
the hunt and of the forest, lord of the sabbat and of the
underworld. He is the embodiment of wild nature and the male
principle.

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Paganism is considered to be an eccentric faith in the West.
Christianity is the accepted norm, and even its ancient enemies such
as the other patriarchal monotheisms of Judaism and Islam are
treated with greater respect than witches and druids, who at the
very best are held to be harmless cranks.

For centuries Christianity has equated the horned one with the
devil, the Christian god of evil. So in such a hostile world, where
would we expect to find the horned god today ?

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Saint Cornely
When the Christians were not demonising the old gods, they were
quietly recruiting them.

Carnac in Brittany, France, is a small town famous for its proximity
to hundreds of menhirs placed in neat rows, several miles long,
during the bronze age. Although now a Christian community there are
records of ancient pagan rites being performed amongst the stones by
the local villagers as late as the end of the 19 th century.

In the centre of the town is a catholic church dedicated to Saint
Cornely. He is the patron saint of horned beasts.

Saint Cornely of horned beasts? The town of Carnac ? Cernunnos the
horned god of the hunt ?

The old pagan deity has been picked up, cleaned up, dressed up, de-
horned and canonised.

This is more common than you might think. When Christian priests
found that the heavy approach was not working and that the local
villagers were still worshipping pagan gods, then they fell back on
plan B. Catholic versions of the old gods were created, and the
villagers could painlessly transfer their attentions from one to the
other. Cernunnos must have been very popular around Carnac for the
Christians to build a church dedicated to him there.

There is no way of knowing how many Catholic saints were created out
of pagan gods. There were a lot of pagan gods, and there are
thousands of saints.

Even the goddess herself found a disguise in the new religion.
Technically speaking, the virgin Mary is never worshipped; she is
only venerated, because she is not a god. But in many European
Christian churches she is venerated a good deal more than Christ is
worshipped. And what is the difference ?

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The Green Man

The Green Man first appeared hidden away high up in the corners of
medieval cathedrals, a disembodied human face sprouting foliage from
every folicle and even out of his mouth. His original significance
is lost, but he was probably a pagan nature spirit smuggled into the
newly constructed Christian temples by the stone masons who built
them. He could be mistaken for an indoor gargoyle, and this is
probably how he was explained to the priests.

Also known as Jack-in the-Green he is common through out Europe, and
clearly represented an idea that was very widespread. The collumns
of Christian cathedrals are reminiscent of tall groves of trees, and
he is depicted as if peering down out of the upper branches, such as
this example from the nave of Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire,
England, dating from about AD 1400.

He is highly popular amongst modern pagans, who have adopted him as
the personification of the forest itself, subtly different from
Cernunnos who is the god of the beasts of the forests. Often the two
are combined into a single image with both foliage and horns,
representing both the flora and fauna of nature. Although this is a
common image today, this author is aware of no such combination
being depicted before the latter half of the twentieth century.

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The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

This famous dance is performed in and around the village of Abbots
Bromley in Staffordshire every year, on the Monday following the
first Sunday after the 4th of September. A hobby horse, a bowman, a
fool, a boy with a triangle, a musician, Maid Marian (played by a
man, on the left of the picture) and six men bearing antlers perform
a spiral dance at certain places on a circle 20 miles across. The
dance finishes in the centre of the village, whereupon the antlers
are returned to the church where they are kept until next year.


This was originally a Winter solstice ritual performed at Christmas,
New Year's Day and at Twelfth Night. Its origins are so ancient that
they are forgotten. But Old Horney must have something to do with
it.

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Robin of Sherwood

In 1983 HTV (a British television company) decided that it was time
to do Robin Hood yet again. The result, Robin of Sherwood was unlike
anything that had gone before.

Written by Richard Carpenter, Robin the Hooded Man became not only
a champion of the poor and the oppressed but also a champion of
Herne, an enigmatic horned shaman who lived in a secret cave in the
greenwood. Many of the stories had a very strong supernatural
element, and Herne was clearly intended to be a mortal man who
gained supernatural powers and who, in an act of transubstantiation,
became the horned god when he donned his stag headpiece.

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Slaine

Pat Mills made him a super hero in his long running series of
stories for the British comic book 2000 AD. The story of Slaine
began in1983, and was originally intended to be a run-of -the-mill
barbarian story like Conan, but at the suggestion of Mills' wife
(who also illustrated the first episode) it was from the very start
located firmly in the mythic Celtic world of The Land of the Young.
The Celtic influence gave the story its destiny, and over the years
it evolved into something quite unique in comics, as the character
of Slaine himself evolved, and Mills used the character (based on
the mythical Celtic hero Cuchulainn) and the strip to present his
own ideas on paganism, natural law and human destiny.

The strip is still running, detailing the saga of an iron age Celtic
berserker and his gradual development from exiled wanderer, to king,
to manifestation of the horned god, to his current role as hero of
the goddess, fighting her enemies across time. So far he has been
revealed to have been pivotal during the The Great Flood of
something BC, the rebellion of Boudicca in AD 60, the events
following the death of King Arthur around AD 510, the battle of
Contarf in AD 1014, and general Norman Christian nastiness in AD
1140.

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Finn

In 1988 the editors of 2000 AD produced a new comic for the purpose
of telling stories that had political, sexual or violent content
unsuitable for children. This ground breaking comic was Crisis. The
first story was Third World War, built on the premise that the West
is already at war with third world using various coverts means such
as the IMF. The rambling storyline followed various characters and
their adventures in the near future, and one recurring anti-hero was
Finn, another creation of Pat Mills.

Finn is the alter ego of an ex-squaddie and taxi driver, an eco-
terrorist fighting the good pagan fight against the evils of
corrupt, polluting trans-national corporations. He is also a witch,
but the stories had no supernatural content.

When Crisis finally folded Finn eventually re-appeared in 2000 AD,
this time as a real witch with supernatural powers fighting against
a race of aliens intent on ruling the galaxy. Earth had become a
battleground between the forces, not of good and evil, but of the
patriarchal aliens and the forces of the goddess. Between the forces
of order and the champions of nature. Finn was essentially doing the
same job as Slaine, but in the present. Instead of a horned battle
helmet, Finn wore a horned gas mask, and as a real witch he was a
champion of the goddess.

Interestingly, the hero was a champion of darkness, and his enemies
were the forces of light.

Similar ideas were also at the centre of other characters created
by Mills. Nemesis the Warlock was a horned alien fighting an
inquisitorial Earth dictatorship across the galaxy in the far
future, and the ABC Warriors gradually mutated from robot
mercenaries into champions of chaos.

Before another comic called Toxic folded in 1991 Mills created yet
another horned hero of nature in a strip called The Fear Teachers.

There is a strong common idea in Mills' stories, that history is not
a battle between good and evil, but a battle between those who
accept the supremacy of Nature and those who fear nature in all its
forms and wish to control and ultimately defeat it. Between those
who worship the goddess and those who worship the unnatural
creations of order. Christianity is always portrayed as an unnatural
force, terrified of both the feminine principal (the goddess) and of
wild nature (the horned god).

Pat "Dark Satanic" Mills has gone on record to say that he writes
for comic books because he is writing propaganda for the post-
literate generation.

In Mills' stories the Horned God is always the champion of The
Goddess, and of wild nature, and Mills is that champion too.

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There is a battle being fought for the body, heart and soul of the
world, between two utterly opposed camps.

One one side are the technophiles, the natural enemies of nature,
eager to explore and make real every possible invention of
accelerating technology. Their research and development has given us
medicine, transport, housing and these computers that would have
seemed godlike only a thousand years ago.

But it has also given us genetic engineering, corporate control of
mass communication, pollution and whole scale destruction of the
Earth's wild places.

Not far from Man's grasp lies the power to eliminate absolutely from
the planet every last trace of wilderness, and to replace it with
order and concrete. The motives for this are simple: the destruction
of nature and its replacement with man-made order will place the
ancient power of the gods within the hands of the leaders of that
new order, be they national or corporate. Real physical immortality
will become a reality within a very few decades, reserved,
inevitably, for the very rich and powerful.

To continue down this path can have two possible outcomes.

If successful the world will become as sterile and tidy as an office
block, and its "human" inhabitants will have been altered by
whatever means necessary to be able to live within it; whether by
means of drugs, genetic engineering or new technologies yet to be
imagined. There may yet be a technological fix for the ancient
problem of free will. Whether you find this possibility (and make no
mistake, it is a distinct and approaching possibility) appealing or
appalling is simply a matter of personal taste.

If unsuccessful we will have destroyed the mechanisms of nature and
replaced them with artificial mechanisms that do not work. The
degree of consequential devastation can only be guessed at. At the
very least we will find ourselves in a new world in which we can
still survive but has become horrible to us, at the very worst the
planet may have changed so much that even our technology can no
longer enable us to live upon it.

In the opposing camp are those who can see the two ends of the path
and behold each with equal horror. Each means the destruction of the
wild nature that has been a part of mankind's soul since he was born
into the world, and even for a new Homo Technicus to live placidly
in a world made tame would seem to them to be the equivalent of
putting our entire brain-dead species on a life-support machine for
ever.

The technophiles hear the arguments of the champions of the
wilderness and they hear sentimentality and nostalgia from the usual
crowd of Luddite bleeding-heart liberals.

The champions of the wilderness see the logical conclusion of the
technophiles' accelerating progression and they see the death of the
soul of mankind, and of the soul of the world. Whether they know it
or not they are fighting for the goddess, and whether they see him
or not at the head of their scattered bands is the horned god.

Whose side are you on?

[Dys]

Excellent article & very well researched. I especially like the 2000 AD references having been a former subscriber (though I was a fan of Judge Dredd, I did read the Slaine & Finn stories & loved them; 2000 AD is just an awesome mag all around). Keeping the archetypes alive & updating them to a modern setting is crucial if we are to avert the 'Technology wins' possibility.

Many people, those that are not anachronistic, have a difficult time relating on a spiritual/co-working level with the imagery of not only the Horned God, but the Goddess as well. When I worked in a neo-pagan mode, I found myself unconciously modernizing the old gods & goddesses; instead of togas or armor as they are pictured in art from their various periods, they would appear in my mind in slick leather or rags & detritus from our post modern world depending on their archetype. I at first balked at this being rather old fashioned & enjoying things in their original modes, but then I realized that no matter how you slice them, the energy is the same. I'm actually surprised that Baphomet was not covered in this article as He/She has been identified with the Horned God many times over; even though this is only a small part of the Baphomet current & archetype.

If we want to preserve what we have left of this wonderful world & those spiritual currents that support it, we need to be able to put these concepts into a form the modern herd person will understand & relate to. Technology is not evil, but it is vastly out of balance with the natural world which it should be walking hand in hand with to the betterment of all; that's what science is supposed to be there for, right, not just to make the sheeple even more lazy.

That's my two cents, maybe it will buy a cup of joe in the retro noir of my oddball psychodramamtic framework.

[Amara-Syn]

I enjoyed this article as well, and agree with the modernising of the old Ones. I am one of those "everything has a place and it has to be organized and done a certain way" kind of person...and it has been hard for me in the past 12 years of being Pagan, to relate to the Gods in a modern way, because I have such a hard time relating to them from the periods in which they came. I think that something in my brain just shuts off, and tries to bring things to a level that I can readily function with them at...but some of them desperately need an upgrade, at least on the clothes they wear lol!! Dys is right though, it is the energy we are working with anyways, but having something that you can relate to, makes things so much more powerful to some people.