An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Horned God, The

The greatest temple ever raised by man, that of Karnak in Ancient Egypt, was built in honour of a horned god, Ammon-Ra, who bore the curling horns of the ram.

The attribute of horns as a symbol of power was wide-spread throughout the ancient world. Many Egyptian gods and goddesses were depicted with horned head-dresses. In Ancient Crete, to set up a pair of horns was the sign of a sacred place. The Old Testament speaks of “the horns of the altar”; and there was a legend that Moses, after he had talked with God upon Mount Sinai, came down from the mountain horned. Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses bears witness to this belief, as it depicts him with small horns upon his forehead.

Alexander the Great was known as ’The Two-Horned’. Greek warriors wore horns upon their helmets, as in later years did the Vikings, the Celts and the Teutonic races. The horned helmet, as the insignia of a powerful warrior, survived into the Middle Ages. There are many pictures of armoured knights wearing such helmets. The idea is found even in the Far East. The Samurai, or armoured warriors of old Japan, wore helmets with horns.

African witch-doctors, too, often wear a horned head-dress as part of their ceremonial attire; while on the other side of the world, the Red Indian medicine man wears a horned helmet as the emblem of his power.

The oldest known representations of a male deity, the pictures from the painted caves of the Stone Age, show him as a horned, ithyphallic figure. (See CAVE ART, RELIGIOUS AND MAGICAL.) The connection between this most primeval of gods, and the sophisticated, wide-ruling deities of Ancient Egypt, is far-stretched, but quite clearly traceable. It stretched again to the Great God Pan of the mountains and forests of Greece, the god of fertility and vitality; and to Cernunnos, ’The Horned One’, worshipped in Celtic Europe and in Ancient Britain. Many statues of Cernunnos have been discovered in Britain; and a temple to him stood upon the site of the Church of Notre Dame in Paris.

Still more tenuous, the link stretches to the Horned God worshipped at the witches’ Sabbats, and denounced by the Christian Church as the Devil; “Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick or Clootie”, as Robert Burns called him. However, we do not find horns referred to in the Bible as a symbol of evil, but of sacredness and protection. “He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation” (2 Samuel, XXII, 3). “My buckler, and the horn of my salvation” (Psalm XVIII, 2). “And hath raised up a horn of salvation for us” (Luke, I, 69). There are many Biblical texts containing such expressions as “The horns of the righteous shall be exalted”, “Mine horn is exalted in the Lord”, and so on. The idea of horns as a sign of wickedness is a comparatively modern one.

On the Continent of Europe, horns were, and still are, an extremely popular amulet against the Evil Eye; so much so, that in Italy the word corno has come to mean almost any kind of lucky charm. (See EVIL EYE.) The same belief, less marked perhaps but still existing, can be found in Britain. A pair of horns hung up in the house as a decoration is still believed to be lucky, by some country folk.

The idea that there is something magical about horns derives from a very distant past, the time before man discovered agriculture. When our remote ancestors, the primitive hunters, roamed the land in search of the herds of wild game on which they depended for food, they must have admired the mighty stag, or the splendid bison, with his imposing horns, his beauty, his power, his strength and virility. He was the incarnation of maleness, the sire of the herds. They painted his likeness upon the walls of their caves; and their priest-magicians wore his horns and his skin in their magical rites.

Some of this hunting magic may have been of a very practical kind. It has been conjectured that one of the ways in which men of the Old Stone Age hunted was to have a clever and daring member of the tribe to act as a decoy. This man would dress himself in the horns and skin of the hunted animal, and lure a number of animals into a trap; for instance, towards some steep place, over which they could be stampeded, and then despatched with bows and arrows, if they were not killed by the fall. This is in fact a possible form of hunting for people armed only with primitive weapons and their own cunning; but all depends upon the nerve and sagacity of the man who acts the part of the decoy ’beast’. He would certainly have been the magician of the tribe.

This magician who was en rapport with the great beasts, is one very probable origin of the concept of the Horned God, but the Horned God himself is more than that. He is the masculine, active side of Nature, as the Moon Goddess represents the feminine side, in the witches’ theology. The Horned God is the opener of the Gates of Life and Death; because that which is born through the Gate of Life must return through the Gate of Death, when the time comes to leave this world again.

Hence the Horned God is the power of returning vitality in the spring; but he is also the Old God of the Underworld, that Dis from whom, according to Caesar, the Gauls claimed to be descended. Every year we see re-enacted the Fall of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, when the sun, the source of vitality for this planet, attains the height of his power at midsummer, and then falls from that height to hide himself in the realms below. Osiris, the Egyptian sun god, was also ruler over the realms of the dead; and his consort Isis, the moon goddess, was mistress of magic. The heart of paganism is a philosophy based upon Nature, and veiled in symbol and myth.

One wonders how much the Ancient Britons and Gauls knew of astrology; because the particular attribute of Cernunnos in Celtic art is the serpent with a ram’s head. Now, the ram’s head is the emblem of Aries, the sign of the spring equinox; while the serpent is one of the emblems of Scorpio, which astrologers call the natural ruler of the House of Death, and which is the sun sign at the time of Halloween, the Celtic festival of the dead. Both Aries and Scorpio are ruled by Mars, the planet which is so much the emblem of male virility that its symbol is used by naturalists for that purpose, to indicate the masculine gender.

The Horned God, then, is the phallic god, the personification of the masculine side of Nature. When man discovered agriculture; and started to till the land and keep flocks and herds, the potency of the bull, the ram, and the goat became important to him also, and these animals played their part in the cult of the Horned God.

Kings and priests wore the horned helmet, crown, or head-dress, in its various forms, all over the ancient world. In Egypt actual bulls and rams were kept as sacred beasts and regarded as dwelling-places for the spirit of the god; even as the god Shiva has his sacred bull in the temples of India today. Extraordinary scenes were enacted in the temple of the ram god Mendes, when women regarded it as a religious rite to couple ceremonially with the sacred ram. The historian Herodotus witnessed this fantastic ritual.

Stories like this, and the many representations in Egyptian art of worshippers, especially women, adoring a sacred horned animal which stands upon an altar, remind us of the shocked descriptions, many years later, of what is supposed to have happened at the witches’ Sabbats; when a horned beast, or a man in the guise of one, was adored in similar fashion.

The gods of paganism are not remote. Their living symbols can be found close at hand in the world of Nature. But this does not preclude the god who is immanent being also transcendent, beyond the veil of manifested Nature.

Pagan and primitive mankind, however, liked to be able to contact, literally, the likeness of their god. He was there for them in the beast upon the altar; or at any rate, the principle of him was there. Even, probably, as the principle of the goddess, the Great Feminine, was present among her priestesses, dancing girls and temple prostitutes of ancient times.

This idea of contact with the living representative of the Horned God was probably the origin of the bull-leaping cult of Ancient Crete, a dangerous sport in which both youths and girls participated, and of which wonderfully graceful representations are found in Cretan art. Later still, we have the bull fight as the continuation of the same idea; not, however, as it is put on today, a bloody and sadistic spectacle but as its name of corrida de toros describes it, ’a running of bulls’. In some of the old towns and villages of Southern France and Spain, the original dangerous and exciting ’running of bulls’ can still be seen, when the young bulls are released to career through the narrow streets of the town, while the young men vie with each other to see who can play the most hair-raising pranks with them, coming within inches of the horns, and often having to save themselves by leaping over fences or shinning up lamp-posts.

But how did this magical image of a Horned God come to be especially the god of the witches? Of all the ancient gods whose cults were displaced by that of Christianity, why is it specifically this god who survived in the secret covens?

The Horned God of witchcraft, has, of course, absorbed many of the characteristics of other popular pagan gods. For instance, the figure of Herne the Hunter, specifically associated with witchcraft in Windsor Forest, has taken on some of the attributes of Woden, and of Gwynn ap Nudd, both of whom were leaders of the phantom Wild Hunt.

The horned and hoofed ’Devil’ of the witches’ coven has a strong resemblance to the Greek god Pan, worshipped with orgiastic rites by the witches of Thessaly. He also has obvious links with the Celtic Cernunnos, especially as the Ruler of the Underworld or Otherworld, beyond the veil of mortal life. Cernunnos, incidentally, ruled beer and ale in Celtic Europe; even as in Greece the horned Dionysus presided over wine. In the days when every good housewife was proud of her home-brewed ale, and tea and coffee were unknown, it was Cernunnos who was the spirit of the working man’s tipple, as downed by thirsty harvesters in the summer fields, or sipped cheerfully by the winter’s log fire.

It was the grass-roots antiquity of the old Horned God that made him survive, when more sophisticated god-forms were forgotten. He was from the morning of the world, deep down in man’s mind, among the primeval things. The impression of him has lasted longer because it is deeper. He is the oldest god man has; even as the White Lady of the Moon, the Great Mother, is the oldest goddess.

The Christian Church might denounce him as ’The Devil’ as much as it liked; and obviously many of the things he represents are antipathetic to the medieval Church’s version of Christianity; strong drink, merry-making, and ithyphallic vigour, for instance. His cult could be driven underground; but it could not be extirpated, because both he and his female counterpart, the moon goddess of the witches, represent forces vitally present in Nature, and in human nature.

Christian morality, however, did manage to twist the significance of horns into the sign of a cuckold. There has been a great deal of speculation among antiquaries as to why this significance should be. The reason is that Christian moralists regarded pagan women as whores, because of their free-living, emancipated ways; and regarded pagan deities with their orgiastic rites as the promoters of fornication. Hence, men who were pagans were cuckolds, because of the shamelessness of their women; or so the Church taught people to believe.

The Horned God was degraded into the Devil; and the Horns of Honour were made into a badge of shame. The moves of propaganda were known in the old days, even as they are today; but even so, this denigration of ancient symbols has never been entirely successful.