by Jason Mankey
About the Author
Jason Mankey is a third-degree Gardnerian High Priest and helps run two Witchcraft covens in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Ari. He is a popular speaker at Pagan and Witchcraft events across North America and Great Britain and has been recognized by his peers as an authority on the Horned God, Wiccan history, and occult influences in rock and roll. Jason writes online at Raise the Horns on Patheos Pagan and for the print magazine Witches & Pagans. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter at @panmankey.
Llewellyn Publications
Woodbury, Minnesota
Copyright Information
The Horned God of the Witches © 2021 by Jason Mankey.
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First e-book edition © 2021
E-book ISBN: 9780738763156
Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover illustration by Laura Tempest Zakroff
For a list of interior art credits, please see Art Credits on page 275
Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mankey, Jason, author.
Title: The horned god of the witches / by Jason Mankey.
Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Worldwide,
[2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This
book is an in-depth look at the horned god as honored by today’s
witches”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021005678 (print) | LCCN 2021005679 (ebook) | ISBN
9780738763088 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738763156 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: horned god. | Witchcraft. | Paganism.
Classification: LCC BL460 .M26 2021 (print) | LCC BL460 (ebook) | DDC
299/.942211—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005678
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005679
Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.
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Llewellyn Publications
Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
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Woodbury, MN 55125
www.llewellyn.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Dwayne Arthur Sortor (1968–2020).
May your spirit run wild and free, my friend.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Finding the Horned God
Chapter One: The Nature of Deity
Chapter Two: Myth and Ancient History
Chapter Three: Ritual to Meet the Horned God
Chapter Four: Antlers and Horns and Phalluses in the Ancient World
Chapter Five: Pan and the Other Horned Gods of Ancient Greece
Chapter Six: Igniting the Fire: A Pan Ritual For Two (or More)
Chapter Seven: Cernunnos
Chapter Eight: A Devotional Altar for Cernunnos
Chapter Nine: The Green Man
Chapter Ten: Herne the Hunter and Elen of the Ways
Chapter Eleven: The Rebirth of Pan
Chapter Twelve: The Devilish Horned God
Chapter Thirteen: The Light of Lucifer Ritual
Chapter Fourteen: The Horned God of Death
Chapter Fifteen: John Barleycorn Ritual
Chapter Sixteen: From Horned God to The God: The Horned One in Wicca
Chapter Seventeen: The Witchfather: The Horned God in Traditional Witchcraft
Chapter Eighteen: Ritual to Meet the Witchfather
Epilogue: Some Final Thoughts
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Art Credits
Figures
Figure 1. Henri Breuil’s drawing of the Bison-Man at Trois-Frères
Figure 2. The Sorcerer as drawn by Henri Breuil
Figure 3. Pan
Figure 4. A sacrifice for Pan
Figure 5. Detail of a Grecian urn showing Dionysus flanked by satyrs and maenads
Figure 6. Val Camonica rock drawing.
Figure 7. Gundestrup cauldron
Figure 8. Cernunnos panel on the Gundestrup cauldron
Figure 9. The Reims stela
Figure 10. The haunting image of the Green Man
Figure 11. Herne the Hunter
Figure 12. Elen of the Ways
Figure 13. Lucifer
Figure 14. A delightful Devil
Figure 15. Robin Goodfellow
Figure 16. Baphomet
Figure 17. Krampus
Figure 18. A shadowy-looking horned god, most likely resembling Cernunnos
Figure 19. A depiction of the Horned God as he often appears in Traditional Witchcraft
Introduction
Finding the Horned God
Witchcraft practices are as varied as the snowflakes that fall in winter. There are Witches who work in covens and Witches who prefer to work independently. Witchcraft practices can be thousands of years old or exceedingly contemporary. There are Witches who have learned from teachers in group settings and Witches who are self-taught, trusting their intuition and perhaps learning from books and other resources.
Many Witches build their practices around the use of magick, with little use for any other trappings. I know some Witches whose rites are focused almost exclusively on the dead, both those who have died during their lifetimes and also the souls of long-ago ancestors from thousands of years ago. There are Witches whose practices revolve around nature, the turn of the seasons, and the power of the natural world. And then there are Witches like me who work primarily with deities, the most prominent one in my life being the figure most people call the Horned God.
“The Horned God” is a god, a title, and a way of describing particular deities found in the various strains of Modern Witchcraft. The Horned God can even be a Horned Goddess or perhaps have no gender at all, and he’s most certainly straight, gay, transgender, and everything in between. I have to assume that as a force greater than mere mortals, deity is complex and most likely appears in different forms to different people.
Over the last eighty years, most authors of Witchcraft books have written about the Horned God as a single, genuinely ancient deity. According to this line of thinking, every horned or antlered deity is simply a reflection of the original one Horned God, and all horned and antlered deities share a multitude of traits and characteristics. This is a lovely pie
ce of mythology, but it’s just not true. There was never just one horned god in pagan antiquity. Instead, there were a multitude of horned and antlered deities, all of them unique and different, with not all that much in common.
For the last hundred years, the Horned God has been pictured in a variety of ways, but his most important visual attribute is the set of horns or antlers atop his head. Yes, antlers and horns are very different things: horns are permanent structures, while antlers are shed and regrown annually. But pictures of the Horned God have included antlers for a very long time now, and “Antlered God” just doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.
Defining the Horned God
The term Horned God means different things to different people. For some, the Horned God is synonymous with nature and wild spaces. This is a Horned God whose journey through the Wheel of the Year mirrors the change of seasons, moving from youthful promise to young adulthood, middle age, and finally death. In my own practice, the Horned God is a figure who stands between two realms: this world and the lands of death.
In many modern myths of the Horned God, he has become a sacrificial deity, giving his own life so that the world may be renewed and made fertile once again. The Horned God’s association with fertility has led many to think of him as a god of sex and lust, and as a provider of much that is good and pleasurable in our lives. But the Horned God is generally seen as being more than just a deity of passion and the wineskin; he’s representative of a balanced life, a figure who embraces joy but also accepts responsibilities (and lives up to them).
The first modern, public, self-identifying Witch was an Englishman named Gerald Gardner (1884–1964). Today Gardner is hailed by many as the founder or architect of Wiccan-Witchcraft, but his writings on Witchcraft in general have been tremendously influential over the last eighty years. Gardner is quite explicit that the God of the Witches is a god with horns/antlers atop his head, which means the Horned God has been one of Modern Witchcraft’s essential deities since Witchcraft became an ongoing, public concern.
In his 1959 book The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner writes about the Horned God of the Witches as embodying most of the traits he’s associated with today. In one particularly striking passage, he calls the Horned One the “Opener of the Doorway of the Womb” and the “Lord of the Gates of Death.” But to Gardner, the Horned God was more than just a figure residing in a faraway realm.
Gardner also placed the Horned God firmly in our world as “King of the Wood” and described him as the “renewer of life.” More than a deity of the wild spaces, the Horned God was also the “God of Gardens” through his power as the “Phallic God.” The Witch God written about by Gardner was nearly limitless, described as the “All Devourer, All-Begetter” and the “Beloved Saviour of the World.”1
Gardner’s Horned God was not just a being with an erect phallus and horns or antlers atop his head. He’s the God of the Witches, and one who reigns over many of the currents that guide and shape our lives. Today most Witches see the Horned God in ways similar to that of Gardner (though they may individually emphasize one characteristic more than others). The Horned One is a god of nature, sex, fertility, sacrifice, death, and rebirth, and is also a figure to aspire to. Because these ideas are so important to understanding him, they are worth going over in a bit more detail.
Nature and The Natural World
Perhaps first and foremost, the Horned God is a figure that links us to the natural world. He’s the god of the wilderness, of dark forests, majestic mountains, and sun-swept prairies. He’s the Lord of the Wood and the magick that keeps us firmly rooted in nature, even if we are living in an apartment in a city of a million people.
Horns and antlers also link the Horned God to wild animals. The Horned God can be seen in the face of a stag or bull. Because many of the antlers and horns atop his head come from game animals, the Horned God is also a deity of responsible and ethical hunting practices.
The Horned God is the personification of nature, which means he can be both gentle and fierce. He is as pleasant as a warm spring day and as powerful as an autumn hurricane. Nature is sometimes scary; we should expect the same from a god who is a part of it.
As a deity who is a part of nature, the Horned God is also the protector of the earth’s wild spaces. He’s the deity to call on when the government turns its back on preserving the natural world. I’m not sure I’d call the Horned God vengeful, but polluters should probably be worried about him.
Sex, Fertility, and Sacrifice
As a god of nature, the Horned God is also a god of fertility. Fertility is about more than human babies; it’s also about rich soil, blossoming flowers, and ripe fields. In some traditions, the Horned God annually sacrifices his essence in the autumn so that the natural world can be reborn in the spring.
The Horned God is also a god of sexual pleasure. Sex and sexuality are his gifts. They are something to be celebrated when engaged in consensually and not used to shame others. In many myths, the Horned God’s sexual interests are strictly female, but history tells a different story. Horned gods like the Greek Pan were equal-opportunity sexual adventurers, loving men, women, their own hand, and everything in between. The Horned God embraces everyone who seeks him, regardless of sexual orientation. He is a life-affirming deity, and sex for pleasure is a life-affirming activity. He wants us to enjoy our time here on Earth, as fleeting as it may be.
In workshops I often describe the Horned God as “horned and horny,” because deities that focus primarily on sex seem to be a major part of the Horned God mythos. If there’s one identifying feature of the Horned God other than the horns (especially the many male versions), it’s the erect phallus. Depictions of the Horned God are not required to include a raging boner, but it’s become fairly common. Even gods who weren’t pictured in antiquity with erect phalluses, like the Gaulish-Celtic Cernunnos, are sometimes now depicted with an excited member. How sexual the Horned God is probably depends on how horny we need him to be in our own lives.
Death and Resurrection
It stands to reason that as a god of the natural world, the Horned God is also the Lord of Death. Without death, there is no life; both are necessary to keep the world going. A god of the hunt is also a deliverer of death, further linking the Horned God to the world beyond this one. The French phrase la petite mort translates as “the little death” and generally refers to orgasm, so there’s that too!
But the Horned God does more than just usher souls into the realm of the dead; he also gives them safe passage back to the land of the living. For Witches who believe in reincarnation, it’s often the Horned God who guards the portal between the Summerlands and this world.2 It’s this aspect of the Horned God who rules at the sabbat of Samhain and stands in wait for us when our mortal bodies die.
A More Perfect Man
One of my earliest memories of the Horned God did not come from personal experience or from a book, but rather from a cover image of Green Egg magazine, a periodical that was especially popular among Pagans in the 1990s. On that cover, the Horned God held up a young child in his hands above his head, with a giant smile on his face. It was an image filled with joy, of a figure who knew and understood his responsibilities.
In a world full of misogynists, racists, bigots, and other assholes, the Horned God is a figure to aspire to. He is a father, a lover, a nurturer, and a protector. He represents the best of what we can be. In a world where we too often feel let down by those around us, the Horned God is a figure who always rises to the occasion.
Unlike some other deities, the Horned God is not a god of judgment. His disapproval is reserved for those who put themselves ahead of others and the natural world. He wants us to be happy, to live a life of joy and pleasure, but only if we can live that life without impeding the free will of others.
The Horned God, the horned gods, and Witches
When I refer to the Horned God in this book, in my m
ind I’m referencing a very real god. To me, he is more than just a title or a type of energy; he’s a distinct being most likely created from several different parts. In my mind, the Horned God is part Pan and part Cernunnos, and also contains just a little bit of the Christian Devil and several other small bits. In this book we’ll be exploring all of those different angles. Sections of the book will also focus on specific horned gods, a general term that does not indicate a specific being.
I’ve also attempted to limit the focus of this book to the Horned God as worshipped by Modern Witches today. I believe that most cultures have a figure we might label as a “horned god,” but I’m not sure they should be included in a book specifically for Witches. While Witches are free to work with whatever deities call to them, I think it’s in poor taste to include extensive material on powers and deities who are still actively worked with and worshipped in cultures outside of Modern Witchcraft. This means I’ve decided not to write about figures such as the Hindu Shiva and the Navajo Kokopelli (more accurately known as Kookopölö). For those of you looking for more information on such gods, I hope you’ll consult the bibliography for more information or visit with the people who actively work with those gods.
This book also has a very European slant, which I apologize for in advance, but the Horned God as experienced by most self-identified Modern Witches has its deepest roots in Europe. While I find both the use of horns in ancient China and the symbolism of the phallus in ancient India to be fascinating, they just didn’t feel appropriate to include in this book. As stated above, there’s a pretty long bibliography in the back for those interested in additional information on such things. (This book is already pretty long and includes over 280 footnotes. I think my editors would scream if I made it any longer.)
The Horned God as we know him today is both an ancient and a modern construct, and the way this book is laid out reflects that. After exploring the nature of deity, I chose to start this book by relating the Horned One’s most prevalent myth in Modern Witchcraft circles and exploring the most ancient aspects of the Horned God: antler, horn, and phallus imagery. Then I examine two specific deities, Pan and Cernunnos. The story of the Horned God is the story of Cernunnos and Pan more so than any other two gods, both in the way they were worshipped in the ancient world and how they’ve been reinterpreted in ours.