The Horned God of the Witches

by Jason Mankey

  I dare not sleep for delight of the perfect hour,

  Lest God be wroth that his gift should be scorned of man.

  The face of the warm bright world is the face of a flower,

  The word of the wind and the leaves that the light winds fan

  As the word that quickened at first into flame, and ran,

  Creative and subtle and fierce with invasive power,

  Through darkness and cloud, from the breath of the one God, Pan.

  [… There’s a lot of space between these two verses.]

  Thee, thee the supreme dim godhead, approved afar,

  Perceived of the soul and conceived of the sense of man,

  We scarce dare love, and we dare not fear: the star

  We call the sun, that lit us when life began

  To brood on the world that is thine by his grace for a span,

  Conceals and reveals in the semblance of things that are

  Thine immanent presence, the pulse of thy heart’s life, Pan.166

  Pan and Aleister Crowley

  Though not a Pagan or a Witch (despite the conspiracy-theory nonsense of some in the Witchcraft community), British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) would have a huge impact on what many Witches do. A skilled ceremonial magician and an accomplished poet, Crowley’s writings on magick went on to influence generations, and many of his words were recycled by the earliest public Witches and inserted into their rituals. In some ways, Crowley and Pan were very much alike. They both pursued pleasures, taking advantage of whatever was available, and loved the outdoors. Crowley was an avid mountaineer, especially in his early years.

  In Witch circles, Crowley’s most well-known poem is his “Hymn to Pan” (1907), which can be read either with a sly smirk and a wink or as a full-throated endorsement of the lustiness of Pan. Unlike other poets of the era, Crowley fully embraced all of Pan’s rough edges, and his embrace is not subtle. Crowley also added rhetorical flourishes from his work The Book of the Law (1904), which would later feature prominently in the rites of the Ordo Temple Orientis (O.T.O.) and other occult groups inspired by Crowley. By the time Crowley wrote his famous paean to Pan, he was quite familiar with the god in a spiritual context. Crowley’s Liber VII from 1904 (dictated to the occultist by Aiwass, his Holy Guardian Angel) contains a vision of the god:167

  Into my loneliness comes—

  The sound of a flute in dim groves that haunt the uttermost hills.

  Even from the brave river they reach to the edge of the wilderness.

  And I behold Pan.168

  Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” can be read as a prelude to the calls to the lusty Horned God that would arise from many Witches just a few decades later:

  Hymn to Pan (Crowley)

  Thrill with lissome lust of the light,

  O man! My man!

  Come careering out of the night

  Of Pan! Io Pan!

  Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea

  From Sicily and from Arcady!

  Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards

  And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,

  On a milk-white ass, come over the sea

  To me, to me!

  Come with Apollo in bridal dress

  (Shepherdess and pythoness)

  Come with Artemis, silken shod,

  And wash thy white thigh, beautiful god,

  In the moon, of the woods, on the marble mount,

  The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!

  Dip the purple of passionate prayer

  In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,

  The soul that startles in eyes of blue

  To watch thy wantonness weeping through

  The tangled grove, the gnarled bole

  Of the living tree that is spirit and soul

  And body and brain—come over the sea,

  (Io Pan! Io Pan!)

  Devil or god, to me, to me,

  My man! my man!

  Come with trumpets sounding shrill

  Over the hill!

  Come with drums low muttering

  From the spring!

  Come with flute and come with pipe!

  Am I not ripe?

  I, who wait and writhe and wrestle

  With air that hath no boughs to nestle

  My body, weary of empty clasp,

  Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp—

  Come, O come!

  I am numb

  With the lonely lust of devildom.

  Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,

  All-devourer, all-begetter;

  Give me the sign of the Open Eye,

  And the token erect of thorny thigh,

  And the word of madness and mystery,

  O Pan! Io Pan!

  Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan,

  I am a man:

  Do as thou wilt, as a great god can,

  O Pan! Io Pan!

  Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! I am awake

  In the grip of the snake.

  The eagle slashes with beak and claw;

  The gods withdraw:

  The great beasts come, Io Pan! I am borne

  To death on the horn

  Of the Unicorn.

  I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!

  I am thy mate, I am thy man,

  Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,

  Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.

  With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks

  Through solstice stubborn to equinox.

  And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend

  Everlasting, world without end,

  Mannikin, maiden, maenad, man,

  In the might of Pan.

  Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan! 169

  Crowley was not the first magickal person to cry “Io Pan,” but he would turn it into something of a catchphrase to many in the magickal and Witch communities.

  Despite its familiarity to many in the occult community, Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” lost the wider battle for how the Horned God would later be viewed by most Witches. Instead of Pan as the “lissome lust of the night,” the most lasting image of Pan from the early twentieth century would be one far more serene and in line with the Pan of Keats and Shelley. That it would show up in a children’s book makes the triumph of this version of Pan all that much more interesting.

  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

  To me, the fullest flowering of Pan as a literary phenomenon appears in Kenneth Grahame’s (1859–1932) The Wind in the Willows from 1908. I’m sure most of you are familiar with Willows today because of the many movie and TV adaptations that have flourished in its wake. (It even inspired a ride at Disneyland.) But what most of those adaptations fail to address is the story’s seventh chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” which features Pan as the soul of nature.

  Without even writing the god’s name in his novel, Grahame perfectly captures the new kinder, gentler Pan, and does it in a way so powerful that reading it sometimes makes me weep. Grahame’s Pan was how I first embraced the Horned God and is the vision I most often return to when experiencing the god in nature. I’m not alone in this reverence; the Pan conceived of in The Wind in the Willows would become the dominant version of the god in Pagan and Witch circles. (A part of me wonders how many Witches were born after hearing about Pan for the first time in Grahame’s work.)

  The reverence Grahame has for Pan is inescapable. He is “the Friend” and “the Helper” and an “august Presence” radiating love, kindness, and the overwhelming force of the natural world. Grahame is clearly writing about a god in his novel, which is why many Christian websites recommend that parents skip this particular chapter when reading the book to their children. The entire passage is worth perusing, but most especially these few paragraphs:

  ‘This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,’ whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. ‘Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we sha
ll find Him!’

  Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

  Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw … All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

  ‘Rat!’ he found breath to whisper, shaking. ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!’

  Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.170

  The Rebirth of Pan and the Horned God of Nature

  The Horned God as a nature deity is perhaps his most obvious manifestation and yet is often the most difficult one to articulate. That difficulty most likely arises from the various ways we each see the Horned God’s role in the natural world. For some Witches he is the natural world, and to others he is a shepherd of it, guiding the yearly turn of the Wheel, sometimes at the expense of himself. Others might interpret the Horned God’s role in a more intimate way: perhaps he is the power that connects us directly to nature?

  I would argue that the writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw Pan in these ways. As the decades progressed and these new interpretations of Pan got caught up in the much bigger Horned God, they became ways to interpret our own personal experiences with him. It’s fitting that the Horned God’s role as a nature deity has been so perfectly captured in poetry and prose over the years.

  Not all of us unknowingly met the Horned God in English literature class, but the way we most often talk about him in Witch (and especially) Pagan circles reflects the influence writers from the last two hundred years have had on his myth. Mostly gone was the idea of a raging panic terror, and in its place we found a power that sings to us in the woods and comforts us when we find ourselves disconnected from nature. As a young Witch, it was this version of the Horned God that led me to his mysteries, and while my understanding of him has greatly increased over the decades since, it’s still a part of his character that calls to me. It’s hard for me to imagine a ritual in the outdoors where I don’t feel his heartbeat near my own.

  For many Witches today, the Horned God of The Wind in the Willows probably feels like an anachronism. Instead of seeing him as the benign “Friend” and “Helper,” it’s become popular in many Witch spaces to focus on the Horned God’s role in death and to explore his connections to the Devil of Margaret Murray’s Witches. Certainly the Horned God is more complicated than “happy Pan running through the forest,” but I would argue that “happy Pan” remains a part of his character.

  The Horned God of nature is what connects us to the bigger world. For many of us who live in an urban environment, the Horned God is the presence that takes us away from the mundane concerns that go along with that sort of lifestyle. Not everyone wants to go and live in the woods, but there is beauty in the wild spaces, and we can feel and experience that beauty through the Horned God’s power. There’s something wild and primal that exists within many Witches, and the Horned God helps us understand and experience that urge. Wanting to throw off one’s clothes and howl at the moon is not a character flaw; it’s a way to connect with the energies of the earth. For many of us, the Horned God is our guide through those mysteries.

  [contents]

  * * *

  134. Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “pan,” https://www.etymonline.com/word/pan.

  135. Boys-Stones, L. Annaeus Cornutus, 16.

  136. Dunn, The Orphic Hymns, 1–3.

  137. A Greek daimon was generally a lesser god, such as a nature spirit or a deified mortal.

  138. Dunn, The Orphic Hymns, 63.

  139. Dunn, The Orphic Hymns, 1.

  140. Taylor was a Neo-Platonist and was called “the Pagan” by his contemporaries. Seriously, I can’t make this stuff up.

  141. Merivale, Pan the Goat-God, 10.

  142. Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 188.

  143. Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, 3.

  144. Bacon, Bacon’s Essays & Wisdom of the Ancients, 333–343.

  145. Bacon, Bacon’s Essays & Wisdom of the Ancients, 333–343.

  146. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 45.

  147. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 3. In the first chapter of this book, Hutton describes how the writings of the Romantic poets provided a framework for describing modern Paganism and its deities, including the Horned God. The title of that chapter is “Finding a Language.”

  148. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 141.

  149. Wordsworth, The Complete Works of William Wordsworth, from Book 8: Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man in The Prelude.

  150. Wordsworth, The Complete Works of William Wordsworth.

  151. Wordsworth, The Complete Works of William Wordsworth.

  152. Percy Bysshe Shelley is immensely famous in literary circles, but he’s probably better known today as the husband of the novelist Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.

  153. Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley and one of Britain’s longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer, was the person to whom Hunt referred in this letter. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the keeper of the purse, essentially the UK’s minister of finance.

  154. Merivale, Pan the Goat-God, 63.

  155. Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. 2, Shelley in Italy, 361.

  156. Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, location 12631, from the poem “Hymn of Pan.”

  157. Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, location 7849, from the poem “The Witch of Atlas.”

  158. Keats, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, 134–135.

  159. Keats, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats, 13.

  160. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 46.

  161. Arnold, Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold, from the imaginatively titled poem “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens.”

  162. Flecker, The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker, location 2362, “Oak and Olive.”

  163. Maugham, Cakes and Ale; or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, 121–122.

  164. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 50.


  165. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 26.

  166. Swinburne, Selected Poems.

  167. Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, 138.

  168. Crowley, Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli.

  169. Crowley, The Equinox: Volume 3, Number 1 (The Blue Equinox), 5–7.

  170. Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, 181–182.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Devilish Horned God

  Modern Witches have a strange relationship with Christianity and the Devil. Many Witches who say they believe in a wide variety of deities often doubt the existence of the monotheistic God(s) of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They tend to scoff even louder at the demigods found in those faiths, such as the figure most of us today call the Devil. When a Witch is speaking to those outside of the Witch and Pagan worlds, I often hear, “Witches don’t believe in the Devil,” but that’s not entirely true.

  There are a lot of Witches who believe in the Devil (see chapter 17), just as they believe in any other entity who has been around for thousands of years. It’s also worth pointing out that when a Christian accuses a Witch of worshipping the Devil, they aren’t necessarily wrong in the context of their own faith. To many Christians, any deity outside of Jesus and his dad are either the Devil or one of his demons.

  Try as we might, most Modern Witches can’t completely escape the Devil. If we are being honest with ourselves, we also have to admit that he’s in the very DNA of the Horned God. This does not mean that when someone is worshipping the Horned God, they are consciously worshipping an entity that wants to destroy the world. It just means that the texts and ideas that helped shape Modern Witchcraft and give rise to the Horned God contained a few devilish ideas.