by Jason Mankey
Gardner’s books on Witchcraft (he released a follow-up in 1959 titled The Meaning of Witchcraft) both owe a huge debt to Margaret Murray (who actually wrote the introduction to Witchcraft Today), especially when it comes to the Horned God. The majority of Gardner’s references to the “horned god” (he doesn’t capitalize the phrase until 1959) emphasize that Horn Head is not the Devil and that such ideas arose out of confusion, again borrowing a page from Murray.
Aside from Gardner’s use of the “horned god” as one of Wiccan-Witchcraft’s primary deities, his most notable contribution to the development of the Horned God is his linking of the Horned One to death. Ruminating on the development of religion, Gardner writes of the Horned God:
Primitive man feared to be born again outside his own tribe, so his ritual prayers to his god were that he might be born again in the same place and at the same time as his loved ones, and that he might remember and love them again. The god who rules this paradise must, I think, have been Death, but somehow he is identified with the hunting god and wears his horns. This god of death and hunting, or his representative, seems at one time to have taken the lead in the cult, and man became the master.209
Gardner would further elaborate on the Horned God as a god of both life and death in The Meaning of Witchcraft. In this book, Gardner seems far surer of his deity: “Horned God” is now capitalized throughout the text, and the links to death are much firmer. Gardner writes of the Horned One as “the dealer of death” and “the Lord of the Gates of Death.” 210 Gardner also establishes the Horned God’s role as a provider of plenty and spells out his role (along with that of the Goddess) in Witchcraft:
Witches say that they came because man wanted magical rites for hunting; the proper rites to procure increase in flocks and herds, to assure good fishing, and to make women fruitful; then, later, rites for good farming, etc., and whatever the clan needed, including help in time of war, to cure the sick, and to hold and regulate the greater and lesser festivals, to conduct the worship of the Goddess and the Horned God. They considered it good that men should dance and be happy, and that this worship and initiation was necessary for obtaining a favourable place in the After-World, and a reincarnation into your own tribe again, among those whom you loved and who loved you, and that you would remember, know, and love them again.211
For me, Gardner’s emphasis on the Horned God as a deity of both life and death forever changed how we see the Horned One. Gardner established that the Horned God of the Witches was not just a deity of the forest or an initiator of sex. Gardner’s Horned God was a truly liminal figure, operating in both this world and the next. His presence was not limited to just this world, but was also a part of the rest.
What’s fascinating to me about Gardner’s focus on death and the Horned God is how unique it is. There’s no precedent for it in the poetry of the Romantics and Victorians, and it’s not a guiding principle in Margaret Murray’s works on Witchcraft. There are some precedents in the ancient world for a deity of both the living and the dead. The Roman Faunus, for example, escorted the souls of the dead to the underworld, and has much in common with Pan, and as we’ve seen, Cernunnos has ties to the dead as well. But it’s unlikely that Gardner would have been all that familiar with interpretations of Cernunnos outside of Murray. In other words, Gardner’s conception of the Horned God hints at something else: personal experience and/or the agency of the Horned One himself.
As someone whose first experience of the Horned One as a god of death came during ritual, I can’t help but wonder if Gardner had similar experiences that influenced his perception of the Horned God. Also not to be discounted is the possibility that Old Hornie himself was whispering in Gardner’s ear, imparting wisdom and an understanding that was probably surprising to many. It would have been easy enough for Gardner to depict a Horned God in the style of Margaret Murray or Kenneth Grahame, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Gardner wrote of a much richer and multi-layered deity.
Acknowledgment of the Horned God as a deity of life and death would continue after Gardner, but starting in the 1970s the idea began to fall out of favor among many Witches. It didn’t disappear entirely, and could still be easily found in many of the traditions close to Gardner’s original version of Wiccan-Witchcraft, but in more eclectic materials the Horned God’s connection was largely overlooked or marginalized. In the practice of Traditional Witchcraft, the Horned God as a Lord of Death has remained close to the surface. Later in this book, we’ll look further at the evolution of the Horned God within both Wicca and Trad Craft.
Dread Lord of Shadows
Witchcraft is a life-affirming religion, but it’s also a practical one. Every Witch knows that eventually they are going to die. My hope for all of us is that death will happen a long time from now, but make no mistake, death is coming for us all. Some people deal with death by ignoring it, but those of us who honor the Horned God embrace its eventuality, for we know that our god is a deity of both the living and the dead.
There are no absolutes in Witchcraft, and no hard-and-fast rules about what happens to us when we die. There are those who think we simply cease to be, and others who believe that our spirit will eventually reside in a land of eternal peace and contentment. The most common belief in Witchcraft circles tends to be in reincarnation. Those of us who hold to this view believe that the soul survives death, rests and recharges in a place often called the Summerlands,212 and is then reborn in a new body on this earth.
It’s not necessary to believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, but the Horned God’s role as the Dread Lord of Shadows is directly tied into this belief (figure 18). If you aren’t a believer, I hope the following information is still helpful. The Dread Lord of Shadows exists to make death easier, on both the living and the now dead.
Figure 18: A shadowy-looking horned god, most likely resembling Cernunnos.
The Horned God in his role as the Dread Lord of Shadows.
When addressing the Horned God as the Dread Lord of Shadows at public Samhain rituals, I’m often surprised by how many people are taken aback by it. For many, their image of the Horned God is simply Pan running around a perfect summer field, or perhaps the Horned God in the middle of lovemaking. But there’s more to the Horned One than this mortal coil, and the promises he makes for us in death are just as important as the promises he has made for us here.
Losing a loved one is perhaps one of the biggest pains most of us face in life. Knowing that tomorrow a friend, lover, or family member will not be there is hard to face. The adjustment those we’ve lost have to go through is most likely equally difficult. To be taken to another realm and place, away from most everything you’ve known and loved, is terrifying.
While the title Dread Lord of Shadows sounds ominous and frightening, the Horned God in this role is a comforter. He welcomes those who have departed our world and makes them feel at home in the next. He is a shoulder to cry on and a place to set one’s burdens. As a god who walks between the worlds, he provides comfort not only to the dead but also to the living. When we struggle with questions and pain, he is there to help us with our grief.
There are many who die in great pain, and while their loss hurts us, we know that their passing is for the best. When the dying are embraced by the Dread Lord of Shadows, know that their pain and suffering is being taken away. His touch in such instances is one of love and release and serves to make those who cross over to the realms of death whole once more.
In invocations to the Lord of Shadows at Samhain, the word rest is often invoked. The Horned One provides a place for us in death to reflect on what we have done in our lives, and to rest. He has prepared a place where our soul might be renewed and refreshed for what lies ahead on our further journeys.
What lies ahead is important when it comes to understanding the Dread Lord of Shadows, for he is also a god of rebirth and return. He watches over the portal that connects this world and the
next, and sends back to this earth the souls that are ready for the next phase of their journey. It is the Dread Lord of Shadows who guards the mysteries of the End and the wonder of beginnings.
At Samhain time, it’s the Dread Lord of Shadows who opens the veil between the worlds, allowing his current charges (the dead) to visit with those whom they are apart from. It’s his magick and wisdom that allows us to experience reunion with those we’ve loved, even if that reunion is brief.
Perhaps most important of all is that when we are reborn, the Horned One will reunite us with those we love. There’s an idea common among many Witches who believe in reincarnation that we will be reborn in the same place and time as those that we’ve loved in this lifetime (and other lifetimes). This happens through the grace of the Dread Lord of Shadows, who rules the lands of death and return.
The Dying and Rising God
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890) by the Scottish academic Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) has been one of the most influential books of the Modern Pagan and Witch revivals. Frazer’s work has influenced how we celebrate and view the sabbats and is full of magickal practices and rituals.213 The Golden Bough was an ongoing project for Frazer and would occupy much of his life; he would release updated and expanded editions of the work in 1900 and a third edition over the years of 1907–1915.
Frazer’s work was written mainly for an academic audience, but his prose is so elegant that the book eventually became a bestseller, with an abridged version going through fifty-one printings between 1922 and 1955. 214 Its popularity in Witch circles was no doubt helped by its extreme readability; compared to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, reading The Golden Bough is like reading Dr. Seuss. It’s also extensively footnoted, and Frazer shares hundreds of religious and spiritual anecdotes from all over the world.
Many of the more agrarian and rural traditions shared by Frazer feel right at home in Modern Witchcraft. Rituals to care for the earth, the home, and the hearth are a part of what many of us do on a daily basis, but Frazer was most likely surprised that such ideas resonated with people in the twentieth century. Most of Frazer’s biographers believe he was an atheist (and many of his early writings allude to this) or at least an agnostic.215 Instead of finding silliness and superstition in his work, many people, even beyond the Witch and Pagan worlds, have found rituals full of love, joy, and meaning.
One of the primary areas of focus in The Golden Bough is on a figure Frazer called the “god of vegetation,” who annually died and then rose again in order to ensure the earth’s fertility. In Frazer’s view, popular deities such as Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, and Adonis were simply stand-ins for grape fields and cereal crops, with the mythology surrounding such gods being just metaphorical tales of the yearly agricultural cycle. Though mostly winked at throughout the text, the endgame of Frazer’s work was to discredit Christianity by suggesting that Jesus was nothing more than a reimagined Pagan deity. In Frazer’s view, the gods of ancient paganism were silly, so by extension, Jesus was silly too.
The idea of dying and rising gods is common in Witchcraft today, though the idea has been mostly dismissed by scholars of religion. (As one religious scholar put it, “There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religion of a dying and rising deity.” 216 ) Whether or not dying and rising gods occupy a real place in history is inconsequential here; what’s important is just how poetic Frazer made such figures sound. It’s also an idea that resonates today with so many of us because most of us can see it every year in microcosm.
I grew up near corn and soybean fields, and as my family drove around central Illinois every year, I learned to appreciate their yearly rise and fall. In late autumn the fields would appear dug up and picked over. In the winter they’d be covered with snow, and then in the spring you’d notice them slowly return to life. In the summer it was possible to literally get lost in rows of corn, and by the start of July the corn crop in my Great-Aunt Gene’s fields was always taller than I was. Eventually the corn would fully ripen, and it would be harvested by the middle of September. Then the whole cycle would start again.
Frazer thought of his dying and rising vegetation god as a worldwide deity simply worshipped by different names. His ideas here are similar to how Margaret Murray would later conceive of the Horned God. Due to just how beautiful and practical Frazer’s idea of a dying and rising god was to many early Witches, the idea would become a common one in Witch circles. And when Witches were looking to embody that figure physically, they naturally looked to the Horned God.
Like Frazer’s dying and rising god, the Horned God was also a part of the natural landscape, and intimately connected to the turn of the seasons. It had already been established that the Horned God was a god of fertility and abundance, and what could be more fertile and abundant than a ripe field full of grain? The end result was that Frazer’s figure ended up wearing horns in many Witch circles, and there are scores of Witches who now see the Horned God as a deity who annually sacrifices himself to preserve the earth’s fertility.
In a break with Frazer, most Witches view this sacrifice as happening in the autumn, while Frazer believed it could happen at any point in the agricultural cycle. Frazer also believed that gifts, sacrifices, and offerings to deity were all originally meant to be acts signifying the slaying of a deity. 217 I’m not sure Pan would appreciate me sharing my wine with him if he thought it was meant to symbolize killing him, but most of Frazer’s other ideas feel at home in the circle.
An even more poetic spin on Frazer’s ideas would appear a few decades later in Robert Graves’s (1895–1985) The White Goddess (1948). Like The Golden Bough, The White Goddess has been tremendously influential in the Pagan world over the last seventy years and shows up in all sorts of different contexts. Like Frazer, Graves didn’t quite give us a horned or antlered deity in his text, but he did introduce two figures who are often depicted with antlers.
Taking the idea of the dying and rising god one step further, Graves proposed that ancient myth contained a legend most of us know today as the story of the Oak and Holly Kings. At the Winter Solstice every year, a newly reborn Oak King challenges his old and decrepit brother, the Holly King, for control of the earth and the seasons. Once his brother has been dispatched, the Oak King reigns during the waning half of the year (from the Winter Solstice to the Summer Solstice). The Holly King leaves to lick his wounds, then returns reborn in the summer to conquer his brother. The cycle then continues (and continues and continues).
The idea of the Holly and Oak Kings as universal or even common motifs is dismissed by most scholars, and Graves’s work was meant to be a piece of prose poetry, not a historical work. But Graves’s work is important when it comes to the Horned God because the brothers are most often depicted these days with antlers. Their tale is also a captivating story that makes for effective ritual.
The Wheel of the Year Myth
Witches have always built rituals around the change of seasons. Inspired by the work of Frazer and others, the story of the courtship between the Great Goddess and the Horned God has been central to myths reflecting the Wheel of the Year since at least the 1960s. There is no one version of this story, but it generally incorporates the idea of the Goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone, with the Horned God developing physically along similar lines.
As I write this book (in 2019), I find this rather common myth to be somewhat troubling. Its limited scope leaves out the experiences of many Witches who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community. (Don’t we want to see deities who reflect all of our lives when we gather together in circle? Think for a moment just how disheartening it would be never to see yourself in ritual.) As this book has tried to make clear, the Horned God is not straight, nor is “he” even always a he!
I also find the idea that a woman’s life can be summed up in the idea of Maiden, Mother, and Crone to be a little too uterus-centric. I know many women who have
chosen not to have children and forgo being labeled a “Mother.” And some of the youngest and most joyful energy I’ve ever experienced has come from women who are most likely thought of as Crones. I’ve also found profound wisdom in the words of those much younger than me.
In most versions of this particular myth, the Horned God dies, is reborn, grows in wisdom and experience, courts the Goddess, and then sacrifices himself to ensure the continued fertility of the earth. Before his final sacrifice, he impregnates the Goddess, thus ensuring that he will be reborn. Generally, specific life events are linked to each of the eight sabbats, though those life events are often shuffled around depending on the needs of the ritual.
The story of the Horned God on the Wheel of the Year begins at Yule, when he is reborn, emerging from the womb of the Goddess. While the God has horns atop his head, it’s the sun that the Horned One is most connected to on the Winter Solstice. The God’s birth is representative of the sun being “reborn” on the solstice, and it’s thought that the God will only grow stronger and more powerful as the days grow longer, coming fully into his power at the Summer Solstice.
After his birth, the Horned One is raised by his mother, before she mysteriously disappears, only to be reborn herself. One of the more vexing problems in this myth is that the Goddess would be an older woman by the time she gives birth. There is also no one moment where she is reborn. She simply reappears at Imbolc as a young lady, where she first catches the eye of the Horned God.