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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter II: Gods & Goddesses

The Horned God: Cernunnos, Pan and the God of the Witches

The Horned God of modern witchcraft explained: Cernunnos, Pan and Herne, the horned Devil, Margaret Murray's theory and the god of modern Wicca.

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The Horned God is the male deity of modern Wicca and much of contemporary Pagan witchcraft, a god of the wild, of animals, the hunt, fertility, death and rebirth who is usually worshipped alongside the Goddess. He draws on several older figures, among them the antlered Gaulish god conventionally called Cernunnos, the Greek goat-god Pan and the English legend of Herne the Hunter. Historians regard the Horned God as a modern synthesis, shaped above all by Margaret Murray's theory of a witches' god and by Gerald Gardner's Wicca, rather than a single deity worshipped continuously since prehistory.

Who Is the Horned God?§

In Wicca the divine is commonly understood as a polarity of Goddess and God. The Goddess is linked with the moon, the earth and the cycle of life; the God, often depicted with the antlers of a stag or the horns of a goat, is linked with the sun, the forest, animals, the hunt, sexuality and death. Over the Wheel of the Year he is born at the winter solstice, matures and unites with the Goddess in spring, and dies or departs to the Otherworld in autumn, to be reborn again. As lord of death he is also the guide and comforter of the dead.

He is known by many names. Early Wiccan texts used names such as Cernunnos and Karnayna; other groups honour him as Herne, Pan, or simply "the Horned One". Some Wiccans see him as one aspect of a single divine reality, others as a distinct personal god, and some as an archetype. A general survey of how Pagans understand deity is given in gods and goddesses of modern Paganism.

Antlered and Horned Gods in Antiquity§

Horned and antlered figures appear in many ancient cultures, but the closest ancient models for the modern Horned God come from the Celtic-speaking world of Gaul and Britain.

  • The Pillar of the Boatmen. A monument dedicated in Paris by the guild of boatmen during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37), discovered beneath Notre-Dame in 1711, shows an older, bearded god with stag's antlers from which hang torcs. The damaged inscription above him reads "[C]ernunnos", the only well-attested occurrence of the name. Because of this single label, scholars use "Cernunnos" by convention for the many other antlered gods of Gaul, though we cannot be sure they all bore that name.
  • The Gundestrup cauldron. This silver vessel, found in a Danish peat bog in 1891 and usually dated to the first or second century BC, includes a plate showing a seated antlered figure holding a torc in one hand and a ram-horned serpent in the other, surrounded by animals. It was probably made far from Denmark, perhaps in south-eastern Europe, and its meaning is debated.
  • Gallo-Roman reliefs. A stone from Reims shows an antlered god seated cross-legged, pouring coins or grain, flanked by Apollo and Mercury, suggesting associations with abundance.

Elsewhere, Greek religion knew Pan, the goat-legged god of shepherds from Arcadia, and Egypt had ram-horned gods such as Amun. These deities were distinct and local; the idea that they formed a single pan-European cult belongs to the modern period. For the wider background see Celtic religion and Greek religion and the mysteries.

Pan, Herne and the Victorian Revival of a Nature God§

The modern Horned God owes a great deal to English literature. From the Romantic period onwards, poets and novelists turned Pan into a symbol of untamed nature and of a pagan joy lost to industrial, Christian modernity. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "The Dead Pan" (1844) took up Plutarch's ancient story that a voice had announced "Great Pan is dead". By the turn of the century Pan appeared everywhere: as a figure of terror in Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and as a benevolent protector of animals in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", a chapter of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). Ronald Hutton has shown how this literary Pan prepared readers to imagine a horned god of the countryside.

England also had its own horned figure. Herne the Hunter first appears in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (written around 1597–1601), as a former keeper of Windsor Forest whose ghost walks at midnight "with great ragg'd horns". The legend was elaborated by later writers, notably William Harrison Ainsworth in his novel Windsor Castle (1843), and twentieth-century writers came to see Herne as a local memory of an antlered god. Folk customs such as the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire, recorded since the seventeenth century, in which dancers carry reindeer antlers, were also read in this light, although their origins are unknown.

The Horned Devil and the Witches' Sabbath§

A darker strand came from Christian imagery. The Bible does not describe Satan with horns, but medieval artists increasingly gave devils horns, hooves, tails and animal features, drawing partly on the satyrs and Pan of classical art and partly on the imagery of beasts in the Book of Revelation. By the early modern period the Devil presiding over the witches' sabbath was commonly imagined as a goat or a goat-like man. In the Basque Country the place of the sabbath was called akelarre, usually explained as "meadow of the he-goat", and Francisco Goya's paintings of the 1790s show witches gathered around a great he-goat.

In 1856 the French occultist Eliphas Lévi published his famous image of Baphomet, a winged, goat-headed figure intended as a symbol of the balance of opposites rather than of evil. Lévi's Baphomet later became a popular image of the Devil and, in the twentieth century, an emblem for some Satanist groups. The overlap of these images explains why outsiders have often equated the witches' Horned God with Satan. The history of the Devil himself is treated in the history of Satan and the Devil.

Margaret Murray's God of the Witches§

The decisive step came with the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and especially The God of the Witches (1931), she argued that the "Devil" of the witch trials was really the god of a surviving pre-Christian religion, or a man impersonating him in horns and skins. She traced this god back to the antlered figure painted in the Palaeolithic cave of Les Trois-Frères in southern France and identified him with Cernunnos, Pan and other horned deities, presenting them all as forms of one ancient deity worshipped across Europe.

Historians have rejected the argument, as explained in the Murray thesis: the trial evidence does not show an organised pagan religion, and the ancient horned gods were distinct local deities. But Murray's vision was enormously influential. It turned the horned figure of the sabbath from a demon into a misunderstood god of nature, and made him available as an object of devotion.

The Horned God in Wicca and Traditional Witchcraft§

Gerald Gardner adopted Murray's god for the religion he publicised in the 1950s, described in Wicca and Gerald Gardner. In Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, the High Priest may represent the Horned God in ritual, sometimes wearing a horned headdress, while the High Priestess embodies the Goddess. Doreen Valiente wrote invocations and poems to him, and in the 1970s and 1980s Janet and Stewart Farrar elaborated a seasonal mythology in which the Oak King and Holly King, two aspects of the God, rule the waxing and waning halves of the year, an idea they drew partly from Robert Graves and earlier folklore scholarship. At Samhain many Wiccans honour him as lord of death and the hunt.

In traditional witchcraft the Horned God is often more ambivalent and less symmetrically paired with a Goddess. Writers in this current speak of a "Witch-Father" or "Old Horny", sometimes associated with Tubal Cain, Lucifer as light-bearer, or the master of the sabbath, and draw consciously on the demonological sources rather than on Pan. Feminist and Goddess-centred traditions such as Dianic Wicca, by contrast, may give the god little or no role.

Despite the shared imagery, Wiccans and most other Pagan witches reject any identification of the Horned God with Satan, a figure who belongs to Christian theology. Ronald Hutton describes the Horned God as a genuinely modern deity, assembled from ancient iconography, literary romanticism and a mistaken historical theory, who is nonetheless a living object of worship for many thousands of people.

Frequently asked questions§

Is the Horned God the same as the Devil?§

No. Wiccans and most Pagans regard the Horned God as a god of nature, animals and the cycle of life and death, with no connection to the Christian Satan. The confusion arises because Christian art gave the Devil horns and goat features, and because Margaret Murray argued that the Devil of the witch trials was really a pagan god.

Is Cernunnos an ancient god?§

Yes, antlered gods were worshipped in Roman Gaul, and the name Cernunnos is inscribed on a monument from Paris dated to the early first century AD. However, it is the only secure inscription of the name, little is known about his myths, and the modern Wiccan figure goes well beyond the ancient evidence.

Who is Herne the Hunter?§

Herne is a ghostly hunter of Windsor Forest first mentioned in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor around 1600, with great horns on his head. Later writers expanded the legend, and modern Pagans often treat Herne as a local English form of the Horned God.

What does the Horned God represent in Wicca?§

He represents the wild and generative forces of nature, animals and the hunt, the sun's yearly cycle, sexuality, and death and rebirth. In ritual he is the partner of the Goddess, and his yearly birth, union and death structure the festivals of the Wheel of the Year.

Sources and further reading§