"The Old Horned God of the witches is not the Satan of Christianity, and no amount of theological argument will make him so. He is, in fact, the oldest deity known to man, and is depicted in the oldest representation of a divinity which has yet been found, namely the Stone Age painting in the innermost recess of the Caverne des Trois Freres at Ariege. He is the old phallic god of fertility who has come forth from the morning of the world, and who was already of immeasurable antiquity before Egypt and Babylon, let alone before the Christian era. Nor did he perish at the cry that Great Pan was dead. Secretly through the centuries, hidden deeper and deeper as time went on, his worship and that of the naked Moon Goddess, his bride, the Lady of Mystery and Magic and the forbidden joys, continued sometimes among the great ones of the land, sometimes in humble cottages, or on lonely heaths and in the depths of darkling woods, on summer nights when the moon rode high. It does so still.” -- [Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft, pp. 21-22]
Though Gardner and many other pagans throughout modern history have joined together in insistance that the Horned God is not Satan, it is hard to defend their point. The Horned God has mastered the art of seamless syncretism, and if He is not one and the same as Pan, or Cernunnos, or even Helios, Dionysus, and Hades, he has certainly added at least a sprinkle of himself into those deities over the years. After all, what does the Horned God stand for if not the hunt, and the dual fear and revelry of the pristine forest glade. He is both the unconquerable life of the sun and its children and the ruler of their death and rebirth from the underworld. These gods are often discrete, but often subsumed into one another. In his book on the Mysteries of Eleusis, artist Bruce Rimell details how Hades can be viewed as the underworld alter-ego of Dionysus - a lord of life and growth above, a lord of life’s inevitable decay below, who enlists the aid of the similarly dual-natured goddess Persephone to ensure life’s continual rebirth. Dionysus and Helios are similarly linked by the relationship between the waxing and waning of the life-giving sun and the cyclical growth of vegetation. Orpheus himself revealed this mystery:
“Jove, Pluto, Phœbus, Bacchus, all are One.”
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| Jupiter Ammon |
Far from monotheism, this syncretism reveals the deep and fundamental contentedness of the gods who embody life (Bacchus), the gods who sustain life (Jove as the rain-giving sky, Phoebus as the light-giving sun), and Pluto, the god of both death and the richness of the soil. The Horned God is all of them, the god of life, death, and rebirth, and the god of the knowledge needed to recognize him. His horns are the antlers of the rutting stag and the rays of the invincible sun.
In the ancient world, for many cultures, rebirth was often represented by the skin-shedding snake. So was knowledge, and this especially included the knowledge of healing, which is itself a kind of rebirth within life. The snake was thought to be wise and close to the earth, a hallmark of underworld deities and mystery religions. In Orphism, Bacchus is believed to be born of Proserpine in the underworld after she laid with Jove, who had come to her in the form of a serpent. Jove carried Bacchus into the heavens, only for him to be cast down by the Titans. In other words, the god of the sky and the goddess of the earth bore the god of life, who rose to the position of the sun, only to be slain and returned to the underworld, and who was then reborn, just as both the vegetation and the sun are each year. The role of the snake denotes not only the underworld setting of the myth, but the clue that wisdom is required to connect myth to truth. The snake goddess of Crete herself may be linked to Proserpine in the same role. The Gaulish antlered god Cernunnos is often depicted holding (horned) snakes, and in the case of one of the few relics on which he is named (the Pillar of the Boatmen), he is depicted in the underworld, holding up the treasures of the Earth. His antlers are often implied to be a part of a ceremonial headdress or at least ephemeral, perhaps falling and regrowing with the seasons (at least one statue of Cernunnos seems to have had room for removable antlers). It is interesting to note that the antlered headdress, with its many prongs, in some ways resembles the many-rayed crowns given to sun gods and even depiction of the horned Moses, his horns representing rays of light emerging from his head - Moses himself may have originally been an Egyptian solar deity, his name, like Ramses, the shortened form of Ra-Moses.
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| Moses |
The Horned God of modern paganism has therefore become a syncretic figure, even if he wasn’t one originally. He is both a god of the shining sky, of life, of the underworld, and of secret knowledge. He is associated with the snake as a giver of knowledge and a representative of rebirth. He is adorned by the rays of the sun, either as horns, antlers, or a many-pointed crown. Is it any wonder that Christians mistake him for Satan? Satan, with his horns and dominion over the underworld? Who was, early on, conflated with the shining sky god Lucifer? Who came to the first man and woman with an offer of secret wisdom and the key to eternal life, if only they would eat of the sacred fruit in a lush garden?
The Yazidis still worship an equivalent being to the Christian Satan in the form of Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, who fell from heaven in primordial times, then rose and was redeemed. Are they "devil worshippers" as their extremist oppressors claim? For them he is not a figure of evil, but a symbol of redemption and rebirth. Why not for modern pagans? According to Yazzidi religion, Melek Taus went on to become the demiurge who created the world from the Cosmic Egg, exactly as in the Hellenic myth of Ophion, the serpent.
For the Gnostics, while the roles of the demiurge and the serpent were reversed, the serpent was also the hero of the creation myth, freeing humankind from ignorance only for them to be punished for it by a more jealous god, who did not want to see them become divine themselves. Had Adam and Eve eaten from both the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, they themselves would have become like the gods - or, from a different perspective, come to comprehend their own potential for divinity via Henosis. Mainstream Christian theology opposed the Gnostics, declaring Gnosticism a heresy and Eve’s act a sin, but isn’t it a central tenant of pagan theology? That we all have the divine within us? That while we are reborn, at our core we are already one with the divine, if only we had the wisdom to understand? Perhaps modern pagans shouldn’t be so quick to distance themselves from the figure of Satan: he has a lot more in common with the Horned God than we may care to admit.
