(16) HORNED GOD & SACRED KING

 

“He is the laughter in the woods.”

Pan and Cernunnos may be the most famous or iconic (the former more so) but there are more horned deities, particularly if you include deities that are represented or symbolized by horned animals.

“Deities depicted with horns or antlers are found in numerous religions across the world. Horned animals, such as bulls, goats, and rams, may be worshiped as deities or serve as inspiration for a deity’s appearance in religions that venerate animal gods”.

Like the Triple Goddess, modern witchcraft and neopaganism have adapted the horned deities of paganism to the Horned God, representing the male aspects of divinity and second only to the Triple Goddess, typically as her consort among other roles.

“The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.”

Of course, supernatural horned beings are depicted much more negatively in Christianity, with the devil and other demons typically as horned (or is that horny)? Interestingly, there are the occasional exceptions, with no less than Moses famously said to be or depicted as “horned” upon being radiant or glorified by God. That is usually attributed to mistranslation but has recurred throughout artistic depictions of him, including by Michelangelo.

“The Horned God has been explored within several psychological theories and has become a recurrent theme in fantasy literature” – with my favorite example of the latter being the titular Horned God in “Slaine: The Horned God” by Pat Mills.

And then there’s the mythic figure of the sacred king, overlapping with that of the horned god, at least in modern paganism and a recurring theme in fantasy.

“In many historical societies, the position of kingship carried a sacral meaning and was identical with that of a high priest and judge…The monarch may be divine, become divine, or represent divinity to a greater or lesser extent.”

The figure of the sacred king was famously propounded by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough – behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king!

“A sacred king, according to the systematic interpretation of mythology developed by Frazer in The Golden Bough…was a king who represented a solar deity in a periodically re-enacted fertility rite. Frazer seized upon the notion of a substitute king and made him the keystone of his theory of a universal, pan-European, and indeed worldwide fertility myth, in which a consort for the Goddess was annually replaced. According to Frazer, the sacred king represented the spirit of vegetation…came into being in the spring, reigned during the summer, and ritually died at harvest time, only to be reborn at the winter solstice to wax and rule again. The spirit of vegetation was therefore a ‘dying and reviving god’. Osiris, Dionysus, Attis and many other familiar figures from Greek mythology and classical antiquity were reinterpreted in this mold…The sacred king, the human embodiment of the dying and reviving vegetation god, was supposed to have originally been an individual chosen to rule for a time, but whose fate was to suffer as a sacrifice, to be offered back to the earth so that a new king could rule for a time in his stead.”

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)