This post is an excerpt from the keynote address that I'll be giving next Sunday at the 18th Current Pagan Studies Conference.

The ancient world knew numerous horned gods. It comes as something of a surprise to contemporary pagans to realize that few, if any, of them were “Dying Gods.” This surprises us because, for us, the Horned has become perhaps the foremost Dying God of modern Paganry.

Due, no doubt, to his preeminence in Wicca, that most successful of New Pagan religions, a case could be made for claiming that the Horned God is one of the most important, if not the single most important, of contemporary (male) pagan divinities; indeed, for the same reason, one might well be justified in viewing Him as the divine patron, perhaps even the embodiment—one might even say, the Incarnation—of the Pagan Revival.

But it must be admitted that, down the millennia, he has changed his character. With the unique exception of Pan, who is said, in a single story, to have died, but not risen, there is no evidence that any of the horned gods of antiquity fit into the Frazerian category of Dying-and-Rising gods. Certainly this is true of the Gaulish Cernunnos, one of the primary ancestors of the modern Horned God, who—to judge from iconographic and epigraphic remains—was himself something of a pan-Celtic god. But a Dying God—so far as we can tell—he was not.

This realization invariably comes as something of a shock to modern pagans, to whom it seems utterly intuitive that a God of the Hunt should himself be a, quote-unquote, Dying-and-Rising-God. But, to judge from the evidence, for the ancestors it just plain wasn't so.

In part, here, we may regard this change as a product of the Christian centuries. The Christian god of the Underworld—if I may put it this way—being, of course, the Devil, if, then, the Devil-cum-Horned God is God of Witches, then He too must be Lord of the Dead. Certainly Gardner regarded Him as such. It only makes sense that a god of the dead—the ancestors' god, himself the Great Ancestor—should himself be thought to have died.

In part, perhaps, we see here the destructive legacy of Dion Fortune's pernicious dictum, “All gods are one god, all goddesses are one goddess,” which collapses the rich and varied pantheons of antiquity into a single misty, amorphous, gender-based bitheism. (As one who has habitually, if humorously, defined himself as a polyatheist, my own feeling here is that—to misquote another of Fortune's sayings—a bitheistic religion is halfway to monotheism.) That Fortune's reductionist paradigm has become an unofficial dogma—or, to use less inflammatory language, a central hermeneutic principle—for much of modern Wicca, only exacerbates the problem. I myself would contend that Fortune's infamous dictum has, in fact, served to inhibit theological creativity, and in particular, to retard the development of much in the way of new Wiccan mythology. Why, after all, bother to come up with something of your own when you can just steal from someone else?

So, the Horned God has changed his character. He did not used to be a Dying God; now he is. In this, perhaps, we in the modern pagan world, for whom The Golden Bough is not so much a work of anthropology as it is one of theology—one could, perhaps, even regard it as a how-to manual—are all children of Frazer. Speaking as a historian of religion—even if, admittedly, an amateur one—it does not seem to me unreasonable to claim that, modern pagan sensibilities notwithstanding, the Horned has assumed his Dying God mantel from the shoulders of Christ.

If blasphemy were as active a category for modern pagans as it was for ancient ones, this statement might, for some, fall into that category. But for me, I think, not so. Here, rather, we begin to see what makes the Craft different from many other modern paganisms. Here, I think, we begin to understand one of the root causes of the Craft's Latter-Day success.

The Craft is a post-Christian paganism. Unlike so many other modern paganisms, which have attempted simply to pick up where the ancestors left off, in modern Witchery we see a paganism that has grown up out of Christianity, a paganism in response to Christianity, a paganism that has had both the courage and the audacity to learn from its centuries of exile.

“Great Pan is dead,” said the old story: foretelling, as it were, the demise of the old paganisms.

In our groves and circles, the witches—those Latter-Day Children of the Horned—smile.

“Great Pan is risen,” we reply.