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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Horned God
A 'Cernunnos' in a 12th Century French Church

Some time around the year 1120, a sculptor working on the Basilica of Mary Magdalene in northeastern France carved onto the capital of a column in the nave of the church an antlered figure that looks remarkably like the 'Cernunnos' sculptures of Roman Gaul from 1000 years earlier.

The Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene in Vézelay, Burgundy, is France's largest Romanesque church. Famed for its masterful sculpture and numerous relics of its eponymous saint, it was built on the site of a Roman-era villa.

High on the capitals of one of the columns in the nave, a handsome, antlered man peers warily from between two acanthus leaves. Bearded, with mustache and shoulder-length hair, he wears high boots and a tunic with long, cuffed sleeves.

Well might the antlered man be wary. On the other side of the stylized tree that divides the capital stands a bowman with an arrow pointed directly at him. There can be no doubt of the eventual outcome. The Antlered must die.

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Samhain in the Forecourt: The Rite of Three Crones

When the horns of sunset sound, we gather with unlit candles and lamps in the great mound's forecourt. Between its tall stones, the gateway gapes.

Then he is among us, singing. I am here, I am right here among you. He shines, his antlers shine. We light from his torch and gather around him in a great wheel of fire. We sing.

Shadows slip between us and our song. Three? Nine? One by one, they snuff out our lights.

One by one, until only the god's torch still burns. They converge from all directions then, like silent hounds on a stag. He struggles, but they bring him down and kill his light. He falls. He is dead.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Whatever Happened to Animal Sacrifice?

At one time, animal sacrifice was the most common form of public worship in the West.

So what happened to it?

We tend to think of Judaism as mother and Christianity as daughter, but in fact Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism are sister religions that arose at the same time in response to the self-same trauma: the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE.

In ancient Hebrew religion, anyone could build an altar anywhere and offer up sacrifice there, but with the rise of the Jerusalem temple, a hard-fought process of centralization set in which eventually banned sacrifice anywhere else, on the logic of “one god, one temple.”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

Call of the Horned God

Blessings be with our ancestors!

May it be so!

Mother of Witches, Lady of the Moon!

I adorn my King!

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I've made the change accordingly. I think we'll be hearing a lot more of this one. The instinct to edit is deeply embedded. I rar
  • Michele
    Michele says #
    for some reason this website tacks on stuff to the front of the link at the bottom of the article. It's just http://13knots.blogs

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
People of the Morning Star

Hear O People of the Morning Star

 

...
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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Old Ways, New World

You live where your people have always lived, and you keep to their ways, the old ways.

At certain times, you go to the Wood, and there you call the Master.

And He comes, in beauty and terror.

And now, for this, you could die, and with you, the old ways.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Devil's Lash

At old style sabbats, they say, the Devil would stand at the edge of the circle and whip up the dancing.

Literally.

(In the mountains back East, where I come from, they say that he'd use rose canes to do this. Yikes.)

One of the few truly effective ritual initiations that I've ever witnessed was priested by one of the local dungeon daddies. Now that scourging really meant something.

Burtrand of Minnesota Church of the Wicca—the grandfather of the local pagan community—used to insist that the scourge is one of the Horned's most important, and least understood, attributes.

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