Ooser (“Rhymes with bosser, not boozer,” I always tell people) is a term from what Sybil Leek would call the Language of Witchcraft. It denotes a carved and horned wooden head-mask of the God of Witches.

It's a dialectal word, of unclear etymology. Doreen Valiente suggests an origin from ós, the Old English cognate of Old Norse áss, “god,” better known to English-speakers in its plural form aesir. An ooser, then, would be a “god-er,” which, since it bears the god and is worn by his personifier at the sabbat, makes sound theological (if not etymological) sense.

The famous and mysterious Dorset Ooser is the best-known example. Also known, from its bull-horns, as the “Yule Bull,” it frightened generations of Dorset children until it was stolen from its hereditary keeper in 1897 and never recovered. Old Craft scuttlebutt would have it that it was “took” to get it out of cowan hands, and that it has since remained in ongoing, if private, use among witch-folk to this day.

Well, so they say. In its own way, it's even a true story.

It was Margaret Murray whose 1921 Witch-Cult in Western Europe first associated the ooser with the witches' god. Historical or not, her claims have inspired the creation of modern oosers, and their use, while not widespread, is now known across the landscape of modern Witchery.

The first of the New World oosers, the Minnesota Ooser, was carved in 1986 from a burl of butternut wood by a Midwest master carver. It lives in its own shrine in Minneapolis, where it receives offerings twice daily and emerges at irregular intervals to grace Grand Sabbats both local and regional.

In keeping with contemporary custom—the Master is well-known for his habit of wearing local horns —it bears the antlers of a stag.

Those who have beheld it know that once again in our day the Stag That Walks on Two Legs moves among his own, in all his strange beauty and terror.