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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Does Mistletoe Harm Trees? | North Carolina Cooperative Extension

 

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.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Flame Between the Antlers

Let me tell you a secret.

You know King Arthur, him we call Artos the Bear?

Well: at the heart of his story throbs the Witches' Sabbat.

Really.

I first read Rosemary Sutcliff's flawed amethyst of a masterpiece Sword at Sunset when I was still in elementary school—too young, really. It was my first Arthurian novel, and—quite frankly—it ruined me for anything else. Mallory's knights in shining armor, White's sly satirical anachronisms, Bradley's horrible nun-priestesses: none of them quite stack up in comparison to the real thing.

Because that's what you think when you read Sword: this is exactly how it must have been.

Sutcliff's Artos—our Artos—is a Dark Age Keltic chieftain in a gritty post-Roman Britain where Old Gods and Old Ways are still vibrantly, resoundingly alive, a world in which a grizzled old horse-herd, after a lifetime of work in the breeding-runs, can believe that the Horned One has finally sent him the perfect horse. A world in which Artos the Bear is raised to kingship in an impromptu coronation (after a resounding victory in battle against the Saxons) on the Eye of the White Horse of Uffington.

Sutcliff knows three things supremely well: the land of Britain, the history of Britain, and the Old Ways of Britain. In Sword at Sunset, these three knowledges, which are one knowledge, converge in one splendid, shining tale of fierce battles and piercing loves.

And at its very heart burns the blue-dark flame of the Witches' Sabbat.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Greybeard
    Greybeard says #
    I ordered a book. Haven't gotten it read yet. Thanks for the recommendation.
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    While I've come to love Mallory for his language and mystery, despite his medievalism, I find both Stewart and Paxson's Arthurian
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I took a class in Arthurian Literature in college back in the 80's. I had read some of Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy as a teenage

Posted by on in Paths Blogs
My Own Personal Jesus

On my beside table are a Loki action figure, a Goddess rosary…and a prayer card with an image of Jesus showing off his sacred heart.

 

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Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I've got recordings of that song "Your Own Personal Jesus" both by Depeche Mode and by Johnny Cash. I think it's a cool song.

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