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Feline Faun

Two centuries before witches were first accused of worshiping the Animal Man with an anal kiss, the same accusation was leveled against the Cathars of southern France: Cathars being thus, in effect, proto-witches.

According to medieval French cleric Alain de Lille, the Devil appeared to them in the form of a huge black cat or, interestingly, of a man with the fur-covered legs of a cat.

In witch-trial documents of later centuries, the Devil is said not infrequently to take the form of a black cat, usually with tail raised: all the better to kiss you with, my dear.

(In 1682, Devonshire witches Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards told the judges that he appeared to them as a lion.)

To the best of my knowledge, though, the man with cat legs—think feline faun—was unique to the Cathar vision.

Though the Animal God of the witches generally shows himself forth as one of the prey species by which we humans live, and have always lived—hence horned—neither is it unknown for him to take the form of a predator: each new form a revelation. Carved in mammoth ivory, the Lion Man is one of Europe's oldest images.

He is indeed a roaring lion, our god, our ancestors' god, stalking and roaring up and down the world.

As once again in our age and day he raises up a people to himself, let no one be surprised to behold him, once again, on feline paws.

Why "buck naked"?

Here's what we know about the expression. It's American; it dates from the early 19^th century; it's definitely not a euphemism for “butt-naked”, which expression doesn't turn up until the 1950s.

So, what's so naked about a buck?

700 years ago, “buck” referred specifically to a he-goat, but with time the term has come to be used for the males of several different species, including deer, rabbits, and (humorously) humans. But, America being America, and the deer being the American animal par excellence, in American usage “buck” has come to mean a male deer preeminently.

(Except to romantic pagans of Ye Olde Renn Fest variety, for whom every deer with antlers is a “stag,” and all big black birds, crows included, “ravens.” Gods, folks.)

So why would a buck be more naked than any other animal?

Well, consider a buck in flight. The tail goes up, exposing a white patch for others to follow.

Exposing also, well...other parts that aren't usually exposed. Um, sensitive parts, intimate parts.

That's pretty naked.

But there's more.

I don't need to tell you that the god of the witches goes by many names: names like “Old Buck.”

“I love you more than I love God,” my first boyfriend once told me.

Then he freaked out, because it was true.

Two young priests-in-training—me to the Horned, he to Christ—trying our best to follow our respective loves, in a time of discountenance for love of man for man.

In the end, the cognitive strain became too great for him to bear. It never occurred to him what from the start seemed obvious to me: that he best loved one by loving the other as well.

So we went our separate ways: him to his priesthood, god and people, me to mine.

We're now both nearer death than birth. My life has been the happier, I think. He has a pension, though.

Do some loves exclude others? Do we not, in loving others, love our gods as well?

For the Horned, for Him Who is all animal life, surely so. And for Christ?

To me, who maybe have no right to an opinion, it seems that perhaps a case could be made. Gods help me, I'm no longer so convinced as once I was that, in the end, my boyfriend's god and mine are even so different, after all.

The Oldest Oracle

Long, long ago, the Horned gave us the bones, and taught us how to read them.

Here's how.

What you'll need: five astragali (“knucklebones”).

First, you need to establish a “ground.”

1. Spread the casting-cloth on the ground, or

2. At need, with the tip of your finger, draw a circle in sand or dust.

Above the “ground,” hold the five knucklebones between your two hands.

Call in your heart to the Horned, Lord of Lots, state your question, and request an answer.

Phrase your question in such a way that it can be answered Yes or No.

Drop the bones onto the “ground.”

Disregard:

Any bone that falls outside the ground.

Any bone that lands on its side.

How to read:

Each knucklebone will show either a bump or a hollow.

Bumps = yes. Hollows = no.

Five bumps = definite yes.

Five hollows = definite no.

Four bumps = probably yes.

Four hollows = probably no.

Three bumps = Yes, but.

Three hollows = No, but.

Equal number of bumps and hollows = The bones decline to answer.

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

That was the phrase that leapt out at me.

I'm a gangly teenager in the family room of our home on the southern shores of Lake Erie, reading for the first time—with mounting excitement—Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today.

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

As if in the voice of an anthropologist observing from outside, Gardner is describing the beliefs of the witches of the New Forest.

How can you not know much about the god you worship? I think, with adolescent arrogance.

Naturally, I wanted to know more.

Now, just how much any human can be said to know about any god remains, of course, an operative theological—or perhaps epistemological—question. Rhetorically, Gardner's observation very cleverly turns a defect into an advantage. “They've been around for so long that they've forgotten much,” he implies. In fact, as we now know, the reality of the situation was somewhat more complex.

In fact, this type of forgetting does happen regularly in oral traditions. The Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, have lost virtually all of their mythology, and their gods tend to be shadowy figures, known mainly for their practical functions. (That's what happens when life is a struggle: it's the basics that you hold onto, while the non-essentials slough away.) Why do the altars of the gods all feature four carved wooden horse heads? No one among the Kalasha remembers any more. We don't know why, they tell researchers: it's always been that way.

(Cross-cultural comparativism provides a ready answer to the question: they're the four horses that pull the god's chariot. Altar as quadriga: a characteristically Indo-European kind of metaphor, preserved like a flower in amber for more than 4000 years. Yes Diana, academic arrogance aside, sometimes the anthropologist really does know more than the informant.)

That skinny, wide-eyed teen in Erie, Pennsylvania didn't know any of this, of course; he was feeling his way with his skin. That didn't stop him from taking up the challenge, though: just as Gardner intended, perhaps.

As I make the physical and spiritual preparations for this summer's upcoming Grand Sabbat, the ecstatic adoration of the embodied Horned Lord, I look back over a life of more than 50 years in the Craft.

Calling the Horned Back Into History

With the wreck of the ancient world, it seemed as if the Horned had turned his back on history.

Never did he turn his back on the world itself, of course. Seedtime, harvest, the rutting, the yeaning, the running of the deer: these continued as ever they have and ever they shall, while ever the world endures.

But of history, of human history, he seemed to have taken final leave.

Then he came back.

Why?

The answer is both simple, and profound.

The dead god lies outstretched on the altar.

The white shroud, like a ghostly snowfall, blurs the horizon of his body. Over the red ruin of his chest, the stained cloth clings moistly, horribly.

Suddenly, from the woods behind, like some night bird, the voice of a flute.

Like flowing water, it ripples and rills, calling.