When you realize the presence of the Horned God,
the Lord of Death within you,
you realize your place in the neverending order of the world,
and your spirit becomes immortal.
-Tannim Maelik, 1999
When you become death, you become immortal.
When you realize the presence of the Horned God,
the Lord of Death within you,
you realize your place in the neverending order of the world,
and your spirit becomes immortal.
-Tannim Maelik, 1999
He is the hunter. He is the dying God. But his death is always in the service of the life force. He is untamed sexuality, but sexuality as a deep, holy, connecting power. He is the power of feeling, and the image of what men could be if they were liberated from the constraints of patriarchal culture.
The God of the Wood is sexual, but sexuality is seen as sacred, not as obscene or blasphemous. Our God wears horns, but they are the waxing and waning cycles of the Goddess moon, and the symbol of animal vitality. In some respects, he is black, not because he is evil or dreadful or fearful, but because darkness and the night are times of power, and is also part of the cycles of time.
For men, the God is the image of inner power and of a potency that is more than merely sexual. He is the undivided self, in which mind is not split from body, nor is it split from the spirit of the flesh. He is a part of the celebration that is life.
The God Cernnunos is only a small part of the overall reality that is life. He is the essence of death that stems from the nurturing Goddess aspect that is birth and re-birth, the continuation that is the life cycle. Birth, life, Death, Re-birth. They are one in the same. Two sides of an identical mirror like night and day.
Cernnunos's love includes sexuality, which is also wild and untamed as well as gentle and tender. His sexuality is fully felt, in a content in which sexual desire is sacred, not only because it is the means by which life is pro-created, but also because it is the means by which our own lives, are most deeply and ecstatically realized. Sex is sacrament, an outward sign of an inward grace. That grace is the deep connection and recognition of the wholeness of another person. In its essence, it is not limited the physical act, it is an exchange of personal energy, of subtle nourishment between two people. Through connection with another, we connect with all that is life.
The God is Eros, but he is also Logos, the power of the mind!
For both men and women, the God Cernnunos is also the dying-god. He represents the giving over that sustains life: Death in the service of the life force. Life is characterized by many losses, and unless the pain of each one is fully felt and worked through, it remains buried in the psyche, where like a festering sore that never fully heals, it exudes emotional poison. The dying god embodies the concept of loss.
Death is always followed by rebirth, loss by restitution. After the dark of the moon, the new crescent appears. Spring follows winter; day follows night. In a worldview that views everything as cynical, death, itself cannot be the final ending, but rather some unknown transformation to some new form of being. The God becomes the comforter and consoler of hearts, who teaches us to understand death through his example. He embodies the warmth, the tenderness, and compassion that are the true complement of male aggression.
The dying God puts on his antlers or horns and becomes `The Hunter', who meets out death as well as suffering it. It is difficult for us to understand the concepts of the divine hunter, but in a culture of hunters, the hunt meant life, and the hunter was the life giver of the tribe. The tribe identified with its food animals; hunting involved tremendous skill and knowledge of the habits and psychology of the prey. Animals were never killed needlessly, and no parts of the kill were ever wasted. Life was never taken without recognition and reverence for the spirit of the prey.
As the lord of winds, the God is identified with the elements of the natural world. As lord of the dance, he symbolizes the spiral dance that is life. He is the bright sun, the light-giving, energizing force, and the darkness of life and death. There is no good vs. evil; both are part of the cycle, the necessary balance that is life. He embodies movement and change. The sun child is born at the winter solstice, when, after the triumph of darkness throughout the years longest night, the sun rises again. The God is within and without. However we call him, he awakens within us. He lends balance and fire, he is the lover that blesses and guides sexual pleasure.
At the Winter solstice, he is born as the embodiment of innocence and joy, of childish delight in all things. He is the triumph of the returning light. At Brigid or Candlemas, February 2nd, his growth is celebrated, as the days grow visibly longer. At the Spring equinox, he is the green flourishing youth who dances with the Goddess in her maiden aspect. On Beltane, May 1st, there marriage is celebrated with maypoles and bonfires and huge versions of the green man of the wood are erected from leaves and branches.
On the Summer solstice it is consummated in a union so complete it becomes death. He is named Summer clad king, instead of Winter born, and the crown is of roses: the bloom of culmination coupled with the stab of the thorn. He is mourned at Lughnasad, August 1st, and at the fall equinox, he sleeps in the womb of the Goddess, sailing over the sunless sea that is her womb. At Samhain, (first full moon in Scorpio), he arrives at the land of youth, the shining land of the dead in which souls grow young again, as they wait to be reborn. He opens the gates that they may return and visit their loved ones, and rules in the dream world, as he too grows young again, until at the Winter solstice he is again reborn.
This is the myth, the poetic statement of a process that is seasonal, celestial, and psychological. Enacting the myth in ritual, we enact our own transformation, the constant birth, growth, culmination, and passing of our ideas, plans, work, and relationships. Each loss, each change, even a happy one, turns life upside down. We each become the hanged one: The herb that's hung up to dry, the carcass hung to cure, the hanged man of the tarot, whose meaning is the sacrifice that allows us to move on to a new level of being.
The God does not perpetuate acts of sadomasochism on the Goddess or preach to her “the power of sexual surrender.” It is he that surrenders, to the power of his own feelings.
Nowhere but in love do we live so completely in the all-consuming present; and at no time but when we are in love are we so seemingly conscious of our own mortality. For even if love lasts, or metamorphoses into a sweeter and deeper, if less fiery storm. Sooner or later, one lover will die and one will be left with the loss alone. Through the embrace of Pan, whose hairy thighs rub us raw even as they bring us ecstasy, can we learn to be fully alive?
And so the God is the proud stag who haunts the heart of the deepest forest, that of the self. He is untamed. He is all that lies within us that refuses to be domesticated, that refuses to be compromised, diluted, made safe, molded, or tampered with. He is free.
Pan shapes flexibility in the World of form.
Known to all societies in one form or another, the Horned God, Death, Pan,
Lord of the Wood, Gadarn; the Druid God of Fertility, God of the underworld,
Kouros, Kern, kernnunose, the Grim Reaper, God of the Dream World, and many,
many others.
To me he is simply known as “The Lord of Death!”