Cernunnos (Art by LoranDeSore)
| “ | It's not that hard to believe that religious nutjobs take one look at a group of wiccans praising Cernunnos and immediately associate it with black magic and worshipping Satan. Shit, these people would mistake a damn goat for Satan. I think it's the horns. In all honesty, I'd much prefer this Green Man over Satan any day. | „ |
| ~ Nico Goldstein |
Cernunnos, also known as the "The Horned One" or the Horned God, is a Celtic god of fertility, life, animals, wealth, and the underworld. He was worshipped all over Gaul, and his cult spread into Britain as well.
Description[]
Cernunnos is depicted with the antlers of a stag, sometimes carries a purse filled with coin. The Horned God is born at the winter solstice, marries the goddess at Beltane, and dies at the summer solstice. He alternates with the goddess of the moon in ruling over life and death, continuing the cycle of death, rebirth and reincarnation.
Although he has appeared in a multitude of forms and made himself known by many names to nearly every culture throughout time. He is perhaps best known to us now in his Celtic aspects of the untamed Horned God of the Animals and the leaf-covered Green Man, Guardian of the Green World, but he is much older. Cernunnos worked his magic when the first humans were becoming. Our prehistoric ancestors knew him as a shape-shifting, shamanic god of the Hunt.
He is often known as the sacrificed one, who wounded unto death begins his journey to the Underworld, returning to the Earth from which he was born and where the seeds of light released from his decaying body will quicken her womb with a new Sun once again. Such reverence and worship of him indicates that Cernunnos emerged sometime around the youthful years of the Earth, appearing in the form of a bovine creature, and one that correlates to the earliest ancestors of a bovine.
Overview[]
Cernunnos is one of the oldest known deities. He is celebrated and honored as the Green Man in spring and summer, the light half of the year and as the Dark One or the Dark God in autumn and winter, the dark half of the year. He appears in spring as the young Son, child of the Goddess, embodiment of the budding, growing, greening world. In the summer, he is is the Green Man, vibrant, pulsing with life essence, the consort of the Green Lady Goddess. It is in autumn, the dying time, that perhaps many see the Horned God most clearly.
Cernunnos is credited as the god and creator of the elves alongside his bride and consort the goddess Beltane. According to legend, Cernunnos picked the most unsullied foliage found throughout the four seasons and Beltane took seeds that appeared by their end. From each seasoned foliage he smeared his blood or semen in some cases on them, wrapped them around the seeds, and from there emerged the first elves who were sometimes considered to be the earliest known fae. These elves were archfae, the strongest of their kind, and second only to Oberon and Titania. While most of the elves have forgotten the worship of Cernunnos he is still highly revered by Sylvan elves or Wood elves.
In his Underworld aspect, Cernunnos is known as The Dark Man, the god who dwells in the House Beneath the Hill. He is the one who comforts and sings the souls of the dead to their rest in the Summerlands of the Otherworld. Cernunnos, as Master of the Wild Hunt, who pursues the souls of evil doers, is not associated with a biblical or even modern morality, but with the protection and continuance of the Land and Nature and the spirits that dwell therein.
