There were many horned gods in antiquity.

There's no evidence that any of them were “dying gods.”

(Osiris, perhaps the preeminent dying god of antiquity, was a horned god, it's true. But since most of the other gods—not to mention the goddesses—of ancient Egypt wore horns, but were never said to have died, it's questionable how much the case of Osiris can be said to prove.)

We have no evidence, for instance, that the Cernunnos of the Keltic world was a dying god, much less a dying-and-rising god. In a single story, Pan is said to have died (“Great Pan is dead!”), but this is a one-off story, not a mythology of an Eternal Return.

Yet, in the modern paganisms, the Horned God is preeminently He Who Dies and Rises: the great and sacred story of humanity's lifelong religious involvement with the animal species which, through the history of our kind, have been the source of our food.

Where, then, did this identification come from, if not from the ancient paganisms? Why do we think of the Horned as He Who Dies to Feed the People?

This is what makes the Craft different, and what gives it so much of its power. Unlike the other paganisms, the Craft is a paganism that has arisen in response to Christianity. It is a paganism that has been wise enough to learn from, and to be changed by, Christianity. This is a paganism that has had the audacity—and the courage—to absorb Christianity, as Hinduism reabsorbed Buddhism, and to go on from there.

We can't just pretend that the Great Interruption never happened. In fact, the Great Interruption changed everything. But the Great Interruption was not the end of our story.

There's no evidence that, in antiquity, the horned god was a dying-and-rising god.

But today he is.

That's what makes him the Patron of the Pagan Revival.

That's what makes his story, our story.

https://i.imgur.com/7O7TVqM.gifv