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If true, it's got to be one of history's more delicious ironies.

The ancient city of Cyrene, in what is now Libya, was founded in 620 BCE by colonists from the volcanic island of Thera (or Santorini), of Minoan archaeology fame.

Foremost among its patron gods was Apollo Kernaios, the Horned Apollo.

On the city's coinage, the god was shown in profile, with a crescent ram's horn curling around his ear. It was likely this image that gave rise to Lysimakhos' famous coins depicting the horned Alexander.

Over the centuries, the city was home to many famous statesmen, artists, and philosophers, but today its best-known resident (historic or not) is probably Simon of Cyrene, who is said in the Synoptic gospels to have carried the cross of Jesus when Jesus himself was too weak to carry it.

Well, beards are back.

These days it seems like every third guy's sporting one.

Which brings me (of course) to the god of the witches.

Oh, it's a long and winding thread that I spin today, my friend. Take hold of the end and let's see where it leads us.

***

The boy froze when he saw the god.

Behind him in the woods, the rite had already begun. The path up from the circle wound through the trees. That's why he didn't see him until he was nearly upon him.

There, seated on the ground between the two tall stones that mark the head of the path.

Waiting. Watching.

His antlers seemed to touch the trees.

Brown eyes meet green.

The boy wanted to turn and run. He also wanted to stroke the velvet of that muzzle.

Around 1261, the troubadour Rutebeuf (“Roast Beef”) published an early French miracle play, Le Miracle de Théophile.

Little did he know that he was about to make Wiccan history.

Based on 11^th century Christian legend, the play tells the story of Theophilus (“god-lover”) of Adana, who sells his soul to the Devil. The Devil is called up, by a sorcerer named Salatin, with a mysterious chant:

You know, gods turn up in the strangest places.

There I'll be, stopped at a light, thinking wholly unsacred thoughts.

And then I'll look up and there He'll be, looking me straight in the eye: the Ram that Walks on Two Legs. The Guy with the Horns. Giving me that Speaking Look.

Like they do.

Now the fact that a decidedly unsacred American auto manufacturer should choose the Ram ("You are a ram, lord, greatly to be praised") as its—shall I say—sigil for a popular model makes this neither an unlikely experience, nor (one might think) a particularly sacred one.

And yet. And yet.

Horns ward.

The Sign of the Horns has been a sign of power since long before it became a Heavy Metal cliché.

Because horns aren't just for beauty or display.

They're weapons. They ward because they warn. Theirs is the power of protection.

You could call the Horns a mudra. (In Witch we usually just say: hand-sign.) You could call them an invocation. (You know Who I mean.) In Anthropologist, you could call them an apotropaic: a turning away, an averting.

The Horns have been warding off the hostile, the unchancy, the ill-favored, for centuries, if not millennia.

You can mutter “Horns ward [me]” or “Horns protect [me]” if you like. It certainly won't hurt.

But only make the Sign and the Horns will do their work, seen or unseen, spoken or unspoken.

Some might call this a fire-fight-fire scenario: like warding like, the unchancy against the unchancy.

In Which The Youngest Warlock Questions the Oldest.

What do you say to the Horned when you pray?

I listen.

And what does the Horned say to you?

He listens.