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Even as a callow first-time reader of Dante's Divine Comedy, I could readily see the major design flaw in the overarching architectonic symbolism of that soaring cathedral of a masterpiece.

It makes Lucifer the—literal—center of the universe.

Like Dante, I too had my own selva oscura experience.

He, though, wanted to find his way out of the dark forest.

Me, I sought a way in.

Forests can be literal or figurative. Mine were both.

The self, too, is a dark forest: one that it took me long to find the courage to enter.

In the end, desperation drove me.

Walking God

When the First Ancestors came to America, they found paths.

Before ever human had set foot on ground, paths were already laid down.

The Horned, god of witches, made them.

Wherever the ancestors went, they found ways, ways worn by no human foot, ways that spoke with the wisdom of the Land.

The Horned, god of witches, made them all.

For this, we call Him the way-god.

Roads, streets, trails, paths, ways: anything that links one place to another.

All are His, for He made them.

All His paths lead somewhere.

Why is the Animal God, He Who Is All Animals, god of roads?

Easily told.

Him that we call the Horned is a walking god.

Animals move from place to place. It is what we do, our outstanding characteristic.

When we go, we rarely go aimlessly. Where we go, we go for a reason.

Our paths lead from one place to another.

They speak with the wisdom of the Land.

In the days of my anguished adolescence, I would go to the woods at night.

Having stashed my shoes under a fallen tree, I would walk the deer-paths, barefoot, until the roaring in my head grew silent, until the I of I had entirely disappeared, and become one with the forest.

(In the darkness, bare feet will always find the path.)

In this way, my life was saved.

Claude Tholosan's 1445 (?) treatise So That the Errors of Magicians and Witches has some pretty profound things to say about the Horned.

Admittedly, he does call him Diabolus, the Devil.

But lay that by for now.

He shows himself to each according to their desire...nor is he seen except by whom he wishes.

“He shows himself to each according to their desire.”

He's skin-strong, this one, a changer of shapes, and how you see him depends on you and your expectations. He shapes himself to you.

Relationship. It's all about relationship: his with you, yours with him.

What a god.

He shows himself to some as a man, to some as a woman, or some beast. Me, I saw a beautiful naked man with branching antlers.

To some he shows himself as Cernunnos, to some as Pan.

To Herb Sloane, founder of Our Lady of Endor Coven and the Ophitic Gnostic Cultus of Sathanas (ca. 1965)—as perhaps to M. Tholosan—he showed himself as the Devil.

One might even suppose, then—surely it is not beyond his capability—that to some he shows himself as Christ.

I say again: what a god.

“...Nor is he seen except by whom he wishes.”

“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.

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.

Bright Heart, Bright Mind

or

Pay No Attention to That Cross Between the Antlers

“Saint” Hubert, they call him: patron of hunters.

Check out Albrecht Durer's painting of Hubert's famous vision. What do you see? A man, kneeling to a worshipful Stag, praying.

Pay no attention to that cross between the antlers.

You know the story. Maybe you've lived it yourself.

Good Friday, when all good Christians should be in church, praying. You're not among them. You, you're out in the woods instead, hunting.

Hunting.

What do you find there? The Horned, the worshipful Stag: the Animal God, lord of all humanity.

Hubert, hyge beorht in the old Language of the Witches: “bright heart”, “bright mind.”

That crucifix between the antlers? A mere cloak to hide behind during the Hidden Times, a bringing-in of the Old Ways.

When, on the morning after

the witches' sabbat, the Horned

leads us up out of the woods and,

to the singing of meadowlarks,

mounts the horizon and,

lambent with white flame,

disappears over the edge,

I've always wondered whether

he sinks down into Earth

or walks off into the Sky,

or maybe both;

but now I know.

I, Steven of Prodea,

Steven son of Russell,

with my own eyes have seen

the Gates of Heaven swing

wide to admit him, and lo!

to the sounding of horns

and trumpets he entered in,

and lo! the gates were shut.

This with my own lips I tell you,

and what I tell is true.

Myth meets myth.