Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Horns Up!
“Horns up!” says my friend, grinning and flashing the accompanying Sign.
It's become his usual valedictory. I find this delightful.
Horns up: a polysemous—many-meaninged—greeting. Go for it! it says. Don't take any guff! it says. Forge ahead! it says.
But for witch-folk like us, it's also an invocation. And of course—so it is with witch-lore—it tells a story as well.
Because, naturally, “Horns up” implies an equal-and-opposite inverse. “The Goat Above, the Goat Below,” the Basque witches used to say at their sabbats. (No doubt they still do.) “Horns up” signs the living god, “Horns down” the dead.
And there's his story. Unlike most gods, the god of the witches dies. Being a god, of course, he doesn't stay that way, but that doesn't obviate what went before.
(How does he die? In fact, sad to say, we kill him ourselves: in love, we kill him. Witches are a tribe of deicides, which explains much of our long, sad history.)
Of course, the expression “Horns down” has secular meanings as well: “Back off!” “No need to get defensive.” But the God Who Dies is its sacred referent, its place in the story. Horns up, Horns down. Life and death, the Oldest Story of all.
Intimations of a horned god.
Hail to you, O Horned, who give your life to feed.
Horns Up!
Above: Prokopov Vadim, Bog Oak Horned (Brutalist)
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