Our rite that night was a Rite of Opening the Gates. That's when I saw the Horned.
He sat cross-legged, as is his wont, on the threshold between What Is and What Is Not. His body was the blue-black of Deep Space, filled with stars. It was as if, from a photo of the night sky, someone had cut out a silhouette of a seated, antlered man. Behind Him, nothing; before Him, the many-colored world. Between the two, one vast Body of Stars.
I don't usually think of the Horned in cosmic terms. I see Him as a transpersonal person, the collective body of animal life here on planet Earth.
Yet there He was: the Cosmic Horned.
Opening the back door, I step out into the cold night to pour out the offerings.
Straddling the threshold, I face the stang in the corner of the garden. In the waning moonlight, the forked stake, standing in its cairn of stones, casts a long shadow.
A rabbit sits in the middle of the garden, a moonlit silhouette. Its ears are exactly the length of the stang's horns, held at precisely the same angle. I look at the rabbit; the rabbit looks at me.
It does not move as I pour out the offerings, and close the door.
Are we each as a cell in the greater body of a god?
Are there other Horned Gods, brothers and other selves, on other planets?
Might not each of these planetary Horneds be as a cell in the Star-Body of an even Greater Horned?
Would this not be, then, the Great Cosmic Horned Himself?