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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Horned God

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

What do you want, he asked me,

sixteen and in love, that night

in the woods, and I answered:

You, for heart and center, all my days.

(Not wealth, nor fame, nor happiness.)

He sighed and shook his head,

tines tipped with firelight.

Not the world's best career move,

he told me tenderly, cupping

the back of my head in his hand:

a loving father ruing his willful son's

bad decision. But if you will

have it so, I promise you

this: enough. You will always

have enough. And so I have.

In this faith, I have lived my life.

(Never has he lied to me, never.)

So it has been, these fifty years

and more, and so it shall be,

I trust, to the end of my days.

It is enough.

 

To Isobel Gowdie, he gave

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

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They say that the Horned, god of witches, has a cloak of invisibility.

Dernmantle, they call it—a dern is a secret—for which reason Dernmantle is counted among his many by-names. Remind me to tell you some time the tale of how he came by it.

(Some, though, call it a cap or helm: the Dernhelm.)

In this way, he walks among us, unknown, unseen. Lord of Beasts, where animals are, he is: nor do we always see him.

Down the long years, he has walked unseen. Through the hidden centuries, he walked among us still.

We, his people, are like to him. We, too, have the power to walk unseen.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Red Deer stag belling photo WP06062

At first hearing, many old witch-songs may not sound witchy at all, at all. Therein lies the magic.

To the cowan eye, the medieval Irish poem You of the Sweet-Tongued Cry may seem a simple nature poem, hymning the beauties of autumn and the rut.

The witch, though, sees both this, and more.

 

You of the Sweet-Tongued Cry

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

“The Witches' Almanac," a priestess that I know once remarked, sadly, "never fails to disappoint.”

Somehow, I've always felt the same way about the novels of Canadian author Charles de Lint.

On the face of it, this seems odd. Fantasy novels situating Old World lore in the New World...you'd think that I would be all over it. But no. Elves, Green Men, and Moon Goddesses are all very well, but in de Lint, somehow they're all just so much window dressing. The depths, the wisdom, just aren't there.

I find this to be even more specifically true (alas) of Greenmantle, his 1988 book about the Horned God. It's something of an hommage to Lord Dunsany's stunning 1928 fantasy The Blessing of Pan: a lyrical and deeply sad novel about a rural English village being slowly won over to the Wild. The contrast between the two novels, unfortunately, illustrates my point in the starkest of ways. Dunsany's book has both substance and magic. De Lint, instead, tells you how magical things are, but somehow never quite manages to make you feel the magic.

Well, but. Even a stopped clock tells truth twice a day. When you're writing about Himself, every now and then, something is bound to sing. Sure enough, in Greenmantle de Lint nails it:

[The Horned] becomes what you bring to him. If you approach him with fear, he fills you with panic....If you approach him with lust, he becomes a lecherous satyr. If you approach him with reverence, he becomes a majestic figure. If you approach him with evil, he appears as a demonic figure [181].

Transcribing this passage makes me wonder if perhaps part of my unhappiness with de Lint's writing may not stem from the unrelentingly pedestrian quality of his prose. Unlike Dunsany, who was both, de Lint is storyteller, but not poet.

Still, though his language may leave something to be desired, what it says offers deep insight into the nature of this particular god, skin-strong shape-shifter that He is. In Him, you will see preeminently—as de Lint so rightly says—whatever you yourself bring to the encounter.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

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?

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

"Any guesses as to what our all-time most popular pysanka is?”

I'm talking with Luba Perchyshyn, owner and co-founder of that longtime Minneapolis landmark, the Ukrainian Gift Shop. Not one to sit by with idle hands, she's working on an egg as we speak; I can smell the melted beeswax in the kistka as she works. Over the years, she's made—and sold—tens of thousands of pysanky. Her hands are deft and quick; the kistka makes little scritching noises as she draws the tip over the surface of the egg. She doesn't seem to have any problem at all carrying on a conversation while simultaneously constructing a complex three-dimensional design.

“What?” I ask, curiosity piqued.

She turns the egg to me. Written in blackened beeswax across the shell, two stags with branching antlers face one another, heraldic-wise, across a tree that in some ways resembles a giant flower.

We've not only sold more of these than any other design, we've sold way more of these than any other design, for years now,” she says.

“Really?” I say, intrigued. What the Christian significance of the pattern—if any—may be, I don't know. Twin Stags, and the Tree of Life? As a pagan, it seems clear enough to me what's going on here; we're all cervophiles, pagans. “Why, do you think?” I ask.

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    That's interesting, in "Two Flutes Playing" by Andrew Ramer it says that the recuring monomyth for gay men is two men together und

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

A Siberian Witch's Tale

 

On the banks of a great river there once lived a poor fisherman. One day he made, from river clay, a clay man, and left him out in the Sun to dry.

The Sun shone, and the Winds blew. When the clay man was dry, he went to the fisherman's cottage and began to tap on the window.

Tap, tap, tap, he tapped.

The fisherman's wife arose and went to open the door, but the fisherman said:

 

Ignore the man of clay,

and he'll surely go away.

 

The fisherman's wife sat back down, but the clay man did not stop his tapping.

Tap, tap, tap, he tapped.

 

Ignore the man of clay,

and he'll surely go away,

 

said the fisherman again, but the clay man still did not stop his tapping.

Tap, tap, tap, he tapped.

 

Ignore the man of clay,

and he'll surely go away,

 

said the fisherman a third time, but finally the fisherman's wife could bear it no more, and she rose and opened the door.

The clay man entered the cottage and swallowed the fisherman's wife. Then he swallowed the fisherman, and all of their children.

The clay man went through the entire village, eating everyone that he could find: infants in their cradles, children at play, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers. With every person that he ate, he grew larger and more voracious.

Then the clay man saw the beautiful elk. So wide did he open his mouth that his lower jaw reached Earth and his upper jaw Heaven, and he stepped forward, to swallow the beautiful elk whole.

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