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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 expect 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.

'...In All the Greater Temples'

Long ago, the Horned God was worshiped “in all the greater temples”, to use Gardner's pungent phrase.

(Well, maybe not all, but why pass up a snazzy quote like that?)

Then came the Great Forgetting. When he wasn't forgotten, he was reviled. Oh, our lives were the worse for it.

A few of us remembered, though. Always we missed him. In the consoling darkness, we whispered to one another prophecies of his Return.

Well, guess what, folks: the prophecies were true.

In a traditional society, now, remembering, we would make a lament for all those Lost Years.

Get Out Your Sieve

In terms of structure and realized characters, Goat Foot God (1936) is Dion Fortune's best novel: better, really, than either Sea Priestess or Moon Magic.

Which, of course, is not to say that it's a good novel, mind you. (As a friend once put it, “Dion Fortune couldn't write her way out of a chalk circle.”) But—unlike her turgid and (frankly) unreadable non-fiction—it has at least characters and a story to embody her ideas. The casual (and gratuitous) racism and unquestioned class prejudice of one who presumably regarded herself as enlightened should stand as a warning to the reader to judge her ideas on intrinsic merit, not on authority. Caveat lector.

Still, it's her novel about the Horned God and his Return. That you've got to love and, indeed, on that topic she has much to impart. As for the bugs in the flour...well, sift carefully. The sieve is a traditional witch's tool for a reason.

The Great God Pan she describes, in Christian idiom, as “God made manifest in Nature.” The novel tells two stories simultaneously: one of an early 20^th century Englishman with a serious Vitamin P deficiency (talk about a pungent phrase), and a 15th-century English monk who rediscovers Pan via some Greek manuscripts.

Well, we need our stories from the Lost Years, too: so we remember “...or, failing that, invent” (Monique Wittig).

A Lament for the Horned

As epigraph to the book, Fortune cites four stanzas from her Rite of Pan. Rereading them recently, I found myself thinking: Well, there's our Lament for the Horned.

The Goat-Foot God

This is a drabsha.

Unrelated to the Christian cross (but is it?), the drabsha is an important symbol of the Mandaeans, called the Last Gnostics, an ethno-religious minority originally from the southeastern Middle East, now dispersed throughout the world.

A wooden cross draped with a white silk cloth and decked with branches of laurel, it symbolizes the light of the supreme god Hayyi Rabbi, “the Great Life,” covering the four quarters of the world.

This is a stang.