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I am a stag of seven tines.

(Song of Amairgin)

The Paris Cernunnos has four.

The "sorcerer" of Les Trois Frères, apparently, seven.

For all his youthful appearance, the Gundestrup Antlered sports a lordly fourteen.

Tines.

Antlers are a miracle. They're the fastest-growing bone on the planet. By Samhain, they're actually dead. Dead horns on a living buck: small wonder that the Antlered is reckoned lord of the dead.

Novelist Rosemary Sutcliff, in Mark of the Horse Lord, describes a cave-painting of the Lord of Herds and the Hunting Trail: "towering into the upper gloom, gaunt and grotesque but magnificent, the figure of a man with the head of a twelve-point stag."

Trophy-hunters value number of points: more is better. The more points, the older (and presumably wiser) the stag.

One wonders just what the meaning of different numbers of tines might be in representations of the Horned God. Having posed the question, the answers readily present themselves.

Horns ward.

The Sign of the Horns has been a sign of power since long before it became a Heavy Metal cliché.

Because horns aren't just for beauty or display.

They're weapons. They ward because they warn. Theirs is the power of protection.

You could call the Horns a mudra. (In Witch we usually just say: hand-sign.) You could call them an invocation. (You know Who I mean.) In Anthropologist, you could call them an apotropaic: a turning away, an averting.

The Horns have been warding off the hostile, the unchancy, the ill-favored, for centuries, if not millennia.

You can mutter “Horns ward [me]” or “Horns protect [me]” if you like. It certainly won't hurt.

But only make the Sign and the Horns will do their work, seen or unseen, spoken or unspoken.

Some might call this a fire-fight-fire scenario: like warding like, the unchancy against the unchancy.

While the labrys is certainly iconic of Minoan civilization, so is another symbol-cum-ritual-object: the sacred horns.

Found on the rooftops of the temple complexes and peak sanctuaries of ancient Crete as well as in the frescoes and other art, this unique symbol was christened the Horns of Consecration by Sir Arthur Evans a century ago.