“The Faun” by Carlos Schwabe

Come, blessed Pan, whom rural haunts delight,
Come, leaping, agile, wand’ring, starry light;
The Hours and Seasons, wait thy high command,
And round thy throne in graceful order stand.

Goat-footed, horned, Bacchanalian Pan,
Fanatic pow’r, from whom the world began,
Whose various parts by thee inspir’d, combine
In endless dance and melody divine.

— Orphic Hymn to Pan (2nd c. CE) (transl. by Thomas Taylor)

The monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions is often por­trayed as the hypostatization of independence, power (i.e., “power over”), hierarchy, and dualism. The Neo-Pagan God­dess, in contrast, is the embodiment of interdependence, “power with,” relationality, and wholeness. According to historians, the god of the ancient Hebrews, Yahweh, had a wife, named “Asherah.” Over time, her religion was suppressed and memory of her worship erased by monotheistic scribes, leaving the “bache­lor God” with whom contemporary Christians, Jews, and Muslims are familiar. Neo-Pagans seek to redeem the mascu­line deity by restoring him to his place as the Consort of the God­dess.

The Neo-Pagan Horned God is a worthy consort of the Neo-Pagan Goddess. He is a composite of several ancient pagan gods, including Pan and the Celtic Cernunnos, but the Horned God is a modern creation. He is an expression of embod­ied wisdom, strength, and love. He represents virility and physi­cal love, symbolized by his animal attributes (i.e., horns or ant­lers). But he is more than sexuality. He is Eros, the energy of life.

For Neo-Pagans, the Divine Masculine is beautiful, strong, virile, and passionate, while also being respectful of female power. According to Starhawk:

“The image of the Horned God in [Neo-Pagan] Witch­craft is radically different from any other image of mascu­linity in our culture. He is gentle, tender, and com­forting, but He is also the Hunter. He is the Dying God—but his death is always in the service of the life force. He is untamed sexuality—but sexuality as a deep, holy con­necting power. He is the power of feeling and the image of what men could be if they were liberated from the con­straints of a patriarchal culture. If man had been cre­ated in the Horned God’s image, he would be free to be wild without being cruel, angry without being vi­olent, sex­ual without being coercive, spiritual without be­ing un­sexed, and able to truly love.”

The Horned God is most often depicted with a stag’s antlers, sym­bolizing his connection with animals, wilderness, the hunt, and virility. But he takes other forms, including the solar Sun God, the vegetative Green Man, the perennial Dying and Reviv­ing God of the harvest. Raven Grimassi has identified four arche­types of the “Men’s Mystery Tradition,” which can be understood as four aspects of the Horned God:

• Hero: embodies the mystery of the quest
• Satyr: embodies the mystery of the sexual nature of men
• Hunter/Warrior: embodies the mystery of the hunt and bat­tle
• Divine King/Slain God: embodies the mystery of self-sacri­fice

These archetypes correspond with the evolution of the Consort through the Wheel of the Year, from spring to winter.

Mythologically, the Horned God is both the Son and the Con­sort of the Goddess. As her Son, he symbolizes our depend­ence on our material and psychological Source, the Goddess. As her Consort, the God symbolizes the complement to the Divine Feminine, which creates the dynamic balance that turns the Wheel of the Year. The Horned God has both light and dark as­pects, which perpetually struggle with each other for the favor of the capricious Goddess. They are called the “Oak King” and the “Holly King,” each reigning over half of the year, and repre­sented symbolically as a lion and a unicorn or bull.

Updated 2019