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THE HORNED GOD
CHAPTER I
"The God of the old religion becomes the Devil of the new."
THE earliest known representation of a deity is in the Caverne des Trois Frères in Ariège, and dates to the late Palaeolithic period (plate I). The figure is that of a man clothed in the skin of a stag and wearing on his head the antlers of a stag. The hide of the animal covers the whole of the man's body, the hands and feet are drawn as though seen through a transparent material; thus conveying to the spectator the information that the figure is a disguised human being. The face is bearded, the eyes large and round, but there is some doubt whether the artist intended to represent the man-animal with a mask or with the face uncovered.
The horned man is drawn on the upper part of the wall of the cave, below and around him are representations of animals painted in the masterly manner characteristic of the Palaeolithic artist. It seems evident from the relative position of all the figures that the man is dominant and that he is in the act of performing some ceremony in which the animals are concerned. The ceremony appears to consist of a dance with movements of the hands as well as the feet. It is worth noting that though the pictures of the animals are placed where they can easily be seen by the spectator the horned man can only be viewed from that part of the cavern which is most difficult of access. This fact suggests that a great degree of sanctity was attached to this representation, and that it was purposely placed where it was screened from the gaze of the vulgar.
The period when the figure was painted is so remote that it is not possible to make any conjectures as to its meaning except by the analogy of historical and modern instances. Such instances are, however, sufficiently numerous to render it fairly certain that the man represents the incarnate god, who, by performing the sacred dance, causes the increase of the kind of animal in the disguise of which he appears.
Though the stag-man is the most important of the horned figures of the Palaeolithic period, there are many smaller drawings of masked and horned men on small objects of bone and horn. These figures are usually represented with the horns of a goat or chamois, and are dancing singly or in groups. The most interesting example is on plate II, where the horned man is not only dancing but also accompanies himself on a kind of musical bow. The only Palaeolithic representation of a human figure found in England is the well-known engraving on bone of a man masked with a horse's head, which was discovered in the Pinhole Cave, Derbyshire.
The art of the Palaeolithic period came to a sudden and complete end before the Neolithic era; it was utterly wiped out in Europe, and seems to have had no influence on later periods. The Neolithic people have left few artistic remains; their human figures are almost invariably of women, and the masked man does not appear. But when the Bronze-age is reached the horned human-being is found again, and occurs first in the Near and Middle East, i.e., in Egypt, Mesopotamia and India. In the Near East the figures may be either male or female, and the horns are those of cattle, sheep or goats. There are no stag antlers, possibly because the stag did not occur in those lands or was so uncommon as not to be of importance as a food animal.
Horned gods were common in Mesopotamia, both in Babylon and Assyria. The copper head found in one of the gold-tombs at Ur, is very early; possibly earlier than the first Egyptian dynasty. It is about half life-size, and the style and workmanship show an advanced stage of metal-working. The eyes were originally inlaid with limestone or shell for the white of the eye, and lapis lazuli for the iris. The head wears two horns, a number which at a slightly later period would indicate that the wearer was an inferior deity; for, during many centuries, the position of a deity in the Babylonian pantheon was shown by the number of horns worn. The great gods and goddesses had seven horns, which is the reason that the divine Lamb in the Book of Revelation was said to have seven horns. The two-horned deities of Babylonia are so numerous that it is likely that they were originally the deities of the primitive inhabitants, who had to take a lower place when the great gods were introduced; these latter were given more horns than the godlings to show their superior position. The horns were a sign of divinity. When the King or High-priest appeared as the god Asshur with the Queen or High-priestess as his consort Ishtar, the appropriate number of horns was worn on the royal headdresses, the royal pair being then regarded as the incarnate deities. When Alexander the Great raised himself above the kings of the earth and made himself a god, he wore horns in sign of his divinity, hence his name in the Koran, Dhu'l Karnain The Two-horned. In Egypt his horns were those of Amon, the supreme god.
A godling, who is found in all parts of Babylonia and at all periods of her history, is a two-horned male figure, known as Enkidu. He is represented as fighting with animals, or holding a staff, but his special duty is to guard the door. He has a man's head with two horns, his body is human, and from the waist down he is a bull. Sometimes the legs appear to be human, but the hoofs are always clearly indicated, and the tail also is a marked feature. In short, he answers to the usual description of the Christian devil in having horns, hoofs and a tail. But in the eyes of the early Babylonians he was far from being a devil, and his image-sometimes the whole figure, sometimes the head only-was worn as a charm against all evil and ill-luck. He was credited with great prophylactic powers; so much so that such charms were in use throughout Babylonia. The evidence shows that the great seven-horned gods of the temples, who gave their special protection to the royal family, had little or no appeal for the people, and that the smaller deities, the little two-horned godlings, were regarded as the real protectors in matters of everyday life.
Throughout the Bronze and Iron ages horned deities are to be found in Egypt. The earliest example has a woman's face and the horns of a buffalo; this is on the slate-palette of Narmer, who is usually identified with the first historic king of Egypt. It is worth noting that, with the exception of the god Mentu, the horns of cattle are worn by goddesses only, while the gods have the horns of sheep. The chief of the horned gods of Egypt was Amon, originally the local deity of Thebes, later, the supreme god of the whole country. He is usually represented in human form wearing the curved horns of the Theban ram. Herodotus mentions that at the great annual festival at Thebes the figure of Amon was wrapped in a ram's skin, evidently in the same way that the dancing god of Ariège was wrapped. There were two types of sheep whose horns were the insignia of divinity; the Theban breed had curved horns, but the ordinary breed of ancient Egyptian sheep had twisted horizontal horns. The horizontal horns are those most commonly worn by Egyptian gods. One of the most important of these deities is Khnum, the god of the district round the First Cataract; he was a creator god and was represented as a human being with a sheep's head and horizontal horns. But the greatest of all the horned gods of Egypt was Osiris, who appears to have been the Pharaoh in his aspect as the incarnate god. The crown of Osiris, of which the horizontal horns were an important part, was also the crown of the monarch, indicating to all who understood the symbolism that the king as god was the giver of all fertility'
In the accounts of the divine birth of the Egyptian Kings, the future father of the divine child, the Pharaoh, visits the queen as the god Amon wearing all the insignia of divinity, including the horns. In this connection it should also be noted that down to the latest period of pharaonic history the divine father was always the horned Amon.
There are two other links between Egypt and the dancing god of Ariège. On a slate palette, which is dated to the period just before the beginning of Egyptian history, there is represented a man with the head and tail of a jackal; as in the Ariège example the body, hands and feet are human; he plays on a flute, and like the Palaeolithic god he is in the midst of animals. The other link is in the ceremonial dress of the Pharaoh, who on great occasions wore a bull's tail attached to his girdle. The sed-heb or Tail-festival, when the king was invested with the tail, was one of the most important of the royal ceremonies. A sacred dance, performed by the Pharaoh wearing the bull's tail, is often represented as taking place in a temple before Min, the god of human generation. The worship of horned gods continued in Egypt until Christian times, especially in connection with the horned goddess Isis.
The Indian figures of the Horned God, found at Mohenjo-Daro, are of the earliest Bronze-age. There are many examples, and in every case it is clear that a human being is represented, either masked or horned. Sometimes the figure has a human body with a bull's head, sometimes the head and body are covered with a hairy skin, probably indicating a bull's hide. The most remarkable is that of a man with bull's horns on his head, sitting cross-legged, and like the Ariège figure surrounded with animals (plate III. i). This representation was regarded in historic times as a form of Shiva and is called Pasupati, "Lord of animals". When in relief sculpture Pasupati is three-faced, as here; but in figures in the round he has four faces. Such a representation is a naive attempt to show the all-seeing god, and is found in Europe in the four-faced Janus. It is still uncertain whether the four-faced form arose independently in India and Europe, or whether one is the prototype of the other; if the latter, the Indian appears to be the earlier.
Though it is not possible to give an exact date to the early legends of the Aegean, it is evident that there also the Horned God flourished throughout the Bronze and Iron ages.
The best known, on account of the dramatic legends attached to his cult, was the Minoan bull, the Minotaur, of Crete. He was in human form with a bull's head and horns, and was worshipped with sacred dances and human sacrifices. He was said to be the offspring of a foreign "bull" and the Cretan queen, who at the marriage appeared in the guise of a cow, in other words, she was robed and masked as an animal like the dancing god of Ariège. The representations of the combat between Theseus and the Minotaur show the latter as entirely human, with a bull's mask (plate iv. i). Theseus is sometimes represented with the flowing locks of the Cretan athlete; this suggests that the slaying may have been a Cretan custom, the man representing the Minotaur being killed in a battle in which, masked as he was, he could be no match for his antagonist. Frazer has pointed out that Minos went to Zeus every nine years, and has suggested that this was a euphemism for the sacrifice of each ruler at the end of that term of years. In the Theseus legend the interval of time was seven years, but the rest of the story so closely resembles other accounts of the sacrifice by. combat that it cannot be disregarded; Theseus did not put an end to the custom, he merely relieved Athens from sending the yearly victims, who, like the children stolen by the fairies, had to "pay the teind to hell" with their lives.
The sanctity of the ram in the Aegean in the early Bronze age is shown in the legend of Helle and Phrixos. They were the children of the family who were set apart as victims when human sacrifice was required. The sacrifice of Helle was consummated by drowning, but Phrixos escaped by means of the divine animal, which he afterwards sacrificed, possibly as a substitute for himself. The story of Jason's expedition suggests that the fleece had a divine connotation, and that its value was greatly in excess of the intrinsic worth of the gold.
Of the horned gods of the mainland of Greece Pan is the best known to the modern world, yet he is put one among many, horned deities of the eastern Mediterranean (plate IV. 2). His universality is shown by his name, which points to a time when he was the only deity in his own locality. All representations of him are necessarily late, after the fifth century B.C.; but even in the earliest forms his characteristics are the same, the long narrow face, the pointed beard, the small horns, and the goat's legs. Scenes of his worship show him followed by a dancing procession of satyrs and nymphs, while he plays on the pipes which bear his name. His appearance should be compared with the little dancing god of the Palaeolithic people (plate II), and also with the figure of Robin Goodfellow (plate X). As a godling beloved of the people he is like Enkidu, whom he also resembles in having hoofs. Though our knowledge of him dates only to the late Iron-age, his worship is obviously of high antiquity, and he appears to be indigenous in Greece.
Another horned god of Greece was Bull Dionysos, who, like the Minotaur of Crete, was slain. Dionysos was said to have been brought into Greece from the north; his cult would therefore be a foreign worship, which fact shows that outside Greece, in the countries which have no written record, the belief in a homed deity prevailed in the Iron-age and probably even earlier.
A few rock carvings in Scandinavia show that the horned god was known there also in the Bronze age. It was only when Rome started on her career of conquest that any written record was made of the gods of western Europe, and those records prove that a horned deity, whom the Romans called Cernunnos, was one of the greatest gods, perhaps even the supreme deity, of Gaul. The name given to him by the Romans means simply The Horned. In the north of Gaul his importance is shown on the altar found under the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris. The date of the altar is well within the Christian era; on three sides are figures of minor gods represented as small beings, on the fourth side is the head of Cernunnos (Plate 4), which is of huge proportions compared with the other figures. He has a man's head, and like the Ariège figure he wears stag's antlers, which are further decorated with rings; these may be hoops of withy or bronze currency-rings. Like his Palaeolithic prototype he is bearded. This altar shows that, in accordance with Roman artistic ideas, the divine man was not masked, he wears the horns and their appendages fixed on his head. The altar appears to have been dedicated in a temple so sacred that the site was re-used for the principal temple of the new faith. Cernunnos is recorded in writing and in sculpture in the south of Gaul, in that very part where the Palaeolithic painting of him still survives. It is highly improbable that the cult of the Horned God should have died out in south-western Europe in Neolithic times and have remained unknown through the Bronze and Iron ages, only to be revived before the arrival of the Romans. It is more logical to suppose that the worship continued through the unrecorded centuries, and lasted on as one of the principal Gaulish cults till within the Christian era. Such a cult must have had a strong hold on the worshippers, and among the illiterate, and in the less accessible parts of the country it would linger for many centuries after a new religion had been accepted elsewhere.
In considering the evidence from Britain the proximity of Gaul to this country and the constant flux of peoples from one shore to the other, must be taken into account. What is true of Gaul is true of Britain, some allowance being made for the differences caused by the effect of another climate on temperament and on conditions of life.
Our chief knowledge of the horned god in the British Isles comes from ecclesiastical and judicial records. As these were made exclusively by Christians, generally priests, the religious bias is always very marked. The worshippers themselves were illiterate and have left no records of their beliefs except in a few survivals here and there. The earliest record of the masked and horned man in England is in the Liber Poenitentialis of Theodore, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690, and ruled the Church in England with the assistance of Hadrian the negro. This was a time when--if we are to believe the ecclesiastical chroniclers--England was practically Christianised, yet Theodore fulminates against anyone who "goes about as a stag or a bull; that is, making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because this is devilish". Three centuries later King Edgar found that the Old Religion was more common than the official faith, and he urges that "every Christian should zealously accustom his children to Christianity."
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