Cernunnos (Herne)

Tom Crotty

Several years ago I was in a place called Prestonbury Rings around dusk. Prestonbury Rings is an Iron Age hillfort near Dartmoor. One side of the site is situated at the edge of a steep cliff that plunges down to a small swift river below. As I approached the Rings, I chanced to look up toward the dim, cloudy sunset and I froze in my tracks. In the near distance, a stag's antlered head was silhoutted against the sky. One of my party exclaimed and the stag leapt into the air and, I don't know how he did it, bounded out of our sight down the steep slope leading to the river. We could hear his hooves hit rock and scree as he went. It was a truly magical moment that I will never forget.

One of the reasons that the event seems so wonderful to me -- other than seeing a magnificent creature in the wild -- is its associations with Celtic mythology and the horned god Cernunnos. Cernunnos is one of the horned gods that date back to prehistory (as evidenced by the dancing "shaman" in the Trois Freres cave painting). Images of Cernunnos appear on carved stone found, among other places, in northern Italy (Val Camonica) and beneath Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and on the famous Gundestrup Cauldron found in Denmark. The images of Cernunnos show a horned man (often stag's horns) wearing a torc (twisted gold necklace). On the Gundestrup Cauldron he has a ram-headed serpent in his left hand and a torc in his right. The god is seated cross-legged on the ground, which would have been common for a hunting people such as the Celts. Cernunnos is surrounded by animals -- stags, bulls, boars, lions, and even a man riding on the back of a large fish.

In such a setting, Cernunnos is seen as the Lord of the Animals or Master of the Hunt, an ancient and powerful shamanistic archetype. This archetype was potent among the common, rural peoples of ancient Europe, and his "worship" and memory continued into historic times in legend and in folk ritual. As a result, when Christianity came to the Gaelic lands Cernunnos was much vilified and his image, combined with that of the Greek Pan, became the common image of the Devil in Medieval Europe. St. Augustine, missionary to the Britons in the fourth century A.D., forbade "that most filthy habit of dressing up as a horse or a stag."

The Horned One appears in Celtic literature as well. In the twelfth-century Welsh text Vita Merlini, Merlin becomes Lord of the Animals, wearing stag's horns and assembling a vast herd of stags and she-goats. In Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, a character dresses as Herne (the southern British name for Cernunnos) to frighten Falstaff, which is fitting because Herne traditionally "haunts" Windsor Great Park near Windsor Castle.

(Sources: The Aquarian Guide to British and Irish Mythology by John and Caitlin Matthews, Celtic Gods and Goddesses by R.J. Stewart, Celtic Lore by Ward Rutherford, Celtic Mythology by Proinsias Mac Cana, and The World of the Celts by Simon James.)