Who is this god?
He bears horns, ‘cernu’ in Celtic, he is literally a horned man, Kernunnos,
the horned one, which is just a descriptive, it is not his name, it is an
adjective. He is half man, half beast, those breeks belong more to Pan than they
do to Kernunnos, but anything with horns will do – cloven feet are fine – but
it’s the headgear which identifies him. Only Pan (Faunus) comes close to this in
the Graeco-Roman world. The God Pan. So what else is there? There’s music, [top link, centre right], and music is
often important in Celtic Britain, the image of the harp for example, and the
magical singing birds of Rhiannon. It would be odd to find any indigenous folk
tradition then without music featuring in it.
[Circle of Demons and Witches, Nathaniel Crouch, The
Kingdom of Darkness, 1688.]
What else? The phallic broomstick and phallic torch or candle, so there is
fire symbolism, which compliments the circle – usually a symbol for the sun
(wheel). And what else – people dancing in a ring and drinking jugs, indicating
feasting, so this is also a god of plenty, and a god of fertility. The Sacred Circle. Then what can we find in Britain and, or Ireland, to match this otherwise
bewildering figure? The art work seems to be derived from a 1628 publication
entitled “Robin Good-Fellow” (short title) and the original figure is
graphically virile, reinforcing the previously-mentioned phallic imagery. By the
17th century Robin was a name for the regent of the fair folk, the King of
Faery, but we need to delve much further back and earlier in time to identify
this elusive fellow
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There are several contenders I think for the god of the witches in Celtic
Brtain and Ireland. We have already noted the horns, the stag god’s antlers; but
during the later medieval period there are repeated references to the devil
being black, for example, “a very mickle [large], black rough man" claimed
Isobel Gowdie in 1662 [1]. So step forward swart god! Not so simple though: Celtic belief was regional, it was tribal, the deities do not fall into neat
categories and I believe their gods may overlap to quite an extent, quite unlike
the classical pantheon with its apparently well defined Olympians.
But black, or rather dark; an obvious match could well be the Irish Donn whose name gives us the adjective ‘dun’. This is a dark god of the Celtic
underworld, but he is possibly more than that as well. Julius Caesar [2] stated
that the Celtic equivalent of his ‘Dis Pater’ was considered to be the ancestor
of the Gauls, and so a very major figure, and Dis Pater was the god of the Roman
underworld, so we may have a parallel dark Donn figure here. In Wales, the
medieval Mabinogion affords us a glimpse of another large dark figure, a
pillar-like ‘black man of great stature on the top of a mound’ grasping a stag
and a club [3]. The club or cudgel is also an attribute of Gaulish Sucellous
(‘good striker’) and the Irish Dagda, called 'The Good God' and the ‘All-Father’ bringing us back
to Julius’ comment again. Equally, the Dagda has been poetically referred to as
‘Donn’ which can mean brown or dark [4], exactly the same adjective used to
describe the Donn Cuailgne or great brown bull featuring in the epic Irish Tain
saga – yes, those horns again.
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But returning to the Good-Fellow imagery – especially the circle - and our
quest for the dark figure, perhaps the Witches’ God. Besides Kernunnos and the
Dagda as sometimes dark, ancestral and fertility deities in the broad Celtic
pantheon, a third personage presents himself. This is Crom Dubh, ‘dubh’ meaning
black [5]. The word ‘crom’ forms Welsh ‘cromlech’ meaning curved stone, in other
words a stone circle. Crom Dubh may have also been known as Crom Cruach, which
would tend to identify him with the hilltop god Lugh (Lleu) who has an
agricultural and harvest association. The god Lugaid - perhaps related to Lugh - is a tricephalic diety just
like Kernunnos – he can be depicted with three heads or faces.
I return to the dancing circle though because Crom Dubh, whom Michael J
O’Kelly calls the chief Celtic idol of Ireland [6], is associated with several
stone circles, and I do not see this as coincidental. Aubrey Burl informs us
that the stone circle in County Cavan known as Crom Cruach or Crom Dubh was a
circle of twelve standing stones with a taller monolith in the centre. The
central stone appears to have been thought of as the god Crom Cruach himself. A
second stone circle in the same county has a Crom Cruach association and that is
at Killycluggin. This circle also appears to have possessed a central pillar.
Both circles have been deliberately destroyed in antiquity and the question of
Crom Dubh’s identity has been all but effaced [7]. However, the ‘mickle
black man’ of the seventeenth century – the Witches’ God of the round dance, and
the many megalithic monuments credited with witch associations, suggests to me
that the chthonic Kernunnos – variously named and conceived of - was indeed the
God of the Witches
From the Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo, (1608).
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Kernunnos only means ‘horned’ it doesn’t mean anything else, it doesn’t
refer to any particular animal at all. Consequently, all horned animals can be
thought of as potentially the ‘horned one’ and this is what we find in the scant
evidence available to us today. Where clearly represented Celtic male horned
figures appear they are antlered (stags) or associated with horns like the ‘ram
horned’ serpents frequently accompanying the chthonic god. Bovids are less
acknowledged as horned divinities, but the Celtic bull was esteemed, as in the
Tain, and a bull deity existed even though his nature is now as altogether
shadowy as the erstwhile major divinity Crom Dubh in Ireland. The bull god was
named Tarvos who is depicted as Tarvos Trigaranus on the 1st century Pillar of
the Boatmen (an altar) at Cluny, France; immediately beneath this panel is a
representation of Kernunnos with apparent stag’s antlers over which are looped
torcs. I think this further suggests the interrelatedness of Celtic male horned
figures, all being seen as facets of Kernunnos.
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The Dagda as a major pre-Christian figure is described in the Tochmarc
Étaíne [8] as having power over the storm which would tend to identify
him as originally an archaic weather god, and his cudgel or club [9] parallels
Indra’s axe, Thunor’s hammer and the thunder bolt of Zeus. In this way these
deities have something in common with anciently bovine lunar* gods like the
Anatolian Teshub, consort of the sun goddess of Arinna, and Sumerian Nanna
/Sin – another ‘father of the gods’ figure - who rode a winged bull. The god’s
consort Ningal was represented by a priestess who led a white cow and is
thought to have performed a ritual to the east or even the rising sun; the
priestess is named ‘ornament of the heavens’ and embodied the person of the
goddess [10]. Considering the sacred issue between Nanna/Sin and Ningal
was the sun it is probable that Ningal was a solar cow goddess, recalling
ancient Egyptian Hathor and the cow goddess Aditi who births the sun in the
mythology of India. Bovine Nanna/Sin’s symbol was the crescent moon, reflecting
his twin albescent crescent horns.
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In general, the educated seventeenth century Establishment – the clergy,
aristocracy and the judiciary, could only interpret the remnants of paganism,
which were all around them, in terms of classical learning and the Bible. Thus
the Witch God became the Christian Devil often depicted with Pan-like goat’s
legs and feet. But it follows that the god of the witches was largely an archaic
moon and fertility god, and that he was consequently worshipped at night.
Indeed, recumbent stone circles in northern Britain are believed to reference
the moon [11]. Elsewhere the solar nature of stone circles and related megalithic
monuments is beyond serious dispute and there are too many documented sun
alignments to call this into question, even accepting that some megalithic
monuments remain obscure in terms of archeoastronomy. The examples of Stonehenge
and Newgrange will always stand, and importantly so [12]. That many daylight
traditions may have been erased, must be accepted, just as the Brythonic sun
goddess Sulis is all but ignored in the modern period; we are left with the
nocturnal god of the witches – a surviving folk memory - but without his consort
the sun goddess, whose identity was probably overlain and absorbed by Roman
Minerva in the late Iron Age and then Mary ‘The Queen of Heaven’ in the
succeeding Christian period, and it remains for us to recover our lost
heritage.
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Notes
7. Aubrey Burl, ‘Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany’ p.211-12,
1995.
10. Harriet Crawford (ed), ‘The Sumerian World’, p.253-4, 2012.
http://www.newgrange.com/newgrange/new_grange_solstice.jpg
http://www.world-mysteries.com/alignments/mpl_al_stonh.gif
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/properties/stonehenge/interpretation/1829989/summer-solstice.jpg
*I broadly refer to Teshub as
lunar after Karl Kilinski’s identification of him with the Neo-Hittite Tarhunt
who was himself identified with the Luwian moon god Arma [Burney, 2004]. Kilinski also
compares Teshub with the bull-horned, storm god Akkadian Adad whose father was
Nana/Sin. The Hittite moon deity Kaskuh equates to Hurrian Kusuh [Taracha, 2009],
consort of Nikkal, the Hurrian version of the Sumerian ‘Great Lady’ Ningal,
spouse of the moon-god Sin, and I feel that this places Kaskuh in a category of
male Middle Eastern weather/lunar/bovine deities.
References.
Karl Kilinski, Greek Myth and Western Art, p.19, 2013.
Charles Burney, Historical Dictionary of the Hittites, p.219, 2004.
Piotr Taracha, Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia, pp. 127-8, 2009.
[All links visited 24.04.2014]
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