One of the earliest such paintings on the continent is in the Trois Freres cave in south-west France. The painting is well back from the mouth of the cave, beyond the reach of daylight. It depicts a bearded man wearing an animal skin with a tail, and antlers on his head. His sexual parts are emphasised.

The horns that he wears are a sign of power. At so early a stage in human social development, the leader of a small wandering tribe of hunters and food gatherers was of necessity its strongest and most able man. Scientific examination of Stone Age skeletons has shown that the average expectation of life then was about 14 years. With so many deaths before the age of puberty, the birth rate was perilously low. The tribal leader was necessary to the continued survival of his people and he was therefore envisaged as being as strong and ferocious as the horned animals the tribe hunted for food— the bull, the ram, the stag, the goat, the reindeer, and (in Europe) the bison. In the minds of these first people there was no abstract idea of a god in heaven. The tribal leader was god on earth in that he daily demonstrated his powers by making it possible for his people to stay alive. The other deity on earth was woman, out of whose body came new children to replace members of the tribe who died. She was depicated in paintings and small rock carvings, always with a big belly that showed her power to produce new life.

Some thousands of years later in human history, when the concept of gods in a remote place separate from men and women on earth was formed, the male god was still shown in paintings and statues wearing horns, as in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Horns had become an enduring symbol of power and divinity. By this time human ingenuity had developed farming and gradually adopted a settled way of life, so making possible the growth of villages. The Horned God still presided over this major social change. As the food-giver of the tribe he became the sown seed from which the crops grew to sustain his people and in this way agriculture gave rise to the new concept of resurrection after death.

The Horned God symbolised fertility—in women, in cattle, and in crops. His earthly representative physically mated with the woman chosen to represent the goddess, who was by now thought of as the earth itself, the mother of all living things, the womb from which all were born and to which all returned to await rebirth. In the same way that the gods mated in the persons of their representatives on earth, so the peasant took his own woman out into his planted fields and mated with her on the ground to ensure that the crops would grow. As the Great Goddess had become the earth from which all life sprang and from which it was nourished, so the Horned God became identified as the sun as well as the seed. The analogy was apt; the sun poured its strength onto the earth to make it fertile and, like the sown seed, the sun dried in winter and was reborn in spring.

In the Old Testament it is related that while Moses was conferring on Mount Sinai with the God in the sky, his brother Aaron made the celebrated golden calf. That is, he cast a statue of the Horned God the Hebrews worshipped in Egypt— Amon with the bull's horns on his head. The Hebrews stripped naked and danced to music around the statue, celebrating their familiar fertility rite. Moses disapproved to the point of having a number of his people slaughtered as an example to others. He had no intention of allowing his new sky god Yahweh (J.H.W.H —with no horns) to be confused with Amon. Yet, when Moses built a wooden altar in honour of Yahweh, he had horns set on each of its corners, overlaid with brass. Horns still meant divinity even if the God himself didn't have them. By one of the ironies of history, Michelangelo was commissioned to carve a statue of Moses the law-giver to decorate the tomb of Pope Julius II who died in 1513. He carved horns on Moses' head to indicate divine power. The statue can still be seen in the church of St Peters in Chains, in Rome.

Over a long period of time the Hebrew tribes that settled in Palestine were weaned and bullied away from the Horned God and the Great Goddess by Moses and his successors, whose idea of the creator was a lone male spirit. Male chauvinism was born on Mount Sinai. Many centuries later, King Solomon incurred the wrath of his priestly chroniclers by venerating the goddess. he had been turned away from the true and only god, the priests claimed, by the foreign women in his harem.

"Following the lead of Paul, the Christian Church repressed sexuality by all the means in its power. Even in marriage the sexual act was only for the procreation of children, who were thought to be conceived in sin and born in wickedness. Outside marriage, sexual activity was unthinkably evil. "

Christianity had as little time for the first gods of mankind as the Jewish religion. The Christian Church still preached the death and resurrection of the god, as did the old religion of the Middle East, but it had no time for sexuality. The Christian theologians established a hierachy of three male gods, but these were spirits in heaven and were not to be represented by a man on earth wearing a horned mask and mating with the earthly representative of a goddess, since there was no goddess in the Christian belief-system. Following the lead of Paul, the Christian Church repressed sexuality by all the means in its power. Even in marriage the sexual act was only for the procreation of children, who were thought to be conceived in sin and born in wickedness. Outside marriage, sexual activity was unthinkably evil. To impose these beliefs on normal men and women was far from easy and therefore women, the embodiment of sexual desire in the eyes of Christian priests, had to be degraded, enslaved, not allowed to choose their own partners or their own ways of life. In the sixth century a church council convened at Macon in France debated the question of whether women were human beings at all. Male chauvinism had now come a long way since Mount Sinai.

In the wake of the slowly disintegrating Roman Empire, Christian missionaries spread their gospel across Europe and built their churches. While they were often able to convert local rulers by offering various rewards, the ordinary people clung to their old beliefs. Throughout Europe the Horned God was carved on alters for thousands of years and depicted in mosaics and in decorative ware. Sometimes he had stag's horns. The Romans who conquered the Celts in present-day France latinised his name to Cernunnos. In Britain he gradually became Herne, by which name he is still remembered in various place-names.

In Britain, Christianity came much later than in the rest of Europe. The early work of Augustine was swept away by tribes whose non-Christian beliefs had the same roots as those of the Celtic Britons whom they displaced westwards. The names of the god and goddess were different, but the belief was the same. The ferocious King Sweyn of Denmark invaded England at the beginning of the eleventh century. His gods were Woden of the horned helmet and Frig the All Mother. Sweyn died in Lincolnshire and his own son Canute became King of England. Canute's gods were those of his father and his people, but he agreed to be baptised a Christian as a matter of politics than of faith. To the ordinary people living out their lives in small villages and tilling the earth from which everything grew, the king's beliefs were of no great importance and they continued in their old ways without interference.

Only two generations later William of Normandy conquered England and made himself king in 1066. He was the illegitimate son of Duke Robert, generally known as Robert the Devil. Neither Robert nor William were Christians and they made no secret of the fact. The Normans were not French of course—they were Teutonic tribes settled in northern France, just as Teutonic tribes calling themselves Angles, Saxons and Jutes had settled in England earlier. William had learned in Normandy the usefulness of the senior Christian clergy as civil servants. They could read and write, accomplishments not shared by his barons and knights, whose only skills lay in horseriding and the use of weapons. So he came to England with the blessing of the Pope and brought a horde of churchmen with him to help administer the new Kingdom.

The ordinary soldiers of William's army, gathered from the villages of Normandy, were no more Christian than their leader or the English they conquered. They merged into the population without fuss, except that the name they brought with them for the Horned God was Robin. But it was during the reign of William the Conqueror that the Christian church well established in power, began to flex its muscles. The followers of the old gods of fertility were not greatly attracted by the new Christian religion of sin and redemption. The old gods promised pleasure and plenty here on earth, the new god promised only spiritual happiness in some vague hereafter.

As soon as the Christian church gained some real political power in England, it set about stamping out the old beliefs by force. Since the Christian god was the source of all good, the reasoning went, it followed that any other god was necessarily evil. To venerate the principle of life in the form of a Horned God, as people did, was clearly to worship an evil god. In this way the Horned God was neatly slotted into the category of "the Devil" of the Christian beliefs. Nothing short of death was adequate punishment on earth for followers of the devil. After death, the Christian God would allow the devil to punish the wicked for all eternity. By this odd chain of reasoning, Christian theologists awarded the task of punishing sinners after death to the Horned God himself, the symbol of life, fertility and pleasure.

As part of its propaganda campaign against the old beliefs, the Christian church began to call the worshippers of the old gods witches. Persecution by torture, rope and fire did not wipe out the veneration of the old gods either in Europe or in Britain, but it drove the celebration of the mysteries underground. From the fourteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century witches were hunted down with zeal and cruelty. There is no way of estimating how many people died for their beliefs yet still their beliefs survived.

At meetings of witches the Horned God was present among them, wearing horns to symbolise the divine power in him. In witch trials the authorities insisted that it was the devil himself the witches had been meeting, in the form of a goat, a ram, or a bull. The witches knew better. The god was the leader of the coven, the most powerful person in the group. He guided and advised them in the affairs of their lives, he led the feasting and the dancing and, above all, he played the leading part in the copulation that was the sacred outward manifestation of the devotion to the principle of life itself.

By no means all adherents of the first gods were simple farmers. Lords and ladies, kings and queens, bishops and even an occasional pope felt the truth of the ancient beliefs. Nor did the beliefs vanish in the "Age of Reason" as is sometimes thought. They endured through the eighteenth century, through the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, when, for the first time steam trains connected towns that had previously been many days journey apart and when towns became cities and cities grew large. In the twentieth century there has been a great deal of revival in these basic and ancient beliefs, as the Christian Church has lost its power to persecute those who do not subscribe to its own beliefs.

However, governments, newspapers, and individuals, or groups of fanatics, try very hard to fit everyone into what they themselves see as the "perfect being". Basic beliefs, however, are not easily supressed, and regardless of what our own particular belief is, we must all acknowledge that the next person may subscribe to something completely different. That is his choice.

Article © Gainsbourg
B&W illustrations © ozpagan.org

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