The Horned God - Tumblr Posts

The Great One, bestower of death and generative force, imaged as a horned man is probably the very earliest conception of the Divine which crystallised, along with the iconography of the Supreme Mother, in the deeps of the prehistoric psyche. The archetype is older than the hills, old beyond reckoning, reaching back into unimaginable gulfs of antiquity, stirring primeval residues of ancestral memory, for the Horned Master as the lord of this world and the Otherworld, has ruled from the time before time, omnipotent and mysterious.

The old icons are mute testament to the initiatory encounters and transformations undergone by his shaman-priests in the vast forests, swamplands and mountains of the primeval world. The Great God was the Divine Hunter who led his worshippers upon the chase, who was propitiated and who gave luck to the faithful who pursued the herds of wild bison, deer and goats.

To these prehistoric hunters the God of the Two Horns was the very incarnation of the Giver of Life and Death, the implacable and dangerous power who held sway over the wilderness. He was the Great Sorcerer and as such he was the source of those magico-psychic faculties which enabled early humanity to survive in rough and savage environment by the guidance of cunning, intuition and magical luck-force.

However the Master was never a simple hunting-deity for he embodied the various states of spirit trance and magical ecstasy cultivated amongst those early shamans of the Pleistocene era. As the cosmic god of life and death the Horned One was the Janus-faced divinity who stood between the worlds, between the realms of light and shadow, day and night, partaking of both and transcending them in the highest state of consciousness.

- Masks of Misrule; The Horned God & His Cult in Europe, Nigel Jackson