The Horned God of the Witches Read online

  Now pick up your small mirror or reflective item, and again visualize any unwanted energy being directed at you being sent back to the source. As you place that item in your Witch bottle, say:

  I use against you what you would use to hurt me.

  Through Herne, all shall bounce back to you. So mote it be!

  Pick up the stone you are using to represent protection. Feel its energy and let that energy throb in the palm of your hand for a moment. Visualize yourself being free from strife and worry and anything that would harm you. See yourself safe and secure in your home and with your loved ones. Know that you are loved and that there are people out there who have a vested interest in your welfare. When you are ready, add the stone to your Witch bottle and say:

  I shall be free from strife, safe and secure.

  With the power of Herne, this I ensure!

  I usually fill my Witch bottles with vinegar and sometimes a small amount of urine. If you want to use strictly vinegar, that’s great! If you are using vinegar in conjunction with something else, be sure not to fill your bottle all the way up in this next step. If you want to add anything else to your Witch bottle (other than that which represents you), do so before adding the vinegar.

  The idea behind using vinegar to fill up your Witch bottle is to make sure the negative energy that will bounce back to your tormentor is rotten and nasty. People tend to stop being assholes when that sort of behavior results in bad luck for them! As you fill your bottle with vinegar, say the following:

  Vile, sour, disgusting, unwanted, and rude,

  I send back to you what you used to intrude!

  May you be the victim of your own evil and malice.

  The scales of justice I now put back in balance!

  Finally, add your piece of hair, fingernail, or urine to the Witch bottle and say:

  Through the power of Herne, this bottle serves only me.

  From torments and pain, I shall soon be free.

  All sent toward me now goes back to its source.

  That is the way of my magick, the path and the course.

  With the power of Herne, god of justice and right,

  I now have my tormentors in my sight!

  All will be good, from negativity I shall be free,

  This spell is now cast, I say so mote it be!

  Witch bottles are usually buried under windows and doorways. Since this is not a typical Witch bottle, best to keep it on your altar for as long as you need it. When those who wish you harm have ceased working against you, take the bottle off your altar and bury its contents outside, or pour the contents somewhere outside where they are unlikely to be disturbed for a while, such as near a bush. The bottle can be recycled or reused after it has been washed.

  When the spell is over, be sure to thank Herne with some sort of offering. Ideally you should pour out your offering near an oak tree in his honor. If that’s not an option, simply place your offering in a chalice or bowl, direct the god to it, and place the offering on your altar for at least a few hours, or better yet a day. When removing the offering, thank Herne again and dispose of the cup’s contents.

  Elen of the Ways

  Currently, one of the most popular faces of the Horned God belongs to a female version of the deity, a reindeer-antlered goddess known as Elen of the Ways (figure 12). Although Elen was virtually unheard of before the 1980s, it’s now possible to buy statues, T-shirts, and books featuring her online and in many Witch shops. Much like Cernunnos, there are no myths that feature Elen by name (or with her antlers), but unlike Cernunnos, there’s also no archaeological evidence for Elen of the Ways. The story of Elen of the Ways is unlike that of any other deity featured in this book.

  Elen is what I think of as a revealed deity. She was brought into the light by reading between the lines of mythology and through personal gnosis, meaning direct contact with a deity by a human being. The revealer of Elen is British goddess historian Caroline Wise, whose essays (and later books) on the subject of Elen of the Ways form the backbone of the deity’s mythology and character. According to Wise, Elen of the Ways is the British goddess of the natural world, fertility, gardens, underground sources of water, ley lines,132 roads, migratory routes, and, not surprisingly, reindeer.133 Since Elen is the goddess of such a vast array of ideas and energies, it’s not surprising that she’s become popular since she was introduced to the modern world in 1986 (the year Wise first published information on the subject of Elen).

  The biggest piece of evidence for the existence of Elen in the ancient world comes from the Welsh collection of stories and tales known as the Mabinogion in the United States and the Mabinogi in the United Kingdom. The stories that make up the Mabinogion were compiled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and are based on much older oral legends. The first written version of the Mabinogion (apart from a few fragments) appears toward the end of that time frame. The stories that make up this collection deal primarily with heroes and kings, but it’s believed by many that those heroes and kings were once most likely Welsh-Celtic deities. The Mabinogion also contains characters familiar to us from other mythologies, such as King Arthur, along with historical figures such as Magnus Maximus (c. 335–388 CE), who ruled the western half of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century.

  Figure 12: Elen of the Ways.

  Because there are no ancient depictions of Elen,

  every image of the goddess is a modern one.

  It’s in the Mabinogion story of Maximus (who is referred to in the text as Macsen Wledig) that Elen appears. According to the tale, known as The Dream of Macsen Wledig, Maximus dreams of a beautiful red-haired woman who lives in a faraway land. Being an emperor, he sends out men all across the world to find this woman. After much searching, they find her in present-day Wales. This is, of course, Elen (or sometimes Helen), and once she’s located, Maximus travels with haste to be at her side. The two fall in love, and Elen’s father is given dominion over the island of Britain and three new castles are built in honor of Elen. Elen also convinces her new husband to build an extensive series of roads in her native land to make the defense of Britain easier. Before Elen and Maximus can live happily ever after, the emperor has his throne stolen from him while he’s away, but thanks to his new allies, he quickly regains it, and gives the Britons the province of Brittany in Gaul (present-day France).

  In Wales, Elen, the wife of Maximus, has become Saint Elen and is thought to have built the first Christian churches in Wales. (While hailed as a saint in Wales, Elen has never formally been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.) Elen is the patron saint of roads and their builders, a tidbit that aligns nicely with her role in the Mabinogion. The ancient Roman road Sarn Helen is named after Saint Elen, though the road predates the time of Maximus, lending more credence to the idea that the Elen of the Mabinogion was a Celtic-Welsh goddess.

  The Mabinogion and the story of Elen as a saint are our best clues to the goddess’s ancient existence. In her writings on Elen of the Ways, Wise offers more justifications for the existence of Elen in the ancient world. Some of those are problematic (such as linking Santa’s reindeer to Elen; Santa didn’t use reindeer until the nineteenth century), but a good argument can be made for a goddess of British roads related to reindeer. As we’ve already seen in this book, there were female versions of Cernunnos: could these have possibly been Elen of the Ways?

  Wise has always been very adamant that Elen has reindeer antlers atop her head, and for good reason. Reindeer are the only species of animal where females, in addition to males, grow antlers. Interestingly, males shed their antlers shortly after mating season in November/December, while female reindeer keep their antlers until their calves are born in late spring. Because of this, Santa’s reindeer are far more likely to be female than male.

  The first “roads” among ancient humans were probably the migratory trails of animals like reindeer. These tracks help link Elen as a reindeer goddess to
her role as a goddess (and saint) of roads. While the physical and literary evidence for Elen of the Ways is scant, there’s a pretty good circumstantial case for her being an ancient goddess of some sort, even if I find much of the historical evidence for Elen of the Ways rather dubious (and I urge you to read about Elen and draw your own conclusions; links are in the bibliography).

  Though some of the mythology and reasoning used to establish the existence of Elen in the modern world feels a bit suspect to me, I don’t doubt the existence of the goddess. I’ve read critics of Wise and Elen of the Ways call Elen a made-up deity, but I think that’s far too dismissive. I have friends who have had experiences with Elen of the Ways, and judging by her current popularity, I have to believe there is some sort of collective energy pushing her to a place of prominence in our society. It’s also worth noting that every deity starts from somewhere, and whether that’s in the ancient or the more modern world is immaterial. As a believer in a truly universal Horned God, I find that Elen provides another entry into the Horned One’s mysteries.

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  125. The editors of The Yale Shakespeare believe the play was probably written in 1599, but the 1597 date shows up in multiple works, including Fitch’s In Search of Herne the Hunter, 253.

  126. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Yale Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 274.

  127. Fitch, In Search of Herne the Hunter, 9.

  128. Shakespeare, quarto 1 of The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Yale Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 43.

  129. Fitch, In Search of Herne the Hunter, 11–12.

  130. Fitch, In Search of Herne the Hunter, 23–24.

  131. Fitch, In Search of Herne the Hunter, 146.

  132. Ley lines are allegedly paths through which intense amounts of earth energy run. Places of special religious or spiritual significance, such as Stonehenge, are thought to be built on top of ley lines.

  133. Wise, “Elen of the Ways, Part 1.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Rebirth of Pan

  In Greek, the word pan means all or everything, which is also one of the word’s many meanings in English.134 Because of pan’s meaning in Greek, the word is also often applied to the god of the same name. This has led a lot of Pagan and Witchcraft writers over the years to argue that the meaning of pan in Greek today is related to the god. That pan and Pan would mean the same thing is a logical assumption, even if it’s wrong. (As we’ve seen previously, the name of the god Pan means shepherd; see chapter 5.)

  Several years ago, I was talking about Pan with an acquaintance of mine who practices primarily as a Hellenic Reconstructionist (meaning she tries to do rituals in honor of the Greek gods in a way that approximates how those rituals would have been done 2,500 years ago). Somehow we got caught up in a discussion on the origins of Pan’s name, and when I told her about its links to shepherds, she exhaled deeply and then tried to suppress a chuckle. “You know,” she said, “I chose not to attend a workshop on Pan you did a few years ago because you called it “Pan: The God of All,” because I just assumed you had no idea what you were talking about.”

  I laughed in response, because what else could I do? Besides, she was right: by using that name, I was suggesting to the well-informed that I probably didn’t know what I was talking about. But in some ways, Pan—and, by extension, the Horned God—has become the god of everything or all. The Horned God today is viewed primarily as a god of the natural world, and as a nature deity with few equals. He’s been written about that way for several centuries now, and the idea was even hinted at in some classical sources.

  As we’ve seen in this book, Pan was most certainly not the god of everything, but there was something very appealing to people about that association. In the early first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Cornutus (first century CE) wrote of Pan:

  And it is ‘Pan’ as well, since it is identical with everything [pan]. He is hairy and goat-like in his lower parts because of the roughness of the earth; his upper parts have the form of a human because the ruling part of the cosmos, which is rational, is in the aether. … His skittish and playful nature points to the ceaseless motion of the universe. He is clad in fawn skin or leopard skin because of the variety of the stars, and of the other things which are observed in it.135

  Cornutus is not calling Pan “everything” here, but the linkage of heaven and earth does imply an awful lot of territory.

  Pan in the Orphic Hymns and Into the Renaissance

  An ode to Pan found in the Orphic Hymns suggests a universal Pan similar to the Pan identified by Cornutus. The Orphic Hymns are a series of poems that most likely represent much of the text used in a single all-night ritual held by an Orphic cult located in present-day Turkey.136 We know very little about the Orphics because initiates were sworn to secrecy regarding the mysteries of the cult, just like with the mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis and in some Witchcraft traditions today. In addition, there were probably several different Orphic cults, each with its own unique liturgy and practices. We do know that, like the cult at Eleusis, Orphics were concerned primarily with the survival of the soul after death, and were inspired by the Greek musician Orpheus, hence the name.

  The primary god in the Orphic tradition was the Greek Dionysus, but Dionysus wasn’t the only deity honored by the Orphics. In the Hymns, several dozen deities are all given their own poem, along with natural phenomena such as the sky and the sea. In addition, most of the eighty-plus poems that make up the Orphic Hymns include an “aromatic suggestion,” or scent to be burned during the reading of each particular hymn. Many of those scents are familiar to us, such as frankincense and myrrh, but others can only be guessed at. Luckily for us, the incense suggested for Pan is “mixed,” so the Pan devotee is free to use whatever they like.

  Here is the Orphic Hymn for Pan, as translated by Patrick Dunn in his 2018 book The Orphic Hymns.

  The Orphic Hymn for Pan

  I call mighty Pan, the god of shepherds

  and the whole universe together; sky

  and sea, the all-regal earth, and deathless

  fire: for these are the limbs of Pan himself.

  Come, blessed, spinning, cavorting, enthroned

  with the Seasons, goat-limbed, Bacchic, frenzy

  of gods’ inspiration under the stars.

  You strike cosmic harmony with playful

  song. You, the aid of imagination

  and bringer of terrible images

  to mortal fears, delighting in shepherds

  and herdsmen among the fountains. Sharp-eyed

  hunter, the lover of Echo, you dance

  with the nymphs. All-growing god, the father

  of all, many-named daimon,137 the ruler

  of the cosmos, increaser, light-bringer,

  fruitful Paian, cave-haunting god, heavy

  with wrath, truly the horned Zeus, for through you

  the boundless plain of the earth lies firm, but

  deeply flowing waters of the tireless

  seas yield, and Ocean, surrounding the earth

  with waters, and the air that we share for

  nourishment, the spark of all life, the eye

  of most nimble fire high above: For these

  holy things stand apart by your command;

  you change the natures of all by your wise

  will, nourishing the human race throughout

  the boundless world. So come, blessed one, frenzied

  with divine inspiration to this most

  holy libation: give life a good end

  and send out Pan’s passion to the earth’s ends.138

  The Pan written about here is generally how we encountered him earlier in this book. He’s the god of shepherds as well as his usual dancing, frenzied self, but there’s something more to him hinted at in the text. This is
not just the rustic god of Arcadia; the Orphic Pan is “truly the horned Zeus” and, as such, the “ruler of the cosmos” and the god of “the whole universe together.” There’s something sinister to this Pan as the “bringer of terrible images to mortal fears,” but also something positive and triumphant. He’s the “increaser,” the god who controls the natural world and the “spark of all life.” The language of the Orphics in regard to Pan was radically different from that of the Pan worshipped in classical Greece.

  Despite the familiarity many of us have today with the Orphic Hymns, they were not widely known in the ancient world. The sect that wrote these was probably very small, and the version we have of them today comes to us by way of Constantinople (current-day Istanbul in Turkey), and from there to Italy and then the rest of Europe beginning in 1423.139 The first English translations of the Hymns wouldn’t appear until 1792, in a translation by Thomas “the Pagan” Taylor (1738–1835) in 1792.140 It’s most likely not a coincidence that the reemergence of the Orphic Hymns in Italy and finally Great Britain coincided with a renewed interest in the great god Pan.

  Perhaps the most beautiful expression of Pan as “everything” came from the Christian Bishop (and Saint) Isidore of Seville (560–636). Seville’s greatest contribution to history was his Etymologiae, an etymological encyclopedia containing writings from classical antiquity that would have otherwise not survived to the present day. Isidore’s writings on Pan were probably based on the writings of the fifth-century Roman writer Maurus Servius Honoratus, who was not a convert to Christianity.141 Isidore’s work is worth sharing here because of both its beauty and its lasting influence. Later writers who wrote about Pan as “all” were very likely influenced by Servius, or others influenced by him.

  The Greeks call the god of country people, whom they fashioned in the likeness of nature, Pan. … He is called Pan, that is, ‘everything,’ for they fashion him out of every sort of element. He has horns in the likeness of the rays of the sun and moon. He has a pelt marked by spots, on account of the stars of the sky. … He holds a pipe of seven reeds, on account of the harmony of heaven, in which there are seven tones and seven intervals of sound. He is hairy, because the earth is clothed and agitated by the winds. … He has goat’s hooves, so as to show the solidity of the earth. They claim he is the god of all things and of all nature, whence they say Pan, ‘everything’ as it were.142