Cernunnos

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Gather 'round the campfire for

 Folklore 

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My grandmum used to say....
The Cernunnos of the Pillar of the Boatmen.
The antlered figure of the Gundestrup cauldron.

Cernunnos is the name of an alleged pre-Christian Celtic deity. The name is conventionally assigned to male god figures in Celtic art that wear antlers and torcs.

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[edit] Attestation

The word Cernunnos is found in that form on exactly one contemporary inscription, the Pillar of the Boatmen[wp], which in the first century CE embellished a temple in what is now Paris, in the Roman territory of Gaul. The Cernunnos of that figure wears short antlers decorated by torcs. The pillar is an artifact of the Gallo-Roman religion[wp]; it depicts Roman gods like Jupiter, Vulcan, and Castor and Pollux, along with more well known Gaulish deities such as Esus[wp], Smertrios[wp], and Tarvos Trigaranus[wp]. A similar word (καρνονου, karnonū, dative case) is found in a Celtic inscription in Greek characters in the south of France; this may name the same being, but the meaning of that short inscription is obscure. Another Gaulish inscription names a Cerunincos; this may or may not be the same name.[1]

This is the extent of the evidence that Cernunnos was the name of a deity. The word would appear to mean "the one with horns", and ultimately derives from the Indo-European root *k̑r̥no-, "horn"; the English word itself is a cognate.

A number of horned or antlered figures appear in Celtic art; a celebrated example is on the Gundestrup cauldron[wp] from Denmark. There is no evidence that this deity was named Cernunnos, or that the name was used outside of Gaul. None of the Roman or Irish accounts of ancient Celtic religion mention either the name Cernunnos, nor a horned or antlered figure; unlike the major Celtic deities, Cernunnos was not identified[wp] with any Greco-Roman god.

[edit] Contemporary revival

The scant attestation of the name Cernunnos has not prevented a great deal of speculation from moderns who find the idea of such a deity fetching. Cernunnos has been linked with Shiva[wp] Pashupati[wp] (Sanskrit: पशुपतिनाथ), Shiva in his aspect as lord of the animals; there is no actual evidence other than the presence of animals, and the allegedly yogic posture of the figure of the Gundestrup cauldron that links the Celtic and Hindu deities.

On even scantier evidence, Cernunnos has been identified as the "Horned God" or "Devil" worshipped by Margaret Murray's pseudohistorical witchcraft cult, and as such became the male deity worshiped alongside the Goddess in most forms of Wicca. Murray also identifies Cernunnos with Herne the Hunter[wp], the malignant ghost of a suicidal hunter mentioned in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. Herne, endowed with "great ragged horns", curses cattle and makes unpleasant noises in the manner of a poltergeist.[2] The Gardnerian tradition of Wicca sometimes uses Cernunnos as the name of this deity.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. Xavier Delamarre, Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise (Éditions Errance, 2003), pp. 106–107.
  2. Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
    Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
    Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
    And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
    And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
    In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

    -- Act 4, scene 4.
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