This incredible new depiction of Herne, Cernununnos, the Horned One is cold cast bronze resin. He is crowned with Antlers and holds a staff of wood spiraling at the tip. The snake, representing wisdom, the underworld, and reincarnation is at his feet. The leaves and moss are hand-tinted. The statue stands 10.5" tall. Click on the Photo Gallery button for more detailed images. The ancient Forest Lord, The Horned One, has appeared in a multitude of forms and made himself known by many names to nearly every culture throughout time. He is Cernunnos, a Celtic god of fertility, life, animals, wealth, and the underworld. He is the untamed Horned God of the Animals and the leaf-covered Green Man, Guardian of the Green World. Cernnunos is mentioned by Shakespeare, as Herne the Hunter, the guardian of Windsor Forest, the Royal Wood. In this aspect it is said that he appears as Guardian of the Realm during times of National emergency and crisis. In modern times he is often called the God of the Witches and embodies uncorrupted masculine energy. His is a masculine energy that is fully-developed and in balance with the natural world.
The Legend of Herne
There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,
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.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.
"The Merry Wives of Windsor"
Act 4 Scene 4
William Shakespeare
As both Hunter and Hunted, The Forest Lord represents the great mystery of
life feeding life. The Forest and fields are filled with his Mystery.
He is the God of the underworld and astral planes, born at the winter
solstice. He appears in spring as the young Son, child of the Goddess,
embodiment of the budding, growing, greening world.
In summer
He bursts forth as the Green Man, vibrant, pulsing with life, and
becomes the consort of the Green Lady Goddess. It is in autumn, the
dying time, that perhaps we see the Horned God at his most mature. As
Master of the Sacrificial Hunt, as both Hunted and Hunter, His is the
full life that is given in service of new life. He is the sacrificed
god, who journeys to the Underworld, but then returns to the Earth from
which he was born. The seeds of light released from his decaying body
will quicken Her womb with a new Sun once again, thus continuing the
cycle of death, rebirth and reincarnation.
The most famous
depiction of him is on the side of the Gundestrup cauldron discovered
in Denmark, on May 28, 1891. In theories of Celtic origin, the figure
is often identified as Cernunnos and occasionally as Mercury. But the
image of the Horned one go farther back. Our prehistoric ancestors knew
him as a shape-shifting, shamanic god of the Hunt.
Paleolithic
cave paintings found in France that depict a stag standing upright or a
man dressed in stag costume seem to indicate that Cernunnos' origins
date to those times.
Romans sometimes portrayed him with three cranes flying above his head. He was known to the Druids as Hu Gadarn.
Pan, the lusty Satyr god of the Greeks, is another aspect of the Horned God.
As
Herne, He became a modern star in "Robin of Sherwood" on British
television in the early eighties, as the shamanic mentor of Robin the
Hooded Man, and this seems to be how everybody remembers him. In the
series he is portrayed as an Anglo-Saxon hunting god, based on the myth
and lore of the Forest Lord, Cernunnos, etc.
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