Riksdaler sueco

Since work of the anthropologist Margaret Murray, the horned God (in English Horned God ) designates the divinity of the Préhistoire which, well before it is called Diable and that one compares it to Satan, seems to be universally venerated. It corresponds at the origin so that the ethnologists, anthropologists and historians of the religions call the Maître or Seigneur of the animals . It is about the god of the hunters, more particularly starting from the appearance of the arc, then pastoralists where he will take then the features of the god Pan.

Origin

The oldest image that one has some goes back indeed to the Paléolithique and is in the south-west of France, Ariège, the cave known as of the “Three brothers”. It represents a man covered with a skin of stag carrying horns ramified on the head, in the middle of other animals among which he occupies a dominant position. The scene appears to represent a consistent rite in a dance in which all the beings present take part. The Abbé Breuil gave the first a description of this “large Magician”, engraving of 75 cm incised on the wall of this cave.

In the world of the Hunters-gatherers, the stag, the reindeer, represents certainly the animal majesty and, more than very other, the animal with horns undoubtedly assumes a sacral value for those which drive out it, it is the “Master of the animals” which the men animists venerate, that them Chaman calls upon so that hunting their is favourable and nourishes their clan on which survival depends, that of which they wish to adapt the force after having killed it then to be itself nourished about it; also once cut up they are covered readily its skin and relative of his horns. The animal, which observes by far the hunter with its arc with deep of the immense forests as itself looks at it fascinated before stripping its arrow, is the Totem of the activity of the hunting to which the man devotes himself. The man and the animal live in symbiosis.

After hunting, when the man turns over to his camping, his cave, with his prey, this one becomes for its community the divine victim , the sacrificial body , the god incarnated . The animal becomes symbol and the god whom it incarnates represented, interpreted by the Shaman, or wizard, who disguises themselves while becoming the alive totem about it. The Chamanisme was the religion of paleolithic, and Horned God a male divinity. The mode to exist specific to the women produced another type of divinity represented by often called figurines “Venus”, that one find of the Free-Cantabric areas in Siberia, and constitute as many “portable sanctuaries”. Large the Goddess-Mother was, at the origin, an ambivalent divinity, androgyne, also " Mistress of Fauves" , before the appearance of Horned God and the exclusive veneration which the hunters will dedicate to him once invented the arc. The complementarity of the values male and female religious symbolic systems is attested with paleolithic and remains in the contemporary primitive companies as much as in the antiquated religions.

Horned God through the millenia

One finds, with the wire of the millenia, during all the Neolithic and well with the die, during all the Antiquité then with the Moyen-âge, the symbolism of the animal with horns.

At the dawn of civilization, when " the History starts with Sumer " , the badge characteristic of the divine beings is the Tiare with horns. The symbolism of the Taureau attested since the Neolithic era was transmitted there without interruption.

The Worship of the fertility and the Culte of the ancestors (of craniums) are interdependent. It is what arises in the first Neolithic boroughs, with Hacilar, Çatal Hüyük and then with Such Halaf. The principal divinity is then the goddess introduced under three aspects: young woman, mother giving rise to a child or to a Bull, old. The male divinity appears in the shape of a teenager, wire or lover of the goddess, and under that of a bearded adult sometimes ridden on a Taureau, god of the storm (the thunder is compared to the lowing of the Taureau). The female chest and the horns of bull dominate the painting of the walls and precedes what will be omnipresent in the Minoan Crete. This is the core of “antiquated European civilization”.

Cernunnos, the god of the Celts, seems a “Master of the deer”, but it probably has other functions, in particular that of psychopompe, in addition to with being symbol of fruitfulness. This god of the hunters of paleolithic remained thus until the romanisation of Gaules and will remain afterwards.

What of astonishing so that the stag, or the goat, more familiar to the peasants, are still the object of a veneration and even of a worship in a world christianized on the surface but shaken by the invasions of seminomad people still living of hunting which undoubtedly cart with them ancestral beliefs which are grafted on those, preexistent, of the sedentaries on which they impose their yoke lasting the Middle Ages? With 12th and 13th centuries of the Christian era when the cathedrals are drawn up in all Europe, that the Monachisme the Almighty builds it and unifies it, that already the Italian Trecento sees being born the first communes and the stammerings from humanism, when this same Europe so animated forever by a real religious faith in a Christendom which does not know yet a Schisme, the north of Europe and the countries Slavic are just christianized and Russia is not it yet.

The oldest document writes known which refers explicitly to Horned God of old times is compiled by Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury towards 670. It seeks to dissuade the faithful ones there to disguise itself as stag, bull or goat with the skins of these animals and the enjoint to make penitence while pleading that they are diabolic practices.

The first document which testifies to the continuity of the worship of horned God, in Great Britain, date of 1300, in which the bishop of Coventry is shown to practice this worship. It is the first time that horned God is called “Diable” by the Church.

Margaret Murray would be right thus to support that this religion of old times had remained in Europe well after this continent was officially christianized; this would have been largely shown besides since, and this thesis was officialized, in particular by Mircea Eliade in its “History of the beliefs and the religious ideas”, which, on the matter, made authority. However, prudence obliges it should be noted that in Western Europe, there does not exist any direct link between the paleolithic horned characters (whom it is abusive systematically to call " dieux") and Celtic horned divinities as Cernunnos (on which besides one is tiny room to make conjectures): the chronological difference between the two is indeed of several millenia.

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Riksdaler sueco

Origin

Horned God through the millenia

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