Kernunnos: or of the perennial renewal of the cosmos

Primordial epiphany of the giver of life and death, archetypically connected to the dark forces of the natural world, the Celtic Cernunno was not only god of hunting and wild nature, but a real "cosmic god" ruler of the cycle of death-and - rebirth, as evidenced by the symbols attributed to it by traditional iconography: the stage with cervine horns, the torques and the horned snake.

di Marco Maculotti

cover: representation of Cernunno on the Cauldron of Gundestrup, Celtic artifact traditionally dated to the XNUMXrd century BC

Cernunnus, which the Romans called simply "the Horned", is an ancient divinity, venerated since the dawn of time: we find attestations of his cult since the Mesolithic and Neolithic. For prehistoric hunters, the Horned God constituted the primordial epiphany of the divinity giver of life and death, as well as the embodiment of the dangerous and relentless powers that spread their dominion over the world of wild nature [1]; it was therefore in part, as is easily understood, a "double" of Bread Hellenic and del faunus Latin, or an equivalent of the Wendigo, terrifying cannibal god-demon of the Algonquins of the Canadian sub-arctic, archetypically connected to the dark forces of the natural world and meteorological and represented as a colossal skeleton of man-deer [2].

Like the Pan of the Orphics - who saw in him the universe considered as an interconnected whole, in spirit, soul and body - the main divinity of these ancient populations is considered to be a "Cosmic god of life and death", whose breath hovers and penetrates everything. In this, Cernunno can also be compared to Dionysus, which similarly embodies at the same time the black death drives and those scarlet of sex and blood, both symbolically connected to the same vital archetype of Zoe, the "indestructible life". Heraclitean wisdom is framed in the revelation of the false dichotomy that ultimately exists within the "cosmic drama" and along the "seasonal dance" of the ages of the world, between Life and Death: the same god are Hades and Dionysus [3].

As in the case of Dionysus, the dominion of Cernunno was not limited to the natural world: although revered by the tribes of hunters, the Horned God he did not simply have lordship over the game and the woods over which his spirit was constantly watching, but also and above all over the Other World, the world of the dead and spirits, which the shaman could access in a trance after having ingested herbs or psychotropic decoctions or having used one of the many "techniques of ecstasy" [4], to use the phrase coined by Mircea Eliade. In other words, since protohistoric times Cernunno was also considered the "Great Magician", as well as the primal source of supernatural or "magical" psychic faculties [5].

The god - adorned similarly to the green man of leafy antlers, symbolizing the cyclical nature of time and the perpetual rebirth of the cosmos and nature - gathered the souls of the dead to escort them to the afterlife, sometimes accompanied by his paredra (in Ireland, the goddess of the hunt Flidass, who, similarly to his Mediterranean counterpart Diana / Artemis, drove a chariot pulled by deer).

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Nicolaas Witsen, representation of a Siberian shaman with deer horns, from Noord en Oost Tartarye (1705)

The deer and the rebirth

According to ancient Eurasian traditions that find their historical roots in the abyss of the times, the cervid was a vehicle the mystery of the cyclical nature of time and natural (and even before cosmic) cycles, as well as that of death and rebirth, already representing for the most archaic hunting cultures

the personification of the budding power which, like the branched horns, grows and declines, reflecting by analogy both in the vegetation and in the sunlight during the course of the year.

[6]

If one side of the coin is about life and fertility, however, the other is about death and dissolution. In various traditions, including that of the Scythians of the Eurasian steppes, the deer was considered as the guardian of the threshold and la guide of souls to the Other World, as it was believed that his accompaniment could accelerate the path of the spirits of the dead towards the Underworld.

Andy Kehoe, "Spirit of Universes Unseen"

This also has a parallel in the Americas: as Peter T. Furst points out,

the deer played a major role in Mayan beliefs about the land of the dead, the Underworld; in fact the deer was associated, among the Maya and other Indians of Mesoamerica, with the magical and metamorphic ritual of death and with both the afterlife and the afterlife, especially with the latter.

[7]

Nonetheless, the vision of the cervine antler stage that bleeds every autumn to be reborn the following spring has also made it possible to place it functional in the group of mythical figures expressing the mystery of time, cosmic cycles and periodic death-and-rebirth of all that exists. We could then say, taking into account what we have said, that in ancient traditions the cervid expressed, borrowing the happy expression coined by Emanuela Chiavarelli, the connective element within the year and time [8].

It is no coincidence that the animal appears in different "Creation myths": its mythical dismemberment, an event that symbolizes the principle of becoming, repeats the split itself and, at the same time, heals it. Thus, in various ritualistic traditions it is believed that from the sacrifice of a deer, immolated to the god of time, the new year will regain vigor.

Gallic-Roman votive stele with Cernunno (whose horns, once bulky, appear damaged) in the midst of Mercury / Hermes and Apollo / Helios, XNUMXst century AD

Chaos and Cosmos

The importance of the god in northern Gaul is attested, among other things, by the altar found under the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris: in other words, one of the most important places in the world for the Christian religion was built above the temple of the ancient Horned God of the Celtic (and proto-Celtic) religion. In some areas inhabited by Celtic populations the veneration of the god remained in force even in Christian times, even hidden behind the image of the Redeemer himself: sometimes we find archaeological finds that show "the image of a Christ crowned not with the classic crown of thorns , but with the horns of the ancient god" [9].

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Cernunno - which sometimes (for example in Borbogna) was represented with three heads similar to the Hindu Trimurti, as lord of fertility, death / destruction and rebirth β€”

it ensures that every creature can procreate perpetuating itself over time, thus giving each species (including humans) an immortality similar to its own.

[10]
Cernunno tricefalo, Gallic-Roman bas-relief, XNUMXst century AD

From this point of view Cernunno was considered the god of rebirth - of nature, of the cosmos and of the human being himself, in accordance with the "dance of the seasons" - but, from another point of view, he also represented the "Demonic power" of the ancient pre-civilized cosmos, "Thus embodying the vengeance of the ancient gods, if the laws and pacts entered into with the forest were [ivan] or somehow violated" [11]:

the wood and the ancient lands that surround it are his private kingdom, a kingdom in which there are sacred laws that have now disappeared from the memory of men and that the zoomorphic god will remind his faithful with a price of blood.

[12]

The representations of Cernunno, among which the best known is the one that appears on the Cauldron of Gundestrup (a Celtic artifact traditionally dated to the XNUMXrd century BC), are extremely consistent throughout the Celtic area. The most evident attribute of him is, as mentioned, constituted by a deer antler stage and is usually depicted as a mature man with a beard and long hair (similarly to Dionysus and the Wild Man). His iconography was confused in medieval times, especially in the British area, with that of green man.

The god's cervine horns are "decorated with rings which can be circles wickerwork or bronze rings used as coins " [13]. If we have already said about the symbolism of the deer, also that of the hoops is to be interpreted as intimately connected to the mystery of time and the cyclical nature of the eras: Okeanos (forerunner of Kronos as a divinity of time) was imagined as a ring that surrounded the earth and often represented with the symbol ofOuroboros, the snake biting its own tail. The ring is also astronomically connected to the planet Saturn, demonstrating its sovereignty over the element chronic (temporal): the custom of exchanging rings between newlyweds still today is equivalent to "binding" in an eternal promise under the aegis of the god of time, or of Saturn / Kronos.

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It follows that Cernunno, in addition to being a divinity of wild nature and generative power, can also be classified as a god of time, or rather of the cyclic time: in iconography the god held in his hand - and often also wore around his neck -, a torques, emblem of the circularity of the year, and also a serpente horned, symbol of time and spring rebirth [14]. Even reptiles, in fact, shed their skin in spring when new antlers grow on the deer to replace those fallen in autumn. As Paolo Battistel notes,

Cernunnos, just like Pan, is at the head of the dark, primordial and chaotic forces that have shaped the world, but which maintain in their essence a titanic force to be able to destroy it, transforming it again into a formless magma, to start a new cycle. of creation.Β 

[15]
Bas-relief representing Cernunno on Pilier des Nautes, monumental column erected by the Romans in the city of Leteia (today's Paris) in the XNUMXst century AD

From this it follows that, in addition to governing the powers of chaos, in the infinite cycle of death-and-rebirth Cernunno has the perpetual power to integrate the apparent disorder within a larger framework in which a perennially recreated order is in force, similarly to the Kronos of the Orphic Hymns that everything exhausts and on the contrary he himself increases (and with whom it shares the etymology founded on Indo-European radical * KRN): for the Celtic peoples, Kernunnos

he can embody the function of the civilizing god who teaches man the rules of life in society, or of agriculture, or, if someone breaks his sacred laws, he appears to mortals as a terrible judge capable of destroying even an entire community . He is a civilizer and a destroyer, β€œintegrating order with disorder, allowing the illicit within the defined limits of what is lawful”, since a double nature lives in his essence: chaos and order.

[16]
Bas-relief representing Cernunno, Garway Templars Church Herefordshire

Note:

[1] N. Jackson, Masks of Misrule, Capall Bann Publishing, Taunton 1996, p. 18

[2] On the Wendigo, cf. E. Monaco, Manitu and Windigo. Vision of anthropophagy among the Algonquians, Bulzoni, 1990; as well as Algernon Blackwood's terrifying horror story The Wendigo [in G. Pilo (edited by), The Cthulhu saga, Fanucci, Rome 1986]. See also, on our pages, M. Maculotti, Psychosis in the shamanic vision of the Algonquians: The Windigo and GM Mollar, Jack Fiddler, Wendigo's last hunter.

[3] Heraclitus, fr. 15 D.-K.

[4] See M. Eliade, Shamanism and the techniques of ecstasy, Mediterranee, Rome 2005

[5] See Jackson, op. cit., p. 18

[6] E. Chiavarelli, Diana, Harlequin and the flying spirits, Bulzoni, Rome 2007, p. 103

[7] PT Furst, Hallucinogens and culture, Cesco Capanna publisher, Rome 1981, p. 232

[8] Chiavarelli, op. cit., p. 103

[9] P. Battistel, Lu Barban, the devil and the witches, The Age of Aquarius, Turin 2016, p. 40

[10] Ibidem

[11] Ibid, p. 42

[12] Ibid, p. 44

[13] M. Murray, The god of witches, Astrolabio / Ubaldini, Rome 1972, p. 78

[14] Chiavarelli, op. cit., p. 46

[15] Battistel, op. cit., p. 39

[16] Ibid, p. 38

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