Samhain Reflections on The Horned God

"Of course I'll hurt you.  Of course you'll hurt me.  Of course we'll hurt each other.  But this is the condition of existence.  To become Spring means accepting the risk of Winter.  To become presence means accepting the risk of absence."

~The Little Prince

With Samhain upon us, it is the God of the Witches whose presence is all too often forgotten in cult and in ritual as a mere ancillary character who does little but reign over the denizens of the Otherworld as God of the Dead.  However, to The Covenant of Morrighan, and to the ancient Celts, the primary male deity of cult and of worship, The Daghda, is a horned and ithyphallic bull-god of life, death, fertility, the sun, storm, and the seasons.  In spring his cleansing showers inseminate the Earth-Mother, The Morrighan, for the bounty of the Midsummer and Harvest Home.  But even at Samhain, as archaeologist Barry Cunliffe illustrates, their annual mating is more than mere physiological gratification and release as some contemporary Pagans have interpreted our Lady's desire for sexual conquest to be, such as once-Pagan-turned-Christian Carl McColman, who wrote in his book, The Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses (New Page Books, 2005) identifying The Morrighan as a clinically psychopathic serial killer!  Rather, to quote Prof. Cunliffe, "...in Irish tradition, the tribal god Dagda mated with the earth mother goddess Morrigan, their successful union ensuring universal fertility and general well-being in the year to come" (pp. 102).  Unlike Traditional Witchcraft, our God is Eternal rather than cyclical and reborn at the Winter Solstice Sabbat of Yule.   As the All-Father sun-god of the Celts He descends into the Underworld daily riding his magnificent chariot of white horses with the setting sun where He resides in the Isle of the Blessed that is sometimes known as "Avalon" until the Gates of Dawn are cast open.  He is an indelibly pan-Celtic god who was worshipped throughout Gaul (ancient France) where the same typology aligning him and his Thunder-Weapon with the fertile Earth-Mother, such as Sucellus ("The Good Striker") and  the raven-accompanied goddess of hearth, fertility, and the earth, Nantosuelta ("She of the Sun-Drenched Valley").  The ubiquitous nature of Celtic religious belief and practice should not be too hard to accept because they do not have a pantheon in the same sense of the Romans and ancient Greeks, and other Indo-European cultures.  Their cults were more pervasive and centered on agriculture and the passage of time as reflected by tribal Earth-Mother Goddess and an All-Father God of sun and storm, respectively.  Images of the Daghdha are few and far between, but they are believed to be found, most frequently, in the Gallo-Romanic Jupiter Columns (pictured above) that dot the French landscape as the god--a Classical "Muscle Daddy"--surmounts the heavens in his horse-drawn chariot atop His axis mundi-like column.  The principal sun-deity drawn across the heavens in a chariot pulled by white horses, in particular, is a ubiquitous Indo-European motif.  However, even the primary Epic of Ireland, The Tain, has been identified as being preserved in Gaullish material culture known as The Gundestrup Cauldron, according to Prof. Garret S. Olmsted's phenomenal study thus assuring us on another level of the Gallic identity of The Daghdha.

Select References:

• Cunliffe, Barry.  Iron Age Britain.  London: B T Batsford, 2004.
• Ó hÓgáin, Dáithi.  The Lore of Ireland: An Encyclopedia of Myth, Legend and Romance.  Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006.
• Ó hÓgáin, Dáithi.  The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland.  Wilton: The Collins Press, 1999.
• Olmsted, Garret S.  The Gods of the Celts and the Indo-Europeans.  Budapest: Archaeolingua Alapítvány, 1994.
• Olmsted, Garret S.  The Gundestrup Cauldron: It's Archaeological Context, the Style and Iconography of its Portrayed Motifs, and their Narration of a Gaulish Version of Táin Bó Cúailnge.  Bruxelles: Latomus Revue D'Etudes Latines, 1979.
• West, M. L.  Indo-European Poetry & Myth.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.