Organization: Arizona State University
Date: Tuesday, 8 Sep 1992 16:13:49 MST
From: <IDJDE@ASUACAD.BITNET>
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Cernunnos as a War God (was: Celtic)

regarding the article on cernunnos as war god, i would like to make the
following associations, based strictly on iconographical comparisons, which
the author of this article states is not to be justified without discursive
interpretations from the celts themselves. with respect to the image of the
god seated on the gundestrupp bowl, the first thing which strikes us is that
the god has the horns of a stag. and beside him, there is the theriomorphic
representation of a stag. the author states that he is not exactly a stag god
since he is anthropomorphic. this is not consistent with the imagery before us.
what the image is stating, is that it is not the form that the god takes on
which is important, but the energy of which either form, anthro- or theriomorph
ic, is a manifestation. that is to say, the accent is on the form-creating
energy, what the scientists today call in their own way, the morphogenetic
field, or that inexhaustible source of life which puts on new bodies and takes
them off again as a man puts on and takes off a suit of clothes. the stag
sheds its horns annually, just as the serpent--which the god is holding in
his hand--also sheds its skin, just as the energy of life is constantly
wearing itself through one form after another. life, like the power of the
serpent and the stag, is inexhaustibly self-renewing.
     The author also mistakenly suggests, that the classical counterpart is
jupiter in his role as lord of the beasts. but the same god, as the author
also points out, is shown in another image, seated between apollo and hermes
with a cornucopia, or horn, pouring forth inexhaustible riches. the classical
lord of riches is pluto, the lord of the underworld, where the source of
life's inexhaustible center lies. now, the very fact that he is seated on
this relief between apollo and mercury proves this assertion. apollo is the
lord of the upperworld, of light and visionary clarity,--which nietzsche in
his great book, the birth of tragedy, associates with the radiant, self-luminou
s forms of dream--while mercury, on the other hand, whom the romans equated
with greek hermes, leads the soul to the underworld, as hermes leads odysseus
to the underworld in the odyssey, where he comes upon a knowledge of his own
immortality. thus, mercury leads souls to the lord of the abyss, who is the
anthropomorphic personification of the world center, or the point at which
the energies of eternity come flowing into time in the pairs of opposites.
this center is in the underworld because it is below the threshold of
conscioussness, psychologically interpreted as the center of the psyche, or
that unfathomable source out of which all the forms of dream and myth are
produced, just as from out  of the same abyss, all of the living forms of
life are produced in undying abundance. in india, it is the god shiva, who is
the lord and master of the beasts, and the personification as well of this
central source of the forms of time. he is the god of the still-point at the
center of the turning world, which in celtic mythology is the god mananaan
maclir, the lord who lives under the ocean and has a cauldron of inexhaustible
ale, from which one may receive the boon of immortal life. poseidon also
corresponds to this, as suggested by the tricephalic cernunnos, which may be
associated with the trident of shiva, and the trident of poseidon. in our own
tradition, the same lord with the trident appears as satan, but he is negative
in our tradition becuase of our rejection of nature.
     All of these gods then are different ethnic versions of one elementary
idea, namely that of the inexhaustible source of the energies of the world,
which come into being through living forms:
cernunnos
osiris,
poseidon
pluto,
shiva,
mananaan maclir,
dionysus,
satan,
tammuz, etc.
     Scholars generally do not see the forest for the trees. each of these
deities is a tree of the same forest. examine them. the associations are
quite remarkable.
--john david ebert
mesa, az