Name – Cernunnos or Herne
Name Meaning – Horned God
Pantheon – Celtic
Animals – Stags, ram-horned serpents, bulls, dogs and rats.
Symbols – Stag, Oak leaves, antlers, ramps horns and pan pipes
Colors – Green, gold and silver
Sacred plant/tree – Ivy, Oak, Mistletoe, Juniper and Valerian
Moon – Oak/Holly
God of – Fertility, vegetation, Lord/Protector of the Forest, Master of the Hunt
Depicted as a man with a beard, a wild shaggy hair and stag antlers. He is often seen wearing or holding a torc, holding a coin purse or spreading the coins and flanked on the sides with snakes.
Cernunnos is a Celtic horned god. Sadly, there is a lack of surviving literature about the details about his name, his followers and his significance. What literature is available, primarily art found on pillars, tombs and engravings can be found spread throughout Europe such as the British Isles and Western Europe. Due to the lack of literature, there is some conjecture on who Cernunnos is.
In some traditions he is seen as the god of death and dying, although there is no evidence to back this claim and in others. In other traditions he is seen as the God of Hunt, the Green Man and is most often seen as a Shamanic God. In Wicca Cernunnos is the BIG God. He is the one that helps spin the wheel of the season. When the Wicca books mention the god that is born at Yule, marries the Goddess and then dies in the Autumn.
When it comes to Cernunnos, because of the lack of concrete information, deciding to celebrate him is a very personal path.
I think I had read at one time that Cernunnos is also seen in the Arthur myth as the Green Knight, and has the role of the leader of the Wyld Hunt in fae legends. Since the Celtic people originally came from what is Russian lands do you know if he or a version of him appears in any Russian folk legends?
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