“Why the antlered man?” he asked over Monica’s voice. The non sequitur took everyone by surprise.
“Eh?” blared Monica.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Mark, completely thrown.
Armin felt suddenly bashful and a little stupid, not to mention rude. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. It’s just that I keep seeing him everywhere, and I wondered…”
Edith, Meintje and Ella looked at him quizzically, all three head tilted to one side rather comically. Rebekka looked vaguely around, as if trying to catch the shape that everyone had missed.
Armin decided he could either explain or let them all think he was stoned, drunk, or tripping, so he pointed with his index finger to the wall. “I am not hallucinating. Look, right there by the window. And there, where the shelf meets the pillar. You can see an arm and a shoulder. And just outside the fireplace, near the table. He pops up all over the sculptures, if you look.”
Van was smiling. Jean-Pierre harrumphed, frowning, and crossed his arms in front of his chest. Allie shot him a quick apprehensive glance.
“Why the antlered man? Who is it?” repeated Armin, a little confused, looking at Van.
Van shrugged. “He’s … Amun, and Silvanus and Pan, and the Leshy and Veles and Svyatibor … even the Minotaur, perhaps. There is a picture of him as old as fifteen thousand years in a cave in the Ariege, la grotte des Trois-Frères. The Sorcerer. Prancing fellow with antlers and a thumping big dong.”
Every woman in the room, including the young girls, giggled.
“Van!” said Allie.
He grimaced theatrically. “Sorry. All these old horned males. What can I say?”
“Van!”
“Anyway, some would say he’s the Devil, too, and Baphomet. And lately, just the Horned God. It all got twisted about since the Christians started messing with the old deities. And the Wiccans just made one big stew of it all to cover all the bases and be on the safe side. They may not be wrong however. In France, the Gauls came to call him Cernunnos or Carnonos or Cerunincos, which all simply mean the horned one or the antlered one. I suppose we might go with Cernunnos.”
He smiled.
Allie looked at him adoringly. Jean-Pierre scoffed.
“Wherever you look, there was always a god of the forest, the earth, the water… a god of low places, valleys, sources, meadows. His trees were always small trees. Healing trees. The willow, the elder, the rowan. Not a sky god. Not a war god. He was also, as often as not, a god of agriculture and fertility. And death and healing, even resurrection. Fall, winter, and spring, the seasons. Nature again. It was easy in the old days to believe in such a divinity. And it was wise to pay tribute to him. Forests, fields, death, rebirth, the cycles and forces of nature were rather more … central.”
“They still seem central enough in this place,” said Edith, smiling.
Van bowed.
“But why the antlers?” asked Josefine. “It seems awfully impractical, even for a forest god.”
Van gave a wry laugh. “It sure is,” he said. But then he sobered and added, “There has always been something mystical about the stag and his antlers, in all the old Indo-European cultures. The stag was important enough to have his own constellation, roughly where modern astronomers place Ophiuchus. The Celts put it nicely, saying that the stag carried the solar disk in his crown. His antlers and his strength are greatest in the autumn, and they are lost in the winter and emerge again in the spring. He incarnates the death of nature and its awakening. He and Cernunnos are avatars of the fall, of the death of nature and its rebirth. Cycles again.”
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Katherine Wyvern, The Elder Man