The Horned God of the Witches by Jason Mankey

Author:Jason Mankey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: jason mankey;horned god;horned god of the witches;cernunnos;green man;pagan;paganism;witchcraft;witches;gods;gods and goddesses;pagan gods;pagan books;pagan history
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2021-05-12T21:30:19+00:00

Pan’s Rebirth in the English Countryside

The most important reflowering of Pan took place not in Greece or Rome but in England, where he would become the most written about male deity in all of English literature.146 That achievement is especially notable when one considers that Pan was rarely written about in England before the nineteenth century. For most of us, the poetry of the Romantic (1798–1837) and Victorian (1838–1901) eras was something we were forced to read in high school English class and then quickly forgot about. But the poetry produced during those hundred or so years would have a tremendous impact not just on Pan but on the Horned God as a whole.

To quote British historian Ronald Hutton, the poets and writers of those eras provided a “language” that we still use today when talking about the Horned One.147 The flowery words many of us use about and to the Horned God were directly inspired by this period of literature; and many of the works written about Pan two hundred years ago continue to fit nicely into modern Witch ritual. We also know that early Witches such as Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente read the poems and literature that helped set Pan’s cloven hooves firmly in the modern world.

There’s a very real-world reason Pan reemerged in nineteenth-century England: the Industrial Revolution. In 1810 about 20 percent of the population in England lived in large cities, while the other 80 percent lived in more rural areas. One hundred years later, the rural-urban divide had effectively flipped, with 80 percent of England’s population now living in cities and only 20 percent continuing to live in the country and other rural settings.148 That’s a drastic sea change in culture, especially to have happened in such a short period of time. The result of this was that people began to feel disconnected from the countryside they (or their forebears) had once inhabited and began looking for an entry back into that world.

It should be pointed out that the majority of poets were city dwellers, but like the Greeks of Athens and the poets of Rome who romanticized Arcadia, English poets began to romanticize England’s lost rural landscape. Many attempted to find a connection to the natural world through Christianity, but not surprisingly, Jesus as a wild god of the forest just doesn’t work very well. Because Christianity lacks an explicit connection to the natural world, they turned to classical Greece and found Pan as the god of all in the Orphic Hymns (which had recently been translated into English) and in the works of Bacon and other Renaissance-era encyclopedists. It also helped that many of England’s most prominent poets chose to write about Pan, inspiring those who came after them.

There were two different “Pan motifs” during this era, and both of them are still with us today when we talk about the Horned God. The first is the “Orphic” or “Cosmic” Pan; this is the Pan of everything or all, who is the very embodiment of nature.

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