The God of the Wicca
The God of the Wicca is the Horned God, the ancient God of Fertility: the God of forest, flock, and field and also of the hunt. He is Lord of Life, and the Giver of Life, yet He is also Lord of Death and Resurrection. For, like the Goddess, the nature of Her Horned Consort is also dual. For the Horned God is not only the Hunter, He is also the Hunted; He is the Sun by day, but He is also the Sun at Midnight; He is the Lord of Light, but He is also the Lord of Darkness: the darkness of night, the darkness of the Shadows, the darkness of the depths of the forest, the darkness of the depths of the Underworld.
The Horned God is the group soul of the hunted animal, invoked by the primitive shaman and the tribe: and as such, He is the Sacrificial Victim, the beast who is slain that the tribe might live, a gift from that group soul, who was often revered as the tribal totem or ancestral spirit. The Celts believed they were the descendents of the God of the Underworld, who was also the God of Fertility: the Latinized form of His name was Cernunnos, which means simply, the Horned One.
The Horned God is also the spirit of vegetation, of the green and growing things, whether of the vine or of the forest or of the field. Dionysos, Adonis, and many other vegetation and harvest Gods were all often depicted as horned, wearing the horns of the bull, the goat, the ram, or the stag: of whichever of the horned beasts was held sacred in that place and time. This aspect is the Dying and Resurrecting God who dies with the harvest and is rent asunder, as the grain is gathered in the fields; who is buried, as is the seed; who then springs forth anew, fresh and green and young, in the spring, reborn from the Womb of the Great Mother.
The Horned God is Osiris, who was often depicted with the horns of a bull. Osiris was believed to be incarnate in a succession of sacred bulls, and worshipped in that form as the god Apis. (1) This was yet another form and manifestation of Osiris as the God of Fertility and also of Death and Resurrection. And Osiris bears the marks of a lunar, rather than a solar god, for Set tears the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces, the number of days of the waning moon; and then Isis, the Great Mother, gathers those pieces together and restores Osiris to life again.
The Horned God is the Great God Pan, the Goat-foot God with a human torso and a human but goat-horned head, the God whose ecstatic worship was so hated by the Church that they used His description for their "Devil" and called Him the lord of all evil. Yet, to the ancients who worshipped Him, and to the modern Pagans and Witches that worship Him still, "Pan is greatest, Pan is least. Pan is all, and all is Pan." (2)
The Horned God is not "the Devil", except to those who fear and reject Nature, and the Powers of Life and human sexuality, and the ecstasy of the human spirit. The Horned God is the God of the Wicca.
Notes:
1-The two names, Osiris and Apis, were later combined to form the name Serapis used for the Consort of Isis in the Hellenized version of the Mysteries of Isis that resulted when Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals, inherited the throne of Egypt after Alexander's death. Ptolemy's aim was to formulate a religion that both the Egyptians and their Greek overlords could share and relate to, and he succeeded so well that the Mysteries of Isis spread throughout the known world, and were the last of the religions of ancient Paganism to be suppressed by the Roman Empire after it officially adopted Christianity.
2-Line from "The Rite of Pan" in The Goat-Foot God, by Dion Fortune
