I've heard this sentence said often in the Pagan and Witchcraft communities: that everything is about the Goddess and there is very little on male gods out there, especially not the Horned God. Well it's simply not true. There is an abundance of works available from as early as the 1920s onward. My own personal favourite work, which I highly recommend to any devotees of this wild god, is "The History of the Devil: The Horned God of the West" by R. Lowe Thompson. Here is a Horned God reading list in chronological order (note the first three predate Wicca - both Gardner and Doreen Valiente were influenced by them):
* 1929 - "The History of the Devil: The Horned God of the West" by R. Lowe Thompson
* 1933 - "The God of the Witches" by Margaret Murray
* 1936 - "The Goat-Foot God" by Dion Fortune
* 1969 - "Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times" by Patricia Merivale
* 1994 - "In Search of Herne the Hunter" by Eric Fitch
* 1996 - "Masks of Misrule: The Horned God and the 'younger gods cluster round him like children by the side of their father.'"
"At this point I stop to see in Cernunnos the old palaeolithic magician of the caves. In this cult he has been deified as a god of the dead, and, since the discovery of metals, probably by wild hunters in the old bare rocks of the hills, as a god of wealth. But he is still the progenitor of all men. He still encourages wild animals, the stag and the ox, or, rather, the auroch. Ancient of days, he stands aloof from the younger gods."
- R. Lowe Thomspon in "The History of the Devi"l, 1929
"The Devil was represented as black, with goat's horns, ass's ears, cloven hoofs, and an immense phallus. He is, in fact, the Satyr of the old Dionysiac processions, a nature-spirit, the essence of joyous freedom and unrestrained delight, shameless if you will, for the old Greeks knew not shame. He is the figure who danced light-heartedly across the Aristophanic stage, stark nude in broad midday, animally physical, exuberant, ecstatic, crying aloud the primitive refrain, 'Phales, boon mate of Bacchus, joyous comrade in the dance, wanton wanderer o' nights'... in a word, he was Paganism incarnate, and Paganism was the Christian's deadliest foe; so they took him, the Bacchic reveller, they smutted him from horn to hoof, and he remained the Christian's deadliest foe, the Devil."
- Montague Summers, 1926
Credit: alchemy-and-alchemists.blogspot.com
