Cernunnos, Herne the Hunter

Cernunnos or Herne The Hunter

Cernunnos or Herne. The arrival of Celtic Herne the Hunter, Oil on canvas, 2013

Sometimes a keeper here in Windsor Forest,

Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,

Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;

And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,

And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain

Most hideously and dreadfully.

You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know

The superstitious, idle-headed eld

Receiv’d, and did deliver to our age,

This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

— William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

Margaret Murray in her book, God of the Witches,  suggests that Herne is a manifestation of Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god. However because Herne is found only in Berkshire, and nowhere else he is considered a local god and could be the local equivalent of Cernunnos. 

In the Early Middle Ages, Windsor Forest came under the control of the Saxons who worshiped their own pantheon of gods.  One of these was Odin who hung at one point from a tree. Odin was also known for riding through the sky on a Wild Hunt of his own.

Herne is a complex and terrifying figure. He embodies the sacred power and peril of the wild forest, symbolized by the stag’s antlers. He represents the primal, life-and-death necessity of the hunt for survival, yet also its dangerous, uncontrollable supernatural aspect.

As leader of the Wild Hunt, he is a psychopomp and an agent of divine or infernal punishment, abducting mortals for eternity. Most significantly he acts as a supernatural harbinger of catastrophe, specifically for the Royal Family and the nation, appearing in Windsor Forest only when dire times are imminent.

He is the wild, untamed, and often vengeful spirit of the forest made manifest in times of profound upheaval.

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