Horned Ones

    So was Helgi beside the chieftains like...the young stag, drenched in dew, who surpasses all other animals and whose horns glow against the sky itself. 
                                                                                    The Verse Edda


    Herla and Herne are variant spellings of the same word.The Romans incorporated their Latin religion into the native beliefs of the lands which they occupied. We therefore find syncretized systems of belief - Celtic gods, say, joined with Roman ones. The name of a horned god whose altar was buried beneath Notre Dame - Cernunnos - then represents the Latinised version of a Celtic name; the os ending is the suffix added to masculine nouns in Greek and old Latin. The original version of the name, we then infer, is Cernunn. Now - the prefixes Cer - and Her - are interchangeable, both being Indo-European roots which mean "horn". Cernunn may thus be rendered as Hernunn. This, as Arthur Evans(1) suspects, was "the original Celtic ancester of Herne, which is one of the oldest names for the male figure we're dealing with."

                                  From 'The Horned God of the Wytches' by Zan Fraser

             

 Illustration from the seventeenth century chapbook Robin Goodfellow: His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests.

1. Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture