Horned deity
Many pagan religions include horned gods in their pantheons, such as Pan in Greek mythology and Ikenga in Odinala.
Some neopagan religions have reconstructed these deities into the concept of the Horned God, representing the male aspect of divinity in Wiccan belief.
[10] This "Pashupati" (Lord of animal-like beings – Sanskrit paśupati)[11] seal shows a seated figure with horns, possibly ithyphallic, surrounded by animals.
[14] Baal-Hamon was especially associated with the ram and was worshiped also as Baʿal Qarnaim ("Lord of Two Horns") in an open-air sanctuary at Jebel Bu Kornein ("the two-horned hill") across the bay from Carthage.
[20] Banebdjedet may also be linked to the first four gods to rule over Egypt, Osiris, Geb, Shu and Ra-Atum, with large granite shrines devoted to each in the Mendes sanctuary.
[20] Amun, the supreme Egyptian god, was often represented with a ram's head, a depiction that may have originated from other regions of North Africa since the Lithic period.
[24] The cult of Amun was likely introduced to Greece early on, possibly through the Greek colony of Cyrene, and came to be venerated in cities such as Thebes, Sparta, Aphytis, Megalopolis, and Delphi.
[28] According to Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, Justin, and Plutarch, Alexander the Great visited the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa, after the battle of Issus, where he was declared the son of Amun.
[32] Pan was a Greek god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds and rustic music, and was depicted with the horns and hooves of a goat.
Depictions in Celtic cultures of figures with antlers are often identified as Cernunnos (Gaulish: "horned one"), such as those on the Pillar of the Boatman in Paris, France, and the Gundestrup cauldron in Himmerland, Denmark.
[34] Cocidius was the name of a Romano-British war-god and local deity from the region around Hadrian's Wall, who is sometimes represented as being horned.
According to Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of ancient Egypt, the book's author Geraldine Harris, said the ram gods Ra-Amun (see: Cult of Ammon), and Banebdjed, were to mystically unite with the queen of Egypt to sire the heir to the throne (a theory based on depictions found in several Theban temples in Mendes).
The Baphomet of Lévi was to become an important figure within the cosmology of Thelema, the mystical system established by Aleister Crowley in the early twentieth century.
[40] In 1985 Classical historian Georg Luck, in his Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, theorised that the origins of the Witch-cult may have appeared in late antiquity as a faith primarily designed to worship the Horned God, stemming from the merging of Cernunnos, a horned god of the Celts, with the Greco-Roman Pan/Faunus,[41] a combination of gods which he posits created a new deity, around which the remaining pagans, those refusing to convert to Christianity, rallied and that this deity provided the prototype for later Christian conceptions of the Devil, and his worshippers were cast by the Church as witches.
Occult and metaphysical author Michelle Belanger believes that Beelzebub (a mockery of the original name[42]) is the horned god Ba'al Hadad, whose cult symbol was the bull.
In Wicca, the archetype of the Horned God is highly important, and is thought by believers to be represented by such deities as the Celtic Cernunnos, Indian Pashupati and Greek Pan.
Deities such as Pan and Dionysus have had attributes of their worship imported into the Neopagan concept as have the Celtic Cernunnos and Gwynn ap Nudd, one of the mythological leaders of the Wild Hunt.
