In some other systems, he is represented as a triune god, split into three aspects that reflect those of the Triple goddess: the Youth (Warrior), the Father, and the Sage.

[13]: 147 Doreen Valiente, a former High Priestess of the Gardnerian tradition, claimed that Gerald Gardner's Bricket Wood coven referred to the god as Cernunnos, or Kernunno, which is a Latin word, discovered on a stone carving found in France, meaning "the Horned One".

Valiente claimed that the coven also referred to the god as Janicot,[needs IPA] which she theorised was of Basque origin, and Gardner also used this name in his novel High Magic's Aid.

[14]: 52–53 Stewart Farrar, a High Priest of the Alexandrian tradition referred to the Horned God as Karnayna, which he believed was a corruption of Cernunnos.

[15] The historian Ronald Hutton suggests the term derived instead from the Arabic Dhul-Qarnayn meaning "Horned One", as Murray offered in her 1931 book The God of the Witches, a source that likely influenced Alex Sanders.

[16]: 331  Prudence Jones has suggested that the name may instead derive from Karneios, a Spartan deity conflated with Apollo as a subordinate consort to Diana.

[19] In the neopagan tradition of Stregheria, founded by Raven Grimassi and loosely inspired by the works of Charles Godfrey Leland, the Horned God goes by several names, including Dianus, Faunus, Cern, and Actaeon.

[21] Sherry Salman considers the image of the Horned God in Jungian terms, as an archetypal protector and mediator of the outside world to the objective psyche.

[23]: 162 Following the work of Robert Bly in the Mythopoetic men's movement, John Rowan proposes the Horned God as a "Wild Man" be used as a fantasy image or "sub-personality"[24]: 38  helpful to men in humanistic psychology, and escaping from "narrow societal images of masculinity"[25]: 249  encompassing excessive deference to women and paraphillia.

Without recourse to any specific representation of this deity, Murray speculates that the head coverings common in inquisition-derived descriptions of the devil "may throw light on one of the possible origins of the cult.

Hutton states that modern photographs show the original cave art lacks horns, a human torso or any other significant detail on its upper half.

Murray also used an inaccurate drawing of a mesolithic rock-painting at Cogul in northeast Spain as evidence of group religious ceremony of the cult, although the central male figure is not horned.

[33]: 9 [34] The popular image of the Greek god Pan was removed from its classical context in the writings of the Romantics of the 18th century and connected with their ideals of a pastoral England.

This, along with the general public's increasing lack of familiarity of Greek mythology at the time led to the figure of Pan becoming generalised as a 'horned god', and applying connotations to the character, such as benevolence that were not evident in the original Greek myths which in turn gave rise to the popular acceptance of Murray's hypothetical horned god of the witches.

[35]: 61 Valiente offers another explanation for the negative reaction of some neopagans; that the identification of Lucifer as the god of the witches in Aradia was "too strong meat" for Wiccans who were used to the gentler, romantic paganism of Gerald Gardner and were especially quick to reject any relationship between witchcraft and Satanism.

[36] 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,[37] 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.

[37] Eliphas Levi's image of "Baphomet" serves as an example of the transformation of the Devil into a benevolent fertility deity and provided the prototype for Murray's horned god.

[38] Murray's central thesis that images of the Devil were actually of deities and that Christianity had demonised these worshippers as following Satan, is first recorded in the work of Levi in the fashionable 19th-century Occultist circles of England and France.

[38] Levi created his image of Baphomet, published in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855), by combining symbolism from diverse traditions, including the Diable card of the 16th and 17th century Tarot of Marseille.

[40] E. A. Wallis Budge writes, At several places in the Delta, e.g. Hermopolis, Lycopolis, and Mendes, the god Pan and a goat were worshipped; Strabo, quoting (xvii.

Lévi combined the images of the Tarot of Marseilles Devil card and refigured the ram Banebdjed as a he-goat, further imagined by him as "copulator in Anep and inseminator in the district of Mendes".

[37] In 1908's The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, in Chapter 7, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", Ratty and Mole meet a mystical horned being, powerful, fearsome and kind.

[47]: 144 The Philip José Farmer novel Flesh depicts a future society where the protagonist, Peter Stagg, adopts the role of the "Horned King".

[49]: 48 [50]: 203 Murray's theories have been seen to have had influence on the horror film The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), where a murderous female-led cult worships a horned deity named Behemoth.

[51]: 94 In the fantasy novel Too Long A Sacrifice by Mildred Downey Broxon (1981), a male character, Tadhg, is an avatar of a benevolent Horned God.

[54]: 33 In June 1986, the comic book 2000 AD published the first part of a serial story called Sláine and the Horned God, written by Pat Mills and illustrated by Simon Bisley.

[56]: 505 The 1992 Discworld novel Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett, features a King of the Elves who is strongly reminiscent of the Horned God.

[57]: 51 In the popular video game Morrowind, its expansion Bloodmoon (2003) has a plot enemy known as Hircine, the Daedric god of the Hunt, who appears as a horned man with the face of a deer skull.

The historical novel The White Mare (2004) by Jules Watson, set in Scotland in the year 79 CE, features a scene where the heroine is partnered with a priest of the Horned God during a religious ceremony.

[58] : 76 Tim Powers' novella Salvage and Demolition (2013) involves a quest for a manuscript written by a being called Aker, who is also designated as the Horned God.