Stag Night:In Search Of Cernunnos.

"I'm horny, horny, horny, horny, so horny" - Horny '98, Mousse T Vs Hot'n'Juicy

Mustafa Gondugdu's late nineties pop-house anthem, held off the number one spot by B*witched's C'est la Vie, may well have been an anthem to many a stag night during the Loaded/new lad era but it could also, if you try hard enough, serve as a soundtrack to a very different kind of 'stag' night. A night in service to the stag god Cernunnos.

I was at home on a Thursday night, with a bottle of San Miguel, some breadsticks and hummus in hand, using Zoom and YouTube to take in a SELFS (South East London Folklore Society) talk about the horned God of Celtic polytheism, Cernunnos. A chap, I must confess, I had previously been unfamiliar with.

So In Search Of Cernunnos would act, to me, as an introduction but I have to say that by the time the talk had finished, and unlike most SELFS evenings, I was possibly even more confused than I had been going in. It was a pleasant enough evening, George played a nice song on his guitar - Gentlefolk Into The Greenwood and there was a Q&A that took in riding horses backwards to Southampton and Lithuanian paganism, but I just wasn't as enthralled as I had been by previous SELFS events.

On 28th May 1891 a group of peat cutters in Denmark uncovered the remains of a collection of decorative plates that, when pieced back together, made a two thousand year old silver vessel which became known as the Gundestrup cauldron and is now on display in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen alongside bronze age helmets, 4c golden horns, and the skeleton of an auroch.

The work appeared to be of Celtic, or even Thracian (an ill defined are between the Aegean and Black Seas shared today by Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey), origin rather than Danish and speculation, there is more speculation than fact about Cernunnos - strangely enough, had it that the cauldron had been brought to Denmark by a Teutonic tribe that had taken it as spoils of war following a military victory over their Serbian rivals.

So far, so pan European but what actually is/was the Gundestrup cauldron? What did the engravings on it mean? What did they represent? To describe something as 'ceremonial' is rather weak and vague (a towel is ceremonial, so is a dishcloth, a bottle opener, or a pair of pants) but to try to decipher every image on the cauldron is a task that will probably outfox even the most patient historians.

Instead, on our search for Cernunnos, we drilled down on just one image from the vessel. Below we can see what we believe to be the god of the hunt, the lord of the animals, the stag god, our elusive prey, Cernunnos. Stags were believed to eat snakes and to have the power to shake off any hunter's arrows they may receive, it was held that they were unable to catch fevers, and Alexander the Great's court had it that they could live to be over one hundred years old.

Presumably they'd receive a telegram from the Queen. The translation of Cernunnos, 'the horned one, suggests that one of these impressive beasts has somehow shapeshifted and become a man but it was here that the talk, or maybe this listener, unravelled a bit. While I understood how Cernunnos came to be viewed as a lord of fertility, wealth, and mystery I didn't really understand how skittish trout, leaping lords, and feeding nuts to blackbirds came into it and I was utterly bemused by references to a ram's head discovered in Cirencester, the Hobbit, and the mystical Irish hunter-warrior Finn McCool.

Sections relating to Caesar's decade in Gaul, the Roman god Dispater, and the Hobby Horse/Obby Oss traditions across Europe, though interesting, seemed only tangentially related to the matter in hand but at least the image of a 13c century mosaic from a baptistery in Florence (worthy of Hieronymous Bosch) and St Augustine battling a green demon whose naked bum has a face were certainly eye catching.

In Hungary they sang of an astral deer and elsewhere horses and stags were once worshipped in temples, all suggesting a religion of animal folklore that Cernunnons, flanked by wolves and adorned with torcs, was but one small part of and possibly not enough is known of him to really flesh out an entire evening's entertainment.

So it was we drifted off into realms partially related. Margaret Murray's God of the Witches, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (according to Murray, related to Cernunnos), and even the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire. A yearly event that involves triangle players, antlers, a fool, and Maid Marian.

Maid Marian, of course, is more associated with another midlands county, Nottinghamshire, and that county's heroic outlaw Robin Hood and the final diversion on our mystery tour was into the world of the hooded man as our speaker, George, enthused about HTV's mid-eighties Robin of Sherwood, a drama with fairly low production values and starring Michael Praed as Robin and a young Ray Winstone as Will Scarlett.

Rula Lenska, Patricia Hodge, Jason Connery, Phil Davis, Richard O'Brien, and Lewis Collins all also put in appearances, I know - my friend John Patrick Higgins once forced me to watch episodes upon episodes of it when I wanted to go to the pub, but of most interest to those in search of Cernunnos, as we still nominally were, was John Abineri's Herne the Hunter, a ghost rumoured to haunt Windsor Great Park and nearby areas who by 1984, it seems, had moved to Sherwood Forest.

A horse riding, chain rattling, cattle tormenting spectre with antlers growing from his head who is believed to be a modern (or fairly modern, he first 'appeared' around 1840) iteration of Cernunnos. The 'cern' part of the name is thought to have derived from a mispronounciation of 'herne'. 

None of this makes the story any more believable, or the evening any more satisfactory - sadly, but it does show how these stories about myths and ghosts not only travel across space (from Ireland to Denmark or from Serbia to Germany) but also through time. On both of these journeys the names and the characters change but the essence of the story, the myth, remains. 

People make up stories so they can entertain each other, teach other, communicate with each other, and have fun with each other. They can come in the form of accepted mainstream religion, folklore, Coronation Street, or Hollywood movies or they can, as I tend to prefer, come in the form of evenings like those hosted by the South East London Folklore Society. This may not have been one of their best but I shall certainly be back for more.