[_The Spiral Dance_, by Starhawk (Miriam Simos), Harper
 & Row, 1979; pp. 94-102, 161.]

     The image of the Horned God was deliberately perverted
by the medieval Church into the image of the Christian Devil.
Witches do not believe in or worship the Devil -- they
consider it a concept peculiar to Christianity.  The God of
the Witches is sexual -- but sexuality is seen as sacred,
not as obscene or blasphemous.  Our God wears horns -- but
they are the waxing and waning crescents of the Goddess
Moon, and the symbol of animal vitality.  In some aspects,
He is black, not because He is dreadful or fearful, but
because darkness and the night are times of power, and part
of the cycles of time....

...The Horned God represents powerful positive male
qualities that derive from deeper sources than the
stereotypes and the violence and emotional crippling
of men in our society.  If man had been created in the
Horned God's image, he would be free to be wild without
being cruel, angry without being violent, sexual without
being coercive, spiritual without being unsexed, and
able to truly love.  The mermaids, who are the Goddess,
would sing to him....

     The Horned God... is born of a Virgin mother.  He
is a model of male power that is free from father-son
rivalry or oedipal conflicts.  He has no father; He is
is his own father.  As He grows and passes through his
changes on the Wheel, He remains in relationship to the
prime nurturing force.  His power is drawn directly from
the Goddess: He participates in Her.

     The God embodies the power of feeling.  His animal 
horns represent the truth of undisguised emotion, which 
seeks to please no masters.  He is untamed.  But untamed
feelings are very different from enacted violence.  The
God is the life force, the life cycle.  He remains within
the orbit of the Goddess; his power is always directed
toward the service of life.

     The God of the Witches is the God of love.  This love
includes sexuality, which is also wild and untamed as well
as gentle and tender....

...The God, in Witchcraft, embodies longing and desire for
union with the prime, nurturing force.  Instead of seeking
unlimited mothering from actual, living women, men in
Witchcraft are encouraged to identify with the God and,
through Him, to attain union with the Goddess, whose
mother-love knows no bounds.  The Goddess is both an
external and internal force: When her image is taken into
a man's mind and heart, She becomes part of him.  He can
connect with his own nurturing qualities, with the inner
Muse who is a source of unfading inspiration.

     The God is Eros, but He is also Logos, the power of
the mind.... 

...He is the Creation, which is not simply a replica of
oneself, but something different, of a different order.
True creation implies separation, as the very act of
birth is a relinquishment, a letting go....

     For both women and men, the God is also the Dying
God.  As such, He represents the giving over that
sustains life: Death in the service of the life force....
The Dying God embodies the concept of loss.  In rituals,
as we enact he death over and over again, we release the
emotions surrounding our own losses, lance the wounds,
and win through to the healing promised by his rebirth.
This psychological purging was the true purpose of
dramatic tragedy, which originated, in Greece, out of
the rites of the dying God Dionysus.

...In enacting and reenacting the death of the God, we
prepare ourselves to face that transformation [to some
new form of being, reincarnation], to live out the last
stage of life.  The God becomes the Comforter and
Consoler of Hearts, who teaches us to understand death
through his example.  He embodies the warmth, tenderness,
and compassion that are the true complement of male
aggression.

     The Dying God puts on horns and becomes the Hunter, 
who metes out death as well as suffering it....  

     As Lord of Winds, the God is identified with the
elements and the natural world.  As Lord of the Dance,
He symbolizes the spiral dance of life, the whirling
energies that bind existence in eternal motion.  He
embodies movement and change.

     The Sun Child is born at the Winter Solstice [about
Dec. 21-3 -- nocT], when, after the triumph of darkness
throughout the year's longest night, the sun rises again.
In Witchcraft the celebrations of the Goddess are lunar;
those of the God follow the mythological pattern of the
Wheel of the Year....

     At the Winter Solstice, he is born as the embodiment
of innocence and joy, of a childlike delight in all 
things.  His is the triumph of the returning light....
at the Fall Equinox He sleeps in the womb of the Goddess,
sailing over the sunless sea that is her womb.  At
Samhain, (Halloween, October 31), He arrives at the Land
of Youth, the Shining Land in which the souls of the dead
grow young again, as they wait to be reborn.  He opens
the gates that they may return and visit their loved ones,
and rules in the Dreamworld as He too grows young, until
at Winter Solstice He is again reborn.

...the God is the proud stag who haunts the heart of the
deepest forest, that of the Self.  He is the stallion,
swift as thought, whose crescent hooves leave lunar
marks even as they strike sparks of solar fire.  He is
the goat-Pan, lust and fear, the animal emotions that
are also the fostering powers of human life; and He is
the moon-bull, with its crescent horns, its strength,
and its hooves that thunder over the earth....

     Yet He is untamed.  He is all that [sic] that will
never be domesticated, that refuses to be compromised,
diluted, made safe, molded, or tampered with.  He is 
free....

     While He is ever-dying, He is also ever-reborn,
ever-living.  In the moment of his transformation, He
becomes immortal, as love is immortal although its
objects may fade.  He glows with the radiance that
sparks life....

     Witchcraft ... means losing the "Great Man" model
of spirituality.  Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, and
the whole horde of preachers, prophets, gurus, and group
leaders who claim to teach in their names, or the names
of secular descendents, lose their halos.  In Witchcraft,
there are no comforting, all-knowing father figures who
promise answers for everything at the price of one's
personal autonomy.  The Craft calls on each of us to be
our own authority, and that can be an uncomfortable
position.

    In fact, there is no more God the Father.  In the
Craft, the comos is no longer modeled on external male
control.  The hierarchy is dissolved; the heavenly
chain of command is broken; the divinely revealed texts
are seen as poetry, not truth.  Instead, a man must
connect with the Goddess, who is immanent in the world,
in nature, in woman, in his own feelings --- in all that
childhood religions taught him needed to be overcome,
transcended, conquered, in order to be loved by God....

     Death and rebirth are the theme of initiation.
Death is at the root of our deepest fears, and the true
face of the Shadow.  It is the terror behind vulner-
ability; the horror of annihilation that we fear our
anger or our power will provoke.  As in the myth, what
pulls u to risk that confrontation is desire and
longing, for those split-off parts of ourselves that
lie on the other side of the abyss, which alone can
complete us and free us to love.  Because where there
is no courage, there is no love: Love demands honesty,
which is frightening, or it is only pretense.  It
demands vulnerability, or it is hollow.  It engages
our deepest power, or it lacks force.  It brings us
to confront sorrow, loss, and death.

     And so we learn the Mystery: the feared Shadow,
the Guardian of the Threshold, is none other than the
God, who is named Guardian of the Gates, in his aspect
of Death.

     We must strip ourselves of our defenses, 
pretensions, masks, roles, of our "clothing and
jewels," all that we assume and put on, in order to
cross that threshold and enter the inner kingdom.
The door opens only to the naked body of truth,
bound by the cords, our recognition of mortality.

     Death is seductive, for once the frightening
threshold is crossed there is no more fear.  Fear
and hope are both dissolved; all that is left is
rest, repose, relief, blessed nothingness, the void.
But just as this void, to physicists, is the "mother
state," so the crown of death becomes the circlet of
rebirth, and the cords of binding become the umbilical
link to life.  Death is subsumed to life, and we learn
the Great Mystery -- not as a doctrine, not as a
philosophy, but as an experience: There is no 
annihilation.

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