The Horned God of the Witches

The Witches' God by Janet Farrar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The witches God has assumed many guises throughout history. Man's first perception of deity was that of Goddess. After all they saw women give birth but were unaware of the male role in the whole thing. As time marches forward and man becomes more aware of the male role in procreation the male God begins to enter their picture. Like Tammyz or Osiris, the god becomes a vegetative God who guaranteed the crops would grow. He was also the God who fertilized the Mother Earth with suns penetrating rays. As men become hunters the God becomes lord of the hunt. Guaranteeing capture of animals for food. He appears as horned and antlered. As society becomes more warlike with the inclusion of patriarchal invaders the image of a defending warrior looms larger. Mars the Roman god of war is a prime example. He was first an agricultural God and then morphed into a God of war. During the Christian Era the horned God would become a blue print for the devil or the good gods antithesis.

The next two sections give the reader a history of twelve different gods plus rituals to go along with and connect to those deities. The third section is painfully long glossary that lists every God from
Every culture that you can think of. The appendices at the books end tell you how to open and close both Wiccan and Egyptian rituals,

The book is filled with all sorts of good information on the various gods, so it is readily apparent that they have done a good amount of reading. The book is told from a Wiccan perspective which states that the Goddess was around first and was driven out by patriarchal invaders. Modern scholarship has since debunked this point of view. Society has always been patriarchal with the male God supreme. Some of their facts about the middle east were wrong. I may not know much but if they made one mistake who knows what they got wrong on the things I do not know about. Gotta be careful about Wiccan or Neo Pagan scholarship.

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