Horned god
The god of Wicca, honoured beside the Goddess: “the Horned God of the sun and animal life”, in the Covenant of the Goddess’s words. Wiccans write his sign as a circle with a crescent resting on it, horns up.
Meaning
The Horned God is the male deity of Wicca and of much of modern Paganism, a horned god of nature and animal life. Ethan Doyle White’s Britannica article says that Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, “presented a theology devoted to a mother goddess and a horned god”, and the Covenant of the Goddess names its members’ deities as “the Triple Goddess of the waxing, full, and waning moon, and the Horned God of the sun and animal life” (the goddess’s sign is the Triple moon (triple goddess)). His sign on Wiccan altar pentacles is a circle with a crescent on top, which the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic records as standing for “the Lord or Horned God”. Wiccans and other modern Pagans honour him today.
Origin and history
Horned and antlered gods were plentiful in the ancient world, but, as Ronald Hutton points out in his 2025 Gresham College lecture on the Horned God, they were not the most popular: the leading male gods were patrons of civilisation. The modern god of nature began with the Greek god Pan. Around 1800, Hutton says, urbanisation and industry, above all in England, made nature seem fragile for the first time, and English writers took Pan up until he was “the most frequently cited deity in English literature”. To the Romantic poets he was the personification of the shrinking English countryside; to later writers he could be “a battering ram against respectability”.
Margaret Murray turned him into an archetype. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) she argued that the people tried as witches belonged to an old religion whose god “was often spoken of as wearing the skin or attributes of an animal”, and she read the trial records that way: in Puy-de-Dôme in 1594 Jane Bosdeau described “a great Black Goat with a Candle between his Horns”. In 1933, Hutton says, she collected horned gods from all over the ancient world and declared him the main god of the Old Religion of north-western Europe, generally known as Cernunnos. “In all of this she was incorrect”, Hutton writes; historians from the 1970s showed that the accused had not practised a surviving pagan religion. Her impact on the popular imagination was enormous all the same, and when an operative Paganism appeared in England at the end of the 1940s it made the horned god of nature its male deity, no longer called Pan.
Is the horned god the Devil?
No, say Wiccans, and the history suggests the borrowing ran the other way. The Covenant of the Goddess answers the question directly, “Do Witches worship the Devil? No”, and adds that “the gods of Wicca are in no way connected with Satanic practice. Most Witches do not even believe Satan exists”, and that the gods of an older religion are often branded the devils of a newer one. Hutton argues that the picture of the Devil itself borrowed from Pan: the Devil had been drawn in many part-animal forms, but only in the Victorian and Edwardian years did he acquire “a goat’s horns, beard and hooves as his standard equipment”. Britannica notes that the UK-based Pagan Federation and the US-based Covenant of the Goddess repeatedly challenged the “erroneous perception that Wiccans were Satanists”, a notion that proved particularly dangerous during the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. The goat-headed figure of the occultists is a different image, described on the Baphomet page.
Where you’ll see him
In Wiccan art and on altars. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic holds a pair of paintings of the God and the Goddess, dated by their donor to the late 1950s or 1960s: the God a Cernunnos-type figure with antlers, ivy, a snake, a torc and horned feet under a large yellow sun, the Goddess with a silver moon, an owl and a hare. A metal wall plaque in the collection, perhaps Pan, has two sets of horns, one pair tipped with acorns. The museum also files under “Horned God” a nineteenth-century print, Leader of the Wild Hunt, of an antlered rider on a black horse blowing a hunting horn.
The sign on the altar
On the brass altar pentacle of Anne Darby, in the same museum, the circle topped with a crescent is “the Lord or Horned God”, set beside the two crescents of “the Lady or the Moon”. The same circle-and-horns shape is the glyph of the zodiac sign Taurus. Richard Hinckley Allen, in Star-Names and Their Meanings (1899), thought it might come from the front of a bull’s head, and noted that it had also been read as “a combination of the full and crescent moon”.
Read next
- Next in Pagan and Wiccan symbolsWheel of the YearThe eight festivals of the modern Pagan year, the sabbats, pictured as a wheel with eight spokes: the solstices and equinoxes, and the four old festivals of Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh between them.
- The same shape in Adinkra symbolsBese SakaBese Saka, a bunch of kola nuts, is the adinkra symbol of affluence, abundance and unity.
See also
Triple moon (triple goddess), Taurus symbol (♉), Baphomet, Wiccan pentacle, The four elements, Chakras.
Sources
- Basic Philosophy, Covenant of the Goddess
- Wicca, Ethan Doyle White, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Beliefs and practices
- The Return of The Horned God, Professor Ronald Hutton, lecture of 19 February 2025 (text), Gresham College, text
- The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology, Margaret Alice Murray, 1921, Project Gutenberg eBook #20411, Introduction; ch. II, “The God”
- Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Professor Ronald Hutton, lecture of 14 May 2025 (text), Gresham College, text
- FAQ About Wicca, Covenant of the Goddess
- 3491 – Brass Pentacle, collection record, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
- 3813 – Paintings of Horned God and Goddess, collection record, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
- 3294 – Horned God Wall Plaque: Pan, collection record, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
- 135 – Horned god picture, collection record, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Taurus, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Taurus
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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