Cernunus with putti & serpents. Gallo-Roman: Stone. Vendoeuvres, Indres. France.

Cernunus is a horned god of the Celts. Depictions of him appear in Britain and the rest of western Europe. Cornu in modern French means "horned “ from the Latin for horn cornu. So Cernunnos is a Roman name meaning Horned One and may have spread in Roman province of Gaul. His main attributes are his horns, those of a stag, but he is otherwise portrayed as a mature man with long hair and a beard. He is an icon for male animals, such as the stag in rut, which links him to fertility and identify a god of lust and fertility. He is the lord of the forest and master of the hunt. He is also the god of vegetation and trees as the Green Man. This description fits Falstaff perfectly as he appears and describes himself at the start of Act V of Merry Wives of Windsor. The god's image has been sustained in the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in the next image, as well as Shakespeare's Herne the Hunter references concerning Windsor Forest in Merry Wives in 1597:

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth. (IV.iv.28-38)


©Kathleen Cohen, Portfolio: Web of Art 12: The Dark Ages: Nomads, Barbarians & Revival, World Images (California State University): Portfolio: British History: Tudor & Elizabethan under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.