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The Fruit and the Branches

I classify Cernunnos (Celtic) as a threshold God. Other mythological characters of this type I include Noah (Hebrew), Dionysus (Greek), Shiva (Hindu), and many more, but for this brief article I want to focus on Cernunnos and the iconography surrounding this God, particularly the God’s headdress as shown on the Gundestrup cauldron (Denmark: 2nd to 1st Century B.C).

The Antlered God Cernunnos depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron.

The Threshold is a state between death and life, that can be celestially symbolized as encompassed by the waning and waxing moons (The Lunar Double Door), and again, symbolically rendered as the dark watery womb of the Goddess, through whose labyrinthine womb (sometimes depicted as a double spiral) all shall pass to die and be reborn. It is here that the Threshold God resides, within the womb of the Lunar-Cosmic Mother, that conceals the gateway to the solar trans-cosmic realm, that is the ineffable source of the infinite forms of the universe, symbolized by Cernunnos animal entourage, as in the Hebrew myth of Noah’s animals on the ark, and again in the myth of Dionysus and the pirates, where animals materialize upon the ship transfixed upon the cosmic ocean, and ivy and grapevines miraculously sprout, and the etheral sound of music filled the air.

The Antlered God: Cernunnos

Before examining the iconography of the divine otherworld fruit between the antlers of Cernunnos, I’d like to refer back to a a number of iconic image from Mesopotamia and Pre-Vedic India. In this relief taken from a Sumerian Lyre two stags feeding feeding upon a sacred tree, with their antlers functioning as substitutes as the crescent moon, as seen on the crude depictions of the cosmic tree of the sun and moon.

Further, to be found on pre-Vedic seals from the Indus period (Late 3rd – Early 2nd Millennium B.C) alongside the Goddess and a figure known as ‘Proto-Shiva’, Proto-Shiva (Below left) sits cross-legged like a meditative yogi, and has a pipal tree (The Pipal, also known as the Bodhi tree, beneath which the Buddha gained enlightenment) sprouting up from his head (like an ambrosial tree of life), between the horns of what may be an old-and-new moon crown.

In another seal (Below Right) he is surrounded by four animals identifying him with Prajapati, ‘Lord of Beasts’, also epithet of the God Shiva, here his horned headdress is much more reminiscent of the waxing and waning moons.

Two depictions of proto-Shiva. On the right surrounded by animals

Both the cycle of the moon and the Stag’s antlers are symbolic of death and rebirth and lunar-seasonal-cosmic renewal. bother symbolize the lunar-cosmic reality, while the divine fig of the pipal corresponds with the Solar-trans-cosmic reality, and in another depiction of Cernunnos (Left), from a Celtic coin found in Hampshire, is replaced with a Solar wheel.

Finally, the stag’s antlers are reminiscent of the Lunar-Cosmic Tree of Death and Life, due to the nature of the branch-like appearance of the antlers, and the Solar fruit that hangs from the tree of life beyond the solar gateway of transcendence. The ambrosial food of the spiritual heart, that Cernunnos is ever-willing to share with us, if we are ready and willing to receive it.

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