Wild Hunt

I wanted a more dynamic title, one that reflects the spiritual and physical struggle that is our life. There's a bit about the Wild Hunt here, sent out as the Samhain e-mail for the Great Wheel in 2004.

The Wild Hunt has a leader on horseback, sometimes headless (think Legend of Sleepy Hollow and you'll get a Wild Hunt tale in an American idiom.). The horse sometimes has fiery eyes and nostrils. Going out ahead of the horse and rider are the wild hounds, the dark Hounds of Heaven, or, the Cwm Annwn, the Welsh Hounds of the Otherworld.

The Wild Hunt announces its imminent arrival with the barking of the hounds and the sound of marching feet, usually specters of the recently dead, or, in a turn I found very interesting, the specters of those who died before their time by hanging, stabbing, say, or a soldier's death, or a duel, or, I suppose, a traffic accident. They fly with the Wild Hunt until their allotted time has run its course, then God or the Other plucks them out of the Hunt and sends them off to their fate.

There are other legends which suggest the Wild Hunt comes for each person as they die, sweeping up their soul as it leaves the body, and carrying it from its body's final resting place to its next home.

Though the Wild Hunt has associations with many seasons (as you can tell by reading some of the webpages.), I feel its connection to Samhain is strong. With the thin veil between the worlds most evident on this last of the harvest holydays, the coming of the Wild Hunt, perhaps right across the barrier between the world of Faery and this mortal world, makes a certain mythopoetic sense.

As the legion of the recently dead, or, perhaps, of those dead with business still unfinished in this world, the Wild Hunt would find the traditional rituals of this time of year soothing. Food set out. Favorite music and scents and liquors in the home. Dios de los muertos altars all round. Little ones with fanciful costumes. Candles lit on porches. Gay jack-o-lanterns carved and glowing.

If you hear the sound of the Wild Hunt, or the Wild Horde, some believe, you hear the sound of your approaching death. Now, if we pay attention, we can always hear the hounds baying in the distance for, as Jesus said, ye know not the day nor the hour. The Wild Hunt, if it comes and passes us by, bears a striking similarity to the Angel of Death in the Exodus story. So, with the Jewish community, we can take each day the hounds run on ahead without us as a day of liberation and freedom, a gift given to us, and therefore not to be squandered, but cherished.

Invocation to Herne

        
A wind comes soughing through the trees
Carrying the song of Frost
The dance of leaves turned red or gold
The baying of the Autumn Hounds, the Winter Wolf.

Holly Lord, we call to you
to keep our fears at bay
The Light is gone, stripped from the sky
and the trees are shorn also
The Earth, our Mother, and our guide
slumbers in her bare cloak of brown

We call to you, Blood-berry Crowned
Royal Stag, come to us from your eternal grove
Hunter, protect our dimming heartfires
Shield our circle of flickering light
Help us see past the long shadows cast
in the dying-birth of the new Year.

Oh stag of seven tines
Guardian of secrets held within Annwn's veil
Bough of knife-sharp evergreen
Antlered King, we call you.

Be with us, Herne,
In the Darkness that is come
Give us eyes to see in shadow,
that we may never fear,
or lose the memory of light.  http://fledge.watson.org/~juniper/pagan/herne

Herne, mentioned in the poem, is the horned god of the Celts, known also (and more commonly) as Cernunnos. The image of Cernunnos appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron where the horned god, an antlered man seated in a cross-legged pose, holds a ram-headed snake, and wear two torcs. The god's name is found only once in the archaeological record, on a stone frieze of an elderly man with antlers and torcs.

Cernunnos is Lord of the Animals, and, in Celtic lore, is the master of the Wild Hunt. He has associations with prosperity and fertility. An important characteristic of Celtic myth and legend is zoomorphism, the transmogrification of humans to animals and animals to humans. Since zoomorphism is also linked to shamanism, it strengthens the connection between the central European origins of the Celts and the plains tribes of the Russian steppes, where shamanism first sprang up.

Cernunnos, banned by the Roman Catholic church, also often has hooves. The hooves and antlers of Cernunnos became conflated with the satyr quality of Pan, the Greek nature god, and also condemned by the Church.

Another important characteristic of Celtic faith is the intimate link between nature and human consciousness. Zoomorphism is, in this regard, simply an example thereof. The Celts connected to nature in a way now lost to ordinary understanding, perhaps in a way understood only in a mystical frame, yet it was not the exceptional person, the occasional mystic, who had this seamless link to nature; it was every member of the tribe.

Consider a world where we all enjoyed conversation with the animals, union with the plants of garden and forest, and had the good luck to dance with the winds and the snow. There would, I imagine, be no need for Green awareness.