The Antlered God, Known Mostly from Images

Cernunnos is the conventional name for a horned, properly antlered, god of the ancient Celts of Gaul, a deity of animals, the wild and, it is often supposed, fertility and abundance. The name is known from only a single inscription, on the Pillar of the Boatmen discovered beneath Notre-Dame in Paris and dating to the early first century CE, where it labels the antlered head of a god.

Modern scholarship uses Cernunnos as a convenient label for the recurring image of a cross-legged, antlered figure that appears across Celtic Europe, most famously on the Gundestrup cauldron, where such a figure sits holding a torc and a ram-horned serpent amid animals. Because no myth or story about him survives, almost everything said of his meaning is inference from these images, and the confident, detailed portraits of Cernunnos found in modern popular and Neo-Pagan writing go well beyond what the ancient evidence can support, the antlered god has become important in contemporary Paganism, a modern reception distinct from the fragmentary ancient record.