Herne the Hunter

Meditations on Hunting

Cernunnos from the Gundestrup Cauldron

There is still some room in my Fall course on Sophiology—but it’s filling up. Reach out if you have any questions. But to the matter at hand…

Even though this week has been quite warm here in Waterloo Township, Michigan, with high temperatures in the 90s, last week was very pleasant and fall-like with nighttime temperatures sinking as low as 45. Even some of the trees have already started turning their colors—very early for this part of the State.

I needed to buy feed for our chickens and lambs and drove the twelve miles to an Amish farm where I buy my feed. Because of the coolness of the weather, the first question Isaiah, the young man taking care of me, asked was “Getting ready for deer season?” That is almost a universal greeting out here in Michigan once the weather has indicated even a hint of moving toward autumn.

This is a phenomenon not common to cities here in the US, and I imagine it’s not very common in Europe, though people from American cities and Europe certainly hunt—but nowhere near the level that occurs in rural America. Also, unlike Europe, where the pedigree of hunting is as “the sport of kings,” the hunting traditions of America (and Canada, too, I suspect) are decidedly working-class, though people of the upper-middle class and the wealthy certainly hunt. But the latter, one would think, have more resonances with the aristocratic origins of European hunting.

In my own family history, though I’m half-Irish, my paternal grandfather was Canadian of French stock and descended from the voyageurs who came to the New World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to hunt and trap and make their fortunes—a privilege only allowed to the aristocracy in their home country. So, in America at least, hunting’s posterity is one characterized by the working-class (or “the peasantry”) and a virulent strain of dissidence. And while I may have a doctorate and write about lofty subjects at times, my affinity is with the working-class and dissent. That’s how I roll.

As it happens, there was a bit of synchronicity with my thoughts of hunting and the change in the weather here in Michigan, as I was asked by my friend Sebastian Morello, a new acquisition in the beaten way of friendship, to write a foreword to his upcoming collection of essays, Woodland Philosophy: Meditations on Hunting, Hiking, and Holiness, due to appear from Angelico Press this winter. It’s a great book and I encourage you to grab one when it comes out. I met Sebastian after a number of friends pointed me to his essay “The Theurgy of Deer-Stalking” (which is in the forthcoming volume) and told me “This guy speaks your language.” He does, indeed; and after I posted his essay on X with the tag “I love this so much it hurts,” Sebastian reached out to me. We are, as Anne of Green Gables would say, “kindred spirits.” (You can see the conversation Mike Sauter and I had with Sebastian on the Regeneration Podcast here.)

The way in which Sebastian “speaks my language,” is that we both hold that there is a spiritual or mystical dimension to hunting that people not familiar with it might not realize. There is a bit of Native American blood in my DNA (which is pretty common to those descended from voyageurs) and my farm is situated upon a long-vanished Indian burial ground from the late-Stone Age (we find arrowheads and spearheads upon occasion), both factors which might be thought to contribute to a spiritual perspective on the hunt. The very origins of the hunt, as cave painting attests, are rooted in an understanding of the hunt as a field of the spirit as much as a quest for sustenance of the flesh. But this spiritual domain—call it the Otherworld, if you will—in addition to being beautiful and mysterious is also potentially dangerous. In his book, Sebastian points to the daemonic figures of England’s Herne the Hunter and Slovenia’s Jarylo as representative of the spiritual dangers of hunting and the Otherworld. For it is there that we find the Wild of God. As C. S. Lewis’s Mr. Tumnus says of Aslan, “He’s not a tame lion, you know.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the figure of Herne. I loved the 80s British series Robin of Sherwood and its Pagan-Christian vibe and Herne as spiritual guide of Robin; and Shakespeare’s riotous sendup of Falstaff dressed up as Herne in the much under-performed The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of my favorite moments in all of his plays. (I once saw the great Canadian stage actor William Hutt as Falstaff in the play at the Stratford Festival in about 1994 or so—it was a brilliant and hilarious performance.)

Herne, who wears the horns of a stag, may (or may not) be descended from the horned Celtic god Cernunnos, but Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, connects him to the archangel Gabriel, a symbolic metaxu of the daemonic and the angelic if ever there was one. Before I had heard any of this, though, I remember decades ago scratching out an ink drawing of a stag-headed man crucified to a tree, an image which reappeared in a poem I recently published in Mythologies of the Wild of God:

THE HUNTSMAN

Orion rises with the fall of the dark
For this is the season of the hunt
And when the moon is quite full
All the forest is washed white with her milk
And the crisp air kisses the skin
Delicate as a faerie’s wing.
On such a night I venture out
On a quest of my imagining 
In search of wonders or at the least for
The roar of the wind through the trees
The prayers of coyotes at their preying
A congregation at the sacrament of blood and bone.

Deep in the beech woods beyond the silent bog
I found a glade on the sleeping giant of 
The moraine’s back: a wide circle of bent grass 
Of moss and of lichen, of oak leaves and of standing stones.
In the center stood a cross made from a young oak
Still green and rooted in the teeming earth
Whereupon hung a man transfixed and shimmering
His head that of an ancient and terrible stag
Antlers branching and twining, tines reaching through all Things
The dry leaves, the hedgerows, the gardens and the ponds
And at last to a place where elemental fires and stars sing 
The greenness, the life and the dark, the light and the hearing
Of all that can be and ever shall be, forever. Amen.

Let’s face it: we prefer our divinities to be tame, don’t we? The Wild of God makes us uncomfortable. But I think we need to embrace God’s wildness. The God of the Philosophers and Theologians ain’t cutting it. Philosophers and theologians lacking an understanding of the wild will never understand the Wild of God. As a result, they can only offer us an understanding of the Real that is threadbare at best, toxic at worst. Or as Sebastian puts it, “The intellectual who is not an outdoorsman is too great a threat to his fellow man, whom he will no doubt eventually come to plague with his ideas.”

Entering the Wild of God, we enter the sources of Life. He’s not a tame lion, you know.

What about that Clannad tho?