“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.”

– William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wives of Windsor”

It is calm, soft and placid in the gray pre-dawn. Nothing of significance happened on this day, except a time of endings and departures. Rummage around in the barrel of history and look for yourself. Chester Allan Arthur became President after Garfield’s death by assassination in 1881. James Merideth was blocked from admission to the University of Mississippi by Governor Ross R. Barnett in 1962. Singer Jim Croche flew into the ground near Natchitoches, La., in 1973 Cal Ripkin sat one out after playing in 2,632 consecutive games in 1998.

It is that sort of day. The hurricane is over. I am moving furniture back out onto the balcony and wondering what to do about my door, since the Autumnal Equinox is coming The cold winds are going to blow and they will blow right through the gap where Hurricane Isabel flung it open, perhaps to chide me for lack of respect for her power. Standing there on the balcony I had the sense, for a moment, that I could orchestrate the fury. The trees twined and swirled below me in a riot of green. I forgot for a moment my mortality in the gales and thought perhaps I could ride forever in the wild gyre of green.

Storms pass, but the ponderous dance of the universe goes on. They are cleaning up from the passage of the latest manifestation of the Goddess. The days are shortening and will momentarily be split precisely in twain. Twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness. The Autumnal equinox is hard upon us. The mechanics of the solar system are irresistible. On or near this date in the northern hemisphere the sun crosses the celestial equator (i.e., declination 0 degrees) moving southward . It is all downhill from here, kids, as we plunge toward the cold and the darkness of the year.

Those who came before us knew what this meant in a way we do not. There are neo-pagans today who invoke myths half-imagined. But it is all imagines or stolen or cobbled together from the original belief. Enough of it is true to peel back the onion, or to mix a metaphor, find the foundations to the ruins in which we walk. In ancient times, the Autumn Equinox was cause for festival, among them the celebration of the birth of Mabon.

Mabon is Welsh for “great son,” born of Mordon, Goddess of the earth. He was a member of the great Celtic pantheon that was driven west by the Saxons and the Romans until they inhabited only the periphery of the British Isles: Scots and Welsh and the stubborn hard-headed Irish clinging to their rocky coasts. Mabon was appropriated by the new arrivals. The Romans identified him as skin to their winged Mercury, or sometimes Apollo. In Christian Britain Mabon was superseded by St. Michael, to whom churches on many sacred Pagan sites were dedicated, and the Fall Equinox became the Christian feast of Michaelmas. In medieval times, rents fell due and contracts were settled at Easter and at Michaelmas.

Mabon’s day is primarily a harvest festival, since at the time of the equinox it is the end of the grain harvest. But it celebrates something else, something older than agriculture. It celebrates the forest deep and the creatures that live within it. This is the mating season for deer, and marks the beginning of the hunting season in many places. In British folklore this time of year is associated with Herne the Hunter. The legend runs deep in the Anglo-Celtic mythos. It has many layers, of course. Other religions and traditions have papered over the legends of the Celts, appropriating them for their own. One line of logic holds that that the figure of the horned god Cernunnos became Cern, and then linguistic drift shortened and softened it to Hern. Cernunnos was a Roman name which replaced an older Celtic word meaning “Horned One.” This figure was worshipped by Celts all across Europe as late as the first century AD, and of course it goes back centuries before that, maybe past Stonehenge. The attributes of the Herne-god are his horns, those of a stag, and he is usually represented as a grown man with long hair and a beard. The Celtic-inclined neo-pagans have adopted him as one of their modern recreated deities, but they are not the first to recreate a legend in terms of their own. There is a tradition that associates Herne with Robin Hood, the protector of the forest.

Herne leads a wild phantom chase through the primal forest, heralding confusion and change. In one tradition the Fall Equinox is called “the Night of the Hunter.” The farmers turned an eye to their herds, to determine which livestock were weak and would not survive the winter. They must be slain, to become food and not to consume it. The Mabon-fest also can mark the death or departure of the God in His yearly life-cycle, and the Fall Equinox has also been identified as the “assumption of the Crone,” when the dark face of the Goddess assumes her sway over the world of darkness. The Crone will rule until the return of the Maiden in February, the half-Equionx called Imbolc. Then the sheep begin to lactate, and despite the cold the world prepares to bloom once more.

If this season of the dying of the green belong to the God, it is only because he is perfectly blanced with the Goddess. There is no hierarchy of sex or gender in the natural world, since we are equally necessary to its turning. If this Equinox is the province of the hunter, it is only because the Mother has earlier given life.

Windsor forest is one of the islands of the Great Forest that once cloaked Britain. It is home to the Royals now, but it has been home to Herne for four centuries. The tale told today holds that Herne was a simple woodsman who threw himself between the King and a rampant stag. The deer was filled with the lust of the rut in that Equinox, it being the time for it. In saving the King, Herne was gored himself, sharing his blood with that of the great forest beast, and though sorely injured slew the animal with the majestic deadly antlers.

From a beech tree nearby a wizard appeared, bidding the King to strap the dead stag’s antlers to Hern’s head. Bound to an oak for support, he miraculously survived. When he returned to health, he was appointed Royal Gameskeeper and became favorite of the king. Two of the other huntsmen grew jealous of Herne’s good fortune and vowed to bring him low. The legends say they framed him for poaching, or he was accused of witchcraft for his forest prowess. Whatever the cause, Herne hanged himself in shame from the oak that was his symbol and his totem.

His spirit was restless, though, and knew no peace. The wizard of the Beech impelled the two treacherous huntsmen to ride with Herne for all eternity. The Mabon-fest of the hunt thus is thus rendered into a tall tale, and the ancient horned god who presided on the passing of summer life into the cold and dark is remembered as Herne’s wild across the heavenly forest. Herne and his minions stampede all before them with celestial horns, signaling chaos and the time of change.

Locals claim the horns can still be heard in Windsor Forest, and as far away as Cookham Moor.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra