Herne, Mammon, Tog-Sothoth

Herne

NAME: Herne, Herne the Huntsman, Master of the Hunt, Lord of the Wild Hunt, Cernunnos.

SYMBOLS: Stag horns, Hounds, Hunting Horn.

USUAL IMAGE: A large man with the horns of a stag, sometimes show with midnight black skin and glowing green eyes.

HOLY DAYS: The whole of the winter months, like most Celtic 'horned' gods, Herne was said to rule the cold months. The Goddess ruled during the summer months.

PLACE OF WORSHIP: The wild wood.

MAJOR TABOOS: Escaping.

FORM OF WORSHIP: "All heads turn when the hunt goes by."

SYNODEITIES: Silvanus (another Celtic God), Pan (Greek/Roman), Buffalo (Native American), Mielikki (Finnish).

DETAILS: Herne is the silent master of the Wild Hunt, a legend that is found in most Celtic lands. Herne is also one of a number of horned gods that are found in Celtic tales. Like the others he was a symbol of the life force. Herne, like the Greek Pan, was a symbol for a wilder form of that force. Just as Pan's pipes drove people to pan-ic, Herne also had a highly effective horn. Only his did not drive one to panic but called all who heard it to joint he wild hunt and be filled with an uncontrollable lust to hunt down and rip to shreds what or whom ever was unlucky enough to become the object of this hunt. He was always aided in this by a number of large hounds.

Mammon

NAME: Mammon. The Golden Calf.

SYMBOLS: a golden calf. $ (also signs for the Pound, Yen, Mark etc...)

USUAL IMAGE: Mostly bovine, male calves and Bulls.

HOLY BOOKS: If there ever were any in the past they have been destroyed however a good god is hard to put down, so that he can be found in the Wallstreet Journal, The Financial Times, Sears & Robuck catalog, Wealth of Nations, Forbes, etc...

HOLY DAYS: Main one use to take place between Dec. 12 to Dec. 25, but his followers have stretched this out so that the images, icons, and chanting of their high holy day now starts around Nov. first.

UNHOLYDAY: One of the rare one's that has one of these, takes place (at least in the U.S. so this one can be thought of as sort of like Thanksgiving,an American based (un)holiday) on April 15

PLACES OF WORSHIP: the market place, Malls, Banks, the `pits' on Wallstreet and in like centers of worship. Also like few other up to date deities Mammon has gone video and has a televised worship place, and just like some others are served by the 700 club or MTV, he is served on the religious channel known as the Home Shopping Network.

MAJOR TABOOS: Don't get caught. Don't leave home with out it. Never give a sucker an even brake.

FORMS OF WORSHIP: BUYING!. spending. hording. dancing around a graven image (as Golden calves are hard to come by today, this has mainly been replaced by such things as large boats, BMW's, and other types of cars.

SYNODEITIES: Baal, Rockefeller, Nephthys, Scrooge McDuck, Santa Claus.

DETAILS: Mammon is the all-American deity, though he is just as well liked and worshiped the whole world over, an interesting bit of synchronicity is the way that the bull image and related images turn up to day, in the past a common foe of some bull deities was a tiger, and as you go west this foe becomes a bear. and on Wallstreet we still have bulls and bears, and the new myths about the war between the bull (capitalism) and the bear (communism) are well known to every one.

Yog-Sothoth

NAME: Yog-Sothoth. the Key and Guardian of the Gate. Atomic-Chaos. The All in One. Tawil at'Umr. Umr at'Tawil. The King in Yellow.

SYMBOLS: The Y rune. Veil. Silver Fire. Iridescent Spheres.

USUAL IMAGE: A giant mass of iridescent globes, like soap bubbles or a barely seeable mass of feelers, legs, eyes, stalked organs, and tentacles phasing in and out of reality. or a huge man seated on a throne, dressed in fine yellow robes, his face covered by a yellow veil, with only his clawed hands showing. or a free-flying globe like a UFO.

HOLY BOOKS: the Necronomicon, Unausprechichen Kulten, Pnakotic Manuscripts, Azathoth and Others, Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft. Liber Al. H.P. Lovecraft and the Hidden God by Kenneth Grant.

HOLY DAYS: As he...it is said to touch all times and all spaces I guess this is a moot point.

PLACE OF WORSHIP: Your basic wind swept moor, or craggy rock out-cropping overlooking the sea.

MAJOR TABOOS: Getting in it's way I guess.

FORM OF WORSHIP: Contemplating "him" without going nuts. Mating with some form of it. Feeding things to it.

SYNODEITIES: Cthulhu, Hastur the Unspeakable, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Aywass, Kali, Yig, Nodens, Tsathoggua, Cthugha, Azathoth, Gozer.

DETAILS: Yog-Sothoth first appeared in The Dunwitch Horror by H.P. Lovecraft in the 20's, but has been used by many other writers since then, and is an important part of the `Cthulhu Mythos' which by the way is not what Lovecraft called or wanted this fiction called, he preferred Yog-Sothothism. And while for H.P. and his friends it was all fiction, there are some that take it a little more seriously, claiming that Lovecraft was an unknowing sensitive who picked up "real" things and filtered them through his paranoid imagination to produce his stories and poems. And there are those that claim that Liber Al by Aleister Crowley (or by Aywass received by Crowley as some would say) is the "real" Necronomicon, and there are those that say that when Liber Al was being up-loaded in data from to different boards each and every one of them had hard-drive trouble that very week, but I don't believe it, not for a minute. (makes elder sign)