Explaining Cernunnos

Last week my resin bust of Cernunnos arrived and I'm in the process of painting him, and I've surprisingly found him to be the source of continually awkward conversation. "Who is he?" people keep asking, and I find myself with no good answer.

I could answer what the figure means personally to me, but that doesn't really help anyone else understand him, much less understand where any of this is coming from.

I can give a historical explanation, which was my first tactic, only to find myself qualifying every statement. "Is he Celtic?" Well, kind of. The Celts have a lot of images that kind of look like him, but we have no idea what they called him. We have one incidence of his name, and that statue is Gaulish-Roman, and the name is actually Latin. "What does he represent?" To the Celts? The answer's highly arguable. "What's his story?" He doesn't have one, at least not that was ever written down. "So what's your connection with him?" That would take a small thesis to cover.

I found slight solace in an unlikely source, however. About an hour after having this conversation with my husband, it dawned on me that I had a simpler answer. "He's Herne the Hunter."

"Oh!" explains my husband. "Now I get it."

Of course, my husband's only exposure to Herne is through Robin of Sherwood, a British TV series from the mid-eighties. But to be honest, that show does a fair job of depicting Herne as I see him. In fact, finding that show years ago was one of the things that lead me to learn about the historical Herne/Cernunnos in the first place.

But it's still awkward referencing TV, especially when I grit my teeth when people reference something like Charmed to explain Wicca. I guess it's the difference between being inspired by TV to further learn, versus taking TV as some sort of canonical instructive text.