Light GOD
The God of the Waxing Year, Lord of Light, Sun-God, Grain Reborn: Ra, Apollo, Lugh the Long-Handed--his image seems as bright and clear as the sun at dawn. Consort, brother, son of the Lady, he is born at Yule, is celebrated as the Waxing Light at Brigid, overcomes Night at Eostara, becomes the Lady's lover at Beltaine, and dies at the peak of his power at Litha, when his place is taken by his twin, the Dark God of the Waning Year, who will in turn be replaced the following Yule.
This is one way of looking at the Horned One: as twin brothers who vie for the Goddess' favors, and turn and turn about win the victory. This is the most ancient way of viewing the conflict between growth and decay which is actually no conflict at all, but rather twin aspects of one cyclic process.
The problem with getting a clear view of the God is complicated by the historical changes which have taken place in religious attitudes toward the Male and Female Principles. Ever since the superseding of the ancient matriarchal religions, the God has been, on the one hand, inflated into the Sky-Father, Creator, Jehovah, Source of All (thereby usurping the prerogatives of the Mother as well as absorbing all her solar attributes); and on the other hand, suffered the reverse sort of inflation into the Devil, the Evil One, lumped with the World and the Flesh (the Goddess as Moon/Earth and as Venus) into the evil Trinity which opposes the Divine Trinity. Both of these distortions have worked to cause a like distortion in both men's and women's views of the Male Principle within themselves.
Perhaps a saner view of the light aspect of the God is to be found in the image of the Hero Triumphant: born of a virgin with the winter solstice, raised in hiding from the wrath of earthly rulers, he sets forth on his quest against evil, and in the midst of his triumph is transformed. Upon his death/transformation, he departs for the Island of Appletrees, to sleep and await his rebirth. Sound familiar? King Arthur, Hercules, Luke Skywalker, Jesus of Nazareth, Parzifal, all are variants on the same ancient myth. It is from the time of his birth until the time of his triumph that we see him as the Shining One, God of East and South, Air and Fire. To the Light God, the Hero, the quest is against Evil. He has not yet reached the point where he sees ambiguity, for this is the point of death, the point of his transformation into the Dark God, the point of the Hero Transformed, the point of sunset.
Thus it is that the Light God is the god of youth, of confidence, of adventure, of noble ideals, of the pure song which hums in the heart when life is fresh and new. He is the Seed-Sower, Grain Reborn, ever springing up from under the ground, setting the feet to dancing and making the Lady young and lovely again with his love. He is her lover as well as her son and her brother: if she did not love him, she would not keep giving him birth year after year, even knowing that it would grieve her when he dies.
And he always dies. That is what makes him so beautiful. He never grows old, and he always comes back. Making his cyclic reappearance into one historical lifetime, never to be repeated, was the worst blasphemy the christians could have brought about to the religion of the Goddess; and it was only because the Goddess religions had died out as an effective political force at the time that the cult of Jesus of Nazareth was able to gain its ascendancy--and even then it took several centuries to pull it off.
By medieval times, the Goddess was crammed into the figure of the Virgin Mary, and the Light God and Dark God battled for human souls in a purely masculine field. By this time, too, there was not much to choose between them. Neither the Holy Trinity of the christians nor the Horned God of the Witches has much resemblance to the true state of the masculine psyche, except insofar as it has been warped by social/cultural factors. The true Male Principle is much more akin to True Thomaas of Erceldoune, who went with the Queen of Elphame and served her for seven hears as her true knight: the Hero, the Poet, the one who is transformed by the quest.
I have gone on at such length about the God (and plan to go on longer, about his dark aspect) because I feel that it is a mistake to ignore him, the way certain segments of the Craft do. Obviously, the Female element in spirituality has been neglected (when not actually being persecuted), and the Macho-Man Sky-Thunderer element in the Male Principle has been elevated clear out of all reason in religions of the past two millennia; however, it is just as macho to do no more than reverse the polarity in an attempt to gain back lost ground. What needs to be done about the God, and about the God in both men and women, is for him to be re-transformed, into the Lady's love, into the ever-living, ever-dying sacrifice (John Barleycorn must die if we are to have beer and bread), into the heroic urge.
This is an age with too few heroes, and too little scope for heroes. Men and women seem to be diminished into mere citizens, slots on the IBM cards, scrabbling for physical survival and losing all nobility of mind in the process. It does not have to be so. Just as contact with the Lady makes all ordinary things Magick, contact with the Lord makes all ordinary activities Heroic.
A SPELL FOR COURAGE
If there is something you are afraid of, write it on a small piece of paper in your own blood. Burn it to ashes, and powder the ashes in a mortar & pestle with some cinnamon, nutmeg, & ginger. Use this mixture to flavor a) cookies, b) mulled wine, c) any other food you like. When you mix in the herbs and ashes, consecrate what you are cooking to the service of the God in you. When you eat or drink, know that what you are physically absorbing is the flesh of the God himself, and that his courage is within you, If you like, you can do an invocation, self-blessing, or other charm which will remind you of this fact. One good one is:
May the Sun shine within me, may Mars lend me his courage and Jupiter his strength. Let the blood of heroes run in my veins, and my feet walk in the paths of heroes. My name is ___________, and I am brave. (repeat)
If you can do this while looking in a mirror, so much the better. Do this spell in full daylight, when the sun is shining.
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