The Horned God

The Horned God

The figure of the Horned God, commonly thought to be Cernunnos, on the Gundestrup Cauldron. The Gundestrup cauldron is a richly decorated silver vessel, thought to date from between 200 BC and 300 AD,[1][2] or more narrowly between 150 BC and 1 BC.[3] This places it within the late La Tène period or early Roman Iron Age. The cauldron is the largest known example of European Iron Age silver work (diameter: 69 cm (27 in); height: 42 cm (17 in)). It was found dismantled, with the other pieces stacked inside the base, in 1891 in a peat bog near the hamlet of Gundestrup in the Aars parish of Himmerland, Denmark.
It has been much discussed by scholars, and represents a fascinatingly complex demonstration of the many cross-currents in European art, as well as an unusual degree of narrative for Celtic art, though we are unlikely ever to fully understand its original meanings. Other details of the iconography clearly derive from the art of the ancient Near East, and there are intriguing parallels with ancient India and later Hindu deities and their stories. Scholars are mostly content to regard the former as motifs borrowed purely for their visual appeal, without carrying over anything much of their original meaning, but despite the distance some have attempted to relate the latter to wider traditions remaining from Proto-Indo-European religion.

Nationalmuseet, Roberto Fortuna og Kira Ursem

http://samlinger.natmus.dk/DO/5324

2007

This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by Nationalmuseet as part of an ongoing cooperative project. The artifact represented in the image is part of the collection of Nationalmuseet. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.