Uncovering and divulging an outlandish conspiracy will put a hard bump into any journalist’s career, and Armin can only blame himself when he’s dispatched from Frankfurt’s skyscrapers into the depths of rural France on the unglamorous job of writing about a cobbing workshop.
Natural building is messy, dirty and sweaty work, but it has its consolations. For example, Van, the greying but undeniably hot master cobber teaching the workshop. Sure, the man is a hopeless tree-hugger, with embarrassing notions about ancient folklore and religions, but he’s still worth a week-long fling, right?
When Van is revealed in all his majesty and power as a long forgotten forest god, however, the week-long fling might well become entangled with eternity, on the edge between life, death, madness, and immortality.
-:-
I can't wait for tomorrow, and the release of The Elder Man, a story that I have worked on for well over a year. It all began even longer ago, with this drawing I made of Danila Kovalev in January of 2018.
"Cernunnos (1)"
(model, Danila Kovalev)
pencil drawing
© Katherine Wyvern
"Cernunnos (2)"
(model, Henry Ian Cusick)
Pencil drawing, digital color
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
"The Great God Pan (1)"
(model, Henry Ian Cusick)
pencil drawing, digital effects
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
"The Great God Pan (2)"
(model, Henry Ian Cusick)
pencil drawing, digital effects
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
-:-
“Why the antlered man? Who is it?” repeated Armin, a
little confused, looking at Van.
Van shrugged. “He’s … Amun, and Silvanus and Pan, and the Leshy
and Veles and Svyatibor … even the
Minotaur, perhaps. There is a picture of him as old as fifteen thousand years
in a cave in the Ariege, la grotte des
Trois-Frères. The Sorcerer. Prancing fellow with antlers and a thumping big
dong.”
Every woman in the room, including the young girls,
giggled.
He grimaced theatrically. “Sorry. All these old horned
males. What can I say?”
“Anyway, some would say he’s the Devil, too, and
Baphomet. And lately, just the Horned God. It all got twisted about since the
Christians started messing with the old deities. And the Wiccans just made one
big stew of it all to cover all the bases and be on the safe side. They may not
be wrong however. In France, the Gauls came to call him Cernunnos or Carnonos
or Cerunincos, which all simply mean the
horned one or the antlered one. I
suppose we might go with Cernunnos.”
“Wherever you look, there was always a god of the
forest, the earth, the water… a god of low places, valleys, sources, meadows.
His trees were always small trees. Healing trees. The willow, the elder, the
rowan. Not a sky god. Not a war god. He was also, as often as not, a god of
agriculture and fertility. And death and healing, even resurrection. Fall, winter, and spring, the seasons. Nature
again. It was easy in the old days to believe in such a divinity. And it was
wise to pay tribute to him. Forests, fields, death, rebirth, the cycles and
forces of nature were rather more … central.”
-:-
"Stag Night"
pencil drawing, digital effects
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
"At the head of the bed was sculpted a huge tree, which
rose from a tangle of roots and interwoven grasses or creepers and spread on the
walls and under the ceiling.
It took a sort of knack,
a subtle shift in vision and a certain familiarity with Van’s twisting and
fractal designs, to realize that the tree was actually two slender stags,
rearing up belly-to-belly, muzzles raised, legs grappling. Their massive leafy
antlers spread up and out like a petrified fountain and ended in a foamy, lacy,
semiformal trellis of finely tooled flower heads.
The stags might be fighting, but seeing how their long
cocks and serpentine tongues were entwined in two labyrinthine knots, they
might also be doing something else entirely.
Armin blinked, dumbfounded, then blinked again, and
uncannily, the tree was just a tree once more..."
-:-
"Cernunnos (3)"
pencil drawing, digital effects
© Katherine Wyvern
-:-
“There has always been something mystical about the
stag and his antlers, in all the old Indo-European cultures. The stag was
important enough to have his own constellation, roughly where modern
astronomers place Ophiuchus. The Celts put it nicely, saying that the stag
carried the solar disk in his crown. His antlers and his strength are greatest
in the autumn, they are lost in
the winter and emerge again in
the spring. He incarnates the death of nature and its awakening. He and
Cernunnos are avatars of the fall, of the death of nature and its rebirth.
Cycles again.”
-:-
I am immensely grateful toe Evernight Publishing and Jay Aheer of Simply Defined Art for including my moon cycle illustration in the cover of the book.
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