Thursday, October 23, 2008

The Magnificent Horn Post, Prt 2

Alright, so the thing that started it all to make me remake all those textures were the aforementioned antlers. Aaaah beautiful antlers that I delighted in taunting you with. But, I also realized that while small horns are cute and lovely, sometimes it's a lot of fun to wear big demonic or primal ones.

To start with, a cute pair of horns I was going to make one of the 100L expression ones, but I actually forgot to take a picture of it and so I lost that perfect camera angle. I also realized these were harder to do and more complex... so they're a whole 20L more, oh noes!

Cernwn is the Welsh name for "Cernunnos", who is a Celtic god often associated with horned animals, and ram horns. But he took on his own life in Wiccan and neo-pagan mythology, becoming more than just a ram headed snake and became the "Lord of the Wild Things", which is why I devoted another pair of horns to him.

Mmmm feel the manliness! He's commonly referred to as just "The Lord" in neo-pagan rituals, and is normally invoked to represent the forces of masculinity.

"Ba'al" is actually just a Hebrew word for master, or lord, so there are many Hebrew gods who ended up falling into the name, including some humans who were in positions of power. Most commonly though, Baal applies to a cultist image of a false god. He isn't depicted particularly with horns... but looking at them the name came to me. Some fun trivia, the term "Beelzebub" is actually a pun, based off of "Baal Zebul", which means "Lord Prince" and was an honored and divine title. "Baal Zebub" means "Lord of the Flies" which was a term that was coined to mock the followers of Baal Zebul and later evolved into a term for the devil.

Baphomet was actually a badly garbled name for Muhammad.. that was some crazy telephone game up from the Crusades, huh? He isn't normally depicted with these types of horns, due to a very famous drawing by Levi, but I was having enough trouble thinking of horned gods as it was :P But, I had to make a special set of horns especially for Herne.

Herne the Hunter was a ghost of English folklore, who's roughly based on Cernunnos but is based off of a story of King Richard II of England. The story goes that on a hunting trip, Herne accompanied the king where he cornered a white stag, but the stag attacked the king, and Herne sacrificed himself to save him. According to legend, he was brought back to life by a wizard who made Herne wear the antlers of the stag as a part of the ritual. In exchange, he lost his ability to hunt, and he was hung by the King's other hunstmen for keeping the loot to himself.

Yeeeaah... well... avoid huntsmen and kings and you should be ok wearing these, I hope. Let me know if you end up in any oak trees.

These horns aren't actually what I'd call antlers, only antler inspired...those are still to come ;)

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