Sláine The Horned God Revisited

Matriarchy versus Patriarchy (1)

Jan 13, 2025

In The Horned God saga, I featured my hero Sláine, champion of the Goddess, at a time in the ancient world where the matriarchy was being taken over by the patriarchy.

Matriarchal fantasy heroes are thin on the ground. I’m not aware of any others, sadly. So The Horned God didn’t encourage more writers to follow suit, as far as I know. That is surely a confirmation of the patriarchal world we live in today.

What’s the difference between the heroes you may ask? Patriarchal heroes are hard and cool; they’re rarely wrong and they rarely acknowledge emotions. Judge Dredd would be a prime example and, in a way, we were taking the piss out of patriarchal heroes with our extreme portrayal of a future cop. Many readers, as we all know, didn’t see it that way. Arguably, that was a miscalculation on our part.

Joe Pineapples is another super-cool example. Hence his transvestite ‘breakdown’ – or breakup.

Matriarchal heroes – following the path of the Horned God – acknowledge vulnerability, indecision and mistakes. There’s a memorable moment in The Horned God where Sláine says, ‘I don’t know.’ He hasn’t got a clue what to do next. I’m not sure that’s reflected in the art. The expression on his face suggests, to me at least, that Simon Bisley wasn’t entirely convinced by our hero’s hesitation. But a certain tension, a difference of interpretation or even disparity between script and art can be a good thing. It gives the final product an energy which it may otherwise lack. You’ll see the way of The Horned God is a path I certainly follow in my subsequent blogs on this very subject. There’s plenty of hesitation and prevarication on my part!

I quoted various sources for evidence of the ancient matriarchy. Notably Monica Sjoo – the Great Cosmic Mother. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. And The White Goddess by Robert Graves.

But, according to The Independent newspaper on 4^th July 2008, Graves stole the idea for the White Goddess from his mistress:

“Between 1926 and 1939, he was learning from her what she was doing and thinking,” Dr Javcobs said. “He was taking her ideas, her research, he was simply shovelling it in to his own books.... She left her manuscript in Majorca. She later wrote to him [Graves] and told him to burn the manuscript. We now know that he didn't. It all appeared in dribble form in The White Goddess. He used it for his own ends without mentioning it to her. She only found out in the 1950s.”

A classic example, surely, of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy.

Another primary source came from a coven of transgenerational witches, who I’m indebted to for the original material they provided for The Horned God and for Finn. I’ve written about them before and the horrified reaction of 2000AD editor Steve McManus, who exclaimed, ‘I can’t have a witch writing for 2000AD!’

Transgenerational, this coven traced their heritage and knowledge back to the witch Alice Kyteller.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Alice:

Dame Alice Kyteler (/ˈkɪtlər/;^[1] c. 1260 – after 1324) was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland.^[2][3] She is believed to have fled the country to either England or Flanders, but there is no record of her after her escape from persecution.^[4] Her associate Petronilla de Meath (de Midia, meaning of Meath, her first name also spelt Petronella) was flogged and burned to death at the stake on 3 November 1324, after being tortured and confessing to the heretical crimes she, Kyteler, and Kyteler's followers were alleged to have committed.

Such claims are usually haughtily dismissed by occult ‘experts’. Probably out of jealousy, they insist modern witchcraft began in recent times with Gerald Gardner.

Not so. The accounts the coven told me fit a lineage that goes back to medieval times.

And recently, I’ve read a new matriarchal source that I would have found useful when writing The Horned God. Not In His Image, by John Lamb Lash. My thanks to my friend Daniel for pointing him in my direction. And the fact that Lash was inspired to write his book in the very village where I live! That feels very much like the Muse to me, which I’ve talked about in Pageturners. Her talents include the ‘library angel’ phenomenon that many of us are familiar with. You’re interested in a (probably obscure) subject, and then a book or a person who is an expert on the subject mysteriously appears in your life.

Lash describes the Gnostic Goddess Sophia and the usurper patriarchal God – the Demiurge – that defeated her followers.

It’s a valuable, very wise but somewhat dry book, but it has the most ferocious and excellent accounts of the patriarchy and the Christian and other religions that enforce it. Here’s just one:

The redeemer complex has four components: creation of a father god independent of a female counterpart; the trial and testing (conceived as a historical drama) of the righteous few or “Chosen People”; the mission of the creator god’s son (the messiah) to save the world; and the final apocalyptic judgement delivered by father and son upon humanity.” (Page 16)

You can see why I hate American superhero stories, which are riddled with variations on these redeemer, saviour and other patriarchal themes.

The three Abrahamic religions are unashamed patriarchy, but at least with Gnosticism, you might think here at least there are role models to admire, especially when its deity is the pagan Goddess Sophia.

Sadly not.

Although there are impressive individuals across the centuries described as Gnostics, there are none to admire in the organised, spiritual sense of the word.

Apart from pagan covens, as far as I know, no one is out there worshipping Sophia the Great Goddess.

Yet, in theory, Gnosticism is admirable. By definition, it means we have gnosis, knowledge, we have the answers already within us, the gift of our intuition, our higher self, the Muse, the Goddess, call her what you will.

We don’t need those Abrahamic books.

And we certainly don’t need the intervention of charlatan ‘wise’ men who seek to interpret them and ‘guide’ their sheep-like followers. But actually, control them.

And that control is very real. A Catholic cousin once said to me, ‘I follow my conscience. Unto thyself be true.’ But that’s not Catholic. That’s actually Gnosticism. Catholic priests will tell her what to do and think and if her conscience says otherwise, e.g., if she is considering contraception, then her conscience is wrong and is actually the voice of the devil (of course). In that context, she cannot be true to herself and remain a genuine Catholic.

‘Unto thyself be true’ is uncomfortably close to Aleister Crowley’s ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ This is definitively gnostic and Crowley actually took his famous phrase – and the name Thelema – from Rabelais written in the sixteenth century, just one example of how Gnosticism has survived in the shadows across the centuries.

In practice, Gnosticism has a cosmology, easily as complex, confusing and unpleasant as the religions of the book. But it differs from them because Abrahamic religions are obsessed with rigidity and dogma and Gnosticism is the complete opposite. Even though, in summary, it states that Earth is Hell, ruled over by the demonic Demiurge, more familiarly known to us as Yahweh or Jehovah. Although it has endlessly changing, bewildering, undogmatic variations, nevertheless, at its core is always this Satanic interpretation and that we must give this Devil his due.

Forget about Sophia, it’s the Demiurge/Yahweh/Jehovah/Lucifer/ Hiram Abiff/The Great Architect of the Universe who was and is followed by gnostics.

Slough Feg’s sinister views, expressed in The Horned Go, are totally gnostic.

It doesn’t bear thinking about. Unless Sláine is there to bring his axe to bear on the enemies of the Goddess.

At this point, you might understandably say, that was all a long time ago. The three Abrahamic religions have caused and are still causing enough wars and misery in the world, so who cares about an obscure fourth religion that hardly anyone knows or cares about

Because its obscurity, usually hidden from public scrutiny, is deliberate.

Because it is the root of and the triumph of the patriarchy. Today.

Because it is a shadow religion.

Lacking the structure and definition of the conventional Abrahamic religions that it sometimes appears to be a part of, and other times hides behind, the shadow religion secretly controls them.

‘One ring to rule them all.’