The sacred stag: Cernunnos, the vision of Saint Eustace and the Physiologus
The stag between Celts and Christianity: the horned god Cernunnos, the Gundestrup cauldron, the legend of Saint Eustace and Psalm 42.
A stag's antlers fall every year at the end of winter and grow back larger in the following months. This cycle, clearly visible to anyone who frequented the woods, made the stag an image of renewal and of the power of wild nature. In the Celtic world the animal was linked to a horned deity, while medieval Christianity transformed it into a figure of the soul and even into the bearer of a vision of Christ.
The horned god
The only written record of the name Cernunnos is found on the so-called Pillar of the Boatmen, a monument dedicated to Jupiter by the guild of boatmen of Lutetia under the emperor Tiberius and discovered in 1711 beneath the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris. On one of the blocks appears a god with stag's antlers from which hang two torcs, the Celtic neck rings, accompanied by an inscription bearing his name, now partly damaged.
By extension scholars also call other antlered figures Cernunnos, although it is not certain that they bore the same name. The most famous is on the silver cauldron of Gundestrup, discovered in a Danish peat bog in 1891 and usually dated between the second and first centuries BC: a figure seated cross-legged holds a torc in one hand and a ram-headed serpent in the other, surrounded by animals.
A figure carved on the rocks of Val Camonica, in Lombardy, in the Naquane area, also shows a being with branching antlers and a torc on its arm, beside a serpent. Its dating and identification remain debated, but the image suggests that a stag god was known to the Alpine peoples of the Iron Age as well.
From the hunt to conversion: Eustace
Christianity took up the stag in a new key. According to the legend of Saint Eustace, a Roman general named Placidus, at the time of the emperor Trajan, was pursuing a great stag during a hunt when he saw a shining crucifix appear between its antlers and heard the voice of Christ. Converted, he took the name Eustace and, according to the story, then faced a long series of trials before his martyrdom.
The legend, known from Greek and Latin texts and spread in the West above all through the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine in the thirteenth century, enjoyed great artistic success. In Rome the church of Sant'Eustachio, near the Pantheon, still bears at the top of its façade a stag's head with the cross between its antlers. An almost identical story was later attributed to Saint Hubert, patron of hunters.
The thirsting stag and the enemy of serpents
Another source of Christian symbolism is Psalm 42, which in the Vulgate, where it is numbered 41, begins with the words «Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum»: as the hart longs for the springs, so the soul longs for God. The verse inspired the image of stags drinking from the rivers of Paradise, frequent in early Christian mosaics and baptisteries.
The Physiologus, a Greek text of symbolic zoology probably composed in Alexandria between the second and fourth centuries, adds that the stag drives serpents out of their holes and kills them. For this reason medieval bestiaries made it a figure of Christ defeating the devil, and the stag appeared beside serpents on capitals, illuminated manuscripts and church decorations.
The stag also had a place in Greek myth, where it was sacred to Artemis and Heracles had to capture the golden-horned Ceryneian hind. But it is above all between the god of the Celts and the hunter saint that its capacity to adapt can be seen: the same animal of the woods could express both the power of nature and the call to conversion.