Rhys Kaminski-Jones
Thomas Pennant was a self-consciously enlightened traveller. Ideas that preoccupied him in his tours of eighteenth-century Wales and Scotland included the improvement of agriculture and industry, the documentation of social progress, and the scientific study of the natural world. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that Pennant also pioneered another quite different aspect of knowledge in the Celtic fringe: the placement of ancient Celtic gods in the mountainous landscapes of Wales.
In Pennant’s second volume of Welsh tours, the Journey to Snowdon (1781), he reports on an excursion from ‘the ancient seat of the Vaughans’ at Cors-y-gedol, a sixteenth-century hall in Meririonydd where he ‘was entertained by William Vaughan, esquire, for some days, in the style of an antient baron’. Pennant declares that ‘There are few places which abound more in British antiquities’ than the environs of this hall, leading his readers around a selection on nearby uplands: the Iron Age hillfort of Craig-y-Dinas, a ‘wonderous group of Druidical antiquities’ near Llyn Irddyn, and various ancient cromlechs and carneddau. At times, Pennant declares that the meaning of these monuments ‘must remain unaccounted for…by reason of the remoteness of the time, and the mystery of the antient priesthood’. But in one instance, Pennant is happy to make an exception.
At a pair of hilltop carneddau known then, according to Pennant, as ‘Bryn Cornyn Jau [Iau]’—now going by the less dramatic name ‘Llecheiddior, Cairns’—our traveller invokes a Gaulish deity discovered less than a century earlier, making this the first recorded Cambrian appearance of ‘Cernunnos’:
‘I met with on my return to Corsegedol, two great Carnedds, placed on small eminences, near to each other… The place is most remarkable for the name, Bryn Cornyn JAU. The neighbours of this antiquity are fond of rendering it, The Hill of the Horns of Jove. It more probably was a place of sacrifice before or after the chase, and derived its title from the horned deity Cernunnos, who was venerated by the Gauls, and applied to as a protector from the dangers attendant on the diversion [i.e. hunting]. Both the Gauls and Britons had one common religion; so that Cernunnos might as reasonably be supposed to have a place here as in France.’
The name ‘Cernunnos’, and the concept of a Gaulish horned god, had reappeared in Paris in 1711, when a relief depicting the deity emerged—in suitably dramatic fashion—from beneath the choir of Notre Dame cathedral.[1] There had therefore been little time to establish him across the Channel, despite growing scholarly consensus that Ancient Gauls and Britons shared a Celtic culture. We know that when Pennant actually visited Bryn Cornyn Iau in 1770 (as recorded in a notebook now being edited by Ffion Mair Jones), he made no identification with Cernunnos. His friend and collaborator John Lloyd of Wigfair, writing in the same notebook, assumed that the name straightforwardly indicated an altar to the classical god Jove/Jupiter/Zeus (who was sometimes depicted with horns), and believed the site was thus unlikely to have been purely Druidic—perhaps indicating Roman attempts to usurp a native holy place. But by the time of the Tour’s publication in 1781, Pennant had developed another theory. Relying on the scholarship of Jacques Martin, whose Religion des Gaulois (1727) helped disseminate the image of Cernunnos discovered in Paris, and probably also influenced by the Cornish antiquarian William Borlase, who had included the god in a 1769 survey of ‘Druid Doctrines’, Pennant decided that a local name suggestive of horns was proof enough to welcome Cernunnos to Wales.[2]
Sadly, modern archaeology has not followed Pennant’s thinly-evidenced flight of fancy. So why this pagan enthusiasm from a major proponent of the Welsh enlightenment? Well, firstly (as I explore in my forthcoming book), it was not in fact unusual in this period for an interest in Welsh antiquities to go together with a passion for scientific progress.[3] Using advances in historical scholarship to gaze into the Celtic past was as much an enlightenment pastime as classifying plants, extracting minerals, and improving industries—all were within the remit of an author like Pennant, who sought to revive the intellectual and cultural reputation of Wales across all fields.
Secondly, Pennant had a particular interpretation of Druidism which was helped by finding a hilltop god. Unlike other Welsh authors like Henry Rowlands and Iolo Morganwg—who believed that the Druids had been an admirable intellectual elite, with a monotheistic religion inherited from Biblical patriarchs—Pennant did not accept the ancient priests of Wales as proto-Christian proto-scientists. Predominently, for Pennant, they were superstitious primitives, whose inheritors in eighteenth-century Wales were not elite scientists like himself, but the poor commoners and ‘modern Druidesses’ [i.e. folk-healers], who clung to ‘follies that have the sanction of antiquity’. Connecting ‘Bryn Cornyn JAU’ to the image of a Gaulish deity distanced the Druids conclusively from his own enlightened status: these were not ancient worshippers of God-in-nature, but adherents of a superstitiously personified pantheon.
Pennant believed that the vestiges of Druidism and superstition in Wales had ‘been gradually dropped, in proportion as the age grew enlightened’—they would, presumably, vanish completely as the nation progressed towards modernity. It might have come as a shock to him, then, that the connection between Cernunnos and Wales that Pennant initiated would eventually become part of a revived pagan religiosity. This would take some time and effort: no solid evidence for an ancient cult of Cernunnos has been found in Wales. But Sir John Rhŷs, the Victorian Professor of Celtic at Oxford University (and an editor of Pennant’s Welsh Tours), would eventually suggest that Bendigeidfran, the giant king of Britain from the medieval Welsh Mabinogi, was a Cernunnos figure.[4] Further into the twentieth century, the anthropologist and folklorist Margaret Murray—with a little help from forgeries by the Welsh neo-druid Iolo Morganwg—was tentatively conflating Cernunnos with the pseudo-historical Welsh hero Hu Gadarn, a claim made in her hugely influential work on The God of the Witches (1931).[5] From here, the inclusion of a semi-Welsh Cernunnos figure in the pantheon of modern paganism became unavoidable—in particular via the deeply Murray-inspired mid-century traditions of Wicca.
With Cernunnos’s increasing popularity as an aspect of the neopagan ‘Horned God’, he began to filter back into entirely unrelated records of Welsh history gathered by Pennant. Take, for instance, the wooden effigy of Saint Derfel Gadarn housed in Llandderfel church, which Pennant reported to have been ‘the subject of much superstition in antient times’. Pennant was here referring to early-modern Welsh ‘superstitions’ of prophecy and Popery; the verifiable history of this carving was already compellingly sinister, with the human figure attached to it having been transported to London during the Reformation, and burned in the execution pyre of a Franciscan martyr.[6] But in the writings of twentieth-century occultists like Lewis Spence and Wiccan founder Gerald Gardner, the icon became a preserved pagan effigy, still worshipped as such in the sixteenth century, and representing Hu Gadarn and/or Cernunnos.[7] The horned deity of Notre Dame continues to find ways into Welsh-inspired paganism: Mhara Starling, a self-identified ‘Welsh Witch and Celtic Pagan’, has written about how the ‘antlered appearance’ of the Welsh supernatural figure Gwyn ap Nudd in neopagan depictions ‘seems to be a wholly modern invention, likely fusing him with other popular entities in modern Paganism…like Cernunnos’.[8]
5,000 people in Wales recorded their religion as ‘Pagan’ in the 2021 census (a write-in option that doesn’t include those who instead defined themselves as Wiccans or Druids). It’s not a huge number, but likely more than Thomas Pennant would have predicted in 1781. Pennant seems to have brought Cernunnos to Wales in order to emphasise the spiritual gulf that separated enlightened Welsh moderns from their Druidic ancestors. Instead, by imagining some desolate piles of stone as the antlers of a forgotten deity, he played a part in giving the Horned God a new home.
[1] For the influence of this discovery on eighteenth century Celticism, see Ian Stewart, The Celts: a Modern History (2025), chapter 3.
[2] See Borlase, Antiquities…of the Counties of Cornwall (1769), pp. 106–7.
[3] Rhys Kaminski-Jones, Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain, 1707–1819: True Britons and Celtic Empires (August 2025), chapter 3.
[4] John Rhŷs, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (1901), Vol. II, p. 552.
[5] Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (1st ed. 1931), chapter 1.
[6] Anne Dillon, ‘John Forest and Derfel Gadarn: A Double Execution’, Recusant History, 28.1 (2006): 1–21.
[7] Lewis Spence, Druids: Their Origin and History p. 85; Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).
[8] Mhara Starling, Welsh Fairies: A Guide to the Lore, Legends, Denizens & Deities of the Otherworld (2024).