Deer Folklore: Omens, Cults, and White Stag Legends

Human relationships with deer stretch back thousands of years. Archaeologists uncovered red deer skulls at Star Carr in Yorkshire which are 11,000 years old. No one knows what they were used for, if they had practical applications or were used in shamanic rituals.

But it suggests some kind of relationship between humans and deer, even if we’re not sure what that involved. Deer appear in mythology all over the world, although this post will focus on the British Isles.

From shapeshifting deer to fairy cattle, deer cults to white stag legends, let’s explore the appearance of the deer in British and Irish folklore and legend…

Deer Parks

Knole in Kent still has deer in the park even now, making it the last medieval deer park in the county. Archbishop Bourchier enclosed the area in 1456 to create the park to allow deer hunting, and fallow deer still wander the parkland even now. Raby Castle in County Durham also has a deer park, with both red and fallow deer. Deer have lived here since the Norman era.

But in terms of folklore? We have to go to Dublin for that.

Dublin’s Phoenix Park is home to around 500 deer, dating back to its creation as a Royal Deer Park for King Charles II.

Back in 2006, a radio announcement exclaimed that a dual carriageway would run through the park, with ten-metre high walls screening it from the park itself. The broadcast included crowd sounds from the assembled protestors, and even construction work, as if the road was already underway. People protested the impact such an undertaking would have on the deer population.

As Brendan Nolan points out, no one seemed to notice the date of the news announcement – 1 April. It took until Monday 3 April for the big reveal it was all an April Fool’s joke, so some people do continue to believe the announcement was real (2015: 60).

The Deer Cult Hypothesis

In the 1930s, J. G. McKay proposed a hypothesis of an ancient deer cult and a deer goddess. I read the article but much of it depends on conjecture and McKay assumes a pan-European deer cult as conclusive fact…without much evidence. McKay admits that the “tales, traditions, customs, and references” he’s based his idea on are scattered through various sources, meaning there is no single body of knowledge from which to draw, so he’s “brought the disconnected facts collected by others into order and system” (1932: 144). He even admits the facts only make sense if you view them as evidence of deer cults. Without this perspective, they’re meaningless. Hm.

One of his starting points is old tales of “mysterious feminine characters” that own, herd, and milk deer. The deer are linked with the fairies, and yet McKay decides this “could only be explained as the last surviving vestiges of a former deer-cult and deer-goddess cult” (1932: 145). Personally, the link between deer and fairies is interesting enough on its own, without trying to bring cults into it. The link could also be explained as what it sounds like: the deer being the fairy equivalent of cattle.

After all, in the Highlands, people considered deer to be fairy cattle, and if a fairy woman transformed into an animal, it would be a hind, and only a hind. That’s worth bearing in mind, given witches would become hares, mice, or cats (1932: 148). Where witches were mortal women, fairies were supernatural women, so it was unsurprising that the deer form was reserved for them. Witches couldn’t transform into deer.

It gets weirder

McKay then goes in a strange direction by admitting no one speaks of the deer goddesses as, well, goddesses, and instead calls them the bean-sídhe, or fairy woman. He also links these figures to the Cailleach, insisting the deer goddesses to be gigantic in stature. His evidence?

“The gigantic stature of these Old Women, their love for their deer, the fact that their dealings are almost exclusively with hunters, and the fact that each is referred to as a bean-sídhe, or supernatural woman, seems sufficient warrant for calling them Deer-Goddesses” (1932: 150).

He notes their lack of domestication, and their links with the wild, although the same can be said of fairy beings.

He also dismisses stories that don’t fit his theory, such as a legend in which a fairy man rides a deer backwards. The fairy man warns a Highlander that heavy snow is on the way before vanishing. Isn’t it interesting that a fairy man would ride a deer, an animal associated with fairies? Not to McKay, who dismisses it as “too slight to be of importance” (1932: 150). But given his insistence that fairy men or giants never interact with deer, I think this story is important, since it suggests a more general link between fairies and deer.

But wait! There’s more!

McKay even brings Thomas the Rhymer into his theory, describing the Queen of Elphame as “probably a medieval and feudal development of some old Highland deer-goddess” (1932: 151). I mean, we’ll ignore the fact Thomas’ story occurs in the Borders, and nowhere near the Highlands, and ask why McKay is so intent on recasting fairy women and fairy queens as deer goddesses?

While it’s impossible to say there wasn’t a deer cult, it seems to me that McKay has gathered fascinating evidence of the links between fairies, deer, and even witches. Yet he was also writing at a time when the idea of ancient cults or matriarchal societies was very much in vogue. Arthur Geddes proposed a theory that these ‘deer women’ were actually based on nomadic deer herders (1951). Far from gigantic goddesses or fairy women, the tales unearthed by McKay actually suggest a real population, now lost to time.

Deer Goddesses?

McKay dismisses Irish folklore, which is very bizarre since there is a link between the Irish goddess Flidais (Flee-ish) and deer, since she milked her herds of both deer and cattle.

Morgan Daimler notes the use of deer and cattle to represent her in mythology, while Flidais is said to have fed vast numbers of people with the milk from her herd (2016).

Some link Artemis and Diana with deer, as the Greek and Roman goddesses respectively of hunting. Actaeon sees Artemis bathing nude, and the goddess is so enraged that she turns him into a stag. His own hounds tear him to bits.

Indigenous American lore also shares tales of Deer Woman. Poet and scholar Carolyn Dunn discusses the Deer Woman from her Cherokee/Creek/Seminole/Choctaw perspective here.

Cernunnos

I couldn’t talk about deer goddesses without at least mentioning one of the more famous antlered gods – Cernunnos.

People confidently describe Cernunnos as a Celtic god, though it’s worth noting the depictions of him in statue form come from Gaul. So he was likely a Gaulish god, though it’s hard to call him a pan-Celtic god. Gregory Wright notes that scholars tend to use his name as a “catch-all for Celtic horned gods”, even though there’s little evidence anyone knew his name outside Gaul (2022). Often referred to as ‘the horned god’, in neopagan depictions Cernunnos has antlers and is often linked with stags. There was nothing written about him in the contemporary period so we can only guess at what he represented.

The Cernunnos Resurgence

But gods don’t always follow neat or linear lines and spiritual movements resurrected him in the nineteenth century as people began to explore pre-Christian ideas (Wright 2022). Much of the mis-belief that he was a god of witches before Christianity comes from Margaret Murray, but unfortunately, many of her generalisations have stuck around. Cernunnos even gets linked with Herne the Hunter, who I’ve discussed at length here.

Still, Cernunnos does appear on the Pillar of the Boatman from the 1st century CE. His torc hangs from his antlers and the pillar even includes his name. We don’t know who worshipped him, or why, but his appearance on the pillar shows he was important enough to include. A horned god also appears on the Gundestrup Cauldron, though there’s no way to know if it’s Cernunnos, or a different horned god. Horned gods appear in Greco-Roman mythology (hello, Pan and Silvanus) and usually rule wild places, so it’s not a mad stretch to assume Cernunnos might have done the same.

Deer Omens

In Hebridean folklore, there was a belief that seeing or encountering a lone deer in a place where you didn’t normally find deer was a bad omen. Worse still, something awful would either happen to the person who saw the deer, or in the place where the deer was seen (MacPhail 1897: 382). Malcolm MacPhail recorded a memory of a drowning in an area where someone had seen a deer shortly before. In this instance, the deer apparently ran towards the sea, and no one had seen deer in the area within living memory (1897: 383).

A similar legend occurs in the area of Lochlacsvat. Two brothers spotted a deer on the island, and one of them swam across. However, he found no deer on the island when he got there, so he returned to the mainland. Once back on shore, he saw the deer on the island, right where it had been originally. He swam back to the island but again, the deer seemed to have vanished. He tried to return to the mainland but this time exhaustion overcame him and he drowned (MacPhail 1897: 383). Here, seeing a deer in such a fashion became an omen of your own death.

Fionn mac Cumhail and Sadhbh

In Irish legend, mighty hunter Fionn Mac Cumhaill enjoyed hunting with his two hounds and came across a doe in a clearing. Fionn didn’t know it, but this was no ordinary deer. Rather, this was Sadhbh, enchanted to take the form of a deer. She’d refused to marry an evil druid, who cursed her to take the form of a doe and be eaten by wolves. Luckily, Fionn’s two hounds recognised Sadhbh as a human in animal form, and Fionn took the deer back to his lands. This broke the curse and Sadhbh could finally regain her human form.

The pair fell in love and married, with Sadhbh falling pregnant soon after. Sadly, their happiness could not last. Fionn and his warriors left for battle and Sadhbh paced the battlements, looking for their return. One day, she thought she saw Fionn in the distance and she ran to meet him. She left the edge of Fionn’s lands and turned back into a doe. The evil druid seized her. The devastated Fionn never managed to find Sadhbh again. Luckily, he did find his son, lost in the wild, who he named Oisín, or ‘Little Deer’.

White Stag Legends

King David I of Scotland encountered a white stag in the woods outside Edinburgh. The stag prepared to attack and the king begged for divine intervention. The legend varies, with the king either grabbing the stag’s antlers which turned into a cross, or a phantom hand giving the king a silver cross (The Newsroom 2017). St Andrew later appeared to King David in a dream, telling him to found an abbey to mark his deliverance. This monastery went on to become Holyrood Abbey.

Sources describe white stags as Otherworld messengers in Celtic folklore, although this is always difficult to verify (The Newsroom 2017). As in, which folklore? Some sources described them as messengers from Annwn in Welsh legends. Others suggest they appear when laws are broken.

White stags in Arthurian legends represent spiritual quests; or, rather, the pursuit of the stag represents the quest. Seeing the white stag often prompts a new quest (Evans 2014).

What do we make of this stag and deer folklore?

The thing that fascinated me was the way that we might associate deer with a sense of gentleness and almost innocence because they are prey animals.

But the stags can be quite dangerous. It’s quite interesting how the stags seem to represent one thing, and the deer represents something slightly different in these different legends.

While the idea of a deer cult was an interesting one, even if there’s not any evidence for it, it does lead to a discussion of the link between deer and fairies. This, in many ways, underscores how important stories of fairies are to the lore on this particular set of islands on the edge of Europe.

What do you make of deer? Let me know below!

References

Daimler, Morgan (2016), Gods and Goddesses of Ireland: A Guide to Irish Deities, Alresford: Moon Books.

Evans, Zteve (2014), ‘Mythical Beasts: The White Stag’, Under the influence!, https://ztevetevans.wordpress.com/2014/04/26/mythical-beasts-the-white-stag/.

Geddes, Arthur (1951). ‘Scots Gaelic Tales of Herding Deer or Reindeer Traditions of the Habitat and Transhumance of Semi-Domesticated “Deer”, and of Race Rivalry.’ Folklore, 62 (2), pp. 296–311.

MacPhail, Malcolm (1897). ‘Folklore from the Hebrides. II’. Folklore, 8 (4), pp. 380-386.

McKay, J. G. (1932). ‘The Deer-Cult and the Deer-Goddess Cult of the Ancient Caledonians’. Folklore, 43(2), pp. 144–174.

The Newsroom (2017), ‘The legend of the white stag of Edinburgh’, The Newsroom, https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/the-legend-of-the-white-stag-of-edinburgh-842492.

Nolan, Brendan (2015), Dublin Urban Legends, Dublin: The History Press Ireland.

Wright, Gregory (2022), ‘“’Cernunnos’, Mythopedia, https://mythopedia.com/topics/cernunnos. Accessed on 24 Sep. 2024.