The Stag Hunt

We had a fantastic Yuletide / Alban Arthan season with family and friends. This was Baby Willow's first Christmas / Yule. This was also the first time our grandson, Shad, portrayed the Stag in the Stag Hunt.

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 The Stag Hunt was a folkplay I did as a child, and I passed it on to my family, since my offspring, Rhiannon, was age two. It is performed in various British Isles communities and in places British / Cornish / Welsh people settled. Other folkplays are similar, all over the world -- sacred hunts, deer dances, deer images too. It is likely a commemoration of a sacred Hunt and possibly a fertility ceremony. There are images of Stag Hunts in prehistoric art. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance might be a similar custom.

The image, above, is my grandson Shad, his cousins and friends, and his puppydawg, doing the stag hunt. Shad is the stag.
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The legend goes: Llew, the Sun God, and Donia, the Earth Goddess, had a quarrel. Llew stormed off, leaving the earth cold and dark. Their daughter, the goddess Mawb (Mab, Madrone, Mabh, Maeva, Mab Queen of the Fae) -- Mawb means "mother" and "all" in old Cymraeg language -- anyway, Mawb turned her husband into a deer and led the sacred Hunt to capture him. We just called him Herne or the Bucca. Although he gave consent for his children to kill and eat him, as a deer, he lost human consciousness, the Bucca ran away. The "hunters", usually small children, hunt the deer and drag him back to be symbolically eaten -- by eating gingerbread cookies in the shape of a deer, and venison stew. 

Below is a mesolithic deer headress (L) found in Starr Car, UK; a stag mummer from a mummer's play in the 16th century, and a modern stag "beastie" from a Morris Dance. These are all examples of FolkPlays.

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