Herne the Hunter oil

How to Use It

Witchcraft & Folk Magick

• Invocation: anoint the brow and breastbone before calling on Herne in the forest or at the altar.
• Courage: dress a red or brown candle when you need to go after something with a hunter’s focus.
• Wild Hunt nights: anoint a candle on stormy winter nights, from Samhain to Yule, when the Hunt is said to ride.

Ceremonial & Occult Magick

• God-form work: anoint the brow when assuming the god-form of the Horned Hunter in rites of the wheel of the year.
• Protection: anoint the doorframe and the four corners of the house, asking Herne to keep watch like a forest keeper.

A Simple Working

• On a winter night, set an antler or an oak branch on your altar.
• Anoint a brown or green candle with Herne the Hunter oil.
• Light it and call Herne by name three times.
• State the one thing you are hunting for in your life.
• Anoint your breastbone and sit in the dark until you feel ready.
• Leave an offering of red wine or bread outdoors at the foot of a tree.

Pairs Well With

• Oak leaves: the tree of Herne’s Oak.
• A brown candle: for earth, forest and animal work.
• Antler: a natural focus for his altar.
• Horned God oil: for rites honouring the wider Horned God.

What You Receive

Herne the Hunter oil, available in 2 dram, 1 oz and 16 oz sizes.

Origin & Lore

Herne first appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor, written around 1597, as a former keeper of Windsor Forest who haunts it after death. Later writers made him the leader of a spectral hunt, and in the twentieth century he was linked to Cernunnos and adopted into Wicca as a form of the Horned God. Herne the Hunter oil is a modern blend made for invoking him.

A ghost with great ragged horns walks round an oak in Windsor Forest at midnight in winter, blasting trees and shaking a chain. That is how Shakespeare introduced Herne the Hunter.

Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Windsor Castle of 1843 built Herne into a full legend. Margaret Murray, in The God of the Witches of 1931, argued that he was a survival of an ancient horned god, an idea now rejected by historians but influential in Wicca. A tree known as Herne’s Oak stood in Windsor Great Park until it fell in the nineteenth century.