the headless body of the god now moved only by the drive to recapitate

[intertribal]

Deer figurine found at burial sites of the 5th century BC Pazyryk, nomads who buried their horses wearing antler headdresses.

I realized this morning that I have become obsessed with deer.  Not real deer, per se, although we did see a truckload of reindeer at the local grocery store being harnessed up to a sleigh, and their Santa walking up from a crappy American car at the far end of a parking lot.  Symbolic deer.  What deer mean to people. 

L'Age du Renne (the age of the reindeer) was the poetic term for the Magdalenian age, the end of the Pleistocene.  Then there was the Sorceror - the antler-wearing human shaman painted in the Cave Trois Frères.  Domestication started soon after, in the Holocene, but did not replace hunting and hunting ceremonies.  As our prey they were put on coats of arms and commissioned tapestries, their heads mounted in hunting lodges all over the north as a symbol of the Swiss Family Robinson way of thinking: "father, I think I've just killed the most beautiful animal in the world!"  Always noble, always fair, always quarry: fairy-cattle made of magic, with crucifixes between their antlers.  Only in the Ramayana was the deer ever used for evil.  Now we run over them with cars and write letters to the newspaper asking for legalized extermination procedures - not just for the sake of our hood ornaments, but for them, the deer.  Meanwhile more and more people have imagined their revenge: the skeletal deer-god of upstate New York in Wendigo, the Nightwalker/Forest God of Mononoke-hime, even the reanimated zombie deer of the Queens of the Stone Age video for "No One Knows". 

When I was in high school and we had to write a creative story about a meaningful event to pass a state exam - demonstrating proper use of English, I guess - I wrote about this father and son that go hunting in the woods and kill a magic stag.  I don't remember what happens at the end.  I think they were attacked by fairies in their cabin, and the body of the stag disappeared during the attack. 

I also played a deer once, back when I did Javanese dance.  Kancil is our Bambi - a poor lonesome fawn separated from its mother who steals vegetables from the villagers' gardens.