Open main menu



In one of the Jataka tales, Buddha has reincarnated into the form of a deer. This story has many incarnations and names itself: such as "The Story of Ruru Deer",[1] "The Golden Deer",[2] and the Chinese cartoon "A Deer of Nine Colors". The story originated in India around the 4th century BCE.[3] The narrative hails the merits of compassion, empathy, and karma.


Antlered figure from the Gundestrup Cauldron, interior plate A

The Insular Celts have stories involving supernatural deer, deer who are associated with a spiritual figure, and spirits or deities who may take the form of deer.

In some Scottish and Irish tales deer are seen as "fairy cattle" and are herded and milked by a tutelary, benevolent, otherworldly woman (such as a bean sìdhe or in other cases the goddess Flidais), who can shapeshift into the form of a red or white deer.[4] In the West Highlands, this woman of the otherworld selects the individual deer who will be slain in the next day's hunt.[5]

In Ireland, The Cailleach Bhéara ("The Old Woman of Beare"), who lives on an island off the coast of County Cork, takes the form of a deer to avoid capture, and herds her deer down by the shore. The Beare peninsula is also associated with the islands in the western sea that are the lands of the dead.[6] Other Celtic mythological figures such as Oisín and Sadhbh also have connections to deer.

Cernunnos is a mythological figure in Continental Celtic mythology, and possibly one of the figures depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron. He has stag antlers on the top of his head. His role in the religion and mythology is unclear, as there are no particular stories about him.

European folkloreEdit

Detail of Saint Giles and the Hind, c. 1500, by the Master of Saint Gilles



St Hubertus / St Eustace in a 13th-century English manuscript (Biblioteca Marciana)

Saint Hubertus (or "Hubert") is a Christian saint, the patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers, and used to be invoked to cure rabies. The legend of St Hubertus concerned an apparition of a stag with the crucifix between its horns, effecting the worldly and aristocratic Hubert's conversion to a saintly life.



In the 14th century, probably keeping some relation with Saint Eustace's legend, the deer again appears in Christian legend. The Chronicon Pictum contains a story where the later King Saint Ladislaus I of Hungary and his brother the King Géza I of Hungary were hunting in a forest, and a deer with numerous candles on his antlers appeared to them. Saint Ladislaus told his brother that it wasn't a deer but an angel of God, and his antlers were wings; the candles were shining feathers. He also stated his intent to build a cathedral in honor of the Holy Virgin in the place where the deer appeared.[7]


Satet, goddess of the hunt, was shown with the horns of a deer, and sometimes a deer's face. Her daughter Anukis, a river goddess, was sometimes depicted as a gazelle-headed woman.




Andy Orchard proposes a connection between the hart Eikþyrnir atop Valhalla, the hart imagery associated with Heorot, and the Sutton Hoo scepter.[8] Sam Newton identifies both the Sutton Hoo whetstone and the hall Heorot as early English symbols of kingship.[9] Rudolf Simek says that "it is not completely clear what role the stag played in Germanic religion" and theorizes that "the stag cult probably stood in some sort of connexion to Odin's endowment of the dignity of kings."[10]


Heracles, Telephus and the doe (Louvre Museum)

In Greek mythology, the deer is particularly associated with Artemis in her role as virginal huntress. Actaeon, after witnessing the nude figure of Artemis bathing in a pool, was transformed by Artemis into a stag that his own hounds tore to pieces. Callimachus, in his archly knowledgeable "Hymn III to Artemis", mentions the deer that drew the chariot of Artemis:




Magical Deer in Ramayana

In Hindu mythology, the Aitareya Upanishad tells us that the goddess Saraswati takes the form of a red deer called Rohit. Saraswati is the goddess of learning, so learned men use deer skin as clothing and mats to sit upon. A golden deer plays an important role in the epic Ramayana. While in exile in the forest, Rama's wife Sita sees a golden deer and asks Rama and Lakshmana to get it for her. The deer is actually a rakshasa called Maricha in disguise. Maricha takes this form to lure Rama and Lakshmana away from Sita so his nephew Ravana can kidnap her.[citation needed]




For the Huichol people of Mexico,[11] the "magical deer" represents both the power of maize to sustain the body and of the peyote cactus to feed and enlighten the spirit. Animals such as the eagle, jaguar, serpent and deer are of great importance to the Mexican indigenous cultures. For each group, however, one of these animals is of special significance and confers some of its qualities to the tribe.

For the Huichol it is the deer that holds this intimate role. The character of the Huichol tends to be light, flexible and humorous. They have avoided open warfare, neither fighting against the Spanish nor Mexican governments, but holding to their own traditions. The Huichol hunt and sacrifice deer in their ceremonies. They make offerings to the Deer of the Maize to care for their crops, and to the Deer of the Peyote to bring them spiritual guidance and artistic inspiration.




Turkic peoples that converted to Islam brought with them from the Eurasian Steppe their beliefs and cults involving horns, deer, antlers, hides, etc. In the Ottoman Empire, and more specifically in western Asia Minor and Thrace the deer cult seems to have been widespread and much alive, no doubt as a result of the meeting and mixing of Turkic with local traditions. A famous case is the 13th century holy man Geyiklü Baba, ‘Father Deer’, who lived with his deer in the mountain forests of Bursa and gave hind’s milk to a colleague (compare with Saint Giles)[citation needed]. Material in the Ottoman sources is not scarce but it is rather dispersed and very brief, denying us a clear picture of the rites involved.[13]



In Jewish mythology – as discussed in the Talmud (חולין נט ע"ב) – exists a giant kind of stag by the name "Keresh". He is said to live in a mythical forest called "Bei Ilai".


The spirit Furfur in The Goetia is depicted as a hart or winged hart.


In 1914, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók collected two Romanian colinde in Transylvania. The story is of a father who has taught his nine sons only how to hunt, so they know nothing of work and spend all of their time in the forest. One day while hunting a large and beautiful stag, they cross a haunted bridge and are themselves transformed into stags. The distressed father takes his rifle and goes out in search of his missing sons. Finding a group of fine stags gathered around a spring, he drops to one knee and takes aim. The largest stag (eldest son) pleads with his father not to shoot. The father, recognizing his favorite son in the stag, begs his children to come home. The stag then replies that they can never come home: their antlers cannot pass through doorways and they can no longer drink from cups, only cool mountain springs. Bartók prepared a Hungarian libretto, and in 1930 set the tale to music in his Cantata Profana. It was first performed in London in 1934, in an English translation.


The Scythians had some reverence for the stag, which is one of the most common motifs in Scythian art. Possibly the swift animal was believed to speed the spirits of the dead on their way, which perhaps explains the curious antlered headdresses found on horses buried at Pazyryk (illustration at the top of this article).

Slavic and UralicEdit


Golden or silver deer/elk was a popular folk character at the Urals in the 18th century.[14] There were tales about the mythical creature called Silver Deer, also known as the elk Golden Horns and the goat Silver Hoof.[15]


Sacred deer in Nara Park , a garden of the Kasuga shrine, Japan

Deer are considered messengers to the gods in Shinto, especially Kasuga Shrine in Nara Prefecture where a white deer had arrived from Kashima Shrine as its divine messenger. It has become a symbol of the city of Nara. Deer in Itsukushima Shrine, located in Miyajima, Hiroshima, are also sacred as divine messengers. In various parts of Northeast Japan, a deer dance called "Shishi-odori" has been traditionally performed as an annual shinto ritual.[16]

Manufactured mythologyEdit

Quintus Sertorius, while a general in Lusitania, had a tame white stag which he had raised nearly from birth. Playing on the superstitions of the local tribes, he told them that it had been given to him by the goddess Diana; by attributing all his intelligence reports to the animal, he convinced the locals that it had the gift of prophecy. (See Plutarch's life of Sertorius and Pliny the Elder's chapter on stags [N.H., VIII.50])

The naming of Sir Francis Drake's ship the "Golden Hind" is sometimes given a mythological origin. However, Drake actually renamed his flagship in mid-voyage in 1577 to flatter his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, whose armorial bearings included the crest "a hind Or." In heraldry, a "hind" is a doe.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, as well as the rest of Santa Claus's reindeer, originated as fictional but have become an integral part of Western festive legend.


  1. ^ "Indira Gandhi National Center of the Arts".
  2. ^ "The Golden Deer". ThoughtCo. Retrieved 2017-04-20.
  3. ^ The Radiant Deer. Augusta, ME: Siddhartha School Project. 2012. ISBN 0-9821274-1-3.
  4. ^ J. G. McKay, "The Deer-Cult and the Deer-Goddess Cult of the Ancient Caledonians"Folklore 43.2 (June 1932), pp. 144–174; McKay (p. 149) points out that the usual term for a giantess, ban-fhuamhair, a cannibal ogress, is never applied to the "Old Woman"
  5. ^ J.F. Campbell of Isalay, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, ii, no. 27, noted by McKay 1932:150.
  6. ^ "The Chase of Ben Gulbin" (McKay1932:151).
  7. ^ Gyurcsák, J., Pótó J. (edit). (2004). Képes Krónika. Hungary: Osiris.
  8. ^ Orchard (1997:82 and 92).
  9. ^ Newton, Sam.The Origins of Beowulf p.31
  10. ^ Simek (2007:70).
  11. ^ Barbara G. Myerhoff, "The Deer-Maize-Peyote Symbol Complex among the Huichol Indians of Mexico" Anthropological Quarterly 43.2 (April 1970), pp. 64–78.
  12. ^ Matthews, John and Caitlin (2005). The Element Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures. HarperElement. p. 435.
  13. ^ Laban Kaptein, Eindtijd en Antichrist, p. 32ff. Leiden 1997. ISBN 90-73782-90-2; Laban Kaptein (ed.), Ahmed Bican Yazıcıoğlu, Dürr-i Meknûn. Kritische Edition mit Kommentar, §§ 7.53; 14.136–14.140. Asch 2007. ISBN 978-90-902140-8-5
  14. ^ Shvabauer, Nataliya (10 January 2009). "Типология фантастических персонажей в фольклоре горнорабочих Западной Европы и России" [The Typology of the Fantastic Characters in the Miners' Folklore of Western Europe and Russia] (PDF). Dissertation (in Russian). The Ural State University. p. 65. Retrieved 25 November 2015.
  15. ^ Bazhov, Pavel (2014-07-10). У старого рудника [By the Old Mine]. The Malachite Casket: Tales from the Urals (in Russian). Litres. ISBN 9785457073548.
  16. ^ Shishi-Odori ( Deer Dance ) ( Throughout Iwate ) A Trip to Iwate