Hiro Protagonist

About horns

A long time back Rhydon, Genie, and I discussed the etymology of the word "horn." It was a discussion brought about due to an anniversary gift Rhydon had purchased for Genie - an illustrated Bible, and the fact that many depictions of Moses include horns and that some anti-Semitism evolved out of the reading of the bible indicating that Moses had horns. (More to the point, there was a depiction of Moses with the horns in their Bible.) Reading through "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology" by Lawrence Weschler I came across a great passage concerning the etymology of horns and their role in Western tradition:

It Turns out that human horns, anomalous growths consisting entirely of concentric layers of keratinized epidermal cells with a tendency to originate on the sites of sebaceous cystss, warts, or scars, are "far more frequent than ordinarily supposed," according to Drs. George Gould and Walter Pyle (Anomolies and Curiosities of Medicine; New York: Julian Press, 1956; p.222). . . .

"Many ancient peoples believed that strength and fertility were concentrated in horns," Monestier points out, "hence the numerous cults wirshipping bulls and rams. . . . Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, was depicted with horns, as was Isisi, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. When Alexander the Great declared himself the son of Jupiter [or, actually, of AZeus], he ordered that all coins bearing his likeness should henceforth show him with horns. Moses was sometimes depicted with horns, as was Christ Himself. Many rulers had horns affixed to their helmets, as a symbol of power" (p. 110).

Monestier suggests that the association of horns with adultery and cuckoldry dates to Roman times, but in fact a primordial sense of the interrelationship between horns and sexuality - an understanding of the "horny," as it were - is embedded deep in the linguistic roots of our civilization. The master text in this regard is R.B. Onian's seminal, and in fact mind-boggling, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (cambridge University Press, 1951). Norman O. Brown draws heavily on Onians's work, as for instance in this pasage from Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1996):

In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, the goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head. (pp. 136-37)

By this reading, Freud's entire theory of sublimation is merely an unpacking of the possibilities already latent in the language itself. But it goes further than that, as Brown himself brought out in his most recent book, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (University of Calirnia Press, 1991), for

English horn is Latin cornu, therefore English corn. Greek keras ("horn") is English kern and kernel; also . . . Cornucopia, horn of plenty.

But also cornu ("horn") is corona ("crown") . . .. And Greek keras ("horn") is Greek kras, English cranium, a head. Greek kratos, a head of power, an authority (aristo-cracy, demo-cracy); krainein, "authorize."

Herne the horny hunter [Falstaff's name in The Merry Wives of Windsor when he cavorts in the forest, horns on his brow] is German hirn ("brain"). Herne was brainy; like the horned Moses, crescent, cresting . . . A swollen or horny head; insane. Cerebrosus (cerritus), which ought to mean "brainy," means "mad." Greek keras and keraunos, "horn" and "thunder". horn-mad and thunderstruck. (p.38)

This latter passage is taken from Brown's essay on Actaeon, who turns out to be an enormously important figure in the Elizabethan imagination (as in the wider universe of wonder). The Elizabethans got their Actaeon from Ovid, more specifically from Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of the Metamorphosis (a text Ezra Pound once praised as "the most beautiful book in the language").

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. . . Antlers: from the French antoeil ("in the place of eyes") or the German Augensprosse ("eye-sprouts"). And recall, in this context [Actaeon being turned into a stag], both the alchemical and astrological symbols for Mercury, still in use today in both chemistry and astronomy: