The significance of horns in mythology and folk-lore

Note: this text is extracted from Book VII, chapter 37:

“Then at night there came there dancing the Yakṣiṇī Śṛṅgotpādinī, playing from afar on her lute of bones, and when she came near she fixed her eye on one of the four Pāśupata ascetics, and recited a charm, as she danced outside the circle. That charm produced horns on him, and bewildered he rose up, and danced till he fell into the blazing fire. And when he had fallen the Yakṣiṇī dragged him half-burnt out of the fire, and devoured him with delight”.

Cf the thirty-first tale in Gonzenbach’s Sicilianisclie Märchen (p. 209), where the black figs produce horns. There is also in the same story a pipe that compels all that hear its sound to dance. See Dr Reinhold Köhler’s notes on the tale; also Grimm’s No. 110, and his notes in his third volume. Cf. also Veckenstedt’s Wendische Sagen, p. 65; Ralston’s Russian Folk-Tales, p. 283; Bernhard Schmidt’s Griechische Märchen, No. 20, and Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 484. The incident in Sicilianische Märchen closely resembles one in the story of Fortunatus as told in Simrock’s Deutsche Volksbücher, vol. iii, p. 175. There is a pipe that compels all the hearers to dance in Huon of Bordeaux, and a very similar fairy harp in Wirt Sikes’ British Goblms, p. 97; and a magic fiddle in Das Goldene Schachspiel,” a story in Kaden’s Unter den Olivenbäumen, p. 160. A fiddler in Bartsch’s Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg (vol. i, p. 130) makes a girl spin round like a top. From that day she was lame.

See also De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, vol. i, pp. 182, 288, and Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 2nd series, p. 152. Kuhn, in his Westfälische Märchen, vol. i, p. 183, mentions a belief that horns grew on the head of one who looked at the Wild Huntsman. It is just possible that this notion may be derived from the story of Actæon. A statue found in the ruins of the villa of Antoninus Pius near Lavinium represents him with his human form and with the horns just sprouting (Engravings from Ancient Marbles in the British Museum, plate xlv). Cf. also the story of Cipus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xv, 552-621. For the magic pipe see Grimm’s Irische Märchen, Einleitung, p. lxxxiii; Rohde, Der Griechische Roman, p. 264. Remarks on the pipe and horns will be found in Ralston’s Tibetan Tales, introduction, pp. liv-lvi.

—For further analogues to Grimm’s tale 110 see Bolte, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 490 et seq., and for the significance of horns in mythology and folk-lore see Elworthy’s Horns of Honour, and J. A. Macculloch, “Horns,” Hastings’ Ency. Rel. Eth., vol. vi, pp. 791-796. For an extraordinary story about a wonderful reed flute, and a sultan who had horns on his head, see Stumme, Märchen der Schluh von Tázerwalt, p. 138. It is quoted by Crooke in “King Midas and his Ass’s Ears,” Folk-Lore, vol. xxii, 1911, pp. 189, 190.—n.m.p.