I was noodling around at the library a while back, delving among the catalogs and inventories of the earliest precursors of modern museums, the so-called “wonder cabinets” of the 16th and 17th centuries–just why I happened to be doing that: don’t even get me started–when I came upon what seemed like my umpteenth eyewitness account of an actual human horn.
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Indeed, any such inventory quickly affords a clue as to the principal force behind the unprecedented eruption of this taste for astonishment that characterized the 16th and 17th centuries, a hankering that hadn’t been there 100 years earlier and would fade within another 50, as the imperatives of a more rigorous scientific method gradually took hold: it was all that new stuff suddenly coming in over the European transom as a result of the concurrent voyages of discovery–America was blowing Europe’s mind with its moose antlers and purple macaw plumes and Aztec sacrificial urns. If such things now turned out to be possible, the wonderstruck 17th-centurians must justifiably have reasoned, then why couldn’t unicorn horns and even human horns be actual as well? Those “sea-unicorn horns” were in fact indisputably real–weird outspiraling corkscrew narwhal tusks that far-flung navigators seemed to keep stumbling upon–so who now was in any position to put limits on the plausibility of the fantastical?
Such, anyway, is how I’d smugly come to frame my own understanding of this tremendous upwelling of sheer over-the-top credulity among our premodern ancestors–that is, until one afternoon recently, when I happened to find myself wandering among the display cases at the Mutter Museum. (Again, don’t get me started.) Now, the Mutter Museum consists of an entirely authentic and indeed rigorously scientific collection of bizarre medical curiosa, dating back to the last century and housed under the auspices of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It features skeletons of Siamese twins, 19th-century celebrity gallstones, wax models of syphilitic faces, Peruvian trephined skulls–that sort of thing. And, of course, it’s all quite wondrous, in a morbid sort of way.
Perhaps the most famous case in the early 19th century was that of the Parisian Madame Dimanche, “the Widow Sunday,” who seemed unfazed as her horn grew outward from her forehead and then down ten inches past her nose and almost to her chin. According to Monestier, however, “one day, at the age of 84, she suddenly decided to have it cut off. She knew her end was near and did not wish to meet her Maker wearing what she had begun to consider a Satanic ornament.” She survived the removal (performed by the famed Dr. Souberbeille) and lived another seven years. Thomas Dent Mutter himself had a spooky wax cast of Madame Dimanche among his collections.
Actaeon turns out to have been an enormously important figure in the Elizabethan imagination (as in the wider universe of wonder). Think of Falstaff cast as Herne, the horny hunter in The Merry Wives of Windsor, antlers spread across his brow (German Hirn is English “brain”)–or of Giordano Bruno, the mystic philosopher, whose suite of allegorical love poems De gli heroici furori, published in England in 1585, 15 years before he was to be burned at the stake as a heretic, is positively studded with references to the ill-visioned hero. The Elizabethans got their Actaeon from Ovid, and more specifically from Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses, which Ezra Pound once praised as “the most beautiful book in the language.” In Golding’s rendition, Actaeon is out hunting in the forest with his hounds when he happens to catch a glimpse of Artemis/Diana, the beautiful virgin goddess of the moon and of the hunt, bathing in a pool with her nymphs. Drawn by this extraordinary vision, Actaeon approaches silently, stealthily pulling aside the intervening branches, but he is seen by the furious goddess, who,
At which point his fate is sealed. “Now make thy vaunt among thy Mates,” the goddess goads the hapless voyeur,
This done she makes no further
