[From an ethnological point of view, the legend, or more properly myth,
of “The Horn Worshipers” is the most interesting in this collection of
legends. None of the scholars at the annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Society held in New York, December, 1923, knew any
parallel for it among the aborigines of America.
However, horns have been significant among many primitive peoples. Many
of the Plains Indians of America, notably the Sioux, wore buffalo
horns, and if I mistake not the totem of one tribe was a head of
buffalo horns. However, the buffalo horn was to the Plains Indian
merely a symbol of the power that he admired, an emblem of the animal
that he was so far dependent on for food and shelter. In the Asia
Magazine for December, 1922, is a picture of a pair of ox-horns
fastened over the entrance to a village near Rodosto, Turkey. The horns
so fastened are said to bring good luck to those who pass under them.
The medicinal properties ascribed to horns among primitive peoples have
a corollary interest here. In a letter accompanying his legend of “The
Horn Worshipers,” Mr. Bertillion says: “As late as ten years ago I
bought a beautiful pair of buck horns, several points of which I had to
sharpen because they had been sawed off a half inch or more for the
purpose of curing some disease, which, to the best of my memory, was
measles, the cure being a dose of pulverized horn, about a
teaspoonful.”
In the same letter, Mr. Bertillion encloses a clipping from a
syndicated article appearing in the McKinney, Texas, Examiner, November
9, 1922, which tells of an Indian rhinoceros horn presented to Pope
Gregory XIV in 1590 as a protection against poisoning. According to the
article, “The horn given to the pope by the prior and brothers of the
monastery of St. Mary of Guadalupe in Spain, was credited with sweating
in the presence of poison, by the way of warning, and if powdered and
taken internally, with acting as an antidote. The tip is missing. It
was cut off in 1591 and administered to the pope in his last illness.”
I myself recall as a pioneer remedy for distemper in horses, the smoke
of burning horn-chips and rags, funneled through a horn up the horse’s
nostrils. The Mexicans sometimes used the same remedy for colds.
The underground palace of this legend of “The Horn Worshipers” is a
feature common to the lore of many peoples. “The Aztecs,” says Lewis
Spence, [136] “believed that the first men emerged from a palace known
as Chicomoztoc (The Seven Caverns), located north of Mexico. Various
writers have seen in these mystic recesses the fabulous ‘seven cities
of Cibola’ and the Casas Grandes, ruins of extensive character in the
valley of the River Gila, and so forth.” [137] Then Spence adds a
comment on the number seven pertinent also to the legend of “The Horn
Worshipers”: “The allusion to the magical number seven in the myth
demonstrates that the entire story is purely imaginary and possesses no
basis of fact.”
The legend of the underground palace has various forms even in Texas.
There are rumors of an underground palace near Leander in Williamson
County and of another on the Blanco River. Some such story is connected
with the Devil’s Cave on the Devil’s River; with a vast underground
passage that workmen are said to have discovered while excavating for
the foundation of the second Austin dam; and with the Carlsbad Mammoth
Cave, located on the Texas-New Mexico line in the Guadalupe Mountains.
Mr. Bertillion says that he knows a man who claims to have discovered
about fifteen years ago a great house within a mountain in West Texas,
perhaps a hundred and fifty feet below the surface. This man was out
with a surveyor. Searching for a place to set up the flagpole, he
discovered a small hole in a rock, “not larger than an ordinary apple.”
Secretly, he flashed sunlight into the hole by means of a pocket
mirror, and down in a great cave he beheld a wonderful edifice. The
details he has kept secret, for he intends to return to the place some
day and make his fortune.
Back in the sixties, according to his own account, a Mexican living in
Fort Stockton (1911) was carrying the mail between Fort Davis and El
Paso. On one trip a band of Indians led by some renegade Mexicans
confiscated his mail and express, burned the mail coach, and took him
and his horses into an unknown region afterward identified as the
Guadalupe Mountains. There, high up on a barren peak, he discovered
some giant mahogany logs, “so big that there never has been a car on
the Southern Pacific Railroad that could have hauled one of them.”
Query: For what else than the palace of the Horn Worshipers could these
mighty logs have been transported to that region?
Finally, the palace of the Horn Worshipers inevitably suggests the
great legend of the Cave of Montezuma, a version of which follows
this.—Editor.]
I am a great lover of horns and have collected and sold many fine
pairs. In order to make my collections I have had to keep constantly
inquiring for specimens. On one such expedition, a good many years ago,
down on the border, I met a very old Yaqui Mexican, by the name of
Pedro Osabia, as I remember.
When I made inquiry after long-horned cattle, he told me that the
long-horned cattle were all dead and that their worshipers were all
dead, but that the spirits of the Horn Worshipers never die, but enter
into new men when the bodies they inhabit decay. He said that if I
continued strong in the worship, some day I would find plenty of long
horns.
Further interrogation brought out the story that long years ago—more
years than man can count—this whole world belonged to one man, and that
this one man lived in a grand temple, such as men do not know how to
build any more, and that this temple is located inside one of the great
peaks of the Jeff Davis Mountains. This Ruler of the whole world had
his subjects scattered over all the earth wherever caves could be found
or made in cliffs. And every seven years these subjects journeyed from
their caves and their cliffs to the Great Palace to worship, each
worshiper bringing the longest horns he had collected from any animal
during the seven years. Then the horns were hung in the great hall of
horn worship, and the Supreme Ruler stood amidst the horns as judge.
The man bringing the longest horns received the first blessing and was
not subject to the laws of the great Ruler for seven years, and those
bringing the second and the third longest horns received second and
third blessings and were immune from the laws for five and for three
years. Furthermore, those who willfully refused to bring horns to the
general worship were made servants of those bringing the longest horns
to the shrine, and would eventually become dead in soul, thus losing
the power to rise after death and enjoy the great horn worship in the
wide, free spaces and the open air, where search for food would no
longer be a necessity.
Finally, though, a great bird came and flew to the cliffs, and
destroyed the dwellers throughout the world, and then, when none came
to worship at the great palace, the great Ruler died of grief. Our
present race is the offspring from a man who had been banished from
some colony for his refusal to contribute horns and to join in their
worship. Consequently, the great bird on his flight of destruction
missed this outcast, who, having lost his blessing through neglect to
worship, was doomed, he and all his generations, to work for a living.
Before he died of his grief the great Owner of the world, knowing that
some day the mountain would decay and the deserted palace be exposed,
placed a magic wand in the greatest horn in the great horn room. It is
there now, waiting for the hand of some one of the soulless to touch
it. Finally when the horn is touched, it will rise into space and draw
all those who worshiped in full faith to the great horn worship above,
where manual labor and death shall be forever unknown.
Such is the story of the first world of men, who were probably the
Cliff Dwellers, or the Horn Worshipers!