_Why Moses represented with Horns_.--Your correspondent H.W. (Vol. i, p.
420.) refers the origin of what he calls the strange practice of making
Moses appear horned to a mistranslation in the Vulgate. I send you an
extract from Coleridge which suggests something more profound the such
an accidental cause; and explains the statement of Rosenmüller (p.
419.), that the Jews attributed horns to Moses "figuratively for
power:"--
"When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of
Julius II, I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of
great genius and vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on
Michael Angelo's Moses, our conversation turned on the horns and
beard of that stupendous statue of the necessity of each to
support the other; of the superhuman effect of the former, and
the necessity if the existence of both to give a harmony and
_integrity_ both to the image and the feeling excited by it.
Conceive them removed, and the statue would become _un_natural
without being _super_natural. We called to mind the horns of the
rising sun, and I repeated the noble passage from Taylor's _Holy
Dying_. That horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty
among the Eastern nations; and are still retained as such in
Abyssinia; the Achelous of the ancient Greeks; and the probable
ideas and feelings that originally suggested the mixture of the
human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realised
the idea of their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence
blended with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more
universal than the conscious intellect of man; than
intelligence--all these thoughts passed in procession before our
minds."--Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, vol. ii. p. 127.
edit. 1817. {92}
[The noble passage from Taylor's _Holy Dying_, which Coleridge
recreated, is subjoined.]
"As when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he
first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits
of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to
matins, and by and bye gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps
over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like
those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to
wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and
still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till
he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one
whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and
little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man's reason and his
life."
--Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Dying_.