Why Do Cuckolds Have Horns

Why Do Cuckolds Have Horns?

After much research we found some interesting facts regarding the question of cuckolds and horns. Honestly, for as much as we enjoy the cuckold lifestyle we had no idea that horns have their roots in early European history and Shakespearian literature! See, we have always been horny little devils!

Below is a compilation of our research on the question: Why Do Cuckolds Have Horns.

Cuckolds and their attendant horns provided a source of humor that was notably widespread during the seventeenth century, especially in plays, and then sharply curtailed afterward. Professor, Claire McEachern argues that horn humor was prevalent because it allowed a ludic response, collective laughter and even enjoyment to the anxieties provoked by the Protestant theology. The cuckolds’ horns, because they represent ignorance of one’s own status, resonate with the uncertainties of soteriology, while other widely disseminated symbolic registers of the horn expand the leverage of the ludic response. In the figure of Acteon, killed by his own hounds, the difference in knowledge becomes tragic. The tradition that depicts Moses as horned, based on Jerome’s Bible, epitomizes both the confessional battleground of the Reformation and a way of bridging it.

So in short,  as far as we can tell,  The Horns depict the mans status in the cuckold relationship as well as a symbol of rebellion against what are considered moral standards. As we looked into this interesting topic further we also found the following:

“Cuckoldry was a prominent issue in early modern English drama, and  provides a fascinating account of the cultural anxiety about it. In fact, there was even a place in London known as Cuckold’s Haven, three miles east of St. Paul’s and marked by a wooden pole sporting animal horns.”

Cuckoldry was a prominent issue in early modern English drama, and  provides a fascinating account of the cultural anxiety about it. In fact, there was even a place in London known as Cuckold’s Haven, three miles east of St. Paul’s and marked by a wooden pole sporting animal horns. McEachern includes a seventeenth-century woodcut with the ballad  A Married Man’s Miserie depicting a well dressed Jacobean gentleman sounding his warning to other men to look out for unfaithful wives.

As far as the stage history of Ado is concerned, McEachern notes Ado was the seventh most popular of Shakespeare’s plays staged in the late eighteenth century, and between 1879 and 1964 it was staged thirty-five times at Stratford-upon-Avon, roughly every three years.

So you see,  despite the social and religious morals of the day,  there was an interest in the cuckold lifestyle long ago. Makes me want to rush out and read Shakespeare!

More regarding horns and the cuckold was explored by a Jewish scholar who concluded the following:

One can, of course, speak in Yiddish of a “betrayed husband,” just as one can do in English, in which cuckold is a semi-archaic word no longer much used for a man cheated on by his wife. However, the only “Yiddish” word I know of that has the tonal quality of cuckold is really more of a Hebrew one, although like just about any Hebrew word it can be pressed into service in Yiddish in a pinch. This is ba’al-karnayim, which means, literally, “a man with horns.”

Ba’al-karnayim first occurs in medieval Hebrew — specifically, in the Mah.barot Emanuel, a large and sometimes bawdy work of poetry and rhymed prose by the late 13th-and-early-14th-century Italian Jewish writer Emmanuel of Rome. (References to cuckolded husbands as having or growing horns occur in Hebrew sources even earlier, one of them being a letter written in the 12th century by Maimonides.) Emmanuel was translating the Italian cornuto, “horned,” which means cuckold in Italian and has close equivalents in other European languages — Spanish cornudo and cornupeta (a “horned bull”), Dutch horendrager (“horn wearer”), Polish rogacz (from rog, “horn”), Greek keratàs (from kérato, “horn”), etc. Even in many languages in which the word for cuckold has a different root meaning, there are expressions for being cuckolded that refer to horns. Thus, we have French faire les cornes à quelqu’un, “to give someone horns” or to cuckold him; German Hoerner aufsetzen, “to put horns” on someone, and so on.

English had similar idioms, as is evidenced by numerous lines in the plays of Shakespeare — who, for instance, has Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” speak of the devil looking “like an old cuckold with horns on his head.” The “cuckold’s sign,” made by pointing with a hand whose pinky and index finger are extended to resemble horns while the ring and middle fingers are folded under with the thumb, also was widespread in many European countries and is still in use in Italy and Sicily. Indeed, it is probable the “donkey ears” that practical jokers make with their fingers in photographs are the descendants of cuckold’s horns, too, put behind the heads of the unsuspecting to jest that their wives are unfaithful.

Just why horns have been connected so widely with cuckolds is an interesting question. The explanation would seem to lie in the association of horns with male sexuality, no doubt because they accompany sexual maturity in many ruminants, which use their horns and antlers as dueling weapons during the rutting season. (This is why, too, in parts of Asia, the ground horns of various animals mixed into food or drink are considered a powerful aphrodisiac.) Perhaps cuckolds have symbolic horns because they are “horny” — i.e., itching with sexual energy that has no outlet, since as their wives are off consorting with other males; perhaps their horns are not their own but symbolically those of the rivals who have bested them, so that “to give someone horns” originally meant to take away someone’s wife in sexual combat.

Languages whose words for cuckold are unrelated to horns also tend to derive them from the animal kingdom. The word cuckold itself derives from old French cucuault (modern French cocu), cuckoo bird, which has to do with the cuckoo’s being what ornithologists call a “brood parasite,” a bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests rather than building its own, so that its fledglings are hatched and raised by surrogate mothers. The cuckold in this analogy is not the cuckoo itself, but rather the cuckoo’s victim — the husband who has been “cuckooed” by unwittingly raising another man’s child as his own.

In German the word for a cuckold is Hahnrei — from old German hanreyge, a capon or castrated rooster. Kapaun in German, on the other hand, refers only to the gelded bird and its meat, as does its Yiddish form of kap-hon. (This is a nice case of folk etymology, for although Kapaun comes from the Latin word for “rooster,” capo, Yiddish speakers interpreted its second syllable as the Yiddish word for rooster, hon.) But Hahnrei did not make it into Yiddish at all, while kap-hon, as in German, does not have the meaning of cuckold.

One can only speculate as to the reason that Yiddish had no indigenous word of its own for a cuckold when practically every other European language possessed one. The most likely explanation is that in traditional Eastern European Jewish society, adulterous women, while by no means nonexistent, were relatively rare. Yiddish folk culture did not make the husbands of adulterers the stock figures or butts of popular humor that they were elsewhere, so there was no need for a special word for them. And if you wanted to speak of a Jewish cuckold anyway for literary or rhetorical purposes, ba’al-karnayim always would do.

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