Horns of Consecration is a term coined bySir Arthur Evans[1] for the symbol, common inMinoan civilization, that is usually thought to represent the horns of thesacred bull. Evans said they were "a more or less conventionalised article of ritual furniture derived from the actual horns of the sacrificial oxen".[2]
Small clay horns on a model building
The porous limestone horns of consecration on the East Propyleia atKnossos (illustration, right) are restorations. Horns of consecration in stone or clay were placed on the roofs of buildings in Neopalatial Crete, or on tombs or shrines, probably as signs of sanctity of the structure.[3] The symbol also appears onMinoan sealstones,[4] often accompanied by thelabrys (double axe) andbucranium (decorative bull skull sculpture), which are part of the iconography of Minoan bull sacrifice. Horns of consecration are among thecultic images painted on the Minoan coffins calledlarnakes, sometimes in isolation; they may have flowers between the horns, or the labrys.[5]
A suggestion for a practical use for the large examples on the top of buildings, is that they were used as frames for sighting the movements of heavenly bodies, for example theconstellation of Orion, which may have represented the "young god" ofMinoan religion.[6]
Evans compared the Horns of Consecration with the four "horns of the altar" of Hebrew ritual,[7] and with the altar with a horned cult object depicted on the stele fromTeima in northern Arabia, now conserved at the Louvre.[8]
^E..g. in Evans, "Mycenaean tree- and pillar-cult and its Mediterranean relations",The Journal of Hellenic Studies31 (1901) pp 107, 135-38, "§15- The Horns of Consecration".
^Evans 1901:137; horns of consecration are juxtaposed with bulls in many configurations onLate Minoan IIIA2larnakes illustrated by L. Vance Watrous, "The Origin and Iconography of the Late Minoan Painted Larnax"Hesperia6.3 (July 1991), pp 285-307).
^Geraldine C. Gesell,Town, Palace, and House Cult in Minoan Crete (SIMA, Göthenburg) 1985, p. 62.
^An example is the seal illustrated by Evans, "The Palace of Knossos",BSA7 (1900/01), fig. 9 and as fig. 1 in Karl Kerenyi,Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (Princeton) 1976, and by Joseph Campbell,Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God (1964) 1970, fig. 12.
^MacGillivray, Alexander, andHugh Sackett. “The Palaikastro Kouros: the Cretan God as a Young Man”, p. 168-166, Chapter 14 ofThePalaikastro Kouros, a Minoan Chryselephantine Statuette and its Aegean Bronze Age Context",British School at Athens Studies, vol. 6, 2000, pp. 165–169.JSTOR. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021
^Their special sanctity is reflected in the practice of the sanctuary seeker clasping the horns of the altar (1 Kings i.50; ii.28ff, noted in this context by Richard Broxton Onians,The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate 2nd. ed. (1988) p. 236 note 9.
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