Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (19 page)

François Trouillu

The Widow Sunday

As for Mary Davis's allegedly lost horn, leave it to the indefatigable Arthur MacGregor, assistant keeper at the Ashmolean, to have tracked down every conceivable reference (see his piece in
The Ashmolean;
no. 3, 1983; pp. 10–11): a horn did indeed exist, in fact several. The Cheshire midwife cast off several pair, each set larger than the ones before (“in shew and substance much like a ram's horns,” according to a contemporary pamphlet, “solid and wrinkled, but sadly grieving the old woman, especially
upon the change of weather”). One of her horns was presented to the King of France “for the greatest rarity in nature, and was received with no less admiration.” Her portrait was painted at least twice in 1668, when her age was given as seventy-four. One of those portraits went to the Ashmolean but was also lost (it appears, however, to have formed the basis for a surviving engraving). “From a historical point of view the disappearance of any part of the Museum's earliest collections is always to be regretted,” MacGregor consoles himself, “but it has to be admitted that the loss of some is easier to bear than others.
I for one can summon only the mildest regret at being denied the opportunity of first-hand contact with Mary Davis's horn.” (And, in fact, he may now be spared even that mild regret, since the horn appears in the meantime to have surfaced in Culver City, California.)

Mary Davis of Saughall (1668
) (
illustration credit nts.7
)

“Many ancient peoples believed that strength and fertility were concentrated in horns,” Monestier points out, “hence the numerous cults worshipping bulls and rams.… Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, was depicted with horns, as was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility. When Alexander the Great declared himself the son of Jupiter [or, actually, of Zeus], he ordered that all coins bearing his likeness should henceforth show him with horns. Moses was sometimes depicted with horns, as was Christ Himself. Many rulers had horns affixed to their helmets, as a symbol of power” (p. 110).

Monestier suggests that the association of horns with adultery and cuckoldry dates to Roman times, but in fact a primordial sense of the interrelationship between horns and sexuality—an understanding of the “horny,” as it were—is embedded deep in the linguistic roots of our civilization. The master text in this regard is R. B. Onians's seminal, and in fact mind-boggling,
The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate
(Cambridge University Press, 1951). Norman O. Brown draws heavily on Onians's work, as for instance in this passage from
Love's Body
(New York: Random House, 1966):

By this reading, Freud's entire theory of sublimation is merely an unpacking of the possibilities already latent in the language itself. But it goes further than that, as Brown himself brought out in his most recent book,
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis
(University of California Press, 1991), for

This latter passage is taken from Brown's essay on Actaeon, who turns out to be an enormously important figure in the Elizabethan imagination (as in the wider universe of wonder). The Elizabethans got their Actaeon from Ovid, more specifically from Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of the
Metamorphoses
(a text Ezra Pound once praised as “the most beautiful book in the language”). In Golding's rendition, Actaeon was out hunting in the forest with his hounds when he happened to catch a glimpse of Artemis/Diana (whom Golding also calls Phebe), the beautiful virgin goddess of the moon and of the hunt, bathing in a pool with her nymphs. Drawn by the extraordinary vision, Actaeon approaches silently, stealthily pulling aside the intervening branches—but he is seen:

But Phebe (“of personage so comly and so tall / That by the middle of hir necke she overpeered them all”) stands her ground, fiercely defiant:

At which point his fate is already sealed:

As yet unknowing, Actaeon scampers off—“trottes,” in Golding's beguiling parlance—and it's only when he comes upon a brook and gazes upon his own reflection in the water …

Within moments his own hounds have caught the scent of him and he is soon being pursued to his death.

Of course, in our context, we will understand the story of Actaeon's fate for what it is—a wonder narrative and a cautionary tale. (Fifteen years before his martyrdom, Giordano Bruno made repeated references to the Actaeon myth in his sequence of allegorical love poems,
De gli Eroici Furori
, published in England in 1585 and dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. See Yates, pp. 275–84.) A story of possession:
Watch out for what you see.
(No sooner had Ovid himself completed his
Metamorphoses
, in
A.D.
8, than he himself appears to have inadvertently witnessed something untoward—something sexual? something political? he doesn't say and we will never know—a calamitous misprision for which the great Augustus Caesar condemned him to eke out the remainder of his days in terrible exile along the farthest reaches of the Empire. “O why did I see what I saw?” the poet would be decrying his uncanny fate, a few years later, in Book II of his
Tristia.
“Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked / but still was torn to bits by his own hounds.”) Antlers: from the French
antoeil
(“in the place of eyes”) or the German
Augensprosse
(“eye-sprouts”). And recall, in this context, both the alchemical and the astrological symbols for Mercury, still in use today in both chemistry and astronomy:
.

When Chaucer's friend John Gower sang his version of the story, in his
Confessio Amantis
(also based on Ovid, though two hundred years before Golding), he cast Actaeon's fate as “an ensample touchende of mislok”—a truly wonderful three-way pun, for, of course, Actaeon
had the bad luck to mislook upon Lady Luck. As might anyone risk to do, gazing too long, too helplessly, at Wonder. Not that it wouldn't necessarily be worth it.

Just ask the ant.

The world will not perish for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.
(
illustration credit ack.1
)

—J. B. S. H
ALDANE

(the geneticist mathematician)

This book would of course have been impossible without the always gracious (if continually wary) cooperation of its main subject, David Wilson. His sweet forbearance was all the more touching in light of his obvious underlying trepidations—as was true, for that matter, of his splendid wife, Diana, as well. (I have tried to keep faith with both of them.) Their daughter, DanRae, showed no trepidations whatsoever and was an unmitigated delight throughout.