Cornucopia

The story begins on the island of Crete, in a dark cave on Mount Dicte, where the infant Zeus was hidden from his father Cronus, the Titan who had devoured his own children to prevent a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him. Rhea, Zeus's mother, had tricked Cronus by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead of the baby, and she spirited Zeus away to Crete. There, the baby was nursed by a goat named Amalthea, whose milk gave the future king of the gods the strength to grow. The goat was attended by nymphs, and one of them may have shared the name Amalthea. When the young Zeus played with his nurse, his divine strength was too much for her. He accidentally broke off one of her horns. The nymphs gathered the horn, filled it with fresh herbs and fruit, and presented it to the infant god. Zeus, in turn, endowed the horn with a power that would make it famous: whoever possessed it could wish for any food or drink, and the horn would instantly overflow with it.

In another telling, the Cornucopia came into being through brute force rather than accident. The hero Heracles, the son of Zeus who was forced to complete twelve impossible labors, sought to marry Deianira, a princess of Calydon. But he had a rival: Achelous, the mighty river god who could shift his form at will. The two met in a wrestling match to decide who would win the princess. Achelous transformed himself into a bull, his horns gleaming, but Heracles was stronger. He seized one of the bull's horns and tore it from Achelous's head. The river god, bleeding and defeated, later traded the horn back from Heracles in exchange for another horn, the horn of Amalthea, which Heracles had acquired. Some say the Acheloides, the naiad daughters of Achelous, took the broken horn and consecrated it, transforming it into the Horn of Plenty that would never empty.

Once created, the Cornucopia became one of the most recognizable symbols in the ancient world. It passed into the hands of the gods and goddesses of abundance. Demeter, the goddess of grain and harvest, was often shown holding it, the horn spilling over with wheat and grapes. Her son Plutus, the child god of riches and agricultural bounty, carried it as his defining attribute. Gaia, the primordial Earth herself, held the overflowing horn as a sign of her endless fertility. Even Hades, the grim ruler of the underworld, was depicted with a Cornucopia in mystery cults, for he was also a giver of mineral wealth and the hidden riches of the earth. Tyche, the goddess of fortune, carried it in her statues at Elis and Aigeira, a star-spangled boy-god named Sosipolis held it in a dream-vision at Olympia, and the Roman goddess Fortuna made it the emblem of luck and prosperity.

The Cornucopia's power was not merely symbolic. In the stories, it was a genuine magical object. The horn of Amalthea could provide bounteous amounts of food or drink, whatever the possessor wished for. When Zeus reached maturity and overthrew his father, he did not forget his nurse. He placed Amalthea among the stars as the constellation Capra, the goat-star that surrounds Capella. Her hide he fashioned into the Aegis, his thunder-shield, and her horn he kept as a token of the abundance that had sustained him in his hidden infancy. The horn bore her name forever: the Horn of Amalthea.

The image of the overflowing horn outlived the gods who carried it. Roman artists carved it into statues of Abundantia, the personification of abundance, and Annona, the goddess of Rome's grain supply. It appeared on coins of Ptolemy IV of Egypt and on the state seals of Idaho and North Carolina. In the 16th century, the Latin name cornucopia, meaning "horn of plenty," entered common usage. Today, wicker horns filled with autumn fruits and vegetables sit at the center of Thanksgiving tables across North America, a direct descendant of the goat's horn that fed a hidden god in a Cretan cave three millennia ago.