The Saturnine Hex and Hornéd Beasts

GEORGE LUCAS: 

" A lot of evil characters have horns. 

It’s very interesting. 

I mean, you’re trying to build a icon of Evil, and you sort of wonder why the same images evoke the same emotions.... "

" Captain Kirk, I invite you and your officers to join me. 

But do not bring that one, the one with the pointed ears. 

He is much like Pan, and Pan always bored me. "

- Apollo

 "And when Moses came down from the mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord."

This was Jerome's effort to faithfully translate the difficult, original Hebrew Masoretic text, which uses the term, karan (based on the root, keren, which often means "horn"); the term is now interpreted to mean "shining" or "emitting rays" (somewhat like a horn).

Although some historians believe that Jerome made an outright error, Jerome himself appears to have seen keren as a metaphor for "glorified", based on other commentaries he wrote, including one on Ezekiel, where he wrote that Moses' face had "become 'glorified', or as it says in the Hebrew, 'horned'."

The Greek Septuagint, which Jerome also had available, translated the verse as 

"Moses knew not that the appearance of the skin of his face was glorified."

[ Radiation Burns ]

In general medieval theologians and scholars understood that Jerome had intended to express a glorification of Moses' face, by his use of the Latin word for "horned."

 The understanding that the original Hebrew was difficult and was not likely to literally mean "horns" persisted into and through the Renaissance.

DOCTOR: 

Jo, Captain Yates, would you mind drawing the curtains? 

(The Doctor sits behind a slide projector.) 

DOCTOR: 

Come on, Jo, stir your stumps. 

Now then. All right? 

Now then, tell me. Who's that? 

(A papyrus image of a ram's head with the solar disc between its horns.) 

JO: 

An Egyptian god, isn't it? 

DOCTOR: 

Top of the class, Jo, top of the class! 

That's right, that's the Egyptian god Khnum, with horns. 

There's another one, a Hindu demon. 

ALL: 

With horns. 

DOCTOR: 

Oh. Thank you very much. 

And our old friend the Horned Beast. 

YATES: 

I don't get it. 

DOCTOR: 

Probably because I haven't finished, Captain Yates. 

YATES: 

Oh sorry, Doctor. 

Miss HAWTHORNE: 

Oh, you could go on all day and all night showing us pretty pictures. I mean, horns have been a symbol of power ever since... 

DOCTOR: 

Ever since man began? 

Exactly. But why? 

All right, Captain Yates, the curtains. 

Now creatures like those have been seen over and over again throughout the history of man, and man has turned them into myths, gods or devils, but they're neither. 

They are, in fact, creatures from another world. 

BENTON: 

Do you mean like the Axons and the Cybermen? 

DOCTOR: 

Precisely, only far, far older and immeasurably more dangerous. 

JO: 

And they came here in spaceships like that tiny one up at the barrow? 

DOCTOR: 

That's right. 

They're Dæmons from the planet Dæmos, which is :-

JO:

Sixty thousand light years away on the other side of the galaxy. 

DOCTOR: 

And they first came to Earth nearly one hundred thousand years ago.

BILL MOYERS: The mesmerizing character for me is — is Darth Maul.

When I saw him, I thought of Satan and Lucifer in “Paradise Lost.” I thought of the Devil in “Dante’s Inferno.” I mean, you’ve really — have brought from — it seems to me — from way down in our unconsciousness this image of — of — of Evil, of The Other.

GEORGE LUCAS: Well, yeah. We were trying to find somebody who could compete with Darth Vader, who’s one of the most, you know, famous evil characters now. And so we went back into representations of Evil.

GEORGE LUCAS: Not only, the Christian, but also Hindu and Greek mythology and other religious icons and, obviously, then designed our own — our own character out of that.

BILL MOYERS: What did you find when you went back there in — in all of these representations? There’s something …

GEORGE LUCAS: A lot of — a lot of evil characters have horns. It’s very interesting. I mean, you’re trying to build a icon of Evil, and you sort of wonder why the same images evoke the same emotions.

BILL MOYERS: What emotion do you feel, George, when you look at Darth Maul?

GEORGE LUCAS: I think the first thing you’re supposed to react to is fear. You’re supposed to go, ‘Ooh.’ You — you wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. And I’m not creating a monster. You know, that’s like — I — I didn’t want to create some ugly — you know, this — somebody ripped out their intestines and threw them all over their head — and it’s — you can’t watch it. This is something …

BILL MOYERS: It’s actually mesmerizing.

GEORGE LUCAS: This is something that is more — it works in a different emotional way. It’s not repulsive, it’s just — it’s — it’s something you should be afraid of.