We were very proficient at throwing rocks and snow balls in my day. My principal at school recognized the propensity to throw stuff when I was pretty small. She told me that I literally scooped up snow the first thing out the door for recess to make a snow ball and the last thing I did when I came in was throw a snow ball. I started noticing that it was true. I was always throwing something at something or someone.
It sounds insane now but this is what we used to do. A few of us would go up into the mountains, divide into teams and throw rocks at each other. We had it set up like the paint ball people do today. Flags and forts were part of the action but mostly just throwing rocks. There was no eye protectors, helmets, special armor, nothing, just running and throwing rock. The problem, as I said was that I and my friends were pretty good at it. I am blessed to be able to remember my friend on the other side of a picturesque brook hunting me and ducking behind a tree. I timed when he would stick his head out and threw a pretty good sized rock and he did the same to me, and sure enough we both clocked each other in the forehead. There was a lot of blood and we called truce and ran to the brook and stuck our heads into the mountain stream to wash the blood away. If you have ever stuck anything into a mountain stream you know that it is very cold even in the heat of summer. My head was showing a rather large lump developing and so was my friend. We both bled pretty profusely.
When I got home my mother of course noticed and felt the lump on my head and said that she thought the devil horns were finally coming out. Sounded funny then and still funny today. It makes you forget the fact that I could have been blinded or killed by that rock and so could my friend. That was one incident out of many.
Anyway this idea of the devil horns came back the last week or so ago with the “news” that children were growing horns out of their heads and it was because of too much cell phone usage. It is more complicated than that and probably more fake news but it is an interesting flourish to a lot of stuff that happened in the last few weeks. One congressman was talking about his colleagues being “possessed”and he didn’t say it once, he said it many times and he didn’t act like he was joking. The idea of children growing horns out of their heads and the devil coming out seemed apropos.
There is a sculpture of Moses that seems to show him growing horns from his head. I wonder what that is about?
