Hail Satan and Rock On: History of the Sign of the Horns
Current conventional wisdom is that Ronnie James Dio brought the devil horn hand signal to the world of heavy metal, and that its origins lie in an Italian protection from the evil eye. Here's Dio explaining.
Dio never claimed to have invented it, but I do think he's being coy in not associating it with the occult. Dio wasn't a satanist, but he did use satanic imagery along with near every other metalhead in the 80s.
I knew the sign of the horns' connection to rock and the occult predated Dio, but I was curious where the connections lie and what, if any, connections there were to the Italian folk meaning.
To get this out of the way: I know none of these people actually worship the devil, even the ones who spend their entire lives playacting that they are, from Aleister Crowley to Slayer.
The same symbol can have multiple meanings, sometimes related, sometimes not. I'm not saying University of Texas sports fans are satanists, or that metalheads are saying I Love You in sign language.
Mano Cornuto
The Mano Cornuto, or horned hand, is a sign of protection from the evil eye in Italian and some other European cultures. Different accounts have different nuances, but generally speaking, holding it up protects you from the evil eye, pointing it at someone curses others, and having a necklace symbol hanging fingers down is passive protection. Holding it at your chin is an insulting sign of the cuckold - "your wife sleeps around" I suppose.
A lot can be said for the overlapping symbolism around horns: goats, Satan, Pan, fertility, cuckoldry, horniness. Having said that, the folk use here doesn't seem rooted in the Devil, and the users certainly aren't identifying themselves as satan worshippers.
In twentieth century fiction it's referred to as "the sign of the horns" and almost every usage of that term refers to the Italian folk meaning. In practice it's like crossing oneself, and turns up in mystery stories with an Italian maid or shopkeeper raising them in response to morbid news. This usage went on through at least the 1990s.
This usage may have snuck into early Jazz culture, with a song Throwin' the Horns. I didn't dig too deep this direction, but it appears to have been a good luck symbol while playing craps, associated with snake eyes. Marlon Brando flashed them in Guys and Dolls in this context.
Sign of the Devil
The same symbol is used to self identify as a devil worshipper, to "hail satan", a satanic benediction, etc. It has been explicitly connected to Satanism since September 13, 1967, when the album The Satanic Mass by the Church of Satan's Anton LaVey was recorded with the line "I bid the rise and give the sign of the horns". They are mentioned (once, briefly) in 1969's The Satanic Bible, and the first visual representation from CoS I could find was in the 1970 mondo film Witchcraft '70, likely filmed in 1969.
Heavy Metal
Dio definitely popularized the horns when he started with Black Sabbath in 1979. It was supposedly a self-conscious marketing symbol to be his equivalent of Ozzie flashing the peace sign. Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler says Dio got it from him, and that Geezer had been using it since 1971.
In this interview, Geezer says he got it from Aleister Crowley, though I have found no evidence that Crowley ever used it. This would be a much shorter article if he did.
Gene Simmons of KISS used the sign, usually thumbs out but sometimes thumbs in, starting November 14th, 1974 according to his ultimately abandoned patent application from 2017. Simmons says it was an homage to Spider-Man. He's been broadly mocked for trying to trademark the symbol, but to be fair, by the mid-70s he had done the most to popularize it in rock circles.
Spidey, by the way, used the sign since his debut in Amazing Fantasy 15 in 1962. Steve Ditko and Anton LaVey were both fans of Ayn Rand, but I doubt that connection is fruitful here.
The first use of devil horns of the satanic variety I could find in rock music was from the insert for Coven's 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls.
John Lennon flashed the horns in publicity pictures for Yellow Submarine starting in 1967. He did the thumb out and in, and palm out and in, so who knows what he was going for. It's just as likely he was doing the Buddhist Karana mudra as anything occult. Some have attributed it to Crowley, but again, I haven't found evidence of Crowley using it.
Origins
The sign of the horns being a symbol of protection in Europe goes back to at least the middle ages, though with no devilish connotations. I assumed the satanic-adjacent usage had some kind of heritage prior Anton LaVey, but had the hardest time tracking that down. I assumed Aleister Crowley had used it, and part of me still thinks he must have and I just can't find it, but I came up empty.
Here are all the occult traditions that don't use the metal sign of the horns: Aleister Crowley, OTO, Golden Dawn, Templars, the Hellfire Club, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Christian claims of Black Sabbaths or Black Masses, Kabballah, Éliphas Lévi, Montague Summers, Sabine Baring-Gould, or Kenneth Anger. I found dubious 21st century graphics on pintrest that link it to the Bavarian Illuminati and Enochian Magic, but I can't confirm it with a pre-21st century source. Dennis Wheatley didn't use it until 1970's Gateway to Hell, and then it was more of the folk use.
I'm making the assumption that LaVey wasn't a secret initiate of some ancient tradition, and that he got his rituals and symbolism from occult books and pop culture. He's pretty generous with his sources, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans' Là-Bas for his Satanic Mass, but not much on the sign of the horns.
I say not much because he explains on The Joe Pyne Show (1970 according to the American Satan documentary; October 28th, 1967 according to TV Guide, though he may have appeared twice) that the sign is used to curse people. This is after appearing to zap everyone with a curse and saying he was blessing them. Maybe the meaning for him evolved over time, or this is an example of satanic inversion, or more likely that he was fooling around cursing everyone and just told a fib.
The sign of the horns is a traditional satanic greeting sign between initiates. The sign is of unknown antiquity, but probably does not date back further than the 13th or 14th century, when Satan was assigned his goat-like attributes. Since the greeting is used between “brothers of the Left Hand Path,” the left hand is always used.The accompanying picture is the "too sweet" variation, used by wrestling stable NWO and Turkish right-wing terrorist group the Grey Wolves.
It also doesn't appear in any fictional accounts of satanism that I've found until the October 6, 1966 airing of The Village of Fear episode of British TV show Adam Adamant Lives!
The timing here makes it unlikely that LaVey or the BBC influenced each other, and I'm honestly more baffled by the Adamant appearance. I couldn't find another filmed satanic sign of the horns until 1969.
Other Signs of the Horns
Mind you, this just covers the "index and pinkie finger up" brand of sign of the horns/devil. Pre-1966 I've found several alternate hand signs associated with horns and devil worship.
Aleister Crowley had the symbol "Vir. Pater. Amoun. Attitude of Pan or Bacchus", shown here in a 1911 photo.
Described thusly:
Vir (man). The feet being together. The hands, with clenched fingers and thumbs thrust out forwards, are held to the temples; the head is then bowed and pushed out, as if to symbolize the butting of an horned beast (attitude of Pan, Bacchus, etc.).
This was used in the 1916 serial The Mysteries of Myra. The sinister Black Order use it to hail each other.
It also makes an appearance in 1970's The Dunwich Horror.
Aldous Huxley's 1948 novel Ape and Essence has a futuristic cult of Belial worshippers who greet each other "Raising his hands to his forehead, he makes the sign of the horns with extended forefingers."
Christopher Lee has a two handed variation in a 1964 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour "The Sign of Satan".
Other fictional variations called the sign of the horns include the fig, or "I got your nose" sign (fist with thumb sticking out between index and middle fingers), the peace sign, and the Vulcan "live long and prosper" V sign. Some of these turn up in the non-fiction texts, but never as signifying membership in a satanic sect.
Sign of the Devil Horns
While fictional satanist were using every other possible variation of the sign of the horns, descriptions of the Italian Mano Cornuto using the term "sign of the devil's horns" pop up here and there, such as in the April 25, 1955 issue of Life, though it is a less common variation.
The conflation of good luck "sign of the devil horns" and different horn-themed hand signs signifying devil worship probably set the stage for the two being combined by LaVey, but we have a smoking gun of sorts.
The Devil in Love
We know that LaVey had a copy of Maurice Bessy's coffee table book A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural, first published in 1961, and LaVey cribbed the Signal of Baphomet originally from this book. (source: Satanism today : An encyclopedia of religion, folklore, and popular
culture by James R. Lewis)
It doesn't mention satanism, and there are a lot of facts wrong here (and in other places of the book), but this is the first and only claim that the metal sign of the horns was used as a symbol of recognition between adherents. It's a bit off on the source.
Le Diable amoureux or The Devil in Love, was a 1772 French novel by Jacques Cazotte. The illustration does not refer to events in the story itself, rather to a forward by Gérard de Nerval in the 1845 and later editions. This forward claims that after the book was published,
Cazotte received a visit from a mysterious figure with a grave demeanor, his features thinned by study, and whose imposing stature was draped in a brown cloak.He asked to speak to him privately, and when they were left alone, the stranger approached Cazotte with some bizarre signs, such as initiates use to recognize each other.Cazotte, astonished, asked him if he was mute, and begged him to explain better what he had to say. But the other only changed the direction of his signs and engaged in even more enigmatic demonstrations.
The mysterious figure assumed that Cazotte was a high level adept in Kaballism/Illuminati/Freemasonry due to esoteric secrets revealed in his book, an incident I very much doubt. The text doesn't describe the "bizarre sign", and I don't know if Nerval came up with it or if it was from the painter, Édouard de Beaumont. No indication that either were into the occult, though it wouldn't be surprising if they were a member of, or familiar with, fraternal orders with secret signs and handshakes.
Between this visual representation of the sign of the horns associated with initiate recognition and a different sign of the horns being the call sign of a satanesque cult in Ape and Essence (which LaVey mentions in The Satanic Rituals), I think we have his source.
I'm guessing Coven got it from the Church of Satan, and it's still a mystery what the Adam Adamant Lives! people were up to.
Devil Signs in Pop Culure
As we've seen, the first use of the sign of the horns (index and pinkie up, others down, thumb optional) that I could find to have an explicitly satanic connection was 1966 with Adam Adamant Lives, with the Church of Satan and Coven using it around the same time or shortly after.
The first "non-fiction" connection was in 1970 in The Second Coming: Satanism in America by Arthur Lyons as quoted above, which acted as if that were established fact.
The first use in fiction I could find was in the 1973 horror porn novel A Girl Possessed by Peggy Swenson (Richard E. Geis).
After Adam Adamant Lives!, the next filmed version I could find was 1969's Witchmaker aka The Legend of Witch Hollow.
Then 1970 porno Madam Satan
1972 Asylum of Satan
February 14, 1973 brought us the TV movie and failed pilot Poor Devil, which has Church of Satan member Sammy Davis Jr. using the sign the same way Samantha in Bewitched twitched her nose.
I haven't caught up with the glut of satanic cult movies from the early 70s, but by 1975's Devil's Rain and KISS making it big, the devil horns were getting around.
I have watched an obscene number of movies with satanists and black masses, and these the only ones with the devil horns through the early 70s. We get a lot of outstretched palms, pointing daggers, two finger points, and of course a lot of sexy dancing. Interestingly, the earlier films had a voodoo or Romani slant to them before becoming explicitly satanic.
I don't know how one would measure such things, but I don't think the satanic connotations of the symbol were truly cemented in the public consciousness until the Satanic Panic of the late 1980s. It was also around that time that metal bands distanced themselves from the devil stuff and we get the lead singer of Slayer saying he's a devout Catholic.
