The second part of the chant that opens Oxen of the Sun
invokes some god to bless women's wombs with new life: "Send
us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit."
Under one aspect, this deity is simply Dr. Andrew J. Horne, the master
of the maternity hospital. But the play on his name to suggest
an animal's "horn," and the mentions of "light," pull in the
Homeric motif from which this chapter derives its name: cattle
sacred to the sun god Helios.
In Book 12 of the Odyssey, the voyagers are forced
to land on an island that they have been warned to avoid,
because it contains cattle sacred to Helios (a sun god who
later became identified with Apollo), and the god will punish
any harm that comes to them. When they run out of food, the
men break their vow to Odysseus and slaughter some of the
cattle. Helios appeals to Zeus, who destroys the Greek
warriors' ship with a lightning bolt when they depart.
Joyce certainly intended the link between Horne and Helios:
the Gilbert schema identifies
the Irish doctor as the counterpart of the Homeric god and the
nurses in his hospital as analogues to Helios' daughters
Phaethusa and Lampetie—facts which Gilbert emphasizes in his James
Joyce's Ulysses (1930). But the anger of Homer's god
introduces a new element into what so far has been an
evocation of human worship and divine benevolence. By killing
the sacred oxen, Odysseus' men commit an offense against life.
The theme of a god being displeased because men disrespect the
fertility that he sanctions will be picked up in the
chastising tone of the chapter's fourth paragraph, and in
many later sections of the episode.
Other echoes probably lurk within "Horhorn." Jeri
Johnson hears a play on the expression "horn of plenty,"
consistent with the idea of "wombfruit." J. S. Atherton
observes in Critical Essays that the doctor's
"conveniently phallic surname allowed Joyce to use him as a
fertility symbol" (314)––a view supported by the plays on
"horn" in Sirens.