Ram

The ram, the male sheep with its great curling horns, was a powerful emblem of generative force and was embodied in several gods of ancient Egypt. Khnum, the ram-headed god of the Nile's source, was the divine potter who shaped humankind and their life-force on his wheel; Amun, who rose to be king of the gods, took the ram as his sacred animal, and avenues of ram-headed sphinxes lead to his great temple at Karnak. The Greeks identified Amun with Zeus, worshipping him as Zeus-Ammon, an oracular god shown with a ram's horns, the horns that Alexander the Great wore on his coins as a sign of divine descent.

Greek myth gives a second, quite separate ram its own major story: Chrysomallos, a ram with a fleece of pure gold, was sent by the god Hermes to rescue the children Phrixus and Helle from being sacrificed, carrying them through the sky until Helle fell into the strait later named for her, the Hellespont; Phrixus, safely arrived in Colchis, sacrificed the ram in gratitude and hung its golden fleece in a sacred grove, where it became the object of Jason and the Argonauts' quest generations later, the most famous single fleece in Greek legend. One proposed rationalisation of the golden fleece itself is technological rather than purely mythic: the ancient Kingdom of Colchis, on the Black Sea coast where the fleece's story is set, is documented to have used sheepskins laid in mountain streams to trap fine gold particles from the water, a genuine placer-mining technique some geologists suggest lies behind the legend of a fleece made of gold.

The ram is the great animal of substitution and sacrifice. In the Book of Genesis, when Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac and then stayed at the last moment, he finds a ram caught by its horns in a thicket and offers it in the boy's place, a scene of the sacrifice that is provided instead, central to Jewish, Christian and Islamic memory. The ram's horn itself becomes an instrument of the sacred: the shofar, sounded in the synagogue at the new year and the Day of Atonement, is a ram's horn, its call a summons to repentance. As Aries the Ram it opens the zodiac. Creation, kingship, sacrifice and the summons to God gather to the horned male sheep.

A technical point is worth adding to the zodiacal reference above: the sign of Aries and the constellation Aries are no longer the same patch of sky. Because of the earth's slow axial precession, the position of the vernal equinox, which tropical astrology fixes at zero degrees Aries, has drifted since antiquity and now actually lies within the constellation Pisces, a roughly two-thousand-year drift that sidereal systems of astrology account for and that tropical systems, by definition, do not. Most halakhic authorities require the shofar specifically to be a ram's horn rather than any kosher animal's, and one horn is explicitly ruled out regardless of the holiday: a cow's or an ox's, disqualified because it would recall the sin of the Golden Calf, the Talmudic principle being that an accuser cannot also serve as a defender.