As a Peruvian, I am quite familiar with the cornucopia that made it onto our flag’s coat of arms in 1825. Depicted typically as a #HornOfPlenty overflowing with produce to symbolize the earth’s bounty, our plutonic variation has golden coins pouring out of it, to represent our mineral wealth.
The best-known origin story of this symbol stems from Greek mythology, where a newly born Zeus was sent to Crete to be suckled, in secret, by the nymph and/or she-goat Amalthea. Quickly gaining in strength, baby Zeus accidentally ripped off one of her horns, which became a legendary item associated to boundless divine nourishment. The horn of plenty makes an odd comeback generations later, when Heracles trades it for the river god Achelous’ own horn, which gets ripped off during their wrestling match. The distinction between these severed horns begets its own interpretive confusions.
Regardless, the notion that a finite container can hold an infinity of resources is a compelling one across mythologies. Variations of the trope abound: it can be a trickster’s means of duplicity—as in the Lokrur and Prose Edda, where it is used to fool Thor into losing a drinking game against giants—; a prop for moral righteousness—as with Philemon and Baucis’ Ovidian pitcher, one-upped by Christ’s miraculous feeding of 5,000 in the New Testament, which evolved into the Holy Chalice and the Holy Grail as containers of divine grace—; and a highly strategic political advantage—like the Cauldron of Dagda in Irish mythology, that could feed entire armies without need for replenishment.
With the exception of Thor’s horn (which had one end invisibly dipped in the ocean, making it impossible to empty), these items are all bound by their needlessness for explanation. Divine nature accounts for their incommensurable, non-Euclidean interior, which exists with no seeming contradiction to the law of conservation of mass, or the economies and scarcities of the world.
March 14, 2023
“In a five-hour hearing this week, a committee on reparations presented a slew of specific proposals to the city's Board of Supervisors. They included $5 million lump-sum payments for every eligible Black adult, homes in the metro priced at $1 for each family, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years, and the canceling of personal debt and tax burdens.
Supervisors unanimously supported the presentation from the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, but its proposals remain far from reality. […] Notably, there is no plan yet for how to pay for the reparations.”1
Intersecting its nature as a symbol of duplicity, righteousness and political advantage, depending on the discourse of its advocates or its detractors, San Francisco’s financial cornucopia projects beyond the grounds of reality, into the fantastic realm of myth.
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-black-reparations-plan-hearing-2023-3