Joseph Horne is an Anglican bishop and Puritan theologian of 17th-century England who publicly rejected his son Patience in the treatise Rejection of my Children (1692).
| Type | Character (historical) |
| Houses of the Cycle | ☷ House of the Descent · ⌖ House of History |
| Spanish entry | Joseph Horne — Obispo y padre |
Description
He is portrayed at his candlelit worktable, in black Anglican vestments with a white clerical collar and a silver pectoral cross, quill in his right hand and a book open before him. Behind him hang a Christ Pantocrator and a library of Puritan theology; manuscript pages lie scattered on the floor, one bearing Rejection of my Children, by Joseph Horne, 1692.
History
- Bishop in an English county of the Puritan Anglican Church, he wrote spiritual treatises still cited in university libraries.
- He read his son’s brittle bones as divine punishment, and wrote and published that reading.
- On learning of his son’s homosexuality, he declared the rejection in writing and left the manuscript on his desk for the family to find on returning from the liturgy. The plural of the title was deliberate.
- In a youthful treatise he mentioned a mythological region called Crapulia, a land of vices where sinners wandered, as a rhetorical warning.
Legacy
Patience recalled Crapulia years later while crossing, unknowingly, the infernal margins his father had described, as part of the Descent cycle, and completed his arc in the Northern Crown. The guilt his father sowed became a vocation for redemption; the false prophecy Patience assumed was partly an attempt to fulfill the paternal warning retroactively.