Record #142
Unicorn
A fierce horned beast whose purity and violence coexist paradoxically.
Original Text
The first version of the Unicorn is nearly identical with the latest. Four hundred years b.c., the Greek historian and physician Ctesias told that among the kingdoms of India there were very swift wild asses with white coats, purple heads, blue eyes, and in the middle of their foreheads a pointed horn whose base was white, whose tip was red, and whose middle was black. Pliny, more precise, wrote (VIII, 3I): the fiercest animal is the unicorn, which in the rest of the body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar, and has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead. They say that it is impossible to capture this animal alive.
Around I892, the Orientalist Schrader conjectured that the Unicorn might have been suggested to the Greeks by certain Persian bas-reliefs depicting bulls in profile with a single horn.
In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, composed at the beginning of the seventh century, we read that one thrust of the Unicorn’s horn may kill an elephant; this perhaps is echoed in the similar victory, in Sindbad’s second voyage, of the Karkadan, or rhinoceros, which can ’carry off a great elephant on its horn’ . (We also find here that the rhinoceros’s horn ‘cleft in twain, is the likeness of a man’; alQaswini says it is the likeness of a man on horseback, and others have spoken of birds and fishes.) Another of the Unicorn’s enemies was the lion, and a stanza in the tangled allegory The Faerie Queene records the manner of their duel in this way:
Like as a Lyon, whose imperiall powre A prowd rebellious Unicom defyes,
T’ avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applyes, And when him ronning in full course he spyes, He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast His precious horne, sought of his enimyes, Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast, But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast.
These lines (Book II, Canto V, Stanza X) date from the sixteenth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland brought together on the heraldic arms of Great Britain the English Leopard, or Lion, and the Scottish Unicorn.
In the Middle Ages, bestiaries taught that the Unicorn could be captured by a maiden; in the Greek Physiologus we read: ‘How it is captured. A virginis placed before it and it springs into the virgin’s lap and she warms it with love and carries it off to the palace of kings.’ One of Pisanello’s medals and many famous tapestries illustrate this victory whose allegorical applications are obvious. Leonardo da Vinci attributes the Unicorn’s capture to its lust, which makes it forget its fierceness, lie in a girl’s lap, and so be taken by hunters. The Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, mercury, and evil have all been represented by the Unicorn. In his Psychologieund Alchemie (I944), Jung gives a history and an analysis of these symbols.
A small white horse with the forelegs of an antelope, a goat’s beard, and a long twisted horn projecting straight out from its forehead is the picture usually given of this imaginary animal.
Around I892, the Orientalist Schrader conjectured that the Unicorn might have been suggested to the Greeks by certain Persian bas-reliefs depicting bulls in profile with a single horn.
In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, composed at the beginning of the seventh century, we read that one thrust of the Unicorn’s horn may kill an elephant; this perhaps is echoed in the similar victory, in Sindbad’s second voyage, of the Karkadan, or rhinoceros, which can ’carry off a great elephant on its horn’ . (We also find here that the rhinoceros’s horn ‘cleft in twain, is the likeness of a man’; alQaswini says it is the likeness of a man on horseback, and others have spoken of birds and fishes.) Another of the Unicorn’s enemies was the lion, and a stanza in the tangled allegory The Faerie Queene records the manner of their duel in this way:
Like as a Lyon, whose imperiall powre A prowd rebellious Unicom defyes,
T’ avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applyes, And when him ronning in full course he spyes, He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast His precious horne, sought of his enimyes, Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast, But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast.
These lines (Book II, Canto V, Stanza X) date from the sixteenth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland brought together on the heraldic arms of Great Britain the English Leopard, or Lion, and the Scottish Unicorn.
In the Middle Ages, bestiaries taught that the Unicorn could be captured by a maiden; in the Greek Physiologus we read: ‘How it is captured. A virginis placed before it and it springs into the virgin’s lap and she warms it with love and carries it off to the palace of kings.’ One of Pisanello’s medals and many famous tapestries illustrate this victory whose allegorical applications are obvious. Leonardo da Vinci attributes the Unicorn’s capture to its lust, which makes it forget its fierceness, lie in a girl’s lap, and so be taken by hunters. The Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, mercury, and evil have all been represented by the Unicorn. In his Psychologieund Alchemie (I944), Jung gives a history and an analysis of these symbols.
A small white horse with the forelegs of an antelope, a goat’s beard, and a long twisted horn projecting straight out from its forehead is the picture usually given of this imaginary animal.