Unicorn of the Sea

The Unicorn of the Land

Emerging from the minds of men, it took over a millennia to ignite the fire of the unicorn fantasy. But, around A.D. 1000, when the narwhal tusk made its debut on the World’s stage, it provided the all-spark that would fuel the flames of power and superstition for another six centuries.

It was a victory of opportunism that kindled the partial manifestation of the beast; a mixture of ignorance mistaken for fortuitousness, and an exploitation of that same ignorance. Vikings had hunted the narwhal and acquired tusks from Arctic natives during the first millennia; a common and practical activity for which they used parts of the whale for different purposes.

It appears that when they learned of the Europeans’ esteemed value for tusk which was fervently interpreted by men of a different culture as an elusive, rare and now incredibly coveted item, they enthusiastically and discreetly let it pass as one of the most prized artifacts of all time: the unicorn horn… for which they collected vast sums of wealth.

The Europeans, who hadn’t yet explored the remote and frigid North, zealously regarded the tusk as proof that the ‘chivalrous’ and elusive unicorn, born of myth and mystery, did indeed exist. Regardless of the era, when people want to believe something, they do. While synchronicities and miracles can occur, they are rooted in something more like quantum entanglement engaged by prayer, faith, and the mysteries of Life, which pervade all levels of Creation. The unicorn myth was more like fantasy; disconnected from realities and idealized. The perpetuation of which invited intrigue, imagination, delight and desires, but still, was an expression and projection of the psyche. It served as a symbol outside ourselves, that had the ability to heal, to be free, to be magical and majestical.

According to researchers, the birth of the unicorn can’t be truly identified or marked in any time or any place. However, one tangible thread leads to Ctesias, a Greek physician practicing medicine in Persia at the court of King Darius II. Upon returning to his home town of Cnidus in 398 BC after seventeen years, he wrote two books, one of which was the ‘History of Persia’ and the other, ‘Indica’.

Ctesias, although born into the priestly caste of the Asclepiadai, in which medicine was an inherited profession, did not engender the profound credibility of Herodotus, perhaps in part due to his recording of an animal that served as the unicorn progenitor. Ctesias’ reputation as a writer was viewed as having a romanticized tone. Even still, Ctesias claimed all that he had written was perfectly true, and in fact, was witness to all his recordings. However, it was clear that Ctesias, by his own confession under different circumstances, wrote about places he’d never been, relying upon news from travelers and Persian officials.

He wasn’t suspicious about the where his sources obtained their information, believing that the people with whom he conferred were beyond reproach. He had already heard stories of a beast existing in the Himalayan mountains, described in languages besides his native Greek tongue. Translations of detail and interpretations may have given rise to images that were more ‘artistic’ than factual with regard to the unicorn. Any doubt could be assuaged by a simple and extensively promulgated ‘fact’; that there were all kinds of unique and curious beasts native to India, let alone the even more remote Himalayan territories. While he wrote about a fierce animal, its description could have been likened more to a rhinoceros with the notable feature, the singular horn, being approximately 28” in length. Rumors of the stubborn and willful members of the onager family were not less intriguing, since this relative of the Central Asian Wild Ass was native to northern Persia, a country in which he spent nearly two decades.

In any case, unicorn legend had a very slow genesis, creeping along by way of written work and only understandable to the educated. Fragmented references to the unicorn surfaced centuries after Ctesias’ writings. Julius Ceasar described a huge animal in the first century BC – a stag – who had a long straight horn supported by his brow, in-between his ears… and then, Julius Solinus in the third century AD, wrote of a monster that had the body of a horse, elephant feet, a tail like a pig and the head of a stag. The horn was bright, and had grown to four feet in length. Solinus also claimed the beast couldn’t be caught alive.

“In that city [Alexandria], during the third century after Christ and under Christian influence, there were brought together a number of animal stories, some of them drawn from the wide-spread “Beast Epic” of the world and others apparently concocted to serve the immediate need, each of them fitted with a “moral” somewhat after the fashion of Aesop’s Fables. It seems unnecessary to assume that any single individual was responsible for the collection as a whole or that a single original text ever existed.” ~ The Lore of the Unicorn, by Odell Shepard, publ. London: George Allen & Unwin, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930, pg 19.

Serving as an english speaker’s window into that time, the King James translation (early 1600s) of the already existing early Christian Bible, advertised clear references to the unicorn in the Old Testament.

Keep in mind, that “the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible is the Old Greek (OG) [or Septuagint], the translation made in Alexandria, Egypt, for the use of the Greek-speaking Jewish community there. At first, just the Torah was translated, in the third century B.C.E.; the rest of the biblical books were translated later. The whole Hebrew Bible was likely translated into ancient Greek by the middle of the second century B.C.E.” ~ http://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/bible-basics/what-are-the-earliest-versions-and-translations-of-the-bible.aspx, accessed 6-21-21.

Assuming the translation was as accurate as possible, the characteristics of the unicorn in ‘Old Greek’ had changed yet again, but remarkable strength, indomitable spirit, and linkages with the lion, bull and calf were loosely tagged (see image at the end of this section). Most importantly, this creature was mysterious, awesome and powerful. It had the basic ingredients of the useful Metaphor.

During the ninth century, it was another Greek, Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople who preserved fragments of Ctesias’ work. Like the famous game of operator, in this case an ancient one, image interpretation emerging in one mind, were altered in another, leading to a new, but (still) non-existent creature:

“There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length. The dust filed from this horn is administered in a potion as a protection against deadly dugs. The base of this hors, for some two hands’-breadth above the brow, is pure white; the upper part is sharp and of a vivid crimson; and the remainder, or middle portion, is black. Those who drink out of these horns, made in drinking vessels, are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease. Indeed, they are immune even to poisons if, either before or after swallowing such, they drink wine, water, or anything else from these beakers. Other asses, both the tame an the wild, an in fact all animals with solid hoofs, are without the ankle-bone and have no gall in the liver, but these have both the ankle-bone and the gall. This ankle-bone, the most beautiful I have ever seen, is like that of an ox in general appearance, but it is as heavy as lead and its color is that of cinnabar through and through. The animal is exceedingly swift and powerful, so that no creature, neither the horse nor any other, can overtake it.” ~  The Lore of the Unicorn, by Odell Shepard, publ. London: George Allen & Unwin, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930, pgs. 7-8.

In dissecting the passage, researchers can make a few observations. One of which is that the passage seems to be describing (at least?) two animals merged together, and that this differs from previous descriptions. The coloring seems very exotic, too. Also, in this documentation, the addition of pharmaceutical value was entered. This value may have been attributed to an already ‘old’ belief – especially in the Orient – that the rhinoceros horn had curative properties. Collectively over time, pieces of this legend having various seeds and roots (from the ancient Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and the Bible) took on a customized form and purpose…

“Not Ctesias and not Aelian but this grist of old wives’ tales fathered upon an imaginary “Physiologus” was responsible for scattering the image of the unicorn throughout Europe, making him familiar where books were never read, contorting his shapely limbs on corbels and cornices and miserere seats, depicting him in stained glass and on tapestry, lifting him finally to the British Royal Coat of Arms.” ~ ibid. pgs 20-21.

Beautiful wall-sized weavings of exquisitely dyed yarns, depict a white horse dipping his long horn into water to purify it, lying down in captivity, and as shown at the end of this section, partially in the lap of a beautiful virtuous woman, purity being the only quality capable of attracting and taming the beast. Even though the Middle Ages show more of a goat head or beard and cloven hooves, the unicorn we are familiar with, is more than not, ‘horse’.

Now that the Europeans were primed with a Christian symbol, allegory and metaphor, they were unwittingly primed for the emergence of the horn itself; circumventing any careful scrutiny or discernment. The value of such an item was incredible, and possession only for those of merited importance.

“In medieval Europe, some people believed that narwhal tusks were the horns from the legendary unicorn. Whilst in the north, the tusk simply had a practical or decorative use, on the European continent, the tusk was believed to have superb magic powers, like healing from poison or curing certain diseases. This made the item worth huge amounts of gold…” ~ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/03/06/unicorn-narwhal-vikings-2/ accessed 6-21-21.

In the late 1580s, Queen Elizabeth I received a unique carved and bejeweled narwhal tusk worth 10,000 British pounds, at that time, enough to purchase a whole castle.  

“The horns became an icon of power, both earthly and divine, in part because of their religious associations. In medieval times, the unicorn was seen as a symbol of great purity and of Christ, the motif common in religious art. The fantastic beast appeared in many thousands of images, Mr. Bruemmer wrote, and “All carry a horn that is unmistakably a narwhal tusk, the only long, spiraled horn in all creation.” ~ http://www.islandbreath.org/2005Year/a05-09-science/0509-10narwhaltusk.html accessed 6-21-21

It wasn’t until the late 1600’s and early 1700’s, when the Europeans began exploring the Arctic regions for themselves, that they learned of the narwhal… even then, it was dubbed the ‘unicorn of the sea’, and retained some of the terrestrial unicorn’s mystique.

“Explorers claimed its tusk could punch holes in thick ice, and that males battled with their long tusks for supremacy. In 1870, Jules Verne told how a narwhal could pierce ships “clean through as easily as a drill pierces a barrel.””~ ibid accessed 6-21–21.

“In his beginnings, wherever and whatever they may have been, the unicorn was a symbol of beneficent power inhabiting the poetic imagination. The symbol expanded into myth and this myth was debased into fable. The unicorn next became an exemplum of moral virtues, then an actual animal, then a thaumaturge, then a medicine, then an article of merchandise, then an idle dream, and, last stage of all, an object of antiquarian research.” The Lore of the Unicorn, by Odell Shepard, publ. London: George Allen & Unwin, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930, pg. 168.