The ancient Greeks and Romans, you see, had been making forays into India and bringing back tales of the strange beasts there, and the facts tended to get a bit.lost. He also notes that it has “the tail of a boar,” much like a rhino’s, “and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead.” Writers would only later describe the horn as white.
Pliny, for instance, mentions that the unicorn has “the feet of an elephant,” a rhino’s feet in fact being not hooved like a horse’s, but fleshy like an elephant’s. Less likely still is seeing a normal antelope from afar in profile, since that would only last as long as the animal didn’t move.Ī far more likely culprit is the Indian rhinoceros, and clues for this are sprinkled throughout the early accounts-indeed, the unicorn is sometimes referred to as the Indian ass. The myth of the unicorn may have come from sightings of antelope and such ungulates with only one horn, having either been born with the defect or lost the horn when scrapping with a predator or one of its own kind. The emperor, though, dismissed it as a fraud and went on to live another 10 years. In the 15th century, a giraffe was brought to China for the first time and presented to the emperor as a kirin, which was a gutsy move considering its proclivities for letting royalty know they’re going to die soon. Its appearance was said to foretell the birth of a royal baby, which is nice of it, but can also predict an imminent death, which is not so nice. Over in the East, royalty had a rather more complicated relationship with their version of the unicorn, the aforementioned kirin, or qilin. More industrious users who didn’t want to wait around to have their food poisoned would grind up the horns-usually those of the oryx or narwal (whose horn is actually a giant tooth)-to gain immunity from toxins. They went for tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money, and were particularly popular among paranoid royalty. What followed was a full-blown mania for their horns, which were said to detect poison if you stirred them around in your food or drink. Thus the unicorn became firmly implanted in European lore. And the unicorn stood for Christ, since he was captured and put to death like the unicorn is done in by the virgin (though pretty much every other animal was also compared to Christ, even the pelican, which was said to peck at its own breast to revive its young with blood, like Jesus shed his own blood for us).
Not only was the natural history of the animal given, but each was then compared to a biblical figure. The scene (above) is one of the most iconic images in wildly popular medieval books known as bestiaries, encyclopedias of sorts that cataloged nature’s beasts, both real and imagined.