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Lore of the Unicorn
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Topic: Lore of the Unicorn (Read 496 times)
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Kofi Easterling
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Posts: 628
Re: Lore of the Unicorn
«
Reply #15
on:
April 23, 2009, 01:56:48 am »
The unicorn legend gained valuable and lasting corroboration from the brilliant error of the Septuagint, but this alone would not have won for it anything like its later prestige; another influence was required to carry the unicorn into the centre of Christian myth and symbolism. Fully to understand the second influence that was brought into play we should need to know more than we do about that agglomeration of vice and virtue, wealth and poverty, ignorance and erudition, wisdom and folly, which we call Alexandria. In that city, 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.
Readers of Tertullian, Cassiodorus, and even Origen, will not need to be told that the habit of allegorizing not merely everything in the Scriptures but everything outside of them was at this time fastening upon the Christian mind. The world of nature, seldom valued for its own sake by the typical Christian, was more and more regarded as a mere storehouse of edifying metaphors. What we should call facts were felt to be of little worth in comparison with the moral truths that alleged facts could be supposed to signify and it was considered that God had created the lower animals, particularly those that seemed to have no other use, solely for the moral and spiritual instruction of mankind. Very little of Aristotle's objective spirit and method was carried over into the Christian thought centring at Alexandria, disabled as that was from the start by a puerile moral-hunting and phrase-making, by the determination to make facts bend to the uses of edification and to see, almost literally, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good--or, what was considered the same thing, moral significance--in everything.
These were some of the conditions surrounding the haphazard selection, fabrication, and welding together of the stories composing the Christian Beast Epic. In the primitive forms of that body of fable, apparently, each article began with a quotation from Scripture followed by the formula: "But the physiologus [i.e. the naturalist] says . . . " and then came a description of the major traits, real or fancied, of some animal, capped by the moral deduction, the lesson to be learned therefrom. Later copyists seem to have separated the animal descriptions and the morals from the texts they were intended to illustrate, so that each article began with the words: "The Physiologus says." Thus the whole collection, naturally regarded as the work of one author called Physiologus, came to be called by that supposed author's name. In later centuries it was called, in Europe, the "Bestiary".
What sort of thing we may expect from this treasury of animal lore is indicated by its account of the ant-lion: "Physiologus says that the ant-lion's father has the shape of a lion and his mother that of an ant. His father feeds on flesh and his mother on herbs. These two bring forth the ant-lion, which is a mixture of both, for his fore part is that of a lion and his hind part that of an ant. Being thus composed, he can eat neither flesh like his father nor herbs like his mother, and so he starves to death."
Official Christianity did what it could to repudiate this collection, for a synod of Pope Gelasius in 496 condemned it as the work of "heretics", although it had been falsely ascribed to Saint Ambrose. In spite of this and other attacks it remained familiar and influential throughout Christendom for over a thousand years, and there are extant texts in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Old High German, Icelandic, Old French, Provençal, Ethiopic, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon. It was chiefly by means of these Bestiaries that the popular as distinguished from the learned tradition of the unicorn was disseminated. 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.
Existing texts of the Physiolous vary considerably in minor details, but this is the substance of what they have to relate about the unicorn: He is a small animal, like a kid, but surprisingly fierce for his size, with one very sharp horn on his head, and no hunter is able to catch him by force. Yet there is a trick by which he is taken. Men lead a virgin to the place where he most resorts and leave her there alone. As soon as he sees this virgin he runs and lays his head in her lap. She fondles him and he falls asleep. The hunters then approach and capture him and lead him to the palace of the king.
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