Lore of the Unicorn

The virgin-capture story is not, for all its interest, a pleasing one, and in its later ramifications it becomes positively painful. When he strayed into Physiologus the unicorn entered a region not worthy of him. A creature imagined nobly as terrible, solitary, with the beauty of power, was transformed under Christian influence into a little goat-like animal eating out of the hand, going to sleep in maidens' laps, and serving as a symbol of virginity. Nietzsche could not have asked for a more brilliant illustration of "slave morality."

The Greek version of Pysiologus brings before us a trait of the unicorn which is quite as strange as its weakness for virgins and which had a development in Europe quite as extensive and bewildering. The statement of this trait is brief and simple, but we shall find that the explanation of it, in so far as it can be explained, is neither simple nor brief but will lead us up and down over great stretches of time and into some of the darkest places of the mind. The Greek Bestiary says that when the animals assemble at evening beside the great water to drink they find that a serpent has left its venom floating upon the surface--a characteristic trick of serpents which is elsewhere vouched for. They see or smell this venom and dare not drink,but wait for the unicorn. At last he comes, steps into the water, makes the sign of the cross over it with his horn and thereby renders the poison harmless. The significance of this trait is elsewhere explained by saying that the animal's single horn represents the Holy Cross, that the serpent stands for the Devil, and that the poisoned waters are the sins of the world.

It is remarkable that this trait--which I shall call, somewhat arbitrarily, the water-conning--exactly suited as it was to the uses of Christian allegory, was not reported in the Bestiaries of western Europe. To be sure it was known in the West, but not until late, and then chiefly in learned circles. Isidore of Seville and his followers seem never to have heard of it, and it was almost certainly unknown to Hildegarde of Bingen, who would have delighted in its magical connotations. We may be fairly certain, therefore, that the trait was not mentioned in the primitive versions of Physiologus and that it entered the Greek version from a source to which the other Bestiaries had not access.

The two themes of the water-conning and the virgin-capture were seldom brought together in a single account except in contexts professedly erudite, but a remarkable exception to this rule is found in a rather famous poem on hunting written by Natalis Comes in Latin hexameter about the middle of the sixteenth century. Here a large amount of unicorn lore is packed into little space:--