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Lore of the Unicorn

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Kofi Easterling
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« Reply #15 on: April 23, 2009, 02:00:33 am »

In that case, we must abandon all effort to explain the virgin-capture story in terms of itself and its variants, and we are driven back into the sea of the world's folklore without compass or chart, there to make what accidental landfalls we may. We are seeking an explanation of the elective affinity between virgins and beasts with single horns, or, if virginity is not a primary notion, of the attraction, whether sexual or of some other sort, between women and horned beasts. Virgins undergoing sundry tests, beautiful girls seated lonely and receptive under trees, unicorns, rhinoceroses, faithful lions, elephants, appear and disappear in the mists. Bartholomew Anglicus says that "Elephants be hunted in this wise: there go in the desert two maidens all naked and bare, and these maidens begin to sing alone; and the beast hath liking when he heareth their song, and cometh to them and licketh their teats and falleth asleep anon for liking of the song; and then one maiden sticketh him in the throat and the other taketh his blood in a vessel, and with that blood the people dye cloth. This is useful information, but it is not directly to the purpose and the fog closes in again. We learn that the horn of the young female rhinoceros, taken before she has mated, sells both in Siam and in South Africa at a price at least ten times as great as that given for the horns of mated animals of either sex, on the ground that they are much more powerfully prophylactic. We delve into the myth of Diana the virgin huntress and ponder her connection with the horned moon which has had control over poisons since the beginnings of superstition. In all this rather aimless beating up and down one may learn much about the mental habits out of which the virgin-capture story arose, but the actual source of it eludes one. The suspicion grows upon the seeker that he is looking for the origin of a belief which has never had any single beginning and that all the success he can hope for will be like that of one who looks for the source of a great river--and finds it in half a dozen different springs separated, it may be, by hundreds of miles, or in the rainwind, or in the wandering cloud. And just as it is a hazardous thing to say that the Nile or the Mississippi or the Amazon springs out of precisely this or that hillside, so it would be rash to assert that the virgin-capture story must have had just this or that origin and no other. Such confident assertions are seldom made by those who have looked long into the mists of the primitive imagination where vague shapes are constantly forming and dissolving again.

    And yet, though the ultimate origin of the story remains hidden, we have already traced that story somewhat behind the form it took on in Physiologus. It is possible to take one long step farther still, and then we shall have done what we can.

    The sudden expansion of the known world during the sixteenth century and the consequent opening of new lands to exploration and conquest, gave to the imagination of Europe an impetus which had among its many results a sort of modern mythology. We are accustomed to think of this expansion in connection with the western hemisphere alone, but the sea route to India and the Far East contributed quite as much as America to European fancy. India, which had been a land of chimera to Ctesias and had remained such during all the intervening centuries, was no less marvellous now that the Portuguese were bringing back a cargo of wonders in every ship that rounded the Cape. By one of the stranger accidents in the history of legend, some of the tales that had once been told of India were transferred to a nearer land, Ethiopia, which had been confused with the great peninsula even in Virgil's time. Most of these tales moved westward with the fabulous Court of Prester John, which had originally been located somewhat vaguely in "India". Ever since the forged letter describing this Christian court had been received, and answered, by Pope Alexander III, Christian missionaries had been much interested in it, and they were none the less so in the early seventeenth century when there seemed to be grave danger that Prester John--at that time approximately five hundred years of age--would fall into heresy. These are the circumstances surrounding the several accounts of Ethiopia that we owe to Jesuits of the period, the best known of which is that of Jeronimo Lobo. Most of the Jesuit travellers to the Court of Prester John have something to say about the Abyssinian unicorn, and Father Lobo has a great deal. From one of them, Fray Luis de Urreta, we get an unmistakable clue to the original nature of the virgin-capture story.

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