“But be not thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee to help me.
Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.
Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.”
– Psalm 22:19-21
First appearing in the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization around 2000 BC, the unicorn was depicted on the Indus seal as a one-horned beast with a body of a cow. It reached Europe during classical antiquity in the accounts of natural history. Greek writers of natural history were convinced of the reality of unicorns living in India, a distant and fabulous realm for them. The earliest description is from Ctesias, who in his book Indika, or On India, written in the 5th century BC, described the unicorn as white in body, scarlet in head, and with startling blue eyes. Its horn was a cubit long, white at the base, black in the middle, blood-red at the tip. In Natural History, Pliny the Elder described the one-horned beast as “a very fierce animal called the monoceros which has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive.”
Of the numerous translations of the Bible, the only translation to call the unicorn a unicorn is the one prepared by Martin Luther. Luther’s work was influenced also by the Vulgate and earlier Septuagint versions of the scriptures, which was commissioned in the 3rd century BC by Ptolemy II of Egypt. A Macedonian by birth, he sent 72 learned Jews to the island of Pharos by Alexandria to produce a Greek translation of the Old Testament within 72 days. Their translation of the Hebrew word “re’em”, which alluded to a wild, untamable animal of great strength and agility, with mighty horn(s), was “monoceros”, that is to say, unicorn. Many modern translations prefer “aurochs” for wild ox, which is now said to be the correct meaning of the term, but the men of the Septuagint did not know that animal, which by their time was extinct in the Near East. The Septuagint term was adopted by the standard Latin version of the Bible in the Roman Catholic Church, the Vulgate, which is how the unicorn entered the text of the Palm Sunday mass.
In the Far East, the unicorn’s equivalence is the qilin, whose appearance was placed as early as 2697 BC. It was described to have a body of an axis deer, horse’s hoofs, an oxtail, and a horned, wolf-like head. Capable of emitting beams of five sacred colors, this good-natured beast possessed a musical voice and had the role of bringing children into the world, like that of the stork in Europe. The birth of Confucius was but one of those announced by a qilin. In 2012, it was announced that archaeologists reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn ridden by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koguryŏ Kingdom from 277 BC to 668 AD. It was discovered in Moranbong near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, proving Pyongyang to be the historic capital of Ancient Korea.
Today the unicorn is largely considered a mythical creature, but in the past, it was believed to be a real-life animal, proven by natural history, pictorial, and eyewitness accounts from across the world. With its pronounced phallic shape, the unicorn horn was considered a vigorous love symbol, and a restorative for sexual potency. In 1558, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a unicorn horn was recorded with a value of £10,000, equivalent to £50,000 in modern times. The problem of adulterated vs. genuine unicorn horn was advised by Dr. Conrad Gesner in the 1563 Zurich edition of his bestiary: “The potency of the unicorn is more curative forward near the tip than behind, and care should be taken to buy the whole or at any rate large chunks the horn, so as to run less risk of trickery. You will find only small fragments in apothecaries’ shops, and they say the more globular pieces, whiter and softer than the rest, are the marrow. The outer portion, however, like cortex is rougher and harder, blade-shaped, and of a pale yellowish-white color. If this kind of horn is easily crushed when you bite on it and is not tough like the horns, fraud is clearly indicated from its color and other distinctive signs, for it can be in fact the burned horn of some other animal, mixed with spices to make it palatable, or quenched whitehot in perfumed water.”
After all, it could have well been a rhinoceros, a wild ox, or an ass. During Zheng He’s 15th-century voyage to East Africa, his fleet brought back two giraffes, of which Chinese court officials thought were the unicorns themselves. To this day, the same word is used for the qilin and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese. The animal knows what it is; its name, its bodily characteristics, its magical qualities are but our perception and imagination upon it.
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