Unicorn

In this episode of the I Can't Sleep Podcast, fall asleep learning about Unicorns. Too magical to be boring, you say? This article will explain more about unicorns than you've ever wanted to know, yet you'll come away having learned nothing because, well, you'll be asleep before you can hear all of it. Happy sleeping! This content is derived from the Wikipedia articles Unicorn, Legendary Creature, and Classical Antiquity, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license.

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast,

Where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

I'm your host,

Benjamin Boster.

Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled,

Unicorn.

The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large,

Pointed,

Spiraling horn projecting from its forehead.

In European literature and art,

The unicorn has,

For the last thousand years or so,

Been depicted as a white horse-like or goat-like animal with a long,

Straight horn with spiraling hooves,

Cloven hooves,

And sometimes a goat's beard.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance,

It was commonly described as an extremely wild woodland creature,

A symbol of purity and grace,

Which could be captured only by a virgin.

In encyclopedias,

Its horn was described as having the power to render poisoned water potable and to heal sickness.

In Medieval and Renaissance times,

The tusk of the narwhal was sometimes sold as a unicorn horn.

A bovine type of unicorn is thought by some scholars to have been depicted in seals of the Bronze Age,

Indus Valley civilization,

The interpretation remaining controversial.

An equine form of the unicorn was mentioned by the ancient Greeks in accounts of natural history by various writers,

Including Theseus,

Strabo,

Pliny the Younger,

Alien,

And Cosmas in Ecoplaestas.

The Bible also describes an animal,

The rheum,

Which some translations render as unicorn.

The unicorn continues to hold a place in popular culture.

It is often used as a symbol of fantasy or rarity.

A creature with a single horn,

Conventionally called a unicorn,

Is the most common image on the soapstone stamp seals of the Bronze Age,

Indus Valley civilization,

IVC,

From the centuries around 2000 BC.

It has a body more like a cow than a horse,

And a curved horn that goes forward,

Then up at the tip.

The mysterious feature depicted coming down from the front of the back is usually shown.

It may represent a harness or other covering.

Usually the unicorn faces a vertical object with at least two stages.

This is variously described as a ritual offering stand,

An incense burner,

Or a manger.

The animal is always in profile on Indus seals,

But the theory that it represents animals with two horns,

One hiding the other,

Is disproved by a much smaller number of small terracotta unicorns,

Probably toys,

And the profile depictions of bulls,

Where both horns are clearly shown.

It was thought that the unicorn was the symbol of a powerful clan or merchant community,

But may also have had some religious significance.

In South Asia the unicorn is only seen during the IVC period.

It disappears in South Asian art ever since.

Jonathan Mark Knoyer notes the IVC unicorn to not have any direct connection with later unicorn motifs observed in other parts of the world.

Nevertheless,

It remains possible that the IVC unicorn had contributed to later myths of fantastical one-horned creatures in West Asia.

Unicorns are not found in Greek mythology,

But rather in the accounts of natural history,

For Greek writers of natural history were convinced of the reality of unicorns,

Which they believed lived in India,

A distant and fabulous realm for them.

The earliest description is from Ctesias,

Who in his book Indica on India,

Described them as wild asses,

Fleet of foot,

Having a horn a cubit and a half in length,

And colored white,

Red,

And black.

Unicorn meat was said to be too bitter to eat.

Ctesias got his information while living in Persia.

Unicorns on a relief sculpture have been found at the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis in Iran.

Aristotle must be following Ctesias when he mentions two one-horned animals,

The oryx,

A kind of antelope,

And the so-called Indian ass.

Antigonus of Christus also wrote about the one-horned Indian ass.

Strabo says that in the Caucasus there were one-horned horses with stag-like heads.

Pliny the Elder mentions the oryx and an Indian ox,

Perhaps a greater one-horned rhinoceros,

As one-horned beasts,

As well 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.

In On the Nature of Animals,

Allion,

Quoting Ctesias,

Adds that India produces also a one-horned horse,

And says that the monoceros was sometimes called cartosanus,

Which may be a form of the Arabic karkadan,

Meaning rhinoceros.

Cosmas and Dicoplus,

A merchant of Alexandria who lived in the 6th century,

Made a voyage to India and subsequently wrote works on cosmography.

He gives the description of a unicorn based on four brass figures in the palace of the king of Ethiopia.

He states from the report that it is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive,

And that all its strength lies in its horn.

When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture,

It throws itself from a precipice and turns so aptly in falling that it receives all the shock upon the horn,

And so escapes safe and sound.

Medieval knowledge of the fabulous beast stemmed from biblical and ancient sources,

And the creature was variously represented as a kind of wild ass,

Goat,

Or horse.

The predecessor of the medieval bestiary,

Compiled in late antiquity and known as Physiologus,

Popularized an elaborate allegory in which a unicorn,

Trapped by a maiden,

Representing the Virgin Mary,

Stood for the incarnation.

As soon as the unicorn sees her,

It lays its head on her lap and falls asleep.

This became a basic emblematic tag that underlies medieval notions of the unicorn,

Justifying its appearance in both secular and religious art.

The unicorn is often shown hunted,

Raising parallels both with vulnerable virgins and sometimes the passion of Christ.

The myths refer to a beast with one horn that can only be tamed by a virgin.

Some writers translated this into an allegory for Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary.

The unicorn also figured in courtly terms.

For some 13th-century French authors such as Thilbault of Champagne and Richard de Fonneval,

The lover is attracted to his lady as the unicorn is to the virgin.

With this rise of humanism,

The unicorn also acquired more orthodox secular meanings,

Emblematic of chaste love and faithful marriage.

It plays this role in Petrarch's Triumph of Chastity,

And on the reverse of Piero della Francesca's portrait of Battista Strozzi,

Paired with that of her husband Federico da Monteveltro,

Bianca's triumphal car is drawn by a pair of unicorns.

However,

When the unicorn appears in the medieval legend of Barlaam and Josaphat,

Ultimately derived from the life of the Buddha,

It represents death,

As the golden legend explains.

Unicorns in religious art largely disappeared after they were condemned by Molanus after the Council of Trent.

The unicorn,

Tamable only by a virgin woman,

Was well-established in the medieval lore by the time Marco Polo described them as scarcely smaller than elephants.

They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant's.

They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead.

They have a head like a wild boar's.

They spend their time,

By preference,

Wallowing in mud and slime.

They are very ugly brutes to look at.

They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins,

But clean contrary to our notions.

It is clear that Marco Polo was describing a rhinoceros.

The horn itself and the substance it was made of was called alicorn,

And it was believed that the horn holds magical and medicinal properties.

The Danish physician Ole Wurm determined in 1638 that the alleged alicorns were the tusks of narwhals.

Such beliefs were examined wittily and at length in 1646 by Sir Thomas Brown in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

This alicorn powder,

Made from the tusks of narwhals or horns of various animals,

Was sold in Europe for medicinal purposes as late as 1741.

The alicorn was thought to cure many diseases and have the ability to detect poisons,

And many physicians would make cures and sell them.

Cups were made from alicorn for kings and given as a gift.

These were usually made of ivory or walrus ivory.

Entire horns were very precious in the Middle Ages and were often really the tusks of narwhals.

One traditional method of hunting unicorns involved entrapment by a virgin.

In one of his notebooks,

Leonardo da Vinci wrote,

The unicorn,

Through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself,

For the love it bears to fair maidens,

Forgets its ferocity and wildness.

And laying aside all fear,

It will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap.

And thus the hunters take it.

The famous late Gothic series of seven tapestry hangings,

The Hunt of the Unicorn,

Are a high point in European tapestry manufacture,

Combining both secular and religious themes.

The tapestries now hang in the Cloisters Division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

In the series,

Richly dressed noblemen,

Accompanied by huntsmen and hounds,

Pursue a unicorn against milieu-fleur backgrounds or settings of buildings and gardens.

They bring the animal to bay with the help of a maiden who traps it with her charms,

Appear to kill it,

And bring it back to a castle.

In the last and most famous panel,

The Unicorn in Captivity,

The unicorn is shown alive again and happy,

Chained to a pomegranate tree surrounded by a fence and a field of flowers.

Scholars conjecture that the red stains on its flanks are not blood,

But rather the juice from the pomegranates,

Which were a symbol of fertility.

However,

The true meaning of the mysterious resurrected unicorn in the last panel is unclear.

The series was woven about 1500 in the Low Countries,

Probably Brussels or Liège for an unknown patron.

A set of six engravings on the same theme,

Treated rather differently,

Were engraved by the French artist Jean Duvet in the 1540s.

Another famous set of six tapestries of Dame à la licorne,

Lady of the Unicorn,

And the Musée de Cluny,

Paris,

Were also woven in the Southern Netherlands before 1500,

And show the five senses,

The gateways to temptation and finally love,

With unicorns featured in each piece.

Eximiles of these unicorn tapestries were woven for permanent display in Stirling Castle,

Scotland,

To take the place of a set recorded in the castle in a 16th-century inventory.

A rather rare late-15th-century variant depiction of the Ortus Conclusus in religious art combined the Annunciation of Mary with the themes of the Hunt of the Unicorn and Virgin and Unicorn,

So popular in secular art.

The unicorn already functioned as a symbol of the Incarnation,

And whether this meaning is intended in many prima facie secular depictions can be a difficult matter of scholarly interpretation.

There is no ambiguity in the scenes where the Archangel Gabriel is shown blowing a horn,

As hounds chase the unicorn into the Virgin's arms,

And a little Christ Child descends on rays of light from God the Father.

The Council of Trent finally banned this somewhat over-elaborated,

If charming,

Depiction,

Partly on the grounds of realism,

As no one now believed the unicorn to be a real animal.

Shakespeare scholars describe unicorns being captured by a hunter standing in front of a tree,

The unicorn goaded into charging.

The hunter would step aside the last moment,

And the unicorn would embed its horn deeply into the tree.

In heraldry,

A unicorn is often depicted as a horse with a goat's cloven hooves and beard,

A lion's tail,

And a slender spiral horn on its forehead.

Non-equine attributes may be replaced with equine ones.

Whether because it was an emblem of the Incarnation or of the fearsome animal passions of raw nature,

The unicorn was not widely used in early heraldry,

But became popular from the fifteenth century.

Though sometimes shown collared and chained,

Which may be taken as an indication that it has been tamed or tempered,

It is more usually shown collared with a broken chain attached,

Showing that it has broken free from its bondage.

In heraldry,

The unicorn is best known as a symbol of Scotland.

The unicorn was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion,

A symbol that the English royals had adopted around a hundred years before.

Two unicorns supported the royal arms of the King of Scots and the Duke of Wrothsey,

And since the 1707 union of England and Scotland,

The royal arms of the United Kingdom have been supported by a unicorn along with an English lion.

Two versions of the royal arms exist.

That used in Scotland gives more emphasis to the Scottish elements,

Placing the unicorn on the left and giving it a crown,

Whereas a version used in England and elsewhere gives the English elements more prominence.

John Willem,

In his book A Display of Heraldry,

Has illustrated the unicorn as a symbol of power,

Honor,

And respect.

Certain coins,

Known as the unicorn and half-unicorn,

Both with a unicorn on the obverse,

Were used in Scotland in the 15th and 16th century.

In the same realm,

Carved unicorns were often used as finials on the pillars of America crosses and denoted that the settlement was a royal burr.

Certain noblemen,

Such as the Earl of Kinnoull,

Were given special permission to use the unicorn in their arms as an augmentation of honor.

The crest for Clan Cunningham bears a unicorn head.

An animal called the riem is mentioned in several places in the Hebrew Bible,

Often as a metaphor representing strength.

The allusions to the riem is a wild,

Untamable animal of great strength and agility,

With mighty horn or horns best fit the aurochs.

This view is further supported by the Assyrian cognate word rimu,

Which is often used as a metaphor of strength,

And is depicted as a powerful,

Fierce,

Wild mountain bull with large horns.

This animal was often depicted in ancient Mesopotamian art and profile,

With only one horn visible.

The translators of the authorized King James Version of the Bible followed the Greek Septuagint Monoceros and the Latin Vulgate Unicornis,

And employed unicorn to translate riem,

Providing a recognizable animal that was proverbial for its untamable nature.

The American Standard Version translates this term wild ox in each case.

God brought them out of Egypt,

He hath,

As it were,

The strength of a unicorn.

Numbers 23.

22.

God brought him forth out of Egypt,

He hath,

As it were,

The strength of a unicorn.

Numbers 24.

8.

His glory is like the firstlings of his bullock,

And his horns are like the horns of unicorns.

With them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth.

Deuteronomy 33.

17.

Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee,

Or abide by thy crib?

Willst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow,

Or will he harrow the valleys after thee?

Wilt thou trust him,

Because his strength is great,

Or wilt thou leave thy labor to him?

Wilt thou believe him,

That he will bring home thy seed and gather it into thy barn?

Job 39.

9-12.

Save me from the lion's mouth,

For thou hast heard me from the horns of unicorns.

Psalms 22.

21.

He maketh them,

The cedars of Lebanon,

Also to skip like a calf,

Lebanon and Syrian like a young unicorn.

Psalms 29.

6.

But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of unicorn.

I shall be anointed with fresh oil.

Psalms 92.

10.

And the unicorns shall come down with them,

And the bullocks with their bulls,

And their land shall be soaked with blood,

And their dust made fat with fatness.

Isaiah 34.

7.

The classical Jewish understanding of the Bible did not identify the Re'em animal as the unicorn.

However,

Some rabbis in the Talmud debate the proposition that the Tahash animal was a domestic,

Single-horned,

Kosher creature that existed in Moses' time,

Or that it was similar to the Keresh animal described in Marcus Jastow's Talmudic Dictionary as a kind of antelope-unicorn.

The kiln,

A creature in Chinese mythology,

Is sometimes called the Chinese unicorn,

And some ancient accounts describe a single horn as its defining feature.

However,

It is more accurately described as a hybrid animal that looks less unicorn than chimera,

With the body of a deer,

The head of a lion,

Green scales,

And a long forwardly curved horn.

The Japanese version,

Kirin,

More closely resembles the Western unicorn,

Even though it is based on the Chinese kiln.

The Khoa-li,

A Vietnamese myth,

Similarly sometimes mistranslated unicorn,

Is a universal symbol of wealth and prosperity that made its first appearance during the Duong dynasty about 600 CE to Emperor Duong Cao Thu after a military victory which resulted in his conquest of Tai Nguyen.

In November 2012,

The History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences,

As well as the Korea News Service,

Reported that the Kirin gul had been found,

Which is associated with a kirin ridden by King Dongmyong of Goguryeo.

Beginning in the Ming dynasty,

The kiln became associated with giraffes after Zheng He's voyage to East Africa brought a pair of the long-necked animals and introduced them at court in Nanjing as kiln.

The resemblance to the kiln was noted in the giraffes' ossicones,

Bony protrusions from the skull resembling horns,

Graceful movements,

And peaceful demeanor.

Shen He Jin mentioned the bo horse,

A chimera horse with an ox tail,

A single horn,

A white body,

And a sound like a person calling.

The creature was said to live at Honest Head Mountain.

Guo Pu in his Zheng Fu said that the bo horse was able to walk on water.

Another similar creature also mentioned in Shen He Jin and said to live in Mount Wingding Center was the bo,

But it had a black tail,

Tiger's teeth and claws,

Devoured leopards and tigers.

A legendary creature,

Also mythical or mythological creature,

Is a type of fantasy entity,

Typically a hybrid,

That has not been proven and that is described in folklore,

Including myths and legends,

But may be featured in historical accounts before modernity.

In the classical era,

Monstrous creatures such as the cyclops and the minotaur appear in heroic tales for the protagonist to destroy.

Other creatures such as the unicorn were claimed in accounts of natural history by various scholars of antiquity.

Some legendary creatures have their origin in traditional mythology and were believed to be real creatures,

For example dragons,

Griffins,

And unicorns.

Others were based on real encounters,

Originating in garbled accounts of traveler's tales,

Such as the vegetable lamb of Tartary,

Which supposedly grew tethered to the earth.

A variety of mythical animals appear in the art and stories of the classical era.

For example,

In the Odyssey,

Monstrous creatures include the cyclops,

Scylla,

And charybdis for the hero Odysseus to confront.

Other tales include Medusa to be defeated by Perseus,

The human bull Minotaur to be destroyed by Theseus,

And the hydra to be killed by Heracles,

While Aeneas battles with Harpies.

These monsters thus have the basic function of emphasizing the greatness of the heroes involved.

Some classical era creatures such as the horse-human centaur,

Chimera,

Trident,

And the flying horse Pegasus are found also in Indian art.

Similarly,

Sphinxes appear as winged lions in Indian art and the payasaw bird in North America.

In medieval art,

Animals both real and mythical played important roles.

These included decorative forms as in medieval jewelry,

Sometimes with their limbs intricately interlaced.

Animal forms were used to add humor or majesty to objects.

In Christian art,

Animals carried symbolic meanings,

Where for example the lamb symbolized Christ,

A dove indicated the Holy Spirit,

And the classical griffin represented a guardian of the dead.

Medieval bestiaries included animals regardless of biological reality.

The basilisk represented the devil,

While the minotaur symbolized temptation.

One function of mythical animals in the Middle Ages was allegory.

Unicorns,

For example,

Were described as extraordinarily swift and uncatchable by traditional methods.

It was believed that the only way for one to catch this beast was to lead a virgin to its dwelling.

Often the unicorn was supposed to leap into her lap and go to sleep,

At which point a hunter could finally capture it.

In terms of symbolism,

The unicorn was a metaphor for Christ.

Unicorns represented the idea of innocence and purity.

In the King James Bible,

Psalm 92 verse 10 states,

My horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of a unicorn.

This is because the translators of the King James erroneously translated the Hebrew word re'em as unicorn.

Later versions translate this as wild ox.

The unicorn's small size signifies the humility of Christ.

Another common legendary creature that served allegorical functions within the Middle Ages was the dragon.

Dragons were identified with serpents,

Though their attributes were greatly intensified.

The dragon was supposed to have been larger than all other animals.

It was believed that the dragon had no harmful poison,

But was able to slay anything it embraced without any need for venom.

Biblical scriptures speak of the dragon in reference to the devil,

And they were used to denote sin in general during the Middle Ages.

Dragons were said to have dwelled in places like Ethiopia and India,

Based on the idea that there was always heat present in these locations.

Physical detail was not the central focus of the artists depicting such animals,

And medieval bestiaries were not conceived as biological categorizations.

Creatures like the unicorn and griffin were not categorized in a separate mythological section in medieval bestiaries.

Because the symbolic implications were of primary importance.

Animals we know to have existed were still presented with a fantastical approach.

It seems the religious and moral implications of animals were far more significant than matching a physical likeness in these renderings.

Nona C.

Flores explains,

By the 10th century,

Artists were increasingly bound by allegorical interpretation,

And abandoned naturalistic depictions.

Classical Antiquity,

Also known as the Classical History,

Classical Era,

Classical Period,

Classical Age,

Or simply Antiquity,

Is the period of cultural history between the 8th century B.

C.

And the 5th century A.

D.

Centered on the Mediterranean Sea,

Comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome,

Known as the Greco-Roman world.

It is the period in which both Greek and Roman societies flourished and wielded huge influence throughout much of Europe,

North Africa,

And West Asia.

Conventionally,

It is taken to begin with the earliest recorded epic Greek poetry of Homer and continues through the emergence of Christianity and ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

It is followed by a transition period called Late Antiquity,

A period overlapping with the Early Middle Ages.

Such a wide span of history and territory covers many disparate cultures and periods.

Classical Antiquity may also refer to an idealized vision among later people of what was,

In Edgar Allan Poe's words,

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

The culture of the ancient Greeks,

Together with some influences from the ancient Near East,

Was the basis of European art,

Philosophy,

Society,

And education until the Roman imperial period.

The Romans preserved,

Imitated,

And spread this culture over Europe until they were able to compete with it and the classical world began to speak Latin along with Greek.

This Greco-Roman culture foundation has been immensely influential on the language,

Politics,

Law,

Educational systems,

Philosophy,

Science,

Warfare,

Poetry,

Historiography,

Ethics,

Rhetoric,

Art,

And architecture of the modern world.

Surviving fragments of classical culture led to a revival beginning in the 14th century,

Which later came to be known as the Renaissance,

And various neoclassical revivals occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The earliest period of classical antiquity takes place against the background of gradual reappearance of historical sources following the Late Bronze Age collapse.

The 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely proto-historical,

With the earliest Greek alphabet inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century.

Homer is usually assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century BC,

And his lifetime is often taken as marking the beginning of classical antiquity.

In the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the ancient Olympic Games in 776 BC.

The Phoenicians originally expanded from Canaan ports by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean.

Carthage was founded in 814 BC,

And the Carthaginians by 700 BC had firmly established strongholds in Sicily,

Italy,

And Sardinia,

Which created conflicts of interest with Etruria.

A steel found in Chition,

Cyprus commemorates the victory of King Sargon II in 709 BC over the seven kings of the island,

Marking an important step in the transfer of Cyprus from Tyrian rule to the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

The Archaic period followed the Greek Dark Ages and saw significant advancements in political theory and the rise of democracy,

Philosophy,

Theater,

Poetry,

As well as the revitalization of the written language,

Which had been lost during the Dark Ages.

In pottery,

The Archaic period sees the development of the Orientalizing style,

Which signals a shift from geometric style of the later Dark Ages and the accumulation of influences derived from Egypt,

Phoenicia,

And Syria.

Pottery styles associated with the later part of the Archaic Age are the black-figure pottery,

Which originated in Corinth during the 7th century BC and its successor,

The red-figure style,

Developed by the Andecytes painter in about 530 BC.

Greek colonization refers to the expansion of Archaic Greeks,

Particularly during the 8th to 6th centuries BC across the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.

The Archaic expansion differed from the Iron Age migrations of the Greek Dark Ages in that it consisted of organized direction away from the originating metropolis,

Rather than the simplistic movement of tribes,

Which characterized the aforementioned earlier migrations.

Many colonies,

Or apoikia,

Greek for home away from home,

That were founded during this period eventually evolved into strong Greek city-states,

Functioning independently of their metropolis.

Reviews

I have no idea what was said 😂 I think I heard centaur 🤷🏽‍♀️ you were correct about falling asleep 😴 I’ll be back 😂 thank you 🙏🏽 ♥️✨🚀🌑🦄🦄🦄✨🩶💙🤎

Fun info + you were right ...it knocked me right out🥱🤗💖🙏 thank you 😁

I don’t think I lasted 5 minutes, fascinating as unicorns are! 😂😂😂

As much as I wanted to stay up to hear about unicorns 🦄 I could not fight my sleep.