Unicorns Read online

  However, the spoor of the unicorn does not lead us altogether in a circle; if even time must have a stop (must it?), then even the spoor of the unicorn must have a beginning.

  There was in Constantinople in the 9th century a holy and scholarly man named Photius, who was in fact the Patriarch of that city, "New Rome," capital of the Eastern Roman (or "Byzantine," a word its people did not use) Empire. Things must have been placid at least for some considerable while in Photius's times. He did not have his beard torn out nor his nose cut off nor his eyes blinded, neither was he burned alive . . . at least I don't think he was burned alive; if somebody knows for a fact that the Patriarch Photius was burned alive, let me know, please. With all this peace and quiet at his disposal, Photius was able to devote himself to abstracting the works of Ctesias, a fellow-Greek and fellow-scholar who had lived almost 1500 years before him. Ctesias, in retirement, did not spend his golden years puttering around the house: he wrote a History of Persia, in 23 "books", a meaningless unit of measurement, now mostly all of it down the tube of time; and a work which we know as the Indica. Aristotle knew of Ctesias, but did not think much of him; what we know of what Ctesias knew, or thought he knew, we owe to His Holiness, Photius, Patriarch Oecumenical; or, more specifically, to his abstracts from the Indica. And so, rather than pretend that I have an excellent working knowledge of Greek, a language which I flunked, forty years ago, boys and girls! forty years ago—I shall quote what is perhaps the beginning of it all (only maybe not), and quote it from the properest place from which to quote: The Lore of the Unicorn, by Odell Shepard, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, '30. And here it be.

  There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about afoot and a half in length. The dust filed from this horn is administered in a potion as a protection against deadly drugs. The base of this horn, for some two hands'-breadth above the brow, is pure white; the upper part is sharp and of a vivid crimson . . . and the remainder, or middle portion, is black. Those who drink out of these horns, made into drinking vessels, are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease [epilepsy]. Indeed, they are immune even to poisons if, either before or after swallowing such, they drink wine, water, or anything else, from these beakers.

  The date? The year 400+ or – before the Common Era will do. It may be said, then, that at this date the unicorn enters written history. You will note that it is not the single horn, as such, which most occupies the attention of Ctesias: it is the curative powers thereof. It ought to be noted, in this connection, that Ctesias, unlike many Greeks who had gone into Persia, was not a military but a medical man. And even as early as his time, and even as late as, say, the 18th century, in the eyes of many the chief importance of a physician was to save people from poison.

  I don't refer here to fear of accidental poisoning, such as properly concerns us all, and against which (in theory) a network of Poison Control Centers have been set up, reachable by one's local police in a matter of seconds: no. I refer to a personal fear of being personally poisoned. It is said that the easy ritual of wine-tasting derives from the slow, ceremonious sampling of the Big Man's food and drink. If power tends to corrupt—and it does—so does the envy and the fear of power. And the desire to achieve it. If one were, say, 500 or 1000 years ago, desirous to remove from office one's chief, be he sacred or secular, one did not go out and ask people to sign a Recall petition; neither was it always feasible to hire an assassin. It was popularly believed that anyone who held high office was liable to be poisoned. What to do about it?

  Recall that forensic medicine was all but non-existent, and that medical science itself, with its belief in the Four Humours, its absolute ignorance of the world beneath the microscope, was—we now realize—all but impotent to provide real help to those really ill. Or, for that matter, when people died, to say from what they really died. Violent death was of course obvious, and so was death by any of the great plagues recognized as such . . . and that was, by and large, about it. But it was not recognized that that was about it. The stroke, the heart attack, the wasting diseases, and—and most of all—food poisoning (the "ptomaine poisoning" of my childhood) . . . none of these were always and clearly recognized as what they really were.

  If the bishop fell into convulsions, if the duke died whilst dining, if the king ate a spoonful of preserves insufficiently preserved: no one said, "Botulism." Everyone was likelier to say, "Poisoning." When, indeed, somebody did not say, "Witchcraft."

  Therefore, it was of immense importance to know that there was a way to avoid vicious intromission into one's food supply, and if this way lay via the use of the horn of a mysterious creature which in life galloped over the mysterious soil of far-off lands, why, how wonderful! Hardly anyone asked, "How do you know?" The usual question was, "How much does it cost?" And the answer was, "Plenty." A wand of unicorn's horn, Shepard says, sold for 20 times its weight in gold . . . If, therefore, a sovereign who used it regularly, lived to die of what was recognizable as old age, this was all to the credit of the unicorn's potent horn. If, however, unlike Mithridates, the king did not "die old," but, after a mere tenth helping of everything on the table during the heat of summer, turned crimson, made funny noises, and fell face forward into the stewed eels: why, what could have caused it? The answer was fairly obvious: poison. And . . . but . . . the king's unicorn wand? His drinking cup of unicorn's horn? It was a fake. Wasn't that obvious? Sure it was.

  Unicorn was merely the chief-most of many substances used in this ceaseless war against doses from the black bottle. Petrarch, taking some time off from Laura, or perhaps Cicero (he made an immense journey to find a rare copy of a book by the Latin lawyer-orator . . . only to lind, also, that there was hardly any ink to copy it with and probably the xerox was broken), noted of a certain potentate the precautions he had taken "against secret plots; between the wines and the viands project the livid horns of serpents skilfully fastened to little gilded trees, so that it is a wonder to see how Death himself stands guard, as it were in the very strong-hold of pleasure, against the death of this miserable man."

  Leaving the horned serpent for a while, let us return a moment to old Dr. Ctesias, there in his retirement home in Cnidus, alternately exciting and boring the neighbors with his tales of foreign parts and the great wonders thereof: he had been the personal physician of the Great King of Persia, and from Persia it was but a spit in the right wind to India. Now, India, by obvious definition, one would think, is the land of the Indus River; only maybe not. Maybe the river was so-named because it was in India. One measures a circle . . . However. It has been said that, "India, to Ctesias, is the Himalayas and Tibet." Maybe so. Well, let's see, then, let's try this on for size and style: "Somewhere in the Himalayas and Tibet is a certain wild ass as large as a horse, and maybe larger." Well, with an eye more to zoology than geography, one might say that this a description of the onager, or wild ass; perhaps of that other Asian wild ass, the kiang: ¿Quien sabe? I am not a specialist in wild asses. Of course, when we read that these beast had horns "on the forehead" we realize that we have left zoology almost past the possibility of returning, and the length of the alleged horn is irrelevant. That there were one-horned beasts somewhere in them there parts is certain, for there still are, if they have not all been extirpated by the wonderful picturesque natives so busy enjoying their independence from imperialist constraint that they may soon have extirpated all their larger wild life and even a good deal of the smaller, too.

  It is of course easier for us to preach conservation to them than it is for them to appreciate it. When a native of Nepal (which is in the Himalayas, or was, last I looked) sees a rhinoceros, he does not immediately think of how magnificent and increasingly rare it is; he immediately thinks (as does his African and Indonesian counterpart) of how much meat it is; next he thinks of all the damage it does to his crops (plenty), and he never thi
nks such thoughts as, "Well, maybe I shouldn't be planting my crops in rhino country;" and then he thinks of the horn, which is actually not a horn as the horn of the antelope is a horn, but a mass of compressed hair-tissue . . . or something like that . . . he doesn't care about that, neither does the horn-buyer. What they care about is that there are quite a lot of elderly Chinese gentlemen who, not yet being resigned to inability to achieve an erection, are willing to pay plenty for the medicine which will, they believe, make this possible. Blamm! It is a seller's market, and if the horn doesn't nowadays fetch 20 times its weight in gold, still, it fetches plenty. How come? How come that after all these years people are still paying plenty for a substance which doesn't do what is claimed for it?—namely, allowing old Mr. Wong to Get It Up. Kindly remember all those long centuries in which people paid plenty for it under the belief that it would prevent and cure poisoning. If "the origin of illness is in the mind," then so is its prevention and cure. —Yes, but what gives them such an idea? Mr. Wong, Mr. Ong, Mr. Dong, et al.? Well, the idea is already there. How did it originate? I say, simply, that it is simple. Horn = Horny.

  Very well, very well. But why did they describe the rhinoceros as an ass? Because, those unfamiliar with cither Linnaean or Aristotelian ideas of categories, faced with new creatures, naturally describe in terms of old creatures. The sea-cow is not a cow, the sea-horse is not a horse, the Rocky Mountain goat is not a goat, the bison isn't really a buffalo; and neither, really, is the North American elk an elk. Going farther back into history than the time of Ctesias, we find the horse being described, early on, as "the ass of the east." The wild ass, by which one does not mean those poor stunted feral burro which, despite inroads made by starvation and disease, continue to destroy land-cover in many a western canyon; the wild ass is considerably larger than its domestic donkey cousin or the latter's run-wild descendants; but now enough about the wild ass.

  The glamor of the unicorn, that is, of it as a particularly graceful and lovely creature, belongs largely to the Renaissance; the ancient world was impressed, but it was differently impressed. Here is our old friend Solinus, called (often) "Pliny's ape," and in fact almost improving on Pliny: here he is, in an older translation by Arthur Golding: "Atrocissimum est monoceros"—oops! that's not Golding, that's Solinus; still, you must admit that Atrocissimum est monoceros sounds more impressive than Omnia Gallia est in tres partes and the rest of it; "But the cruelest is the Unicorne, a Monster that belloweth horrible, bodyed like a horse, footed like an elephant, tayled like a swyne, and headed like a stagge. His home stikketh out of the midds of his forehead, of a wonderful brightness about four feet long [It has grown, you see, since the earlier report of Ctesias; eh, Mr. Wong, Mr. Ong, and Mr. Dong? Hmmm.] so sharp that whatsoever he pusheth at, he striketh it through easily. He is never caught alive; kylled he may be, but taken he cannot bee." Note that there is here no mention at all of the matter of his being taken by a virgin. That came later.

  And when, long later, it came to be realized that there was an animal, the rhinoceros, which, like the unicorn, had one horn—did this immediately dissipate the legend, relegating the unicorn to the realm of myth? No it didn't. The rhinoceros was one animal, the unicorn another. Besides: sometimes the rhinoceros (read nose-horn) had more than one horn. You see?

  Physiologus (not his real name), that fairly early Christian writer who (most likely) lived in Alexandria and probably invented the Bestiary; Physiologus said that the unicorn was about the size of a goat-kid. Having swelled, it now shrinks. Uh-oh, Mr. Wong, Mr. Ong, Mr. Dong! This could not be endured. Just as the unicorn could not be tolerated to be as large as the rhino, so it could not be endured to be as small as a kid. The human mind, by a series of trials and errors, finally figured out what the right size of the unicorn was, and there it still is, on the other side of the British lion, both of them holding up the Royal Arms. You don't believe me, go look. I don't recall having seen any ancient Greek or Roman picture of a unicorn, either graved on pottery or painted on walls; but in one of the murals of Pompeii is a centaur: how big is it? oh, about the size of a goat-kid . . . in comparison to the man-figure before whom it stands. Do I mean to imply a connection? no I don't. The centaur was "merely" mythical; the unicorn was medicinal as well. Do you know about St. Hildegarde? Do you know about Bingen on the Rhine? Course you don't.

  It was the custom in our public schools during the last century and partly into this, to give those children capable of it a "piece," often but not always a poem, to memorize during the week, and to recite, usually on Friday afternoon, "in assembly." The assembly was not merely a gathering, it was a hall in the school building (is it still? they don't tell me these things); there we would gather to Niilutc the Flag, listen to a Psalm being read, and receive Instruction from the Principal. Sometimes this was limited to orders to eschew the syllables Om and Yup; on one Memorable Scene he directed all girls and women teachers to Leave the Assembly: the doors being reported firmly closed, he smote the table in front of him and cried, "This practice of throwing paper towels in the urinals must stop!"

  Also, poems and other "pieces" were recited. One favorite began (searching the dimmest corners of memory), "A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers / There was dearth of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears. . . ." And at each verse's end the dying soldier reminds us that he was "born in Bingen, dear Bingen on the Rhine." Other favorites included Darius Green and His Flying Machine; There's Nothing To Laugh At, As I Can See, / If You'd Been Stung By A Bumble-Bee . . . and, of course, a late-comer but a stayer: Joyce Kilmer's Trees. The science of reciting well had a name, it was called Elocution, my late Cousin Tootsie taught Elocution, and when this became unfashionable, she re-emerged as a Speech Therapist. Good one, too. Nowadays kids are not subjected to this harsh discipline, and, instead of reciting long poems, they drink, dope, smash windows, shoot out lights, wreck cars, knock up their eleven year old girlfriends, and set fire to churches. Progress, this is called. Progress.

  Very well, Hildegarde was from Bingen, she was a nun, a physician, and a visionary. Shepard tells us that:

  Hildegarde believed that not the horn alone of the unicorn but the whole animal was medicinal; under its horn, she says, it has a piece of metal as transparent as glass in which a man may see his face; she tells how to make an unguent of the yolks of eggs and powdered unicorn's liver, which . . . is a sovereign cure for leprosy—"unless the leper happens to be one whom Death is determined to have or else one whom God will not allow to be cured. [ . . . . ] A belt made from unicorn's skin, she says, will preserve one from fevers, and boots of the same material assure one of sound legs and immunity from plague. All this is good to know, and it comes from one who, as head of a large religious house, had the health of a whole community in her keeping.

  As to where Mother Superior got her unicorn parts from, I am sure I do not know. Certainly it is easy to laugh and sneer. Once I saw a reproduction from an illuminated Ms which St. Hildegarde had either painted herself or directed a painter to execute; it showed things which I can best, though inadequately, describe as turrets, or castellations; I brought and showed it to an ophthamologist, asked what he thought. He said that he thought he agreed with the caption. "Probably they are migraine constructs. Why do you ask?" I said, because from time to time my eyes would become sun-dazzled by flashes of light and that things very much like the ones in St. Hildy's Ms would wiggle within them. Dr What examined my eyes fore and aft. "It is my diagnosis, "he said, thoughtfully, "that you suffer from migraine, fortunately a mild form. Take the pills I'm going to prescribe, as directed." I did, they worked, the label says they consist of caffeine and phenobarbital and ergot: if they also, and surreptitiously, contain unicorn, well, I wouldn't be surprised.

  When "a whole unicorn's horn [was] worth six or seven thousand ducats" there was a temptation to get one's money back before the interest mounted too high; anyone who has seen, even today, people casually swapping pills, will acknowledge a fair
ly widespread belief that what is good for one thing may likely be good for another; an old-time country pharmacist told me of the woman who used to come in once a year to ask for "A quarter's worth of mixed pills for my children." Ought to be no surprise, then, to learn that unicorn's horn, also known as licorn or alicorn, "had an important place in the materia medica . . . prescribed as a cure for all poisons, for fever, for bites of mad dogs and scorpions, for falling sickness, worms, fluxes, loss of memory, the plague, and prolongation of youth. Charlatans were even known to assert that it could raise the dead." Absurd? Take a look at the other items included in the medieval materia medica—with the possible exception of worms, nothing was available which was of any use, really, for any of the ailments mentioned. But this doesn't mean that they were useless. (Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.) A 19th C. cartoon by the great Daumier shows a sick man with a physician on each side. Says the homeopath, "My patients die of the disease." Says the allopath, "My patients die of the medicine." Says the patient, "A moi c' est égal, it's all the same to me." Sometimes, of course, the patients recovered; this was sometimes due to a sound constitution, a weak form of infection, or factors unknown; sometimes it was due to an absence of fear, itself one of the great killers. And if "the medicine," no matter what it contained, provided confidence, confidence would drive away fear. Often.