The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers - review
Helen Brown enjoys a study of our 2,000-year fascination with the creature
By Helen Brown Last Updated: 11:12AM GMT 08 Jan 2009
At a conference of cryptozoologists (they study “hidden creatures”) in Devon a couple of years ago, a proud man showed me a sort of terrapin in a small, plastic tub. The awed crowd behind me were barely breathing. “You see?” said the revelator of the bewildered reptile. “It’s of no species known to science! New creatures are being discovered all the time. So there’s no reason why we might not discover some zoological truths behind camp-fire stories of the Mongolian death worms, Bigfoot, dragons or unicorns!” This 21st-century cryptozoologist isn’t the first to be gripped by the romantic desire to track down the creatures of long-enjoyed myth. Chris Lavers traces our fascination with the idea of a one-horned horse back 2,000 years in this scholarly history of unicorns.
The written history of the Western legend begins in 398 BC with an account from a rather credulous Greek physician called Ctesias of Cnidus, who spent two decades in Persia ministering to the king and his court. Like his famous predecessor, Herodotus, Ctesias had a characteristically Greek curiosity about exotic peoples and places and wrote down all the tales he heard to ship home. One was of a wild, Indian ass with a white body, dark-red head, blue eyes and one horn of white, red and black. “Those who drink out of these horns,” he wrote, “are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease [epilepsy]. Indeed they are immune to poisons if, either before or after swallowing such, they drink wine, water, or anything else from these beakers.”
Delving into the possible origins of this tale, Lavers takes us on a tour of some Indian animals that share some of the characteristics of Ctesias’s miracle beast. We meet the Indian rhino, a fearsome ass called the kiang, a Tibetan antelope and a wild yak. Lavers is good at fitting the properties attributed to the mythical creature to the characteristics of the real animals, although readers may sometimes find themselves wondering why. People have always just made things up, and that probably says more about our species of ape than it does about the Himalayan yak.
I found Lavers’s chapters on unicorn lore more revealing, particularly the way in which Ctesias’s ass made it into the Bible. Lavers reveals that the numerous references to unicorns in the King James Bible are a consequence of mistranslation from the Hebrew to the Greek. Most probably the Bible’s authors were talking about an ox.
Things get interesting when the pagan myth of how to catch a unicorn (send a pretty young virgin into the forest, wait for her to attract and pacify the beast, then spring out from behind the bushes to kill it) fuses with Christian tradition. So the unicorn becomes a symbol of Christ, brought among men by a virgin and killed by mankind. Lavers doesn’t pry too deeply into the Freudian aspects of the story, but he does quote the Thirties unicorn scholar Odell Shepard who noted that in some tellings the virgin doesn’t behave with convincing modesty.
Money, as well as religion, comes into the unicorn’s history. Lavers describes the fabulous sums paid for whole horns, or their ground-up varieties, until the “alicorn bubble” burst in the 1630s. These artefacts treasured by churches and royal families, from China to Europe, were probably narwhal tooths, walrus tusks, gazelle antlers and the like, although the fabulously coloured and patterned substance of “khutu” may well have derived from mammoth tusks.
The last expeditions launched in search of the unicorn went to Africa at the end of the 19th century, inspired by Stanley’s mention of a donkey called an “atti”. And while the final adventure didn’t find its quarry, it did reveal the okapi. Lavers’s meandering book ends with an account of an attempt in the Thirties to create a unicorn by grafting a day-old calf’s hornbuds onto the centre of its forehead. He reproduces a photograph of a creature that looks as confused as the poor terrapin I saw in Devon. It’s a horrible reminder of mankind’s desire to bend an already miraculous natural world to our will. The history of the unicorn shows human beings at our imaginative best and our manipulative worst.
Helen Brown enjoys a study of our 2,000-year fascination with the creature
By Helen Brown Last Updated: 11:12AM GMT 08 Jan 2009
At a conference of cryptozoologists (they study “hidden creatures”) in Devon a couple of years ago, a proud man showed me a sort of terrapin in a small, plastic tub. The awed crowd behind me were barely breathing. “You see?” said the revelator of the bewildered reptile. “It’s of no species known to science! New creatures are being discovered all the time. So there’s no reason why we might not discover some zoological truths behind camp-fire stories of the Mongolian death worms, Bigfoot, dragons or unicorns!” This 21st-century cryptozoologist isn’t the first to be gripped by the romantic desire to track down the creatures of long-enjoyed myth. Chris Lavers traces our fascination with the idea of a one-horned horse back 2,000 years in this scholarly history of unicorns.
The written history of the Western legend begins in 398 BC with an account from a rather credulous Greek physician called Ctesias of Cnidus, who spent two decades in Persia ministering to the king and his court. Like his famous predecessor, Herodotus, Ctesias had a characteristically Greek curiosity about exotic peoples and places and wrote down all the tales he heard to ship home. One was of a wild, Indian ass with a white body, dark-red head, blue eyes and one horn of white, red and black. “Those who drink out of these horns,” he wrote, “are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease [epilepsy]. Indeed they are immune to poisons if, either before or after swallowing such, they drink wine, water, or anything else from these beakers.”
Delving into the possible origins of this tale, Lavers takes us on a tour of some Indian animals that share some of the characteristics of Ctesias’s miracle beast. We meet the Indian rhino, a fearsome ass called the kiang, a Tibetan antelope and a wild yak. Lavers is good at fitting the properties attributed to the mythical creature to the characteristics of the real animals, although readers may sometimes find themselves wondering why. People have always just made things up, and that probably says more about our species of ape than it does about the Himalayan yak.
I found Lavers’s chapters on unicorn lore more revealing, particularly the way in which Ctesias’s ass made it into the Bible. Lavers reveals that the numerous references to unicorns in the King James Bible are a consequence of mistranslation from the Hebrew to the Greek. Most probably the Bible’s authors were talking about an ox.
Things get interesting when the pagan myth of how to catch a unicorn (send a pretty young virgin into the forest, wait for her to attract and pacify the beast, then spring out from behind the bushes to kill it) fuses with Christian tradition. So the unicorn becomes a symbol of Christ, brought among men by a virgin and killed by mankind. Lavers doesn’t pry too deeply into the Freudian aspects of the story, but he does quote the Thirties unicorn scholar Odell Shepard who noted that in some tellings the virgin doesn’t behave with convincing modesty.
Money, as well as religion, comes into the unicorn’s history. Lavers describes the fabulous sums paid for whole horns, or their ground-up varieties, until the “alicorn bubble” burst in the 1630s. These artefacts treasured by churches and royal families, from China to Europe, were probably narwhal tooths, walrus tusks, gazelle antlers and the like, although the fabulously coloured and patterned substance of “khutu” may well have derived from mammoth tusks.
The last expeditions launched in search of the unicorn went to Africa at the end of the 19th century, inspired by Stanley’s mention of a donkey called an “atti”. And while the final adventure didn’t find its quarry, it did reveal the okapi. Lavers’s meandering book ends with an account of an attempt in the Thirties to create a unicorn by grafting a day-old calf’s hornbuds onto the centre of its forehead. He reproduces a photograph of a creature that looks as confused as the poor terrapin I saw in Devon. It’s a horrible reminder of mankind’s desire to bend an already miraculous natural world to our will. The history of the unicorn shows human beings at our imaginative best and our manipulative worst.
1 comment:
As for the illustration, it was difficult to find one that wasn't an orgy of airbrushes, pastel paints, and cheesy sentiments so often associated with the typical white unicorn.
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