Fate & Fabled

When you picture a unicorn, what comes to mind?

A white horse with a gleaming horn, maybe a shaggy rhinoceros, a terrifying horned rabbit or a multicolored chimera?

The tragic news is that only one of these creatures is real but the good news is that all of them are unicorns.

Before unicorns were cemented as the universal symbol of purity and grace we picture today, they were a whole malleable class of folklore creatures who shared a single trait: that solitary horn erupting from their head.

Most of the modern unicorn's predecessors had dark dispositions and body parts borrowed from multiple beasts, likely inspired by real-world animal anatomy.

Thus hidden in the mythology of the unicorn is a lesson in how humans collective imagination can adapt truth into whatever fable we need at the time.

[inquisitive music] Since time immemorial, one-horned creatures have prowled our dreams and nightmares alike, but they didn't spring fully formed from myths or fairy tales.

Instead, we find powerful unicorns in natural histories, travel logs, and geography from around the world.

For this reason, many unicorns straddle the boundary between fact and fiction.

And that only becomes more obvious when we look at how they've been translated across different cultures.

While some one-horned creatures influenced the figure of the white equine unicorn that became popular in the Western imagination, they also complicate its symbolism.

Rather than denoting purity or chastity, the unicorns we'll talk about today are hybrid creatures with multifaceted powers.

The millennials in the audience know who "The Last Unicorn" is but one of the first is the bovine unicorn of the Indus Valley civilization in South Asia.

Described as a bull, ox ,or an antelope of heavy build with a horn protruding from the back of its head.

It's been found on official seals dating to 2,600 BCE.

Figurines of this creature have also been found across ancient India, Pakistan, and Mesopotamia.

Some scholars have linked these stocky single-horned figures to the very real elasmotherium, a giant rhinoceros that had already been extinct for eons and whose fossils could have inspired the unicorn myth.

Whatever the inspiration, the Indus unicorn was usually shown beside a stand of sacred water or other offerings indicating that this is no ordinary animal.

Another exceptional creature continues this trend of fusing zoology and mythology, the Chinese qilin.

It's described as having the body of a deer or elk, the tail of an ox and a single horn, but also shows up covered in scales and surrounded by fire like a dragon.

Qilin were known for their gentle disposition, and as tokens of good luck with their appearance often heralding the birth of an important person.

While some accounts picture the qilin as a supernatural figure who clomps across the earth without disturbing a single blade of grass, they also made their way into real life.

In 1414, the Ming emperor was presented with a qilin from a far away land only to discover that what he really had on his hands was a giraffe.

Amalgamations of mythical and real animals continue in the karkadann which appears in Islamic writing and art.

Described by polymath al-Biruni as a scaly buffalo with yellow hooves and a horned nose, scholars generally agree that he was talking about rhinos here, but embellishments and mistranslations produce karkadanns as winged antelopes, horses, and even feline figures.

Others fuse different animals.

In one account, the karkadann sports the head of a camel, body of a mule, and the tail and hooves of a bull.

In another, it's a giant elephant horse mashup.

The karkadanns horn was also the source of much debate.

The medieval geographer Muhammed al-Idrisi tells us that it's so big you can't fit both your hands around it.

While the naturalist al-Damiri insists that the horn is so heavy the karkadann can't even hold its own head up.

In all their forms, karkadanns were fearsome.

They were said to actively hunt humans or to inflict death on all who heard their voice.

It also has a fraught relationship with other animals.

In one story, the karkadann takes out its mortal enemy, the elephant, by impaling the elephant so deeply that it can't extract its horn.

This story tends to end in pretty grizzly ways with all the elephant's fat seeping out and blinding the karkadann, for instance, or a huge bird carrying both animals to her nest and feeding them to her chicks.

These stories convey the brutality of the animal realm which the karkadann appeared to rule over, but never with absolute security.

In comparison to other Islamic unicorns the shadhavar seems deceptively benign.

This deer-like animal sprouts hollow branches from its single horn which makes sweet music as the wind whistles through them but the music ultimately attracts unsuspecting animals who are promptly devoured by the wily shadhavar.

These dangerous tendencies don't stop people from coveting their horns.

So-called karkadann horns, whose original owner was usually a rhino, was sold as a remedy for countless illnesses.

It was said that a karkadann horn could also be used to heat cold water, ward off evil forces, and keep horses standing upright.

In one Persian legend, karkadann horn is mixed with dust and sprinkled over a band of robbers, immobilizing them before they can ransack a village.

These Middle Eastern unicorns look very different from each other, but are united by their rarity, ferocity, and unpredictability.

Descriptions of these creatures reveal the overlap between myth and observation in that they tend to embellish the animal realm and heighten the chaos of the natural world.

Early Western ideas about what the unicorn looked like echo this embellishment, but they also stemmed from confusion and intrigue about exotic, faraway creatures.

In a tangled zoological and geographical report of "The East," the Greek physician Ctesias reported Indian unicorns with crimson heads, multi-colored horns, and shapely ankles.

He also notes their blood-thirsty violent nature.

Pliny wrote of monokeroses, meaning single horn, who each had a stag's head, elephant's feet, a boar's tail, and a single black horn.

While Claudius Aelianus described a red-haired horse with a curly pigtail and spiraling horn.

These creatures have been variously linked to the Indian rhino, the Tibetan antelope and the onager, or kiang, both a type of donkey.

But Europeans had their own take on the unicorn throughout the early Christian and Medieval period.

Christian writers linked unicorns and their mystical powers to Jesus Christ himself or a symbol of the cross.

The unicorn was thought to have kept Adam and Eve Company in the Garden of Eden cementing its status as supreme animal and a spiritual allegory.

So as unicorns were absorbed into Christian iconography, they became associated with purity, chastity, and unity.

There's a clear distinction between the pure, angelic unicorn and its hybrid fearsome predecessors.

Recently, the unicorn has earned a third reputation as we in the queer community have claimed its wild side for ourselves.

There are plenty of glittery horns and flowing rainbow manes in queer iconography but the connection goes deeper than that.

In queer culture, unicorns are celebrated as creatures that shun the status quo while reminding us how special and resilient we are.

We have adopted the unicorn as slang and symbol, empowering ourselves and our queer kin to embrace our identities.

LGBTQ+ soldiers fighting in Ukraine's army have started sewing unicorn patches onto their uniforms as a way to express pride, solidarity and the desire to be seen.

Here we see echoes of older and more varied understandings of the unicorn whose power lies in its outsider status, its hybridity and its resistance to classification.

Ultimately, it's this lack of consensus that gives unicorns their symbolic power.

As creatures who muddy the line between fact and fiction, disrupt cultural boundaries, and reveal fears and fantasies about the natural world, unicorns have always been about subjective interpretation.

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