Realms of Myth Playlist, Part 8: Unicorns of the Mythic World

Discover the power and symbolism of the unicorn.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe
McCormick and Robert. I know you are dying to talk
about a movie that you rented this week. Maybe not
because it's as perfect as you remember though. Yeah, well look, luckily,

(00:27):
I don't know that I remembered it as being perfect,
at least not as a whole. I'm sorry if I misrepresented. No, no, no,
there are aspects of this film that are perfect. But yeah,
we're talking, of course about the five Ridley Scott film Legend,
which I imagine a number of you when you saw
that we were doing an episode, or of a pair
of episodes actually on unicorns, you probably thought about Legend. Now,

(00:52):
I think, in the tradition of Ridley Scott movies, not
all Ridley Scott movies, but a lot of them, this
is a great looking film that really under sells in
the plot and writing department. Oh yeah, it's it's tremendous looking.
Every frame of this film is just gorgeous and barroque
and slimy, and like you can you can feel it,

(01:14):
like there's it's a very moist film. I must say,
like every everybody, whether you're you know, an elf or
a goblin, whether you're a unicorn or a or a demon,
there's there, there's a moisteness every character that's a that's
a word. Okay. Uh. We should come back, by the
way someday to the question of why people hate the

(01:35):
word moist so much. You know what, you know that
thing about it's the most hated word in English. I
think there are reasons for well, I can I can
always say wet, a lot of wet unicorns. It's a
damp fantasy, it is. It is a damp, swampy world
that then is is frozen and you know it's It's
weird too that you mentioned the writing because William Hortzberg

(01:56):
wrote the screenplay and I who that is? So he
wrote a book called Falling Angel is kind of a
supernatural noir novel and uh, and I remember being a
pretty fun read. They made it into a movie called
Angel Heart, which I don't think I ever actually saw.
But but you know, William Horsburg was a legitimate writer, um,
you know, brought in on this project. But yeah, when

(02:18):
you think about legend or When I think about Legend,
what I think about are just the fabulous visuals. I
think about the terrific score by Tangerine Dream and Cruise
with sweaty hair, sweaty hair, Tom Cruise. Does it have
the young Lady from Ferris Bueller's Day Off in it? Yes?
It does. Yeah, because in addition to Tom Cruise, Tim

(02:39):
Curry as a darkness, it does have Mia sarah As
as the Lady, the Princess. Now a big thing about
the movie. I think one of the big reasons it
falls flat for me is that any movie you tell
me Tim Curry's in it, and I'm like, oh, okay,
so it's gonna be one of my favorite movies. But
Tim Curry, even though he's in fantastic demon makeup in this,
and they give him these home burns that are bigger

(03:00):
than his arms, uh, gigantic horns, this big wide red
devil face, the makeup does all of the acting and
there's not actually a whole lot for Tim Curry to
do in the movie. Yeah. That makeup, by the way,
that was Rob Boton coming off of John Carpenter's The Thing.
The monster effects in this Yeah, yeah, and uh, the

(03:22):
suit fits almost too well, because yeah, Tim Curry is
just kind of entombed within it. And and and in
his voice even sounds like it is constricted or even
you know, like electronically modulated a little. Now we've got
to get to the unicorns in the second. But one
more thing. There was a there was an actress you
were telling me about who's in the movie, who plays
one of the goblins. Yeah, yeah, there uh stage character

(03:45):
act actor by the name of Alice Playton. And she's
phenomenal as the goblin. Blicks Like, she really steals the
show as the scheming goblin underling of Tim Carey's Darkness character.
But doesn't the movie basically just start with It's kind
ofly the Empire strikes back, right, It starts with like
the bad guys chewing each other out. Yeah, yeah, in

(04:06):
a in a movie that is essentially sold as this
this fantasy adventure, it does begin in in the swampiest,
darkest um most hellish location in the film, essentially with
a villainous uh performance review for the goblin. How would
you rate your own communication skills this quarter? Yeah? And

(04:28):
then Blick says like, I think I'm doing well, Lord
and and Darkness says, what I would really like you
to do. I think this is an area of potential
growth for you is I would like for you to
get me a unicorn horn. Unicorn horn. Now, why does
Darkness want a unicorn horn in this fantasy movie? Well,
first of all, unicorns are bright and lovely, So what

(04:49):
else would you want to do but but heard a
unicorn if you're an awful demon. But also they are
traditionally magical items that command great power. Yeah, so even
the legend it might not actually be the most traditional
fantasy story, it does sort of convey the way we've
received these types of characters. So we've got the big
horn devil on the one hand, and he lives in

(05:11):
the pits of darkness with all these infernal flames and
goblins and everything around him. And then on the other hand,
you've got this ultimately wholly innocent beast, which is the unicorn.
And I want to as we talk about some unicorn
lord today. By the way, this is going to be
part one of a two part episode we're doing on unicorns,
because there's a lot of unicorn stuff out there. I
want us to think about why are unicorns considered so holy?

(05:36):
Like why is the unicorn the counterpart, the essential opposite
of the demonic spirit? Yeah? I mean why does darkness
and legends say they are each crowned with a single
horn reaching straight to heaven. It's more pinhead than darkness,
but you get the gist. It's not literally true though,
It's just like it's like a foot long horn. Yeah,

(05:57):
but I like the idea that it's kind of like
an antennae of holiness like it is. It is in
direct its getting a direct, like high quality WiFi signal
from the celestial world. I'm thinking of what Belloch says
in Raiders of the Lost Art it's a radio. We're
talking to God, it is. It is kind of Yeah.
So as we as we roll through this, uh these episodes,

(06:20):
I'm going to keep thinking about legend you likely out
there will as well. And luckily it's treatment of the
unicorn does match up with a number of the different
myths we're going to discuss folklore's and other fictional treatments.
Now we're going to try also to discuss some of
the science that can be connected to unicorn lore, and
we'll focus on that, especially in the more biological second

(06:40):
part episode here. But today we definitely wanted to start
by looking at the archaeological record and sort of the
myth and folklore history of what the one horned beast is. Yeah,
there's a there's a wonderful quote from Jorge Luis Borees
in his book The Book of Imaginary Beings, when which
he says, the first version of the unicorn is nearly

(07:02):
identical with the latest, which is which is interesting, Like
it is a it is a creature that has not
changed all that much in our various treatments. If you
look at the Unicornian legend, if you look at the
unicorn in any other films, or or it's or how
it appears on a lunch box that you might buy
at a at a store today, it's basically the same concept.

(07:24):
The concept has It has vary varying levels of symbolic meaning,
but at heart, all you have is a a horse
with a horn on its head. Well, I think maybe
we should start by going as far back as we
can to the first known unicorn. All right, let's do it.
Where are we riding off to, Joe, I think let's

(07:44):
ride off to the Indus Valley. So we're gonna talk
a little bit about the Indus Valley civilization, which was
a powerful Bronze Age civilization. It's often now cited as
one of this list of sort of the cradles of
civilization on Earth Earth. If you want to think about
areas where going back into ancient times, there have been

(08:04):
mass populations of humans practicing agriculture, settling in cities, living together.
You've got several areas, right, You've got the Yellow River Valley,
You've got the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, you've
got Mesoamerica. And another big one is the Indus Valley.
And that's going to be in areas that are now
encompassing parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and western and northern India

(08:26):
around the Indus River. So this civilization flourished from the
middle of the third millennium b C. About twenty hundred
until about nineteen hundred BC before falling off. And according
to Andrew Robinson, writing for Nature and two of the
largest cities in the Indus Valley civilization, known as Mahinjo
Daro and Harappa Or, which are both situated along the

(08:48):
Indus River or its tributaries, were highly advanced in terms
of civic infrastructure. He claims they actually had street design
and things like sewer drainage to rival the design of
twentieth century city. And so the civilization left behind tons
of beautiful artifacts for us. They had fabulous jewelry and
all that kind of stuff. But then also, of course,

(09:08):
they had these artifacts known as seal stones, these carved stones,
including long, undeciphered writing and a famous style of ancient
unicorn depiction found on many seal stones throughout the culture,
including one that I've put a picture for us to
look at it in our notes here that it's this
four thousand year old stone from the Mohino Daro site.

(09:32):
And so what are we looking at here, Robert, Well,
we're definitely looking at an equine creature, I feel, I mean,
I look at I look at it, and I see
a creature with the basic body and proportions of of
a horse. It doesn't look very bovine. You could maybe
make a case that it's sort of an antelope. I
don't know. I I see I very much see the
hind quarters of a horse here. Yeah, it's got four legs,

(09:54):
it's clearly got hoofs. It's got a tail that looks
like it could be maybe a horsetail or maybe a
cow to ale of some kind. Uh, And then on
its head, its head goes up and then sloping at
a curve up away from the top of its head.
It has one horn. A picture of another stone from
Hinjo Dara, we have here very similar type animal. Right.

(10:14):
We see this sort of bull, sort of horse looking
animal that again has a tail. It's got four legs,
clearly clearly with hoofs. It's got some kind of artifact
in the lower left hand corner of the picture that
could be like an incense burning device or some kind
of religious artifact. It's got this undeciphered script up at

(10:35):
the top, and then it's again got this single horn
in profile. And so what people have been asking for
a long time since these these artifacts were first discovered
is what are these animals? They're often referred to as unicorns,
but we don't actually know what they are for sure.
Are they mythical one horned, four legged beasts that are

(10:55):
supposed to communicate some kind of you know, magical power,
or are they mundane two horned animals that only appear
one horned because they're in profile. That's an option, right,
Like one of the things we see in the carvings
depicting bees in ancient Egypt is sometimes it looks like
they've got the wrong numbers of legs or something. Oh, yes,
we talked about that in our our episode on the

(11:18):
Tears of Ray. Yeah, but it just seems to be
an issue of of perspective or or in how the
carvings come through to us. Yeah. Actually, it's worth noting
that in Frederick Schrader suggested that the the idea that
it is, the very idea of the unicorn might have
emerged from Greek interpretations of various uh Bas reliefs that

(11:40):
depicted profile depictions of bulls. Oh so that's that's amazing,
the idea that the unicorn could possibly have been an
outgrowth of misinterpretations of art, that art created the unicorn
because of the side perspective of animals that are supposed
to have two horns, but you can only see one. Yeah,
so it's kind of kind of getting too the idea

(12:02):
that the unicorn emerges from air. Now, is it an
error in artistic depiction? Is it an error in in interpretation? Uh,
it's hard to I guess, really, nail down, who bears
the blame of the unicorn. It's almost like imagining that
there is an artistic tradition somewhere in ancient culture that
generally draws people with their heads facing to the side

(12:24):
so that you can only see one of their eyes
and the other one is hidden on the other side
of the face, behind the bridge of the nose, and
that this type of artwork would lead to the mistaken
belief that this culture contains cycloptic people. Yeah, there's only
one eye in the picture. That must be what they
look like. Well, I think that's an interesting possibility to consider.
Another option to consider is that the animals depicted in

(12:45):
these carvings are actually supposed to be some real animal
that was actually one horned, but was mundane, wasn't some
kind of mythological beast. And that's the thing we'll have
to consider here. And I think this trilemma is going
to follow us throughout our our study of unicorns throughout
history and culture. You always have to ask, are you
dealing with a magical, non existent animal, a two horned,

(13:08):
real mundane animal that's being misinterpreted, or a real one
horned animal that is maybe being a little bit misdescribed. Yeah,
misdescription and misinterpretation I think are going to be a
common theme, whether we're talking about someone seeing again an
ancient carving and misinterpreting it, or someone repeating something they

(13:28):
heard about a rhinoceros. All right, let's take a quick
break and the when we come back, we will get
into the history of the western unicorn. Thank you, thank you.
All right, we're back. We're going to talk about, Yeah,
the history of the western unicorn, which is is generally
what you're going to think of when you hear the
word unicorn. One of the things that I think is

(13:49):
going to be most interesting about the history of the
western unicorn is that generally the western unicorn does not
appear in ancient texts as a mythological beast, but as
a physical, mundane beast. Even though it's sometimes given a
lot of superlatives and powers and stuff, it's not described

(14:10):
as a part of myth, but more as a part
of natural history in the natural world. Yeah. Indeed, let's
look at some of these examples of individuals writing about
the unicorn. So Greek historian Ctessius wrote of unicorns in
the fifth century BC, describing them as white creatures like
asses with purple heads, blue eyes in a central horn

(14:31):
of red black and white. Oh, that's a lot more
colorful than the standard like bleach white unicorn we get
in Legend and other modern works. This is something you see.
They're gonna see time and time again. These older depictions
of unicorns are going to be pretty white, wild, wildly colored.
So it's not not only the fact that their form
is different, but also of their pigmentation. Well, I like

(14:52):
those unicorns better. Why can't we get the colorful ones back?
I guess we get them In Lisa frank yes um
now a Greek history orient Herodotus. He also wrote of
the unicorn, as did plenty of the elder centuries later.
And I actually have a quote from old plenty here
to read. He said, quote, The fiercest animal is the unicorn,
which in the rest of the body resembles a horse,

(15:14):
but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant,
and in the tail a bore, and has a deep
bellow and a single black horn three ft long projecting
from the middle of the forehead. They say that it
is impossible to capture this animal alive. It cannot be
taken alive. Now, this does occur in a passage in

(15:35):
Plenty's Natural History, alongside other strange claims, where he's supposedly
talking about the animals that you could find in India,
and he says things like, quote the Orsean Indians hunt
down a kind of ape which has the body white
all over, as well as a very fierce animal called
the monicerus or monserras. And then he goes into the unicorn.
But wait a minute, this pale ape all over that

(15:58):
they hunt down in in India. That doesn't seem true either.
That's right, It's not like this is a mention of
the unicorn in a text that is otherwise um mundane.
Now there's so much there's so many fantastic and just
outright wrong tidbits throughout his work. Yeah, Plenty seems rather
promiscuous in his reporting, right. He will report all kinds

(16:21):
of things as real nature facts of the world. Yes,
second or third hand accounts from other travelers who have
actually seen these things, presumably, and then he's just collecting
them into his work or who might have been making
them up. I mean, it's hard to know. One more
thing about Plenty's description, though, is that so he says
that the unicorn of India makes a deep, lowing noise,

(16:43):
and when he describes the horn of the forehead, he
says that it's two cubits in length. Two cubits is
about one yard or about point nine meters. That is
a long horn. Usually the horns you see on the
modern unicorn depictions, I'd say, what are they about a foot? Yeah,
they tend to be a lot shorter. But but when
you look at some of these for some of the
tapestries we're going to discuss, they also show a very

(17:03):
like javelin horn unicorn. Yeah. The second and third century
Roman author Alien wrote of the unicorn in the second
century see calling it the cardizan and of India, yellowish
red with a black horn and long mane, a fierce creature,
and this is a common feature of descriptions of the
unicorn and enemy of the lion. Oh yeah, I like

(17:26):
that you highlight that relationship because there are some other places,
especially I think I'm going to mention later in this
episode where animals that may have inspired the unicorn are
traditionally depicted as like alongside the lion and a kind
of pantheon of powerful animals. But I want to explore
just a little more of what alien says. So he
writes in his on the Nature of Animals India, quote

(17:47):
fosters asses with a single horn like that phrasing, but
he says that from these horns they make drinking vessels,
and if anyone puts a deadly poison in them and
the man drinks, the plot will do him no harm,
for it seems that the horn of both the horse
and of the ass is an antidote to the poison. Yes,

(18:07):
so this brings us to one of the most famous
legends about the western unicorn, especially that pervades all of
this literature, is that there's something magical and special about
the horn, not just in service of the animal's life,
but if you can take that horn off of it,
you can get some magic stuff out of it as well. Yes,
so the the idea that say that the unicorn could

(18:28):
dip its head and touch its horn to water, and
then that water would be made uh drinkable. Uh. And
then yeah, you could also potentially saw that puppy off,
work it into like your your your beer stein or something,
and then protect yourself from poisoning. Now, we mentioned a
little bit of this in our previous episode about poison
and the rhino horn. So I guess we'll link that

(18:49):
on the landing page here if you want to go
back and listen to that whole episode about uh drinking
vessels made out of rhinocerous horn that would believe to
purge poison from drinks or react with poison, who showed
that drink had been poisoned or something like that, and
the actual chemical argument for for these things actually working. Now,
one more account of unicorn I want to mention here.

(19:10):
This one comes to us uh in in the second
century see Greek text Physiologus. So this is essentially an
early beastiary, you know, a monster manual, if you will,
a tone of all the various exotic creatures one might
find in the world. And in it, the unknown author
describes how a unicorn may be captured by baiting it

(19:33):
with a virgin. Now that ties into the idea that
the unicorn cannot be captured alive, right, we mentioned that's
part of the legend. You can't capture it alive unless
apparently you use the special strategy, right, which again is
referenced in a legend when Blicks asked how to capture
the the unicorn, Uh Tim craze darkness says in no sense,

(19:56):
no sense, pronouncing it like he's never actually said the
word before. It doesn't quite feel right in his mouth. Yeah,
im I saying this right and no sense and something
like that. But so, how does this work? How do
you use a virgin to capture a unicorn? This is
the way your hey. Luis Borges summarizes it in his
book Imaginary Beings. Quote. It springs into the virgin's lap,

(20:17):
and she warms it with love and carries it off
to the Palace of Kings. Oh no, so she so,
because of her innocence and goodness and virtue, she can
lure the unicorn to herself, and then by pretending to
make friends with it, she can lead it to the
bad guys who want to get its horn. Yeah yeah,
which is basically what we see happen in legend. The

(20:39):
idea that the unicorns is too pure for uh, for
the forces of darkness to uh to take on directly,
but they can essentially manipulate others uh so you know,
such as the virgin, into enabling its capture. That is cruel.
I don't like that. It's this, this, this trope. We're
gonna return to again and again that the unicorn is

(20:59):
this this, this holy creature but also essentially a wild creature,
very much a part of the natural world, and it
is it is too good for the human world. Like
all we're gonna try and do is hunt it, capture it,
probably and process it for its parts and eat it.
It's kind of this holy vessel that just shames is

(21:19):
for our treatment of nature. That definitely comes through, But
it's also a lot more than that, because as as
with anything you give, you give enough writers enough time,
they're going to interpret something as symbolic as the unicorn
in many different ways. And as Bohes points out, the
unicorn goes on to represent everything from uh, the Holy
ghost and Jesus Christ to mercury and uh and just

(21:42):
and just outright evil at different points as evil. Wait
a minute, now, I thought we were setting up this
thing where it's this holy, innocent creature. Well, but it
has this very phallic thing on its head. Is the
is the deal? That's true? People are always gonna see
is on some pre e petic kind of imagery, and
I guess that'll tend to make people assume that it
what somehow embodies lust or or masculinity or male fertility

(22:06):
in some way. Now, let's get back to what would
happen again. According to these legends, if you say opportunistically
broke off that pre epic horn, well then you have
a fabulous ingredient for your various magical concoctions. Um. We
already touched on the whole poison rhino horn thing a
little bit. But I found more information on this from
Toxicology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Philip

(22:29):
Wexler and featuring a paper titled Origin of Myths related
to Curative, anecdotal and other medicinal properties of animal horns
in the Middle Ages by Chris Lavers, and he refers
to the book uh Physica by Hildegarde of Bingen who
lived ten through eleven seventy nine, and this is what

(22:50):
he wrote about the unicorn horn. I hope we're going
to get some alchemy type stuff. Oh, yes, quote, pulverize
the liver of a unicorn. Yes, give this powder in
fat prepared with yolk of egg, and make it a
salve and there will be no leprosy. The leprosy comes,
of course, oftentimes from the black bile and from the

(23:12):
black stagnant blood. If you make a girdle from the
hide of the unicorn and gird yourself with it, no plague,
however severe and no fever will harm you. Also, if
you make shoes from the high and wear them, you
will always have sound feet, sound legs, and sound joints,
and also will no passion wants harm you while you

(23:33):
were wearing them. Well, this is just bad advice in
every possible way. This is like factually wrong and morally bad.
That's the worst kind of advice. And yet there is
also a sense of use every part of the unicorn, right,
don't just saw it's horn off and run off and
you know, into the darkness with it. Use the rest
of the animal as well. Um. He also recommends placing

(23:54):
the hoof of a unicorn under a plate or cup
to cause boiling in the presence of poison. Okay, so
this brings us back to the idea that it will
somehow make poison not poisonous anymore, or alert you to
the presence of poison. Now, I'm talking about the Middle
Ages here and in me evil Europe in particular, certainly,
there are a number of classical texts that they could
draw upon to learn about the unicorn. But what about

(24:15):
the most essential text of the time. What about the
Holy Bible? What does it tell us about the unicorn.
Let's have a reading from the King James Bible, shall we.
Let's do it so first, I want to read Isaiah
thirty four six to seven. The sword of the Lord
is filled with blood. It is made fat with fatness,
and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the

(24:38):
fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord hath
a sacrifice to Bozrah and a great slaughter in the
land of Dumia. And the unicorns shall come down with them,
and the bullocks with the bulls, and their land shall
be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.
I have a lot of questions about that. This this fat,

(25:00):
fleshy sword that the Lord is wielding here, and then
the flock of unicorns that that that seemed to to
flock down amidst all the bloodshed. Well, yeah, so this
is apparently saying that, so there's gonna be a great
smiting of many things, including all of your unicorns, and
the dust is going to be you know, made fat
with their fatness. I do not remember this passage from

(25:22):
Sunday School. I want to read you another one. Let's
go to job Job thirty nine nine through twelve. Now
this is part of the there's sort of these long
didactic poetic sections of job where there are a lot
of sort of repeated phrases in the sentences of like
is this gonna happen? Are you going to do this?
Can you do this? Yeah? Basically the whole idea of

(25:42):
being who do you think you are? Job right? So
here's one starting at verse nine. Will the unicorn be
willing to serve thee? Or abide by thy crib? Canst
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

(26:04):
he will bring home thy seed and gather it into
thy barn. Now this sounds an awful lot like this
unicorn is being reduced to agricultural labor. Here, well, it's
saying like, are you what you think You're gonna get
a unicorn and reduce it to agricultural labor? Think again, buddy,
and these are, by no means the only references to
unicorns in the King James version of the Bible. There,

(26:26):
I think I was looking at. I don't want to
be wrong about this, but I'm I think I'm gonna
say about nine references to unicorns in the King James Bible.
And on one hand, that shouldn't be super surprising because
the Bible contains other passages that appear to be references
to mythical beasts. Right, We've got the Behemoth. Whether or
not that's a mythical beast, not quite sure. Definitely, the

(26:48):
Leviathan in the Book of Job is supposed to be
a mythical beast because the Leviathan pretty clearly is a
fire breathing dragon sea monster. If you doubt this, check
out Job forty nine to twenty one. Quote out of
his mouth go burning lamps and sparks of fire leap
out out of his nostrils, goeth smoke as out of
a seething pot or cauldron. His breath kindleth coals, and

(27:10):
a flame goeth out of his mouth. Yeah he could.
They couldn't. The author here couldn't be anymore clear. Yeah,
this is a fire breathing dragon. But at the same time,
I think there's a very good case to be made
that the word in the Bible that the King James
translators interpreted as unicorn was unfortunately not actually a reference
to a mythical beast like the Leviathan, but a mistranslation

(27:33):
of a word for a normal, mundane animal, but in
a very interesting way. So let's chase that lead for
a second, Robert, Let's have a reading from Deuteronomy thirty three.
Let's start right in the middle of thirty three, verse sixteen.
Let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph, and
upon the top of the head of him that was
separated from his brethren. His glory is like the firstling

(27:57):
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. And they are the
ten thousands of ephre Um, and they are the thousands
of Manassa. Now wait a second, some red kind of wrong.
They're right because the horns of unicorns like horns plural.

(28:18):
Now you might be able to read that as well.
You've got a big mess of unicorns, and as a group,
there are horns plural, But that's not actually what the
passage says. Right. His glory is like the firstling 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. So it sounds like he's describing

(28:41):
a pair of horns or multiple horns, who knows, maybe
even seven horns, a bunch of horns on a single
animal head as a point of comparison for the strength
of a single person. So what the heck is going
on here? If this is supposed to be a unicorn, Yeah,
I'm feeling I'm I'm picturing something more like a bull
or a gazelle now, yeah, And I think you might
be onto something there, Roberts. So what we have to

(29:02):
consider here is that the translators who produced the King
James version of the Bible were working with a lot
of limitations. These were scholars who, you know, studied ancient
languages and ancient manuscripts to try to make the best
translation they could. But they were working at the beginning
of the seventeenth century, right, it was like the first
decade of the seventeenth century, and they had this colossal

(29:23):
job of taking this huge tradition of different manuscripts written
over hundreds of years, primarily in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic,
and translating them into a Bible for the English speaking
world to read, and there were lots of They were
all kinds of problems, right. For one thing, these translators
had access to lower quality, more corrupted manuscripts than the

(29:44):
translators of more recent versions. But also these Greek, Hebrew
and Aramaic texts, as you might imagine, were full of
ancient words and expressions that the King James translators did
not know what to make of. And how would they
have right, I mean, they were working in the beginning
the seventeenth century, but they did their best. So sometimes
their best involved unnecessary invocation of mythological beasts. So the

(30:08):
word that the King James translators rendered as unicorn is
in fact the Hebrew word h m. And at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, nobody in this English speaking
committee knew what rem meant. And today actually scholars are
not certain that they know for sure what Rem was
supposed to mean, but they think they've got a pretty
good guess. So one question to begin with, if the

(30:30):
King James translators didn't know what was meant by M.
Why did they choose unicorn and not something else? Why
didn't they just say, like, I don't know, uh, cow
or what? Just something random? Yeah, because there's nothing. It
doesn't seem like there's anything really in the text. It
demands the creature have one horn. It just needs to
be a like a strong, powerful beast. Right, So, so

(30:51):
the the the existence of a single horn uh is
not important, not in the text itself, but here's where
it comes in. So I've read the U N S. E.
Chapel Hill. Biblical scholar bart Erman speculate that the reason
the King James translators rendered h M as unicorn may
have been that they were taking their cue from an
earlier translation of the Bible, not into English, obviously, but

(31:14):
into Greek, the Greek Septuagint. And this is the Greek
translation of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, which
had existed since ancient times. It had been around since
the Ptolemaic period, I think. And in the Septuagint, the
Hebrew word rem is translated into the Greek word mono
kairos mono meaning one and karos meaning horn. Now, that

(31:35):
actually just pushes the question farther back, like why did
these scholars in the Greek translation translate rem as monocros
and there We don't know for sure, but one possibility
could be that they were thinking that it was a
reference to the rhinoceros. That's right, that would make sense.
But later scholars have come up with a pretty good
idea of what the Hebrew red m actually meant. And

(31:56):
my main source here was a summary in a book
called Sacred Monsters, Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud
and Midrash by Natan Slifkin, who is a rabbi, but
he also he deals with zoological sciences and stuff, so
he interprets a lot of references to animals and beasts
in the Old Testament and the Talmud and other Jewish

(32:17):
texts in light of zoological science. And so what Slifkin
says is that modern scholars have suggested that the realm
of the Hebrew Bible actually refers to the orox bos
primogenious and these were the wild ancestors of modern domesticated cattle.
They lived throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa, and they

(32:39):
had these huge forward and upward facing horns, perfect for goring,
and the descriptions in the Bible are also a very
nice fit with their reputation as extremely aggressive and powerful.
You wouldn't want to face down in Orax in the wild. Now,
the Oracs are extinct today, right, but they still existed
in the ancient Near East when these texts were written,
and in fact we think the last of them died

(33:01):
out in Poland in sixty seven. But Sliftin points out
that there are ancient Near Eastern engravings of Orex, specifically
in the Assyrian context, bearing the name Remu, a close
cognate for the Hebrew rem So there's good reason for
thinking m probably meant Ox and that works right, And

(33:22):
then the context of the passages, it is a mighty
wild beast, yes, And they truly were mighty because they
were huge, like they could stand about one point eight
meters or about six feet tall at the shoulders. So imagine,
you know, you're you're talking about a wild bull with
gigantic horns that was aggressive and stubborn and probably taller
than you were, maybe not taller than you, Robert, but

(33:43):
that's that's that's still too much broader than me. Yea
far more intimidating than me, if you were to happen
to upon one in a field. Yeah, and so this
makes me think about a thing when when you read
about the ancient Middle East and all of the bull
gods and bull headed deities of the ancient world and
the power they were supposed to embody, you might think,

(34:03):
why imagine all of this raw, holy, scary kind of
power in essentially a domesticated animal that you eat or
milk or used for farm labor. You know, like, what
why is that? Why? Why a bull? Why not some
scarier wild animal. But I would suggest when you think
about what bulls meant to the people of the ancient world,

(34:24):
they you know, they had begun domesticating breeds of cattle.
But you should also think about the context of the
primordial bull, the wild primordial bull, the roux, which was
a mighty and threatening beast. Wow, it was. It was
essentially like the god cow of of the ancient world. Yeah,
and you see it, You see it inspiring the imagination
of you know, pre pre civilization people's right even in

(34:47):
the Paleolithic period or exappear in cave art. Like if
you think about the paintings at Lasco in southwestern France.
These are giant cave paintings and they're amazing. They're from
the Upper Paleolithic, the Stone Age, and the most famous
section of the cave at Lascaux is known as the
Hall of the Bulls, which shows these four black orcs.
One of the bulls depicted is more than five meters

(35:09):
long or about seventeen feet, which it was gigantic for
a cave painting. Wow. So so ultimately in the Bible
we're seeing references not to the unicorn from legend, but
to a beast that looks more like Tim Curry's character
from legend. I think that's a good point in comparison.
I mean, there's a reason that this became the largest

(35:30):
single animal ever discovered in cave art. These were fearsome, powerful,
revered animals. Hunting them was a serious task. You know
that they probably were hunted by Paleolithic humans, but that
was a dangerous endeavor, right. These are strong, powerful, They
could inspire Biblical terror, and I mentioned earlier about keeping
the company of lions. Orcs are also depicted in the

(35:51):
ancient Babylonian wonder the Ishtar Gate, which I bet you've
probably seen pictures of before, Robert. Oh yeah, this is
the big blue one right, yeah, yeah, with the arch
and uh so it depicts three animals lions, dragons, and rax.
The kind of company this primordial bull kept. Also, I
want to add one last bit of interesting news about
the oracs from recent years. Um, some conservationists actually believe

(36:14):
that the oracs were a sort of keystone species in
Europe before it went extinct that was crucial for maintaining
European biodiversity and the wildlife environments. And as a result,
there's actually been an effort to back breed a version
of the wild oracx that could be released into the
wild as grazers to help Europe sort of maintain its
original ecosystems. Because this was this would be a creature

(36:36):
I'm assuming that would fill the basic niche that uh
the the American buffalo would have filled, right, something kind
of like that. I mean, you can't make a one
to one comparison, but yeah, because it is something that
is a herb before it is a grazer. But it's
also not something that's easily picked off by any wolf.
For what I mean, this is a huge, powerful, animal.
But anyway, coming back to the Bible translations, most modern

(36:59):
Bible translation and since the King James for example, to
anyone you pick up today, the new revised standard version
is probably gonna render those unicorn passages not as unicorn
but as wild ox or something like that. So it
really does kind of transform it. But it can still
be pretty interesting if you picture the orex in your mind,
in all of its powerful glory, is the wild ox

(37:20):
willing to serve you? Will it spend the night at
your crib? From job or in Isaiah, wild oxen shall
fall with them and young steers with the mighty bulls,
and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their
soil made rich with fat, or that Deuteronomy passage a
firstborn bull, majesty is his His horns are the horns
of a wild ox. With them, he gores the people's,

(37:43):
driving them to the ends of the earth. You know,
it's it's fascinating in all of this that it also
ends up mirroring Peter Beagles the Last Unicorn. Oh yeah,
this of course is the fantasy novel later made into
the two animated film from and can embass But in
that we see the red bull as the as as

(38:06):
the nemesis of the unicorns that has driven them all
into the sea for the evil king. And it is
very much in keeping with the idea of an arc
as opposed to your your just standard domesticated cow. I
think about the rax often whenever I think about the minotaur.
We need to we need to sort of bring back
the scariness of the primordial cattle instead of just thinking

(38:28):
about it as a thing you grill, Yeah, it's it's
regal nature is really lost when you you look at
footage of say, you know, modern cattle rearing practices and
say the American Midwest. Yeah, well, I mean it's one
of those many products of agriculture, right, And agriculture is
sort of the process of of taking this wild thing
that lives for its own purposes and bending it to

(38:49):
human purposes, capturing the unicorn really right, and processing it
for its liver Pulu. One more option I want to
mention is that there could be other things. You know
that reference in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the
Hebrew Bible. Uh, it's got this monocross idea. Sliff Can
mentions this could also maybe refer to the Orix. I

(39:10):
know that sounds a lot like Orax, which we've just
been talking about. But this is rix O r y x,
which is a kind of antelope with straight horns that
in profile could easily look like one single horn. And
we're back to the idea of animals depicted in profile again,
like with the Indus River carvings. Is that maybe something
like the Orax with this one horn depicted in profile,

(39:33):
because the two horns line up very evenly right or
or seen at a distance, a silhouette. One more fun
bit from the King James issue h that we should do,
and then I guess we'll take a break and move
on to some other things, is that there's another beast
that is I think somewhere between the Leviathan and the unicorn,
meaning it's a might be a reference to a mythological beast,
or it might be a reference to a normal animal,

(39:54):
not quite clear, which is the Bible's reference to satyrs.
I had no idea. So Isaiah thirteen twenty one and
the King James version, we're in the middle of this
prophecy about how Babylon is going to be destroyed like
Sodom and go Mora and the destruction will be so
terrible that no human will ever be able to inhabit Babylon, again,
picking up the quote quote but wild beasts of the desert,

(40:17):
She'll lie there, and their houses shall be full of
doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and sadders shall
dance there. Oh man. Uh So, for anyone who needs
a reminder, when we're talking about statyers, we're talking about
the human goat hybrids of of of Greek and Roman tradition.

(40:37):
They were known as fawns in the Roman tradition, and
they were attended to Silenus and Bacchus, and they tended
to chase nymphs around and are generally depicted as just
the embodiments of drunken mail lettery and aggressive sexuality. There's,
I mean, there's really a robust artistic tradition depicting them.
I think of them in a much darker set of motifs,

(40:59):
because I primarily think of them now in the context
of the Great God Pan, which is much darker than
them just being kind of uncontrollable party dude. But in
the paintings you often depict them, they're also often depicted
as just yeah, kind of out of control party dudes,
which can be pretty terrifying in its own right. Now,
in terms of how satyrs are treated in the Christian tradition, Uh,

(41:19):
it's it's interesting because in hindsight it seems destined to
be classified as a demon. Right, Yeah, it's just your
like a satanic Satanic goat man. And it's essentially in
a legend, the darkness character is like just a a
satyr on steroids. Oh, you're talking about the movie Legend.
For second, I meant in legend, not know in legend

(41:39):
and in parenthesis this is probably going to be a
problem for listeners. Sorry, but but the thing is, when
you start looking around at a medieval examples of treatment
of the statter, you you can find it both ways.
So in Liz Herbert McAvoy's Monstrous Masculinities in Julian of
Nor which is a Revelation of Love and the Book
of my A Drey of Kemp, she points out that

(42:02):
there's this individual by the name of Guide This Shaaliac,
a late Middle Ages authority on disease, and he drew
explicit comparisons between lepers and satyrs. He cites that they
both have stinking breath, prominent brows, paw like hands, and
I assume this might be due to decomposition of tissues

(42:22):
due to leprosy, as well as a ruddy complexion, and
most importantly black blemishes and black blood. Well, this sounds
very prejudiced. Yeah. Meanwhile, I was looking at Sarah Sally's
Idols and Semilacra and she points out that in the
fourteenth century work Mandovel's Travels, which is the one of
these these books of just you know, this character traveling

(42:45):
the world and seeing all the fantastic sites of the
of of of the larger world. Okay, so that reads
to me as full of lies. Yes, that is it
is full of lies. But but in it there are
sayers that pop up, and they're described as simply quote
a deadly creatures such as God had formed. So they
were monsters, they were wonders in their own way, but
they were part of the natural order of things. So

(43:07):
again we get back to this idea that many of
these older texts, the unicorn is not depicted as something holy,
in supernatural or unnatural in any way, shape or form.
It is uh, it is noteworthy, but it is a
part of the world. Wait did Mandeville have something to
say about unicorns. Oh, yes, yes he did. He wrote,
of the unicorns in that country, be many white elephants

(43:28):
without number, and of unicorns, and of lions of many manners,
and many of such beasts that I have told before,
and of many other hideous beasts without number. Oh so
he's one of these guys who's always reminding you the
great stories he told you before. Yes, and there there's
so many hasn't even gotten to yet. But I guess
that's kind of what we do to write. We've talked

(43:48):
about you've heard us talk about it in a previous episode,
and we could totally do an episode on this as well.
We're the modern Mandevell's. I hope we're not lying about
our travels in But to to go back to the
idea of the sadders in the Bible, So you've got
the idea of sadders, you know your town is going
to be destroyed, or your city is gonna be destroyed.
You're gonna have owls the satders are gonna dance there.

(44:10):
In the New American Standard Bible version of that verse,
it's translated very differently. It's rendered not as a mythological beast,
but just a reference to a mundane animal. So it says, quote,
but desert creatures will lie down there, and their house
will be full of owls. Ostriches also were there, and
shaggy goats will frolic there, which is an amazing bit
of trash talk. You're saying, your city is going to

(44:31):
be destroyed when I'm through with you. Your house is
going to be full of owls. Your kitchen is gonna
be full of shaggy goats. Yeah, but it's it's it's
a different type of Uh, it's a different kind of doom,
isn't it. You know. It's like you can imagine like
the fall of Las Vegas and then all that's left
in this the apocalyptic wasteland or satyrs and that like
that makes sense. You know, they're the only ones who

(44:52):
can really get by there. But if it's just shaggy goats,
it's it's a little less sad. It's like even the
even the sin of your of your city has washed away,
and now it's just really your ruins are just a
place that goats want her around. I like the owls,
the owls, and that's like somehow that's very savage it's like,
oh no, not owls. What it reminds me of Futurama.

(45:14):
In all the Futurama episodes that they depict owls as
infesting the cities of the future, apparently playing on some
politicians comment that if if al Gore got his way,
that that owls would infest the country. The owls are
not what they seem. Yeah, anyway, I think we should
take another quick break and when we come back we

(45:34):
will discuss more wonderful unicorn lore. Thank thank alright, we're
back now, Robert. Earlier we were talking about the idea
that the unicorn, in at least modern fiction, but also
a lot of this ancient law as well, seems to
be a symbol of innocence, of holiness, of purity, of rectitude. Right,
I mean, before you get to the idea that it's

(45:56):
also sort of a lustful or sinful creature, you've got
this very sinless unicorn. That's right, it's a holy, blameless creature.
I would tend to think that the Christian tradition would
do something with that, Yes, and what they do is
is rather interesting. So yeah, it again becomes a tradition
in these beast areas that the unicorn can be baited
with a virgin, it's drawn to her purity, and then

(46:16):
it can be captured and taken to a way to
a king. And so we can look to a twelve
twenty Anglo Saxon beast herey and see, uh, from there
an emergent symbolism, that of the capture of the unicorn
as the betrayal of Christ. Whoa that? Yeah, I didn't
see that coming. Yeah, so this is what Carol Rose

(46:37):
writes about. Carol Rose compiled uh two different sort of
modern beastiaries. Or she talks about folklore and legend and
mythology of monsters and dragons or fairies and other supernatural creatures.
But the comparison here would be that that Christ was
betrayed by Judas Iscariot right, who betrayed him with a
kiss and lead the Roman authorities to capture or him

(47:00):
and turn him over to punch his pilot. Yeah, so
Rose rights. From that time the unicorn seems to have
acquired a graceful piety that the earlier descriptions had lacked.
And so we see this again and again we see
this idea of that the unicorn is a symbol of,
among other things, Christ and his purity, like this thing
that was too good for the world, and so of

(47:21):
course we ended up betraying it and killing it, betrayed
by a kiss. Yeah. And uh, it's also I find this, this, this, uh,
this this extra amusing because you'll see occasional memes these
days that depict Jesus writing a unicorn or in the
presence of unicorns, and to humorous effect, as if the
the idea of Jesus Christ and the unicorns sharing the

(47:43):
same space is just completely ridiculous and so ridiculous that
it's just just absurd. But but really it's it's a
perfectly natural pairing. They have a history together, they have
a past. One has been used to represent the other. Yeah,
I would not be surprised at all if some piece
of medieval art somewhere had Jesus writing into Jerusalem illustrated

(48:04):
not as on a donkey, but as on a unicorn.
Now we've mentioned that the Travels of of Sir John
Mandeville from the fourteenth century also another important text that
mentions unicorns, that of Marco Polo. The Travels of Marco
Polo okay, or the Travels of Marco Polo similarly full
of lies. Well, a lot has been written on on

(48:25):
on the journeys of Marco po But in terms of
the unicorn that he describes, uh, most of the interpretations
I've I've come across seemed to say this was a rhinoceros. Okay,
So again we come back to the rhino, as we
do time and time again. And of course we've already
mentioned the lion popping up in the company of the unicorn,
and uh and and this, this idea of lion unicorn

(48:47):
drama was well established by the sixteenth century. That's when
English poet Edmund Spencer wrote of it in The Fairy Queen,
and this popularized the idea a new and so you
see lion and unicor horn iconography. Um, you know is
as as a free control from that point onward. Interesting,
now we mentioned tapestries earlier. There are actually two sets

(49:10):
of tapestries that that we should mention here, uh, the
first of which is the Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries.
It's a series of six tapestries woven in Flanders around
the sixteenth century, and they each feature a lion, a unicorn,
and a beautiful woman, with the woman always between the two.
Five of the tapestries seem to depict the five senses

(49:32):
of touch, taste, smell, hearing, in sight, while a sixth
is labeled a Monsieur dessier to my only desire. And
this one is is different because this is this is weird, right,
because we've already hit all the senses and then there's
this additional tapestry um which will we'll get to here.
So these were believed the appropriate reception, right, But I
have I have read some arguments along those lines. But

(49:56):
these tapestries are believed to have been commissioned by a
member of the prosper suh le Vista family in the
late fifteenth century. Now, there's an excellent episode of CBC's
Ideas podcast about these tapestries titled The Lady in the
Unicorn from I recommend everyone check that out. I'll try
and include a link to it on the landing page

(50:16):
for this episode at seft to Bow your Mind dot com.
But they spent a lot of time talking about the
history of these tapestries and the symbolism and the differences
between them. For instance, in Touch, the unicorn is smaller
and more ghatish in appearance, like it basically looks like
a goat unicorn with the beard. It's also small and stature. Also,

(50:39):
the woman is touching its horns in a highly suggestive manner.
But then in the other paintings the unicorn is more
equine in appearance, though it still has the ghatish beard
and that sixth the painting to my only desire, this
one still remains a bit of a mystery. And you
have these various theories on what it is referring to, uh,
including les you know, I phenomenon. But the one that

(51:02):
that I like the most is that it concerns human
obsession with material possessions. Oh that's weird, like greed as
a perceptive sense, I guess, uh. I mean you can
you look at the painting and you see that, yes,
the woman is holding a chest of jewels, and almost comically,
the lion is about to eat the fabric of the
pavilion or the tent. Uh, and the unicorn is not

(51:23):
early doing much. So the unicorn is just basically in
the same posture that you'll find it in another one
of the tapestries. Oh well, I want to learn more
about that. Yeah. Well, like I say that that episode
of ideas is is really fascinating. Now another set of
unicorn tapestries is that that we know is that the
Hunt of the Unicorn. Now, these were probably woven in

(51:44):
Brussels in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries, and
they feature a common theme from art of that period,
Nobleman hunting the Unicorn. And these are incidentally the same
paintings brought to life in the opening credits of that
two adaptation of The Last Unicorn. You know, can I
confess I've never seen it? Should I see it? You should?
It's good. It's uh. It's all set to the music

(52:07):
of America America as in like Ventura Highway and yeah,
horse with no Name, Yeah, horse with one Horn, Horse
with one horn through the desert on a horse with
one horn. They had. There's some catchy America tunes in
that the theme song especially uh huh, yeah, Wait a minute,
is it about a horse with one horn or is
it something else? It's about the Last Unicorn the theme song.

(52:28):
This is custom music. They didn't just grab America original
music America. Yeah, they didn't just grab it off the shelf.
They commissioned it. They're they're part of the fabric of
the film. So these seven tapestries tell the story of
nobleman hunting the the the unicorn, but is pointed out
by Helmet Nickel in a nineteen two Metropolitan Museum Journal article,

(52:52):
it's difficult to establish the exact narrative sequence because two
of the tapestries are in a different style. So then
there's several different reasons for this, most of them entailing
the work of two different artists, sort of like you
want to complete tapestry set of the Hunting of the Unicorn,
but you only have four available from this artist and

(53:16):
then two available from this one, so you just sort
of mash them together, and well, now it tells a
complete story. Well what's the story. Well, it seems to
go together like this. There's the start of the hunt.
There's the unicorn of the fountain, the unicorn attacked, the
unicorn defending himself, the unicorn is captured by the Virgin,
the unicorn is killed and brought to the castle. And

(53:36):
then finally the unicorn in captivity and no longer dead. Huh,
so they kill it, they bring it back to the castle,
and then it resurrects. Well, basically, again, if you think
about the the idea of this capture of the unicorn
um as as the story of Christ. I mean, what
happens with Christ. Christ is is betrayed. Uh, he is,
he has put on across, he has he has executed essentially,

(53:59):
but then he returns to life, he has resurrected, and
in that believers find hope. That's interesting. Now, one thing
I would notice is that the unicorn in captivity in
the versions of this I'm looking at it's in a pin,
it's fenced in, it can't escape, but it still has
its horn. So I'm at least seeing the horn has
not been harvested, right, the liver has presumably not been pulverized,

(54:22):
So there's hope in that as well. Now we mentioned
earlier that we have Eastern unicorns as well. Oh yeah,
And and it makes sense, right because on one hand,
it's not that crazy of an idea. It seems like
a complete no brainer that a culture would eventually imagine
a creature with a single horn or other protrusion coming
out of its head. Well, especially since there actually have

(54:44):
been some versions of animals like this that exist on
Earth exactly, you know, because we get into we get
into areas of of Indian Asia that either currently have
rhinoceros or have had species of rhinoceros in the past. Yeah,
And if you're thinking, hey, wait a minute, don't rhinocero
says have two horns, you need to think about the
Indian rhinoce right, So many African rhinoceroses have two horns,

(55:07):
but the Indian rhinoceros has one nose horns, right, and
is a It is a very strange looking beast if
you were accustomed to only seeing their their African cousins.
And so we have to think about this particular rhino
when we look at things like the Chinese kaylin, which
in its form and function varies depending on who, when
and where the tale is told, but it is one

(55:27):
of the celestial beings alongside the dragon, the tortoise, and
the and the finglong or the Chinese phoenix. Um think
of a deer with the head of a Chinese dragon
with one to three fleshy horns or antlers in some
cases scales the who's of a horse, the tail of
an ox with bunches of of of of of spotted

(55:48):
and spiral whirls on its hide, And that's essentially the
kailin And in some cases it also fulfills the role
of a Western stork, bringing talented sons with potential for
success civil service careers to families. Um. It's also depicted
as a gentle, musical, vegetarian creature or just a symbol
of auspicious birth, of longevity and of balanced n and

(56:11):
yan and and again there's an argument that these are
essentially based on descriptions of of of a rhinoceros. They're
also uh. There's also this idea that it is based
on the description of an African giraffe. Giraffe, how would
that be? Well, in fourteen fourteen, Unich Commander shing Ho
led the ming fleet to the coast of Africa, and

(56:32):
Uh supposedly returned with a giraffe as a tribute to
Emperor yung Low. And the Somali name for giraffe is
apparently guran, which might have sounded like quillen uh the
and that this is the name for the emblem of
justice uh in Mandarin, so uh, that's uh. Again, you
get into this complex web of of how much of

(56:56):
it is is observations of an actual animal, how much
of it is just retellings and misinterpretations of those observations,
And then how much of it is just pure myth making,
how much of it is just the the pure magic
of religious thinking. I know I've mentioned this a lot
on the podcast before, but I think a lot of
times we tend to under sell the role of pure

(57:18):
myth making in in coming up with these kinds of
beasts because we want there to be a mystery to solve,
right we it's more fun to think about, Okay, what
could have inspired? And I like playing that game too.
You know, we talked about it with the first Fossil Hunters,
right at the idea of maybe seeing ancient triceratops fossils
inspired the idea of a griffin or something like that,

(57:41):
and all these types of ideas which I think are
very interesting and worth talking about. But it's also sort
of driven of our need to create a causation narrative,
where we need to say people saw something and that
led to them dreaming up this kind of animal. But
when you think about the writers of today, writers of
today invent all kinds of mythological animals. They come out

(58:02):
of their imagination, they met, you know, they put together
the characteristics of one creature with characteristics or of another,
or they to a monstrous dimension, change the size of
some features of an animal, or you know, something like that.
It often just comes out of the imagination. And I
think we always have to keep in mind that ancient
people were using their imagination to indeed indeed and uh.

(58:24):
And of course we see other variations of this of
this Eastern unicorn or I almost hate to call it
an Eastern unicorn, but just suffice to say Eastern magical
creatures that had something like a single horn in some depictions.
So you have the Japanese kiran. You have the Po,
which was a Mongolian creature that was depicted as a

(58:44):
beautiful white horse with a black tail, tiger claws, and
then a horn on its muzzle. You have the High Chai,
which is which had the body of a horse reddish
yellow for a single black horn. And I like this
it was able to detect the guilty and the innocent,
presumably by pointing its horn at them. That's what how
I like to interpret it. There's the two Jushin, which

(59:07):
was more like a lion unicorn. Uh. There were Tibetan
unicorns as well. Uh. There were at least three different
versions of this that carry the sero and the Soapo,
And of course these are just a few examples, but
I think they do help to drive home the idea
that we kind of have a global fascination with animals
that have a single horn growing out of their head,

(59:29):
based again in part on the fact that we have
real animals that have this basical, basic anatomical feature, and
then we have all of these these imagined forms as well.
Why do we find unicorns so fascinating? Like, why is
this such a fascinating mythological creature. It's just a horse
or a goat or something with one horn on its head.

(59:51):
That's not even all that hard to imagine. It's not
like it's not like a pegasus, Like a horse with
wings is really weird. You know, you just you wouldn't
ever expect to see that in nature. You know, when
you see it, it's something magical. But I don't know.
Animals have horns. Four legged animals have horns. Lots of
four legged animals have two horns, but if they have

(01:00:12):
one horn. Now we are in Lisa frank dream time,
and it's We're gonna cure all of our diseases and
we're gonna expose all of our sins and folly in
comparison to the holiness and purity of this beautiful creature.
What is the deal with one horn that's so special? Yeah,
it's it doesn't even really evolve much as an idea.
It comes back to what bo has said about the
first unicorn essentially being the same as the latest unicorn.

(01:00:35):
I at least like that the earlier unicorns had a
lot more colors. I think the Lisa Frank idea is good.
I think there need to be unicorns with like purple
and black and red and orange that this like snow
white unicorn, you know, doesn't doesn't really do it for me. Yeah,
we need some other equestrian colors in there, you know,
we need some dapples and grays. Uh, you know, all

(01:00:56):
all the horse colors, unicorn zebras, Yeah, why not, why not,
let's have it, giraffe coloration. It all works, all right.
So there you have it. Basically, just a lot of
consideration of myth of history and uh and symbolism surrounding
the unicorn. But we are going to come back and
do a second episode that is going to deal with

(01:01:18):
some of the the very real organisms in our natural
world that are essentially unicorns as well as some prehistoric
examples of single horned animals, and we will definitely be
discussing unicorns created by a wizard all right. In the meantime,
be sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That's where we'll find all the episodes, as

(01:01:40):
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(01:02:01):
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