THE HORN OF THE UNICORN

by
Professor Humphrey Humphreys, O.B.E., M.C., M.B., F.D.S.R.C.S.
Vice Dean, Faculty of Dental Surgery, Royal College of Surgeons of England
THE HORN OF the unicorn as it appeared in medieval. art and legend is
of particular interest to doctors and dentists: to the former because
its substance formerly figured as a drug in the British Pharmacopoeia,
to the latter because it was in fact a tooth, the tusk of the narwhal.
Though everyone now agrees that the unicorn never existed, this unanimity
is quite recent. All through the 19th century there were periodic reports
of its presence in darkest Africa or on the Asiatic steppes, and hopes
that it would turn out to be a reality died hard. But if there never was
such a creature why did the men of the middle ages believe in it so firmly
and depict it so often ? As Christians it was incumbent on them to do
so, for it was mentioned in the Old Testament and, therefore, must be
real. Its presence there was due to the authors of the Septuagint, the
Hellenised Jews who, at Alexandria, in the centuries between the city's
foundation and the Christian era, translated their sacred books from
Hebrew into Greek and on seven occasions used the word piovoKEpcos
(Greek for unicorn). The Hebrew original was re'em or oxen, but the
context shows that a wild ox was intended, for the reference is always to
an animal strong and untamable, as for example in Job xxxix, 10.
" Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? Wilt
thou trust him, because his strength is great ? " Why did the translators
--the legendary 70-employ the word PovOKEpcS ? There were at least
two sources from which they may have derived their belief in a wild bull
with but a single horn, and there may have been others in the shape of
folklore now forgotten. In the first place the Greek naturalists, Aristotle
and others, had put on record the reputed reality of the unicorn, though
none claimed to have seen one. The earliest reference is by Ctesias,
a Greek physician at the Persian court at the end of the 5th century B.C.,
who wrote that such animals existed in India, and it appears highly probable
that he had heard of the Indian rhinoceros which-unlike the African
variety and the extinct species figured in paleolithic art-has only a
single horn. The strength, solitary habits and ferocity which are said
to be the most striking qualities of the unicorn support this conjecture,
though Ctesias' description reminds us in some respects of the onager or
wild ass. The theory is further favoured by the fact that S. Jerome,
when writing his Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, used rhino-
ceros as equivalent to pov6KEpCS : he had probably seen one in the Rome
arena. But there was a second source from which the Septuagint scholars
may have derived their belief. Assyrian and Persian art employed a
convention which regulated the representation of animals in profile on
flat surfaces. In such profiles an animal like an ox commonly appeared
with one horn thereby solving for the artist the problem of perspective,
377
 HUMPHREY HUMPHREYS
and it is possible that alien peoples, like the Jews in captivity, without
proper understanding of an unfamiliar convention, may have been led
in this way to believe in unicorns. The great single-horned bulls upon
which they gazed at Nineveh or Babylon probably represented the gigantic
aurochs or wild ox (Fig. 1). That was the opinion of Layard, who
excavated them a century ago. This animal, extinct since the 16th century
but once widespread over Europe and the Near East, stood nearly
seven feet high, and Cesar's description (on de bell/ gallico) of its strength
and ferocity accords well with the biblical attribution of these qualities
to the unicorn.

Fig. 1. Sculptured ornament on robe on Assur-Nasir-Pal II, King of Assyria 850 B.C.
From A. H. Layard's " Monuments of Nineveh," I, plate 48, Fig. 2.

There is no convincing evidence that the Assyrian sculptors themselves

believed in it. Indeed in the art of the ancient east there is none of that
surprising unanimity on the shape of the unicorn's horn which we find
in Christian illustrations. A bull, an antelope or a goat seem at different
times to have supplied the model and this perhaps shows that the artists
were not thinking in terms of a specific single-horned animal. But there
is one feature of their art which is a source of perennial speculation.
For 3,000 years from the Royal Tomb at Ur to the palace at Persepolis
erected by Artaxerses in 350 B.C. the art motif of a lion attacking an
ungulate represented with a single horn-the lion and the unicorn
fighting-recurs so constantly that many scholars have sought for the
symbolic meaning which, as our knowledge of ancient art compels us to
believe,underlay it. The most plausible hypothesis is that it personified
378
 THE HORN OF THE UNICORN

the victory of a sun-worshipping patriarchal people over an older moon-

worshipping matriarchal society, a struggle reflected in the myths of
many nations. The early history of Egypt and Chaldea, Greek myth
and modern anthropology, all indicate that the patriarchal social pattern
displaced one in which descent, property and power passed in the female
line. The coincidental duration of the lunar and feminine cycles suggested
that the one governed the other so that the moon became pre-eminently
the planet presiding over women. Now an association of the unicorn
with the moon is attested by both ancient and mediaeval art, and from
very early times the lion has served as a solar emblem. Another theory
is that the allusion was astronomical, representing the triumph of summer
(for the summer solstice then lay in Leo) over spring represented by
Taurus, the zodiacal sign of the sun at the vernal equinox (Bunt Anti-
quity: December, 1930). Some faint echo of this ancient feud lingered
on even after the dawn of the Christian era. The theme recurs occa-
sionally in Byzantine art and its derivatives, and appears in mediwval
bestiaries so that Spenser alludes to it in the Faerie Queene
Like as the lyon, whose imperial powre
A proud rebellious unicorn defyes,
T'avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre
Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applies.
And when him running in full course he spyes
He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast
His precious home, sought of his enimyes,
Strikes in the stroke, ne thence can be released,
But to the Victor yields a bounteous feast.
This is an exact description at an interval of 2,400 years and nearly
3,000 miles of the scene depicted in Fig. 1. The tenacity of life of this
legend need not surprise us when we recall that a belief in the power of
the moon to influence the flow of the body's humours was held by serious
physicians as late as the 19th century.
Let us now come to Europe in the Christian era. The art of the
Middle Ages reveals the unicorn as one of its favourite subjects, and the
reason for this-even more surprising than the fact-is that the animal
had now become one of the symbolic representations of Jesus Christ.
We can trace this belief back to the third century A.D., when there was
compiled at Alexandria a collection of animal stories known as Physio-
logus or " The naturalist." They were fables, usually adorned with a
moral and some reference to a passage in scripture, and in the course
of time they attained such immense popularity that they were translated
into practically every written language of Europe and the Near East
from Iceland to Ethiopia. Some were perhaps old folk stories; others
were probably invented at the time, for the human fancy has ever delighted
in such tales and been prolific in their creation, from Esop's fables and
the Buddhist Jataka to " Alice in Wonderland " and " The Wind in the
Willows." In Physiologus appeared the tale by virtue of which the
unicorn, already made authentic by the Septuagint, really came into his
379
 HUMPHREY HUMPHREYS
own. He is depicted therein as a small animal the size of a goat-very
different from the personification of power figured in the Old Testament-
but like him, wild and untamable, proud and solitary. However, there
is one method by which he may be taken. If a virgin is set in his path
he will run towards her, lay his head in her lap and sink into a repose
wherein he can be slain by the hunter. This picture is a parable in which
the Virgin is Mary and the unicorn Jesus; his rest in her lap might repre-
sent the Incarnation, and his death at the hand of the hunter the Passion,
though sometimes the hunter is represented as the Holy Ghost. It had
an immense vogue for a thousand years, in the course of which the unicorn
acquired other mystical attributes. In Gothic sculpture and stained
glass, in painting and tapestry, in illuminated manuscripts and in
heraldry, he is a favourite figure from the 12th century onwards.
(Fig. 2.) Nor was the obvious erotic potential of the tale neglected in the
literature of chivalry. There is some variety in his pictured appearance,
perhaps encouraged by the conflicting accounts of Aristotle, Aelian and
Pliny; sometimes his hoof is cloven, sometimes solid; here he resembles
a goat, there a horse. But on one feature there is a singular unanimity
amongst the medieval artists of every kind, and that is the shape of the
horn-the straight and slender spike with its spiral markings which we
see projecting from the forehead of the unicorn in our royal arms.
Now the reason for this unanimity is not far to seek. The artists drew
not from their imagination but from models, a number of which were all
exactly alike in shape if not in size, and which we know from many records
to have been amongst the most treasured possessions of popes and
princes, of doges and of dukes. These were the actual unicorns' horns
which were perhaps the most precious merchandise of the Middle Ages,
worth ten times their weight in gold. The Doge of Venice had two,
believed to have been looted from Constantinople when it was captured
in A.D. 1204 on the Fourth Crusade; they are still to be seen. Bene-
venuto Cellini records how he just missed a commission from the Pope
to mount one for presentation to Francis I of France. There was one at
Windsor which was disposed of with the Crown Jewels under Cromwell's
Commonwealth. In 1404 William of Wyckham died and left one to his
New College, Oxford, which is still preserved. Others are recorded and
no one ever doubted their authenticity till the 16th century.
And yet they were not horns at all but teeth, the tusks of that curious
cetacean, the narwhal, a native of the Arctic ocean from which it seldom
if ever strays (Fig. 3). It is one of the smaller members of the whale
family, 12 to 18 feet long, and the male possesses a single tusk projecting
forward, slender and straight, with spirals traced on its surface exactly
as the medieval artists represented it. Like the tusk of the elephant
it grows continuously, and is commonly about one-third the length of
the animal. Now very rarely a dead narwhal may drift down with the
summer currents and be cast up on the beaches of the British Isles or
Scandinavia, and its single tusk may then be found by man. It was such
380
 THE HORN OF THE UNICORN

Fig. 2. Marginal illustration from Italian MSS. of 14th Century A.D. in the British
Museum (Royal MS. 12.F.XIII folio lOv.)

chance finds, their origin obscured by successive exchanges, that were

marketed by medixval merchants-possibly in all good faith-as the
authentic horn of the fabulous unicorn, and they were all the more
valuable for being so scarce. Their scarcity can be judged by the fact
that since their real origin became known in the 16th century, only
three instances have been recorded of narwhals stranded on the coasts of
Great Britain-in 1648, 1800 and 1808. There are also one or two
records of tusks being picked up. The growth of the whaling industry
however in the 19th century made them familiar objects.
But there was another quality besides their rarity and their mystical
associations which caused them to be so highly prized, and that was
their reputed medicinal potency. A cup made from unicorn's horn
had the power of neutralizing any poison put into it and small fragments
ground into powder and swallowed were not only sovereign against
poison but against any other ill that flesh is heir to. Belief in the first of
these powers is ancient and is, indeed, mentioned by Ctesias in the 5th
century B.C. as a property of unicorn's horn. But it is not confined
to that animal, and it was long a popular belief, still cherished among
381
 HUMPHREY HUMPHREYS

Fig. 3. Male narwhal.

primitive peoples, that a cup of horn has the power to purify its contents.
Faith in its pharmaceutical qualities taken internally is more peculiar.
It is not mentioned by Galen or Hippocrates, and as it appears to have
first gained currency in the 13th century it may have been borrowed from
Arabic medicine, then the chief source of new ideas. Arabs in their
turn drew much from India, where faith in the protective power of horn
is still widespread. Its *roots reach right back to the primitive and
universal belief that any form of matter which appears to be incorruptible,
such as ivory, horn or gold, holds the secret of life and has the magical
property of passing it on if suitably invoked or .applied. Untutored
minds do not draw the sharp distinction that we do between animate and
inanimate matter.
It was in the 14th, 15th and early 16th centuries-the great age of
political poisoning-that the reputed properties of unicorn's horn won
their widest credence; and as they were very scarce their price reached
astronomical proportions. Their scarcity precluded the clinical tests
which might have disproved their prophylactic powers, but from the
beginning of the 17th century there was a slump and their value -rapidly
declined. This followed on the knowledge newly won of their real
origin. As soon as it was realised that America was not the India its
earliest discoverers had believed it to be, there began that search by
British sailors for a North-West Passage which continued intermittently
till the middle of the 19th century. Humphrey Gilbert, Frobisher and
others coasting along Greenland and the shores of Baffin Bay for the
first time in history saw the narwhal and described it. For Frobisher
and his fellows it was a fish and they named it the sea-unicorn, but
despite the name the glory had departed. By no stretch of imagination
could this strange monster be fitted into the familiar fable and its horn
was no longer exalted but debased, at any rate in terms of the currency.
Nor were the physicians slow to perceive the significance of the change.
Marini, a Venetian doctor, published a book in 1566 denouncing the
therapeutic properties of the unicorn's horn, as being devoid of all founda-
tion in fact. He was followed a few years later by the more famous
Ambroise Pare, " The Father of French Surgery." In England, however, the
substance remained on the list of drugs which registered pharmacists
382
 THE HORN OF THE UNICORN
were required to carry till 1741. In that year a new edition of the
Pharmacopaeia was published containing it, and this evoked a protest from
the College of Physicians at the inclusion of a drug long recognised in
scientific circles as without effect and employed only by charlatans and
quacks. It was omitted in subsequent editions. Hogarth was engaged
in 1741 on his series of pictures, " Marriage a la mode" (now in the
National Gallery). He probably heard of this incident and it is perhaps
for this reason that in the third picture of the series, which shows a con-
sulting room, he painted a unicorn's horn conspicuously displayed to
label the consultant as a quack.
It is to be remarked that though the spread of knowledge in western
Europe extinguished faith in the pharmaceutical efficacy of unicorn's
horn, it remained active farther east, in Russia and in Asia. In China
it was the single horned rhinoceros, native not only to India, but to all
S.E. Asia, and not the narwhal, which supplied the stock of unicorn's
horn. It is still in use there for medicinal purposes, more often as
an aphrodisiac than an averter of disease, and the demand for it has
led to a noticeable diminution in the numbers of this species.
Nowadays the scarcity is to some extent met by a brisk import trade
in the horns of the African rhinoceros, which providentially has two of
them. While, as always happens when superstition holds sway, there
is a fertile field open for the supply of fraudulent substitutes.
Any discourse on the unicorn is expected to account for its presence
as the supporter of our royal arms, which has made it universally familiar.
The explanation is simple. Owing to its mystical associations the
animal was a favourite with the heralds, and two unicorns figured as the
supporters of the royal arms of the last three Stuart monarchs of Scotland,
James V, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. When the last named
became James I of England his heralds produced new arms for the joint
kingdom. Leaving the lion which for many generations had been the
English dexter supporter they installed the Scottish unicorn sinister in
place of the Welsh dragon, which the Tudor monarchs had maintained
there. This friendly confrontation of the lion and the unicorn is due to
a dynastic incident, and does not derive from the feud figured in the art
of Assyria and already described. But it is not impossible that the
College of Heralds, aware of their planetary associations, should have
felt it to be particularly appropriate that symbols of the sun and moon
should support the new arms of a greater and more glorious kingdom.

383