Maybe just stick to the acid.We are endlessly fascinated with unicorns.
I'd recommend against heading over to Pyongyang to find one, though.
Today, the unicorn is a decidedly more magical, gentle creature, running around on rainbows and inspiring millions with regular appearances in My Little Pony and the occasional acid trip and in North Korea, apparently. We also know that the ancient Chinese had contact with rhinos from art made out of their horns, so the animal could well have also inspired the kirin. And while Pliny actually did a pretty good job of describing the rhino, his popularization of the “unicorn” picked up more and more improbabilities as the centuries wore on. Cotton, for instance, was said to grow in India as an actual lamb that sprouted from the ground, just hanging there patiently producing cotton. The ancient Greeks and Romans, you see, had been making forays into India and bringing back tales of the strange beasts there, and the facts tended to get a bit.lost. He also notes that it has “the tail of a boar,” much like a rhino’s, “and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead.” Writers would only later describe the horn as white. Pliny, for instance, mentions that the unicorn has “the feet of an elephant,” a rhino’s feet in fact being not hooved like a horse’s, but fleshy like an elephant’s. Less likely still is seeing a normal antelope from afar in profile, since that would only last as long as the animal didn’t move.Ī far more likely culprit is the Indian rhinoceros, and clues for this are sprinkled throughout the early accounts-indeed, the unicorn is sometimes referred to as the Indian ass. The myth of the unicorn may have come from sightings of antelope and such ungulates with only one horn, having either been born with the defect or lost the horn when scrapping with a predator or one of its own kind. More industrious users who didn’t want to wait around to have their food poisoned would grind up the horns-usually those of the oryx or narwal (whose horn is actually a giant tooth)-to gain immunity from toxins. They went for tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money, and were particularly popular among paranoid royalty. What followed was a full-blown mania for their horns, which were said to detect poison if you stirred them around in your food or drink. Thus the unicorn became firmly implanted in European lore.
And the unicorn stood for Christ, since he was captured and put to death like the unicorn is done in by the virgin (though pretty much every other animal was also compared to Christ, even the pelican, which was said to peck at its own breast to revive its young with blood, like Jesus shed his own blood for us). Not only was the natural history of the animal given, but each was then compared to a biblical figure. The scene (above) is one of the most iconic images in wildly popular medieval books known as bestiaries, encyclopedias of sorts that cataloged nature’s beasts, both real and imagined. This is one alarm that the unicorn shan't be sleeping through.
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