The Unicorn is the pure white horned horse of classical and medieval European legend: a beautiful, untamable beast like a horse (or goat) with a single spiralling horn upon its brow, a creature of surpassing wildness, purity, and power, whose horn could neutralise poison and whose only captor was a virgin maiden, in whose lap alone it would lay its head — the supreme symbol of purity, chastity, and Christ. It is the one-horned beast, the emblem of purity.
The One-Horned Beast
The Unicorn (Latin unicornis, “one-horned”; Greek monoceros) was reported by the classical authors — Ctesias, Aristotle, Pliny — as a real wild animal of India: a fierce beast with a single long horn on its forehead, swift and untamable, impossible to take alive. Through the bestiaries it became the beautiful creature of the medieval imagination: usually a graceful white horse-like animal (sometimes with a goat’s beard, cloven hooves, and a lion’s tail) bearing a single straight, spiralling horn (the “alicorn”) upon its brow, an animal of wildness, grace, strength, and above all purity.
The Horn and the Virgin
Two great traditions defined the medieval unicorn. The first was the marvellous power of its horn: the alicorn was held to be a sovereign remedy against poison — a cup made of it, or the horn dipped in a poisoned drink, would neutralise the venom — and so unicorn-horn (in reality usually narwhal tusk) was among the most precious and sought-after of all substances, worth many times its weight in gold, used to protect kings from poisoning. The unicorn was said to dip its horn into poisoned waters to purify them so the other animals could drink.
The Capture and the Symbol
The second great tradition was the unicorn’s capture. So fierce and swift was the unicorn that no hunter could take it by force — but it could be caught by a single, gentle stratagem: a pure virgin maiden was set in its haunt, and the unicorn, drawn irresistibly to her purity, would come and lay its head and its horn in her lap, growing tame and gentle, and so be captured (or, in the crueller versions, slain by the waiting hunters). This made the unicorn the supreme medieval symbol of purity and chastity, and in Christian allegory the maiden became the Virgin Mary and the unicorn Christ, drawn down to her womb and slain — the “hunt of the unicorn” an allegory of the Incarnation and Passion, beautifully depicted in the great medieval tapestries. The unicorn became a beloved heraldic beast (the supporter of the royal arms of Scotland and Britain) and an enduring emblem of purity, grace, and the unattainable ideal. In the Unicorn, the European imagination gave form to the one-horned beast — the pure white horned creature of wildness and grace, healer of poison, tamed only by a virgin, supreme symbol of purity and of Christ, the emblem of the bestiary.