Man cannot say that no one looked for them, on the contrary. Even in the enlightened 19th century, in the age of steam engines, light bulbs and tin cans, Europeans went hunting for unicorns in South Africa. Locals had told them of horse-like creatures with a single horn on their heads, and there were reports of telltale cave paintings. So did the legendary animals exist after all?
At that time, European researchers swarmed out again and again at the Cape – in search of the sensation; but without success. But this episode in colonial history is not just the story of a curious error. Like South African archaeologist David Witelson now in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal argued, it was also the result of European cultural ignorance. The researchers could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort if they had only listened to the locals better.
At that time, there were at least considerable doubts in Europe that unicorns existed or ever existed. Numerous long, pointed, yellowish-white horns have long been stored in the cabinets of art and curiosities of European aristocratic houses, which apparently proved the existence of the legendary animals. Icelandic traders had exported the supposed unicorn relics to Central Europe at high prices.
But as the Cologne philologist Julia Weitbrecht and the Berlin Latinist Bernd Roling trace in their very entertaining cultural history of the unicorn, which has just been published by Hanser-Verlag (“The Unicorn. History of a Fascination”), the Danish scholars Caspar and Thomas Bartholin as well as Ole Worm recognized already in the mid-17th century that these were in fact not horns but narwhal tusks.
The Danes had not only uncovered an international fraud. Rather, they had – even if they did not expressly want to rule out the possibility that there might not be or could have been unicorns somewhere in the world – at least in part disenchanted a myth that goes back to antiquity.
One possibility had not been considered: taking San culture seriously
Weitbrecht and Roling write that it is unclear how the legend of the unicorn began; maybe it was an antelope, “whose second horn the hunters had not noticed because the sun made the light shimmer”. In any case, the animals were considered real by the authors of nature books in antiquity; they located it in India. And animals were also mentioned in the Bible. Eight passages in the Old Testament speak of wild beasts with strong horns called “Re’em”.
In Hebrew, this probably meant cattle, but in Greek and Latin the expression was initially erroneously translated as unicorns. As late as 1912, for example, Psalm 22:21 in the Lutheran Bible read: “Save me from the lion’s mouth and save me from the unicorns!”
The fascination with unicorns is not only explained by the appearance and wildness of the mythical creatures. Rather, according to Weitbrecht and Roling, special powers and properties were ascribed to the animal early on. Drinking water or wine from his horn protects against seizures and any kind of poison, wrote Ctesias of Cnidos in the fifth century BC.
16 centuries later, Hildegard von Bingen swore by the healing power of the horn. And even in modern times, the same was still recommended as a medicine – although some authors warned against relying on the effect: Unfortunately, real unicorns are very difficult to find.