Wednesday, January 31, 2001
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Wednesday, January 31, 2001 |
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Unicorns: Mythical Beasts or Flights of fancy By
MICHAEL BOYALN In search of inspiration for this week's column, I went to a random word generator on the internet. My randomly chosen word was "unicorn," so here is a column about the mythical beast. A unicorn is a horse-like creature with a horn growing out of its forehead. The word unicorn can be broken up into two parts; uni, meaning one, and corn, meaning, well, corn, which could be what the unicorn's horn is made out of. The world will never know, though, because unicorns are extinct. Some would say that the unicorn never existed in the first place, but these people are just jaded cynics who have a hard time believing that the moon is in fact made out of green cheese or that other planets actually exist. The first mention in history of the unicorn came from a man named Herodotus in 300 B.C. Herodotus referred to the creature as the "horned ass of Africa." One hundred years later, Ctesias called the unicorn the "wild ass of India," a creature that is swift of foot, untameable and almost impossible to capture. It is unknown if Ctesias ever caught a unicorn, but there were rumors that when Ctesias drank water from the well, water would pour out of a hole in his stomach. In 79 A.D., Pliny described the Unicorn as a "ferocious beast with the body of a horse, the head of a deer, feet of an elephant, tail of a wild boar and a black horn over two cubits long." One hundred and fifty years later Appolonius of Tyana, a philosopher, related the story that Indians believed that the unicorn's horn had a healing power. A man who drank from the horn would be immortal, but this power was reserved for kings only, as was the privelege of hunting unicorns. It is unknown if a unicorn would be immortal if it drank from its own horn. There were very few mentions of unicorns over the next few centuries, but in the Middle Ages a story circulated that the unicorn was impossible to catch, but that it would be so attracted by the beauty of a young virgin that it would approach the maiden and lay its head in her lap. I bet there were a bunch of young men dressing like unicorns back in the Middle Ages. Marco Polo refuted this claim and said that it was not the maiden's beauty that attracted the unicorn but rather the perfumes she was wearing. I think he just said that to sell more smelly stuff from the East Indies. The last historical mention of unicorns came in 1624 when Jakob Bartsch discovered the constellation Monoceros (unicorn). There are 146 stars in the constellation and the Milky Way galaxy runs directly through it. Since the end of the 17th century, man has gravitated away from the mystical world of myths and enchantment and more toward the rational and reasonable. Unicorns did enjoy a brief comeback in the 1970s and '80s. People painted scenes with unicorns on their vans and unicorns invaded the media in movies like "The Last Unicorn" and cartoon programs like "Rainbow Brite." There was also a period where people would claim they captured a unicorn, but it was really a horse or a goat with a horn glued to its head. Now, unicorns just live inside the hearts and minds of people who believe in a world of magic, a world that lies beneath the surface of this world, in the shadows. Do I believe in unicorns, you ask? Only if they believe in me. |
