Chronos Apollonios' "Home On Olympus" Chronos Apollonios' "Home On Olympus"
Unicorns, Who Protect and Heal:
More Exploration of the Rational and Practical Meanings of Occult and Magickal Symbols
Sometimes, I think that besides Aleister Crowley's invention of spelling "magic" with a "k"-"magick"- to distinguish it from the "magic" of show business (and of course I still have a hard time convincing people that one who practices magick should therefore also be spelled accordingly), we'd prosper from also reintroducing the "k" to the word practical-"practickal"-, for the sake of keeping some perspective of what all of this is "supposed" to be about once upon a time. The modern occult is of course a wonderful place that's free of the dogmatic authority required for anyone to tell anyone what their art and their spritual path must consist of, but then there's times when that very freedom seems a difficult impediment to understanding the voices of our ancient guides.
Of all of the people I can think of who diligently keep alive the magick and the lore of the Unicorn, I'm not too confident that I can find many who may know exactly what a Unicorn may have been when it all started. While flights-of-fancy about magickal wish-granting beasties might rightfully warm anyone's heart, and that kind of spiritualism is a rightful part of anyone's growth on a mystical path, there may of course be those of us in the occult who think we understand that there wouldn't be much point to much of our ritual and conjuring if there were powers that be who made things that simple.
I'll grant you that the lore of the Unicorn may be some of the most tangled of our lore, and some of the most obscure as well, but I can't help keep returning to that sense of "practickal"- if only because being a Capricorn moon, that comes as natural as the elusive Unicorn's affiliation with that very sign. Nonetheless, what do I, who are up to my ears in speculations about the ways and means of ancient wisdom, happen to think this creature may be? (Bearing in mind of course that should they not exist of themselves, we might easily create one or a few, along with several genies and some other things- but that's beside the point of what they might have been meant to stand for long ago.)
Granted you're reading the words of someone who thinks Leprechauns as symbols have a lot to tell us about the Philadelphia Experiment, for example... but then again, I try to approach things as an alchemist, as well as a pagan, and while we don't always agree amongst ourselves, there is a certain frame of reference that comes with that...
The first thing I'd like to bring up is that it's probably pretty insulting, if unintentionally, to the ancestors, to think they were foolish enough to believe in Unicorns if they didn't exist in some sense of the word, a sense that had very important meanings.
Second of all, I probably should mention that a person could probably make very short work of the symbolic value of such an enigma using the basic values of horses and winged things that you find on these pages, with maybe a dash of Pegasus and the fountain Hippocrene thrown in, and mostly relying on dreams and imagination, functions that were once much more highly respected, for guidance. It's nearly a question of what we like them to mean most of all, and with the ancient's tendencies in using dreams and imagination that way, they very likely did mean that. In fact, they're so wonderfully singular sometimes, it's also maybe a better question to ask what didn't they mean? Whatever they might mean, however, we have to give the ancients a little credit for having the wisdom, and the technology, to at least get very close to making it so.
It's hard to find a better work on Unicorns than Odell Shephard's wonderful book, "The Lore of the Unicorn". In fact, it's also a wonderful place to also pick up the idea that whatever they were all about, it's not quite as simple as it may sound. In fact, it's literally fascinating, but it's not that much a pretty tale, it's one virtually filled with charlatans and frauds, selling all sorts of things as the fabled medicinal horn of the Unicorn, criminals purported to have preyed on the feeble and the sick, and a tale of rampant poisoners and murders, of arrogant idiots passing themselves off to the public as zoologists, and of the peculiar practices of the rich elite.
On the other hand, it's between the lines of much of this that the "practickal" part may start to shine through. This page, in fact, might as well be considered a companion to my page on so-called "Superstitions", because the best place to actually begin a good look lies very close to the themes you will find there.
The point may be not in this sad tale, but the glimpses of something bright that shine out of it, of powerful magickal protection against poison, and bits of a fabulous understanding that, while it may not be safe to automatically or systemically convert into belief, is part of an ancient web of exquisite texture and harmony that more than simply symbolizing the potential of ancient magickal knowledge, literally embodies it.
The accounts of poisoning, in fact, are themselves almost too thick and too frequent to be quite believed (some of us like to think of Catherine de Medici as far more wise and good than that!- and of course we may have evidence), and yet, in the typical ancient travestic style, they are part of a method of teaching what agents and magicks can prevent poisonings, reverse poisoning, identify potentially poisonous materials, and neutralize poisons and other potentially dangerous material- methods that would suit our present toxic industrial world only all too well.
Writes Odell (pg. 127): "One has no difficulty in understanding, therefore, how the demand for the alicorn, as for several other articles used to detect the presence of poison, was built up and maintained...when we think of them with the history of poisoning in mind".
Indeed, and while what follows may often be peculiar enough to suspect still more tongue-in-cheek (that "more than one Italian city already groaning under taxation had to melt its silver spoons in order that its lord might pay some northern merchant the sum he asked for an alicorn" is very nearly hilarious if we already know of the history of superstitions that silver has long had such a reputation for detecting and neutralizing toxins, not in fact at all unlike how it is used in our modern times, that we suspect such a lord would know all too well he would be better off to keep his silver and forget the alicorn!), this seems to be at least typical of the sort of mere grain of truth that may lead us to the broader meanings of the legend.
"Besides the alicorn," continues Odell (pg. 127-136), "about a dozen different substances and objects were used during the Renaissance in the halls of Italian princes and elsewhere for the detection of poison. These were, in something like the order of importance: the bezoar-stone, the ceraste's horn, snake's tongue, griffin's claw, terra sigillata, vessels of crystal and of Venetian glass, aetites or the eagle-stone, snake-stone or ophite, the stone called "stellio", the toad-stone, the vulture's or raven's claw hung over a burning candle, rhinoceros horns, walrus tusks, parrots, and various limestone formations having the appearance of horns..."
"The bezoar-stone was a calculus, composed of calcium phosphate and hair found in the intestines of certain Oriental sheep, goats, monkeys and hedge-hogs. Similar concretions might have been found, of course, in European animals, but either this fact was not known or else object found near at hand were not valued."
Such a premise is anything but like the common beliefs attributed to pagans and country folk, actually... and of course it's also astonishing for the Renaissance men not to have taken a serious interest in the dramatic poison-detecting and neutralizing properties of the alloy Electrum, which Pliny so clearly refers to in his "Natural History".
"Hunters and plainsmen of the western United States still believe in the magical properties of the "mad-stone", an object of the same kind, found in deer and put to similar uses, and there seems to have been an active belief in such objects in Peru before the Spanish conquest. Long known in the Orient and still used there, these stones were brought to Europe in large quantities by Portugese traders from India and were often sold for ten times their weight in gold. They were usually enclosed in delicately wrought baskets of gold filigree hung on chains so that they might be dipped into wine. There are frequent references to the bezoar owned by Queen Elizabeth and to many others belonging to European monarchs. During the great plagues in Lisbon bezoar-stones were hired out to sufferers for ten shillings per day."
It's here of course that some of the more realistic and understandable motivation for explorations into such magickal items may start to show through- not of vogue poisoners and entire populaces on the very edge of desperate paranoia because of it, but because of myriad concerns from the real possibility of food poisoning to concerns about contagion from numerous communicable diseases.
"The cerastes is a small poisonous serpent of the Sahara and Mesopotamia which has two very short protuberances, vaguely like horns, above its eyes... in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance... they were set in elaborate goldsmith's work and placed on the dining table where all might see them, in the belief that when poison was brought near them they would break into perspiration. The similarity between this belief and that regarding the ailcorn is obvious, and a contemporary writer has even ventured to assert that the cerastes gave the original suggestion for the whole unicorn legend...
Albertus Magnus himself had spoken without complete incredulity of the "virtue" of the cerastes, Peter of Albano gave it his full support, and all later writers on poisons and antidotes echoed in chorus... illustrated by the belief that the gates of Prester John's palace were composed of sardonyx mixed with ceraste's horns, so that no poison could be brought through them undetected.
Even more commonly used that the horns of the cerasters... were snake-tongues... it was thought that these also perspired in the presence of poison, and because of the belief that they should be kept as dry s possible they were usually placed near the salt...
One of the axioms of magical belief everywhere in the world is that an object bearing a close resemblance to another object has the "virtue" or "property" of that other. A curious illustration of this is seen in the use of the stone called "Glossopetra" or "tongue-stone", really the petrified tooth of a shark. 'This stone', writes Boethius de Boodt, 'is so much like the tongue in shape that the vulgar... call it snake's tongue... Many people make much of it for its supposed power against poisons... They say that when poison is brought near to it a sweat breaks out on it, thus revealing the intended crime'.
This recalls the very ancient and still existing belief of the East Indians in a stone with similar properties, sometimes vaguely called in Europe the "Smaragdus", to be found in a serpent's head. Philostratus relates in his life of Apollonius that the snake-charmer lures the snake out of its hole by incantations, lulls it to sleep, cuts off its head with a hatchet, then extracts the jewel. This stone or jewel is said to contain a 'thin, crescent-like fiber which oscillates unceasingly in the center'. In other words, the fiber resembles a snake's tongue, and the resemblance has suggested, in the first place, that is its powerful against poison, and, in the second place, that it is to be found in the head of a snake.
From these stones of the Indian snake the transition is easy to the toad-stones of Europe, commonly worn in finger-rings as amulets and prophylactics... Most of the poison-detecting agents were thought to be very difficult to obtain unless one knew the magic formula... 'You should know whether the toad-stone called Crapaudine be the right and perfect stone or not. Hold the stone before a toad so that he may see it, and if it be a right and true stone the toad will leap toward it and make as though he would snatch it from you... Most of the toad-stones in actual use seem to have been greenish-brown objects about the size of a large pea, and some were certainly the fossilized teeth of the sting-ray. Finger-rings containing them are still not uncommon.
Similarly used...was the 'griffin's claw'- in reality the horn of an ibex or a buffalo... All three of those mentioned, and most of those to be found in various parts of Germany, have been made into drinking-horns. They were thought to act like the beakers mentioned by Ctesias and Aelian when poisoned liquor was drunk from them.
The old belief concerning cups of crystal and of Venetian glass, that they would crack when poison was poured into them, is too familiar to require more than mention. It is a well-known fact, also, that the carbuncle or ruby- the names were commonly interchangable in the Middle Ages- was thought to have an unerring faculty of detecting poison. More interesting than these was the aetites or eagle-stone- so-called because, according to Pliny, it was to be found only in the eagle's nest, and was therefore exceedingly rare. The eagle placed it there, as she also sometimes did the amethyst, to watch over her young while she was absent, and it was able to do this because of the great antipathy felt toward it by all serpents. We are told that if a plate containing poison was placed over this stone, no man would be able to eat the food upon the plate.
Another belief... is that concerning the vulture's foot, an object that seems to have been in common use on the dining tables of the Middle Ages... the foot was hung in such a way that the claws surrounded the flame of a candle, and it was supposed that whatever poison was brought upon the table it would clutch and extinguish the flame...
The description of the furniture used at the wedding dinner given by Edward IV for his sister and the Duke of Burgundy illustrates one method of using the alicorn. Like the horn of the cerastes... and other objects, it was simply set upon the table, or near it, so that any change in its appearance might be instantly seen. We may imagine that they gaiety of medieval feasts was somewhat sobered by the necessity of keeping the eyes fixed on such objects... the alicorn was used to touch the food and drink before the meal began, being carried about the table by an officer of the household detailed for that important trust...
Slices of the horn were shaped into the handles of table knives and salt-cellars, they were shaped into 'test-spoons' and sunk in the silver of table dishes..."
The principles of homeopathy, the basis of a medicine now widely used and accepted even by our reticent goverment bodies in charge of medicine, were widely attempted in explanation for these effects.
(Odell, pg 148): "One of the most satisfactory statements of the principle to be found in early writers is that of Antonio Ludovico, who says that nothing except poison can expel poison and that the antidote is not hostile to the poisonous substance, as some suppose, but is 'bound to it by invisible chains of everlasting and indissoluble amnity'."
Indeed. It is in this very area, and its possible modern counterparts, that such beliefs as these may have yet have considerable basis in reality. It has probably been a long time since science truly took a serious empirical look at these magickal items, and we might find some very interesting surprises were it to happen again. Alas, one Ambroise Pere, whose name is scattered through Odell's work may have singlehandedly done such a "good" job of "scientifically" overturning these beliefs that the damage has been taken for granted and parroted far more than these beliefs themselves ever were, and if there's one thing that's immediately obvious about Pere, it's that he has all the earmarks of someone willing to take his new-found powers of "science" and mercilessly pummel both the beliefs and the reputations of his ancestors with it.
While I certainly wouldn't stake my own life on any of this magick, it still cries out after all this time for an honest, fair and competent scientific exploration. It may be that to properly use these objects with any true reliability takes specialized knowledge- knowledge which Pere and many others may never have possessed- but in all fairness the same can be said of any modern technology; no matter how reliable it is, it's tragically unreliable in the hands of someone who does not have adequate understanding of its workings, and perhaps most poignantly, the very same thing is true of Pere's "science" and modern medicine.
Toward an understanding, then, both the semblance of discerning that these magickal objects supposedly possessed, and the homeopathic principles used to defend them, are an integral and bona-fide part of much modern technology... Pere, in fact, might have been presented with a computer and might refused to believe in it for failing to grasp the minimum of how it worked. Our present understanding of non-linear effects, of fractal and holographic principles, of wireless interactions, and even of quantum-mechanical "action-at-a-distance" could all be used to begin to justify much of exactly what has been described, along with many other related examples.
Perhaps the most powerful model we possess at present to explain such phenomena may be the principles of quantum computation and the quantum computer, a model that seems to have great harmony with efforts to explain the workings of a vast number of other "unbelievable" magickal traditions.
Several of the most striking examples of possible naturally-occurring quantum computers or four-dimensional holographic principles in magickal and divinatory processes are in fact eerily close to these magickal objects that "know" poisons and give reactions; the flawless medical divination of the Meskwaki Indians, so similar to the floatation testing of offerings at the ancient temple of Ceres, and the medical divination of the catoptromantic type that Pausanias' "Guide to Greece" describes are not only explicable with modern scientific understanding, they represent probably virtually everything we could aspire to with the total mastery of our own science.
Such a larger picture, no doubt unknown to Pere, gives us much cause to reconsider the lore of the Unicorn.
And of course, there is a great deal more. I have said nothing here, for example, of the magickal chemistry of calcium and the striking possibilities thereof. I have said nothing yet of the unusual magnetic nature of some of these animal stones, and I have said little if any of some of the possible contributory physical effects that may prove the reality of a great deal of ancient magickal purification, although some of it has been said on other pages of this site. I have said nothing of the meanings of the Unicorn's horn as a spiral symbol, and its possible meaning to alchemy and vorticular-force magick, and I've said nothing of the physical study of divination that constantly implies the predictable occurrence of unusual physical properties in familiar materials.
On perhaps every page of this site you may find something that by ancient rights is part of the Unicorn's treasure. Over time, I have much more commentary to add to this page, so please check back now and then to see what's new.
Whether we believe that unicorns really exist, and still hide in dense shady woods, awaiting humans with the kindness and gentleness to be trusted, or whether we believe them to be one of the most complex, profound and rewarding alchemist's symbols of all time, or both, it's just not a belief that mankind should have ever given up so easily... not at all.
In one way or another, and maybe even many ways, Unicorns really do exist, and they're often clearly far more real than the pretentious posing of their famous detractors.
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