Medieval Europeans did! In tales of faraway lands and magical beasts, unicorns were a favorite topic for kings, queens, lords, and ladies. They even thought that unicorn horns had special healing powers. But do you ever wonder about where Unicorns come from? The answer apparently is India!
So around 400 BCE, this Greek dude named Ctesias travelled to the Persian court and became a physician to Darius II and Artaxerxes II which would be a pretty awesome gig for the times. He eventually returned to Greece and wrote up 23 books detailing the Assyrian – Babylonian Empire and was considered 2nd only to Herodotus as the go-to historical reference of the day. He also wrote a book called Indica, based on interviews with Persian dignitaries that had gone to India and Indian merchants and envoys that had come to the Persian court. So the work was totally hearsay, legendary and fabulous, and the only account of India that existed in the west for a few hundred years. In it is the first ever written reference to Unicorns, describing them as a beast as large as a horse, with one horn and that horn has magical healing powers. (Can we say Rhinoceros…duh)
Fast forward about 400 years and Pliny the Elder, one of those perfect Romans that did it all, naval commander, lawyer, politician, scholar, writes up a Natural History that was used as “the book” right up to the Middle Ages. In it he quotes Ctesias and further describes the Unicorn as the fiercest animal in India, that becomes calm in the presence of the female, body of a horse, head of a stag, tail of a boar, impossible to capture alive, and a single horn that can heal any disease.
Fast forward another couple of hundred years (between 500 and 1500 AD) and there appears a book call the Physiologus, an anonymously compiled collection of bestiary tales that was wildly popular in Medieval times. And due to a mistranslation from Hebrew to Greek to Latin of the word Ox, suddenly the Unicorn pops up in the Bible, and is interpreted as a symbol of Christ, pure of heart and ferocious as a lion but calmed to gentleness by the Virgin Mary. No wonder Europeans believed Unicorns were real. All the experts said so! Well into the 1700s, wealthy rulers across Europe would buy unicorn horns - that is, what they believed to be unicorn horns for their magical healing properties, and to this day Unicorns adorn many heraldic crests.
Sadly, Unicorns are no longer to be found but we can still invoke their magic. Tell me a properly done image of a Unicorn does not inspire wonder and bring on a smile and that is some of the best healing magic there is.
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