“Wild and untamable”
According to a medieval legend, a unicorn will only reveal itself to a virgin. The maiden, as the story has it, must sit alone in a forest clearing until the magical creature jumps into her unsullied lap. We spoke to German language and literature expert Julia Weitbrecht about an animal that many people are not sure really exists.
© Oil on wood. Stanza di Paolo III, Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome
© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Some countries, such as Scotland and Canada, have a unicorn supporting their coat of arms. Cities such as Tengen (Germany), Eger (Hungary), and Bludenz (Austria) also include it in their heraldry.
David Meran: Ms. Weitbrecht, what sparked your fascination with unicorns?
Julia Weitbrecht: I want to be clear that I was definitely not a horse girl when I was little. In my generation, children’s bedrooms were still free of pink unicorns and the like. I became interested as a result of my work with religious symbols and animals. At some point, I noticed that there were just so many unicorns. They can be found accompanying saints or in depictions of the sacred unicorn hunt, which symbolizes the immaculate conception. That made me curious. And that fascination has remained to this day.
Every good toy store has unicorns in the form of stuffed animals, balloons, stickers, from their rainbow horns to their pony tails. Why is this mythical creature still so popular?
Our book “The Unicorn. A History of Longing”, which I published together with Bernd Roling in 2023, shows how the image of the unicorn has changed: from the cabinet of curiosities to children’s bedrooms, from a Christian motif to a symbol of the queer movement. The unicorn has always fascinated people. While today it lives on in fantasy imagery adorning T-shirts, in antiquity and the Middle Ages no one doubted its existence. Despite all the changes, there is one characteristic that has remained the same throughout the centuries: The unicorn cannot be caught or tamed.
Which only makes them all the more fascinating and leaves plenty of room for imagination.
Not even academic research is safe from the imagination. A Stone Age antelope was recently found in Siberia. It had a horn on its forehead or at least a thickening of the frontal bone. The media ran the headline: “Did humans live alongside unicorns?” Apparently there are people who wish we had lived side by side with unicorns in the Stone Age.
© By Permission of the Trustees and Factor and Commissioner of the Walker Trust. Photography by National Museums Scotland
When the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek, the translators came across an unfamiliar animal name: “Re’em.” They eventually translated it as “unicorn”.
Are there unicorns?
There are no unicorns. As a scientist, I’m one hundred percent certain (laughs). The sources from antiquity, such as Ctesias’ “Indica or Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis”, notwithstanding, which explain, according to the scientific standards of their time, where they live, where they are at home, how they feed, and how they are hunted. People in the late Middle Ages, in the 15th and 16th centuries, allegedly also encountered unicorns on pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Of course, it isn’t all that difficult to spot a unicorn if you really want to see one. From a distance, it’s easy to mistake an antelope or a rhinoceros for one.
Fake news!
What I find fascinating is how authoritative statements and the dissemination of knowledge across multiple sources shape subjective perceptions and create alleged facts: The unicorn must exist! This is certainly a point that is worth considering, not just in regard to the Christian Middle Ages, but also in light of the problem with fake news we face today.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© National Museums Scotland
According to the German superstitions, the unicorn is powerful enough to defeat even lions. It is considered aggressive, reclusive, and hostile towards male creatures. It has a ruby in a bulge on its head. In captivity, it dies.
In these post-pandemic times, people communicate with their “spirit animals”, download astrology apps onto their cell phones, and use crystals to ward off harmful radiation in their homes. We live in a world in which escapism and the denial of scientific facts have become widespread. The ideal circumstances for a unicorn revival?
Perfect conditions, so to speak. Many new agers believe that these animals actually exist, which falls into the same category as a belief in angels or totemism. So be it. What I find frightening, however, is how much money is being made off of these beliefs. A few years ago, Astro TV was selling a “Unicorn Super Set XXL,” including ritual accessories and unicorn spray, by means of which the mythical creatures would return from the realm of legend to make our everyday lives “shine.” For the enormous sum of 249 euros. It disturbs me see such profits being made off of unicorns and the promise of salvation. That’s certainly in no small part because esoteric beliefs like that are totally foreign to me personally.
How have unicorns been depicted in art throughout history? Even St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome has a depiction of a unicorn symbolizing Jesus Christ.
The hunt for an animal, the unicorn, which symbolizes Jesus Christ, was used to illustrate the abstract concept of the immaculate conception, i.e. pregnancy without sexual intercourse. This combination of natural history and religious symbolism, which might seem strange to us today, was completely normal to medieval Christians. The pure Virgin Mary conceives by placing it on her lap and holding its horn. In religious symbolism, Mary’s taming and capture of the reclusive animal is interpreted as the incarnation of Christ.
© Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection
Incidentally, the term “unicorn” is also used in “capitalist mysticism” to describe a start-up compaeny with a valuation of over one billion US dollars, whose shares are not publicly traded.
Let’s talk about a wonderful painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Italian artist Moretto da Brescia created the painting “St. Justina, Venerated by a Donor” around 1530/1534. Guess why the painting is so popular with visitors...
...There is a unicorn taking part in this intimate scene! It is a very graceful, pretty, beautifully combed animal, very similar to a horse.
Daniel Uchtmann, art historian and head of art education at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, gave me the following interpretation: It appears so tame because St. Justina has triumphed over the animal’s wild nature. You see, the phallic horn points directly to the center of her body, to her pubic region. The sexual interpretation is obvious. Incidentally, unicorns became increasingly similar to horses during the Renaissance, as seen here; the mythical creature became associated with the ubiquitous farm animal, potential unicorns everywhere...
...But if you look closely, Moretto’s unicorn has cloven hooves, unlike a horse. Like a billy goat, for example. This is entirely in keeping with the depictions in medieval heraldry. In aristocratic culture, the unicorn appeared in coats-of-arms, tapestries and paintings as an animal representing the court and sovereignty. It resembles a horse, yes, but the attributes of wildness like the tousled mane and beard remain. Such attributes can be seen in the famous unicorn on the Scottish coat of arms, for example. In this case I see the animal as symbolizing the saint’s virginity—which it is prepared to defend with its fearsome horn.
© KHM-Museumsverband
Are there any myths or legends about unicorns that you find particularly fascinating?
Some sources report that the unicorn can also purify water with its healing horn, protecting all animals from poisoning. I would assume, however, that the origin of this story, or at least this interpretation, is Christian. Christ, the unicorn, brings redemption from sins. There is the famous tapestry “The Unicorn Purifies Water (Southern Netherlands”, 1495-1505), which is in the Metropolitan Museum (The Cloisters) in New York. It depicts a unicorn kneeling in front of a fountain, surrounded by animals, dipping its long, coiled horn into a stream below to cleanse it of poison.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna has a drinking cup from around 1600 that was made from a narwhal horn. It was sold as being from a unicorn. According to legend, drinking from a cup such as this would make one immune to poison...
That fits in with the story. The so-called cabinets of curiosities of the time were full of narwhal teeth, actually the tusk of a male whale native to the Arctic Ocean. Which is in fact a canine tooth of the upper jaw...
© Julie Howden/Culture Perth and Kinross
What does the unicorn of the future look like? In Moretto da Brescia’s painting, the unicorn—despite the phallus on its head—appears rather feminine and gentle, somehow genderfluid. Was Moretto ahead of his time? These days, the mythical creature has become a symbol of the queer movement.
In my opinion, the future belongs to an army of diverse unicorns of all stripes. The unicorn of the present stands for transgression, playfulness, wildness, and freedom. I think that’s fun. The animal is returning to its pre-modern diversity, for example as the Pride mascot. It’s not just the pretty, graceful unicorn with the big eyes, ideal measurements, and a white coat. It comes in all shapes and sizes now—chubby, slim, rainbow-colored, and glittery. This is the semantic exploitation, in a positive sense, of the unicorn, which has always carried with it a certain ambiguity as to whether it exists or not.
If you could meet a unicorn in real life, what would you expect?
Were I to take my medieval sources seriously, I would have to sit down in a clearing and hope that the unicorn sees a pure virgin in me. I think that would be hard to pull off (laughs). I keep my fascination with unicorns going by never seeing one.
Thank you very much for the interview.
Julia Weitbrecht is Professor of Older German Language and Literature at the University of Cologne. She published the book “The Unicorn. A History of Longing” with Bernd Roling (Hanser, 2023). The latter is Professor of Middle and Modern Latin at the Free University of Berlin. In addition to unicorns, he has also studied dragons and sirens in the early modern period.