How Did We Get Here? Tracing the Rise of the Contemporary Unicorn
There’s a certain mystical beast that has — in glorious defiance of not actually existing — managed to infuse itself into just about every area of modern human living. I speak, of course, of none other than the majestic unicorn. So impressive is this noble creature’s world domination that these days, it can be tricky to keep one’s exposure down below a dozen or so encounters a day.
Yes, this colourful, often sparkly, and eternally whimsical non-being can be found embroidered onto the latest fashion accessories, lurking inside food packaging, gathering with its kin in your kid’s back-to-school stationery, and tucked into plenty more sneaky spots beside.
What’s more, the pervasive unicorn is divisive. Some love its spiralling horn and rainbow tail to the point of giddy obsession, while others curse it endlessly on account of its cutesiness and stunning omnipresence.
The thing is, no matter which of these camps you fall into, have you ever stopped to wonder how we got here? Rumour has it that there was a time before the glittery unicorn cupcake became a ubiquitous office staple. So where did the myth — and the obsession — begin?
Not long ago, I took it upon myself to ask and answer that very question. My quest started unexpectedly, as an unusual turn of events led me to stumble through the proverbial looking glass, triggering a search for the origins of our contemporary unicorn-centric status quo.
Untwisting the Unicorn Myth
As a child of the 1980s, growing up on a diet of fantasy films that included Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and Ridley Scott’s Legend, I was as much of a unicorn fan as you’d expect any head-in-the-clouds creative type to be.
However, it wasn’t until after I’d passed into the drudgery of adulthood — when dreams of meeting real-life unicorns had substantially faded — that it crossed my mind to question where their enduring lore might have emerged from.
At that time, as a 30-something visiting the home of an enigmatic family friend, I was delighted and surprised to find myself inside a shrine to all manner of eccentricities. Flashbacks into childhood wonderment ensued as I explored a house filled with gilt and marble, antiquities and taxidermy, and shelves upon shelves of intriguing books and oddities.
After a whirlwind tour, as we stood in the kitchen drinking tea, I glanced upwards — and then paused in amazement. Mounted above a doorway was what appeared to be a vast and twisting unicorn horn, perhaps as much as two meters in length.
Rescuing me from the indignity of my widely dropped jaw, our thoughtful host explained that I wasn’t looking at what I imagined, but rather an antique narwhal tusk. This was, he shared, the protrusion shed by a very real creature; a medium-sized whale that grows a single pointed tooth of immense length, historically prone to being confused with the horn of a unicorn.
This illuminating encounter made it clear to me that there is more to the unicorn’s story than I’d previously considered, and so from that moment on, I was hooked and eager to know more. Simultaneously, I wondered how many others might have gawked in amazement, believing that a narwhal tusk was a real-deal unicorn horn.
But that thought only raised further questions, because if a person is to believe that one thing is something else entirely — something magical and otherwordly — then they must already be familiar with the myth. So, at what point did humans first begin passing fantastical tales of unicorns around?
In Search of the Mighty Monocerous
Intriguingly, a little research revealed that the OG unicorns of antiquity consisted of single-horned creatures of varying legend. In fact, hazily interpreted unicorn mythology can be traced back thousands of years to early Mesopotamia, the Bronze Age Indus civilization, and the folklore of ancient China, but these weren’t quite the pale and pastel-hued entities that we know so well today.
So, if early unicorns hadn’t yet benefitted from their sparkly modern-day makeover, what did they look like?
Ancient Greek historian and physician Ctesias answered this question in relative detail around 400 BCE, when he wrote a natural history account of an Indian animal that was fleet of foot and the size of a horse but too bitter to eat, possessing a white body, purple head, and a single cubit-long horn with a red tip. Some speculate that this was a poor account of a rhinoceros, but if so, it was impressively off the mark.
An alternative but equally funky record can be drawn from the writing of Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder who, in the early 1st century CE, described “a very ferocious beast, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, a deep bellowing voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length, standing out in the middle of its forehead.”
Jumping forwards once more to the 6th century CE, we encounter the records of Alexandrian merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes, who doesn’t offer much about appearance but certainly adds to our idea of the unicorn’s demeanour.
Dramatically, he wrote, “it is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive,” before continuing, “When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture, it throws itself from a precipice, and turns so aptly in falling, that it receives all the shock upon the horn, and so escapes safe and sound.”
Shaping Unicorn Lore
Perhaps surprisingly, it was only within the last millennium or so that the modern vision of what a unicorn looks like really began to really take hold. Over the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the creature took ownership of its widely-known form as a mystical and rarefied woodland animal, white in colour, and with horse or goat-like features.
It seems safe to assume that as unicorn lore grew more popular over this extended period, it was informed by records from the ancient civilizations that we have already mentioned.
For example, the Physiologus, an Ancient Greek text from around the 2nd century CE, asserted the familiar doctrine that the unicorn can only be captured by a virgin maiden. Meanwhile, our old friend Ctesias was possibly the first to record that drinking from the horn of a unicorn offered protection against poison and sickness.
Indeed, stories abounded in the midst of the second millennium of unicorns using their horns to purify poisoned water so that others could drink. At a time when illness was little understood and betrayal-by-poison a genuine worry, a thriving trade in unicorn horns and alicorn, or powdered horn, took hold.
Soon, European aristocracy drank with false confidence from horns of the gentle sea-dwelling narwhal and sprinkled so-called alicorn in their drinks and dishes — no doubt originating from the horns and tusks of all sorts of unfortunate real-world animals.
The rampant spread of this myth may explain how the unicorn came to be the national symbol of Scotland, as records indicate that Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots is said to have used a unicorn horn to test her food for poison in the 16th century. While such frenzied fixation on the beast’s magical powers gradually calmed over the decades that followed, the Scottish still celebrate National Unicorn Day on 9th April each year.
The Evolving Essence of the Unicorn
I’ve never been too fond of the Renaissance-popularised vision of the unicorn as something to conquer, destined to be brought to heel by a pure and innocent maiden so that testosterone-laden men could capture and slay it. To me, this version of its legend vibes uncomfortably of thinly veiled sexism and misogyny, so I’m quite happy that others saw fit to reimagine the unicorn’s symbolism and meaning.
These days, alongside its role as a magical companion for kids, the unicorn is associated with LGBTQ pride and identity, and we can perhaps in part thank the English writer and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley for that.
Back in the late 19th century, after the creation of his iconic Salome illustrations for Oscar Wilde, Beardsley spent some of his last years penning provocative unicorn erotica. More than a century later, unicorns have become inextricably linked with the celebration of diversity, inclusion, and sexual liberation — and of course, Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag.
Returning to innocence, the enchanting creature’s entry into the imagination of younger minds can be traced to Lewis Carroll, who introduced the unicorn to his audience in Through the Looking Glass. In doing so, Carroll also established the unicorn as a symbol of hope and possibility, launching forth into the world the beloved phrase, “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.”
In recent years, the unicorn has come to represent something else entirely. Within tech spheres, a “unicorn” is a startup company that hits a value of $1 billion or more. Although, since the phrase’s adoption, there has been a need to make further additions to the collective lexicon.
These include the “decacorn,” valued at over $10 billion, and the “hectocorn,” valued at $100 billion or more. With businesses like OpenAI and Meta among their ranks, I’m not entirely convinced that these gargantuan myth-forged beasts are as noble in nature as their timeless cousin.
Sticking with the trusty unicorn as an unavoidable motif of our times, I prefer not to think of it as representing something insanely unattainable, all-powerful, or out of reach. Instead, I favour seeing it as emblematic of our collective capacity to imagine, evolve, and reinvent. For the unicorn is paradoxically unreal and universal, ever-present and ever-changing.
The world unicorn comes from the Latin unicornis, meaning single-horned animal, which in turn is translated from the Greek monoceros or monokerōs. With this in mind, perhaps it’s comforting to know that if we want to find the mythic creature’s most constant and dependable form, we can skip the endless sea of plastic and fluffy products and instead look up at the night sky.
Here, its namesake constellation can be seen in clear darkness, sitting delicately on the celestial equator just a smidge to the east of the Orion constellation.
So there you have it. I jumped through the looking glass in search of unicorns and found everything and nothing all at once.
Having stuck with me this far, you might just agree — whether you love or loathe the colourfully-horned army of stuff that surrounds us — there’s something pretty cool and aspirational about a beast that has journeyed with humanity over millennia without once being entirely tangible or tied down.
