The perennial story of the Virgin and the Unicorn sprang into our popular imagination at a time when monotheism and the moral codes of kings supplanted the subtle distinctions to be made between spirit and soul with faith and being good. A living connection with the gods which had thus far kept people in charge of their own religious life was broken. Spirit and soul had to go underground, burying themselves in the universal symbolism of a collective dream.
There are few perennial stories. So when you find one, its worth psychological inquiry. The tale of the Virgin and the Unicorn can be found throughout European folk lore. The exception is in Greek mythology but only because the Greeks attributed it to the fauna of India. The Chinese have stories of Unicorns, as do the Persians. In fact the wee beastie features from Patagonia to Japan, from Scotland to Mongolia and spans a time period dating from Adam.
Apparently, Noah had to leave the Unicorns off the ark because they were so troublesome. Several thousand years later Emperor Fu Xia of China supposedly spotted one, as have other notables, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Confucius. The fact that no-one ever actually produced one doesn’t seem to have prevented people all over the world believing in them since time immemorial.
The unlikely Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th century merchant from Alexandria, made a voyage to India and subsequently wrote about things he had seen along the way. He tells of a brass unicorn he spotted in the palace of the Ethiopian King and recounts the story … “It is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive,’ He says, ‘all its strength lies in its horn. 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.”
The Unicorn’s horn is the focus of it’s universal fascination. Despite the great differences in descriptions available everyone agrees on the horn and it’s qualities of purification and healing. According to legend the problem with obtaining such a medicine is that Unicorns are almost impossible to catch.
‘The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap.’ Leonardo da Vinci.
Then and only then, can the Unicorn be caught and killed, though even this is not the end of the creature for it is often depicted thereafter, alive and well, lain beneath a Pomegranate tree having broken the chains which had previously restrained it.
This motif of resurrection caught the Church’s attention and the story has been given ecclesiastical overtones ever since, though this seems inadequate for a myth which predates the birth of Christ by several millennia.
What then can we make of this story? What is it that’s common to human experience that it could be so universally represented by the motif of the Virgin and the Unicorn?
The Alchemical tradition might provide us with some clues. The various descriptions we have of the Unicorn, though they are widely divergent, do have something in common. It is depicted as a composite creature. Marco Polo describes it as having the body of a horse, head of a boar, feet of an elephant and the hair of a Buffalo. Some traditions throw in a lion’s tail. The Chinese afford it green scales, the tail of an ox and the body of a stag. In the Arabic tradition it has the wings of a vulture, the head of an elephant and the tail of a dragon.
Such descriptions are reminiscent of the monstrous personifications of the ‘prima materia’, the starting off place in the alchemical process, symbolized by a confused mass or complex of opposites all jumbled together, the unvarnished and contradictory personality of the alchemists themselves replete with illogical admixtures of vice and virtue, a ‘complexio oppositorium‘ whose hermaphroditic nature further befuddles efforts to apprehend it.
Such a contradictory melange of traits and attributes is very much like the human personality with all its strange foibles, conflicts and idiosyncrasies, it’s strange admixtures of light and shade out of which eventually grows, all being well, a one-pointed sense of centerdness, of ‘I’ which transcends the chaos of conflicting traits.
‘ I suffered for years on the horns of a dilemma before I discovered it was a unicorn.’ D. Winnicott.
This emerging sense of identity au dessus de la melee, transcending the chaos of conflicting drives and the tension of opposites is qualitatively different from the content of the personality, all the various soapbox oratarios being held by the vested interests of being a son, a brother, an artist or a biker. Its different from the hodge-podge of lion’s tail and dragon’s scales. It has assumed a singular identity, symbolized by the horn out of which cups for kings were supposedly carved to protect their majesties from the poisoning of life’s cruel vicissitudes. The horn is..
‘an emblem of vigour and strength and has a masculine quality but at the same time it is a cup, which as a receptacle is feminine. So we are dealing with a uniting symbol.. C G Jung.
As such the Unicorn represents spirit, the still point, the hub of the wheel, what the Hindu tradition calls Atman. But even so the Unicorn is still wild and intractable. S/he lacks context and so peace. This can only be found in the Virgin’s lap.
At the time these tales were written, what it meant to be a Virgin had a broader meaning than it does today. It went further than chastity to the sense of belonging to oneself, which seems like a good way of describing the anima/us, the soul or psyche which represents the autonomy of the unconscious. Its something you can’t integrate like the repressed stuff of childhood because it was actually there first. It is not a part of you. It is a partner of you, with its own life, in whose lap peace may finally be found.
Humanistic psychology, as benevolent as it is by comparison with what preceded it, has much to answer for because it does insist in placing the ego at the center of the psyche. It still manages to view the unconscious as a rubbish tip of stuff repressed from and therefore originally belonging to consciousness. ‘Everything in your dream is part of you..’
All of which goes to show how centuries of repression can dry clean numinosity from experience, leading people to believe that the unconscious is ‘nothing but..’ the derivative, edited clippings of ego. There could not possibly be interior, a priori factors in the psyche; autonomous, archetypal complexes which have had to take to the woods like outlawed bandits. Despite and perhaps because of their disenfranchisement, they continue to raid and harass the now civilized citizens who have disavowed them.
Cultures relatively unscathed by monotheism have managed to preserve the felt sense that we humans are full of gods. Shamanic culture in particular recognizes, and uses, the fact of the inner other. It recognizes that if this connection is lost it can constitute a loss of soul which is why the Unicorn is so wild and ill tempered.
Its not enough to be ‘spiritual’. There has also to be a felt sense of the inner other.. the ‘not-me,’ in whose lap meaning can be found that the Unicorn cannot provide for itself.
In alchemy this figure, the Anima, is equated with Mercurius, the agency of transformation, who appears as ‘most chaste virgin’. {Jung Alchemical studies.} She is the representative of a depth of experience previously unknown to the Unicorn, peace and dream and belonging. The double edge of this homecoming is that it also involves a death, the end of a mind set seduced by notions of its own self-sufficiency, a de-integrating initiation into a new inter-relatedness which, though mortally wounding to ego-constructs, breaks the chains of its isolation and places it at the roots of the Pomegranate, the Tree of Life.
