The bizarre history of our obsession with unicorns
Everyone's favorite sparkly Internet meme has a long and strangely scientific history – naturalists and scholars have been obsessing over unicorns for over 2000 years. What turned a scientific curiosity of the year 398 BCE into a virgin-loving Christian symbol?
The Early Science of Unicorns
In his terrific book A Natural History of Unicorns, University of Nottingham geographer Chris Lavers includes a translation of the first known written description of a unicorn. It comes from the writings of Ctesius, a Greek physician and historian who wrote a number of scholarly books based on what he gleaned from Persian archives. In roughly 398 BCE, Ctesius writes:
There are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length. The base of this horn, for some two hands'-breadth above the brow, is pure white; the upper part is sharp and of a vivid crimson; and the remainder, or middle portion, is black. Those who drink out of these horns, made into drinking vessels, are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease [epilepsy]. Indeed, they are immune even to poisons…
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