“Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a gold horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. ‘There’s a unicorn in the garden,’ he said. ‘Eating roses.’ She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. ‘The unicorn is a mythical beast,’ she said…”
Thus opens one of the incomparable James Thurber’s little fables – from the same place that gave us ‘little girls aren’t nearly so easily fooled these days’, and (for all my libertarian friends), ‘anyone who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country’. If you haven’t read ‘Fables for Our Time and Illustrated Poems’ you have missed a treat of wit, charm and humour – so get out and do so (although my wife once went into a bookstore in New York enquiring for Thurber books and got the response “who?” – rather sad given he is maybe The New Yorker’s most famous ever writer!).
But that wasn’t the point – I didn’t want to talk about not counting one’s boobies before they’re hatched but about mythical beasts. And where better to start than with that most elusive of such beasts, the unicorn. Now clearly, being neither female nor a virgin, I have never encountered a unicorn. Indeed, those who have encountered the beast are of course sworn eternal silence as to mention its existence or reveal its location is to condemn it to death.
Mythical beasts – whatever their provenance – are now mere symbols. Our unicorn indicates chastity, purity and honesty (perhaps explaining the beast’s rarity) just as the wyvern shows us guile, exploitation and wickedness. And, like much of legendary and religious symbolism, mythical beasts give us a shorthand of morals, values and virtue. We can use such mythic metaphor for anything – even shy depression. Such beasts are real in that we know what they are, can describe them and can appreciate their role and purpose – and that reality is to me the same reality as gods, devils or the Lorelei. These symbols explain – make easier to understand – some of the dilemmas of virtue, the vagaries of fortune and the wonders of nature. Without them the world is two-dimensional, prosaic, dull and lacking in magic. And without magic we are not human.
Unicorns do not have a scientific reality but a reality of the spirit – a symbolic truth as important to understanding the world as the laws of science. They show us beauty, perfection of spirit, purity and faith - surely things we can believe in, even aspire to? And the unicorn's darker side - the loss of such magic with growth and adulthood is just as important.
But nevertheless a unicorn may be a mythical beast but it is the most beautiful of mythical beasts!
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