The VERY Strange History of Unicorns

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea. Thus begins the much-beloved 1968 novel The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. This book, which we'll explore later, embodies everything most held dear about the mythical unicorn, their beauty, immortality, wisdom, bravery, and healing powers. These are things we all seem to have agreed on with regards to this mythical creature, but its actual history is far more storied and complex, from the musings of ancient philosophers, to real-life unicorn horn trade, to the creature's association with Christianity, to the unicorn's shift into the world of popular media today. There's something about this beast that no one wants to let go, but where did it even come from? Come learn with me. Disclaimer, this video is going to focus on European unicorn myths, because that's kind of the central lore that we deal with today. Magic horse with head horn. Also, there is media discussion in this video, obviously, but considering that the WGA and SAG Strike are still happening because these studios are greedy and wretched, I will only be discussing the original books of said media. What I'm wearing today later in the video is my interpretation of Amalthea from the book, The Last Unicorn. Sadly, no exploration of any properties owned by Struck Studios today, so support the strike and stay slaying. So without further ado, let's get into it, but first, a quick word from today's sponsor, June's Journey. Who among us wasn't obsessed with decoration games, I Spy, Nancy Drew, and any other type of mystery solving stories as a kid? I know I was. So for a few years now, June's Journey has been literally one of the only mobile games I actually enjoy playing, because, like, I'm not a gamer. But this game gets me in the nostalgia bone. It's a murder mystery hidden object game where you play as June, who is investigating the suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths of her sister and brother-in-law. The hidden object scenes are gorgeous, with well-crafted environments and delicately researched 1920s flair. As you follow the story, you can find new clues, unlock prizes, and can use the coins that you find to buy things to decorate your island. The story gets more and more complex over time, introducing some really fun 1920s themes like bootlegging, as well as new and unique locations like Paris, and you can visit other islands or participate in unique special challenges. Like, for instance, right now to celebrate the game's 6th anniversary on the 25th of September, they've got a super fun anniversary event going on. Starting on the 30th, on the official June's Journey YouTube channel, there will be a live action mystery web series with hidden easter eggs throughout the series, so follow them on social media and watch the series to vote on who you think the criminal is to win an in-game prize. Download June's Journey for free by clicking the link below in the description, or use the QR code on screen. June's Journey is available on Android and iOS mobile devices, as well as on PC through Facebook games. Thank you to June's Journey for sponsoring this video, and now let's get back to exploring the Myth of the Unicorn. First of all, you do not have to tell me that I look like a 1930s railroad conductor right now. The outfit is not giving what I thought it was going to give. OHHHHHHHHH I just really wanted a way to weasel in this unicorn in captivity scarf that I got at the Met. So. Come with me back, way back, to the 4th century BC, when the first written account of a unicorn appeared in a book written about India by Greek writer and doctor, Theseus, who called the creature the Indian Ass. Now, shocking, no one who knows literally anything about ancient geographic writings, I'm sure. Theseus had never actually been to India, but still presumed himself to be expert enough to be writing about the place. He recounted tales from travelers who had witnessed there, quote, certain wild asses which are large as horses, and even larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn in the middle of their forehead, and this is one cubit in length. The base of this horn is pure white, the middle part is sharp and vivid crimson, and the upper part is black. And apparently all who drank from the horn would become immune to poison and convulsions. Now, much like Theseus, I have never been to India, personally, but my friend Nami Sparrow has, and her expert report is to the contrary. Some of y'all also confirmed on Twitter that you've never seen one of these magnificent beasts in India, uh, except for Douglas, apparently. I won't get into it here because it's very long-winded and complicated, but if you're interested in the possible reasoning behind Theseus and his so-called Indian Ass, chapter one of The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers does its best to break it down, so. Now, around a half century later, good ol' Aristotle basically was like, Theseus is such an unreliable loser little bitch boy. But also, the Indian Ass is definitely real, so yeah. The one-horned creature craze continued to take Europe by storm from there. My best friend Pliny the Elder, who honestly deserves his own video, wrote that most mythical creatures are dumb, stupid, and fake, but there are definitely unicorns, or as he called them, monoceroses, in India. Yet another Roman guy named Alien, spelled A-E-L-I-A-N, he had his own take on the alleged Indian unicorn, where he introduced the idea of the spiraled horn. Even Julius Caesar wrote on his own travels in Gaul that unicorns were roaming around in Germany. Germans in the audience, please sound off if you guys have unicorns over there, or if Caesar is just yankin' my chain. But even if we go back before Theseus to ancient Persepolis in the 5th century BC, various buildings had carved, single-horned creatures depicted in battle with lions, likely based on even earlier Babylonian images. The unicorn versus the lion is a long-standing part of the myth, showing up in all sorts of stories for centuries, one being the Letter of Prester John, written around 1165, which claims that unicorns and lions are inherently enemies, and that the lion kills the unicorn by standing in front of a tree and then jumping out of the way as the unicorn charges at it, whereupon the unicorn's horn gets stuck in the tree trunk. And so, the lion kills the unicorn. This theme of the tree being the trick carries on through so many stories, even appearing in the popular German fairy tale, The Valiant Little Tailor. Even the Zoroastrian Bundahischem, or a Persian creation myth, involved a creature with three legs and one horn, who could purify poisoned waters with that horn. So by this point, all of the unicorn accounts kind of form a similar picture. Super majestic horse-like thing with a single, magical horn. It's super fast and strong, and can heal all ailments. I mean, animal horns being seen as having healing properties is nothing new. Eastern markets traded rhino horns, and Western markets traded narwhal tusks. Both of these things were typically billed as unicorn horns, and the way that people wrote about both animals was in a markedly scientific tone. It wasn't portrayed as a myth or, like, a fantasy creature at this point. The unicorn was a real animal, with real healing properties, as people believed it to be. It's just that the real animals in question were actually usually… narwhals and rhinos. And unusual medicine at this time period wasn't exactly uncommon. If you watched my video last year on real-life vampire hunting, you may remember the discussion on corpse medicine. This really wasn't all that different. People believed that by consuming a healthy, strong, and powerful thing, it would therefore make you healthy, strong, and powerful too. I mean, at a basic level, it kinda makes sense, right? But it's also important to note that while people viewed rhinos and narwhals as real-life unicorns, and they do indeed exist, the much older magical myth of unicorns long precedes this market, dating back to when the Bible's Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek around the 3rd to 2nd century BC. It was then that, most likely, a wild mistranslation occurred at the hands of a number of scholars called the Seventy, who were doing the translation. Their version of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, changed the wild ox mentioned in the Book of Job, which was the then-extinct urus, to monokeros, or single-horned creature. Follow the trail to St. Jerome's Latin translation of the Septuagint, and the monokeros became the unicornis. And so, as these things usually go, the newly-cemented existence of a unicorn in the Bible from then on was seen as undeniable proof that unicorns do indeed exist, and furthermore, it was linked with Jesus Christ himself. The unicorn craze continued to take over medieval Europe when the popular book The Physiologus was published, in which a number of animals, both real and fantastical, are described and associated with lessons that Christians could take from them. It wrote, Unicornis, the unicorn, which is also called rhinoceros by the Greeks, is of the following nature. He is a very small animal, like a kid, excessively swift, with one horn in the middle of his forehead, and no hunter can catch him, but he can be trapped by the following stratagem. A virgin girl is led to where he works, and there she is sent off by herself into the wood. He soon leaps into her lap when he sees her and embraces her, and hence gets caught. Our Lord Jesus Christ is also a unicorn spiritually, about whom it is said, and he was beloved like the son of the unicorns. Can y'all excuse me? Can I, like, wear this for a second? Because I spent money on it at the costume store, and ended up not wearing it, and now I want to feel like I'm not wasting money, so... Now as translations usually go, the story changed tone in the next version. The Syriac edition took an unexpectedly weird turn, writing, They lead forth a young virgin, pure and chaste, to whom, when the animal sees her, he approaches, throwing himself upon her. Then the girl offers him her breasts, and the animal begins to suck the breasts of the maiden and, uh, to conduct himself familiarly with her. Well, anyway, the virgin-luring-the-unicorn story became incredibly popular, becoming permanently ingrained through the ages as the enduring association of unicorns with young maidens. The Physiologus also introduced the idea of unicorns using their horns to purify water, and both of these aspects of the story can be seen in the unicorn hunt tapestries that live now at the Met Cloisters Museum in New York. Which, we'll get into that later. But essentially, the idea of fierce unicorns being tamed by pure young maidens became the staple of the myth, and was subsequently intermingled with stories of Christ, either literally or as an allegory. Christ was not only associated with the unicorn, but was also being described as literally being a unicorn. Usually one who, in the story, spiritually entered the body of the virgin, usually Mary, and was therefore made human and born that way. This tale, called The Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn, shows Gabriel as a hunter, chasing Christ Unicorn into the arms of Mary, the virgin, who captures him. As you can probably imagine, this tale of the unicorn and the virgin begin to take on… confusing and often problematic connotations. Angelica Farici writes, Although the virgin is witnessing the brutal slaying of the unicorn, she seems passive and detached. To a certain extent, this may be explained as a perception of women in general during the High Middle Ages. In courtly love circles where the legend gained momentum, it's interesting to note that the lover unicorn dies at the hands of the virgin in the quest for love. Her position, nevertheless, is still described as fixed and immutable. She's a passive bystander, a chess pawn in the Hortus Conclusus, without any hope of redemption. This weird relationship between the maiden and the unicorn, as a medieval allegory for courtly love and chivalric codes, became a permanently ingrained aspect of the story, and Europe at this time was obsessed with both the idea of romantic woman worship and the idea of the inevitable doom that follows a woman's attraction. And so the tale of the hunt of the unicorn became a symbol for the hunt for love, with the unicorn being depicted as the masculine player, the phallic horn symbolism and all, and obviously the virginal maiden who secretly plots the man's doom, or the doom itself being a symbol for marriage. The old ball and chain? Never heard of it. All I know is the old wooden fence enclosure. I can take this off now. Now I no longer feel like I've wasted money. Can't wait to give that to my baby cousin when she's old enough to wear it. The attachment to Christ as a unicorn persisted until the 1500s, when people started thinking that it was weird, and it is, and also kind of distasteful, especially considering that the unicorn does, you know, get killed in many depictions, like, too soon. They also started wondering if maybe no one actually has ever seen a real unicorn. The myth was finally firmly, well, made a myth in the 1800s when a French zoologist pointed out the fact that animals with cloven hooves have skulls that are split down the center, so obviously it's impossible for them to grow horns in the middle of their heads. This didn't actually stop the myth from mything, though. I'm sure you've all seen various examples of fake taxidermied creatures and cryptids. You've got that one mermaid, the jackalope, million aliens, all sorts of oddities. As far as unicorns go, my personal favorite is the Magdeburg unicorn skeleton in Germany's Natural History Museum in Magdeburg, created in 1668 by Prussian naturalist Otto von Grick, who discovered the remains of an ancient woolly rhino and, having never heard of those, obviously assumed that it was a unicorn. And so, still today, we have this glorious beast. But Grick was not the only guy to create a supposedly real unicorn. A doctor in the 30s managed to transplant a bull horn onto a bull calf, and in the 80s a horn was transplanted onto a circus goat's head to make a unicorn. Guys, please leave farm animals the hell alone. The 30s is actually a hilarious decade for unicorn drama, actually, because in 1930 you've got the publication of Odell Shepard's famous book, The Lore of the Unicorn, and following that you've got the fake bull unicorn surgery, using Shepard's book as an excuse. And then, in 1939, the American Journal of Semitic Languages publishes an article by Alan H. Goadby titled The Unicorn in the Old Testament, where he basically spends the entire time fuming about how much he hates Odell Shepard's book. You really have to love academics, it's so funny. Now, given that by the Enlightenment era many people agreed that unicorns aren't real, still others claimed that they used to be real, but were extinct for one reason or another. One story claims that they didn't make it onto Noah's Ark, and so they perished in the flood. And there's a lot of different reasons that people have made up for why they might have missed the boat. It became a significant ongoing discourse, with numerous books being published on the subject, such as The Unicorn, a Mythical Investigation by Robert Brown from 1881, and Mythical Monsters by Charles Gold in 1886. Both of these are obviously more critical and based in history of the myth, whereas if you dip back to the 1600s-1700s, writings on unicorns get a lot weirder. The learned Thomas Brown has many, many unicorn opinions, which can basically be whittled down to, yes, unicorns are real, but there's a lot of animals that are unicorns, and oh no, we can't figure out which one has the magical horn. And then in Speculum Mundi from 1643, John Swan is like, no guys, you're all stupid. None of these horned animals you're calling unicorns are unicorns, unless they're literally a horse with a horn. Interestingly, he goes on to claim that hunters catch unicorns by dressing a man in drag and making him smell pretty with spices and stuff, and then the unicorn believes him to be a young virgin maiden and lays down in his lap. So I guess the only way a unicorn decides someone is a virgin maiden is if they're femme and smell good. In the 18th century, a bunch of folks started publishing memoirs and biographies recounting alleged unicorn sightings, or talking about how they traveled to Tibet or something and the locals tried to convince them that they really had unicorns there. Or like this book, which writes of the voyages of Mr. de Paget, who says he saw a unicorn in 1776, but it's literally just a narwhal. Speaking of narwhals, or, I'm sorry, sea unicorns, the narwhal tusk trade was a big, huge business for a minute there until the late 1600s, and you can trace the blame for that back to… My Medieval Wife, Hildegard von Bingen? Okay, pause. Dead serious, Hildegard absolutely rocks. She was a medieval abbess, musician, songwriter, physician, herbalist, psychic, mystic, you name it. Basically, a veritable queen. And her music goes hard as hell, seriously. Anyway, Hildegard wrote about a great many things and read many books, and she had many things to say about the unicorn in her own reworking of the Physiologus story. The unicorn, you know, wonders when it sees a maiden from afar that she has no beard, although she has the form of a man. And when two or three maidens are together, it wonders all the more and becomes all the easier to catch while it has its eye fixed on them. But the maidens with which one wishes to catch it must be aristocratic and not boorish, also not too grown up, but also not too small, but in the true bloom of youth, for this it loves because it recognizes this as gentle and pleasing. Which is hilarious, like, picturing a unicorn staring at three teenage girls and being like, oh hell yeah, but why the hell don't they have luscious beards? Hildegard then goes on to describe the various medicinal uses for the unicorn. You can mash up its liver into a salve to cure leprosy, or you can make a girdle from unicorn hide and wearing it will protect you from all plagues and fevers. If you place a unicorn's hoof under your plate, any poisoned food on it will boil and steam. Which, I guess, doesn't exactly help if it's soup? Who am I to question my beautiful medieval wife? Anyway, Hildegard actually doesn't mention any uses for the alicorn, though. Or the unicorn horn. Unusually. But she did start the whole idea of consuming unicorn body parts, or otherwise using them in real life, for medicinal purposes. And given that in this time period there was indeed one capturable real unicorn, the sea unicorn, people were about to go totally horny for some of that horn. So people were scrambling all over the place trying to capture, buy, or sell narwhal tusks, believing them to have healing properties. Until this had gone on for a long while and people started realizing that it actually wasn't doing anything and got into some other sort of weird medical quackery, as usual. But indeed, we can't talk about unicorn history without taking a deeper look at one of history's most beloved pieces of art, the Hunt of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Met Cloisters Museum. I have had the pleasure of visiting the tapestries twice now. Once about two-ish years ago, my first visit to the museum, and again back in July when the museum invited me and a number of other creators back for an incredibly fascinating lecture tour of the tapestries and the gardens. Side note, my favorite thing that I learned at this visit was that there's a tiny hidden frog in the lower right corner of the Unicorn in Captivity Tapestry. Wait, is he in this one that I have? Is he there? Oh no, that's too cropped. He's not in this one. He's everything to me. Anyway, there's a lot unknown about these tapestries. For one thing, a bunch of them are fragmented or missing or were badly altered by dumb Victorians, which is sad because these things were expensive. Seriously, there is actual gold and silver woven into them. But the tapestries, which were made sometime around 1495 to 1505, tell a sequential story of the unicorn hunt either as a Christian allegory or as a love allegory, like an early comic. I particularly love this one fragment hanging over the door in the museum, which is like so funny because you have this like sneaky ass treacherous bitch giving a smirk to the hunters. Like, it's literally so funny. Famously, the tapestries are also covered with miofleur patterns with dozens of very real plants, many of which are actually planted there at the mechloisters in the gardens. The tapestries can be traced back the farthest to the ownership of a certain Francois V de la Rochefoucauld in Paris in the 1680s, but how he acquired them is a mystery. The family held on to the tapestries for years, although without really taking very good care of them until the Populist Party of France looted them during the revolution, after which they promptly disappeared, and locals claimed that they were being used to cover trees and potatoes and barns. Finally, in the 1850s, the de la Rochefoucauld family started trying to recover their looted property, and some peasant's wife was like, oh yeah, my husband's using y'all's old curtains to cover our vegetables over in the barn. And the curtains turned out to be none other than the unicorn tapestries, in real shit condition, obviously. The tapestries were recovered and later bought by none other than Mr. Moneybags himself, Mr. John D. Rockefeller Jr. The Met bought the tapestries from him in 1937, and they have been there ever since. I sincerely recommend going to check them out if you're ever in New York. Obviously they're beautiful, but seeing them in person truly takes your breath away. Now, the unicorn, of course, did not remain forever in the world of knightly myth and religious symbolism. The unicorn we know and love today, rather, has been a favorite character of any number of media. Movies, TV, books, merchandise, you name it. Today, we live in the era of the capitalist unicorn. In chapter 11 of The Last Unicorn, arguably the most core piece of mythic unicorn literature in the last century, the complex but evil King Haggard says something that I think is very emblematic of how most people in history have related to unicorns. He's speaking to Lady Amalthea, who is the human form of the last unicorn herself, and King Haggard reveals that he has trapped the other unicorns beneath the waves of the sea for his own pleasure. He says, I like to watch them. They fill me with joy. I'm sure it is joy. The first time I felt it, I thought I was going to die. There were two of them in the early morning shadows. One was drinking from a stream, and the other was resting her head on his back. I thought I was going to die. I said to the red bull, I must have that. I must have all of it, all there is, for my need is very great. So the bull caught them, one by one. Haggard is a very sad king, and nothing in the world makes him happy, except for unicorns. And so he endeavors to possess all of them for his own, to covet their beauty. He's much like a stand-in for, well, most people of history with regard to unicorns. As long as the myth of the unicorn has existed, it's never been simply a creature which can just exist just to exist. It had to have some great purpose that lured humans in with their greed. Greed and powerlust, the two great follies of humanity, are what has always driven people to hunt this fierce beast. Whether it be simply for glory, or to use the unicorn's magical body for various uses, or medicine, people have always coveted to take the unicorn, using virginal maidens to lure them in. Peter Beagle's story is an interesting retelling of this never-ending legend. For one thing, while the unicorn is coveted in general by various characters, Haggard and Mommy Fortuna for their greed, and Prince Lear for his love, and Molly Grew and Shmendrick for their virtue, it's never expressly for her horn, nor her power. The unicorn in this story has a sort of wordless amoebic power over mortals. They can't help but seek her, or be drawn to her, simply by the lure of some deep ancient power. And interestingly, the story doesn't completely demean these characters for feeling that way, although two are punished by death. The story more so pities all of them. Even the good characters get a bittersweet ending, because both having and being exposed to immortality is itself a bittersweet thing. It does, however, give their lives new meaning. Jeffrey Reiter writes, Beagle's stories vocate a dialectic, a synthesis between the poles of mortality and immortality, suggesting that life ought to be lived in a balanced perspective that privileges neither the real nor the ideal, but exalts in both. For the unicorn in this story to truly learn this lesson, she first has to be reduced from her mythic status. She leaves her fairytale forest into the mortal realm, where humans can no longer see her for what she is, but rather as just a pretty horse. Then, in an attempt to save her from the red bull, the magician Schmendrick transforms her into a human, an act that causes her more pain than anything else possibly could have done. She says, Why did you not let the bull kill me? Why did you not leave me to the harpy? That would have been kinder than closing me in this cage. I am myself still. This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it truly be beautiful? By becoming human and then slowly losing her memories of her past, the unicorn learns an equally valuable lesson as her mortal friends, that her immortality and their mortality are neither greater nor more accursed than the other. There is beauty in both, but the lesson that she learns is still a scar on her spirit. At the end of the story, when she's returned to her unicorn form and bids Schmendrick farewell, she says sadly, I will go back to my forest too, but I do not know if I will live contentedly there nor anywhere. I have been mortal and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep and I want nothing and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret. There is another aspect to The Last Unicorn that's an interesting take on the evolution of the historic myth itself, that being a loss of innocence. There's always been a somewhat sexual angle to the unicorn mythos, what with the virginal maidens and such. The beginning of the story sees the unicorn innocent and ignorant in her beautiful forest that could be interpreted as childhood, and her journey is the process of maturing. She ends up becoming the virginal young maiden and experiencing the draw of romantic love. Though she and Prince Lear part ways in the end, she's still forever changed and can never go back to that childhood again. Although it should be noted that Amalthea and Lear never actually touch, an interesting hearkening back to medieval tales of chivalric love, in the end it's Amalthea's experience of mortality and human love that shatters her innocence and gives her the ability to fight the Red Bull in a way that the other unicorns could not. The Last Unicorn is, of course, not the only modern book to involve mythic unicorns. There are many, far too many for me to get into in one video, but I do want to briefly mention the book Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, which has a really interesting hearkening back to a part of the myth that I brought up earlier. In this book, Tristan, the male protagonist, saves a unicorn from a lion, bringing back the age-old unicorn versus lion battle. And thanks to him for his heroism, the unicorn rests its head on Yvain's lap, Yvain being the star that fell from the sky as, well, a virginal maiden. Thus, the unicorn accompanies the pair on their journey and at some point uses its horn to purify a cup of wine that had been poisoned. Tragically, the unicorn in Stardust meets the typical end of most unicorns. It's killed by the witch, beheaded, and its horn cut off and used as medicine. Quick diversion into something ridiculous, though. If you're of a certain age and have been on the internet since at least the late 2000s, you have probably run into this image of what appears to be a real unicorn. If you roam around old blogs, you'll find a ton of people posting this photo being like, oh my god, proof that unicorns are real! Or impact font text memes. Honestly, I gave it a solid shot trying to find the actual origin of this image, but it looks like it showed up online sometime around 2008 and that's as much as I got. Beyond that, the image is as much a mystery as unicorns themselves. Well, no, I'm sure someone out there knows all about it, but I just don't have the time. I'm still recovering from the trauma that I accrued dealing with my Tribulé video. Coincidentally, Charlie the Unicorn was really having its heyday at this time, so it was kinda unicorn mania online in general. Unicorn craze was a long time rising, ever since the 60s and 70s, when fantasy novel publishers made it the icon of the genre. From there, it was co-opted by Lisa Frank, who many scholars believe to be truly responsible for the permanence of today's rainbow unicorn, and after her, onto, of course, My Little Pony in the 80s. The boon of horse girls the world over. Timothy Miller writes in The Unicorn Trade, a fantastic paper, In some ways, the unicorn has always been a natural sticker, fit to be slapped onto a cloister wall, just as readily as a young girl's school notebook. Today, the unicorn craze is no hunt of grandeur or glory, no quest of knights and maidens, no hunger for healing. Today, you can spot unicorns literally every few seconds walking through any store, like Target or Walmart, gracing clothing, bags, kitchenware, the packaging of food and drinks, toys, anything you can imagine. I even got unicorn-themed boba yesterday. It was really good. The unicorn is no longer rare and pure and sacred. It's permeated every aspect of our lives. In some sort of way, this is our modern world doing unto the unicorn what Schmendrick did when he made Amalthea the human woman. We have made the unicorn somewhat mortal and forever removed her from the age of innocence. Miller continues, For some time now, the unicorn has been an ownerless, non-copyrighted but nonetheless distinctive and recognizable brand, promising the fulfillment of consumer desire and carefully engineered by uncountable corporations to market products ranging from band-aids to bicycle helmets, and especially but not exclusively to young girls. Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn could be interpreted as a parable warning against the destructive desire to possess unicorns and whatever a unicorn may represent. Yet publishers and marketers of fantasy novels did not hesitate to use the unicorn to sell more unicorns. Now, is this actually hurting anyone? No, obviously not. The unicorn was never real, nor does it belong to any one culture. This is simply an observation of what capitalism does to mythology. Don't take it too seriously. Come play with me in this space. Deep dives are fun. Let's think about things. Miller creates a list of seven theses to encapsulate what the unicorn has become in the modern era. One, the unicorn is pure capitalism. Two, the unicorn is pure nostalgia. Three, the unicorn is always a sign, never a signified, then always a symbol, never a thing. Four, the unicorn is always vanishing, always almost gone, limited time only, last chance to see. Five, the unicorn is both new and old, both individualized and available to all in endless acts of repetition of the purportedly singular. Six, the unicorn can only exist as long as we pretend to the illusion that it is rare. And seven, the unicorn always holds a mirror up to itself. The unicorn reflects, and one of the things it reflects is itself. Shocking no one, unicorn capitalism has reached some pretty plainly ironic heights. For example, in 2021, when NFTs were all the rage, which, oh. There was a ton of unicorn themed NFTs. One collection, the Utopian Unicorn Society, was like, well, first of all, really fucking ugly as all NFTs are. But the way they marketed themselves was interesting, playing into the very core of the historic unicorn mythos. They said, we're not here to just sell some NFTs. Our mission is to create a lifelong community of utopians who are united with each other in redefining the way NFTs are used forever. Ownership of a unicorn gives you membership in the utopia, the lifelong community of friends and companions that we are building. Shocking nobody, the Utopian Unicorn Society disappeared. What about the eternal unicorn friends? Anyway, my point is, a unicorn is no longer an object of chivalric pursuit and capture, of elusive glory. You can buy a unicorn, as many as you want, at any time, for a few bucks on Amazon, and get it on your doorstep the next day. In a way, we have become King Haggard, and as such, the unicorn's value is not immortal. It's removable. When the unicorn plague, as some have dubbed it, ends, the unicorn will return to her lilac forest, the same as ever, and yet also forever changed. Thank you for learning with me about the history of everyone's favorite horsey thing. I hope you enjoyed it. I also want to take a minute to plug my book. A graphic novel, actually. Liberated the Radical Art and Life of Claude Gahan. Available now wherever books are sold. If you love art history, queer history, comics, and resistance during World War II, please check it out to see my retelling of the very true and so incredible story of one of my favorite artists. And also, don't forget to check out June's Journey by clicking the link below or using this QR code. So, until next time, wash thy hands, wear thy mask, and stay away from virgins in the woods.