DARN, I THOUGHT IT WAS THE NEW PRESIDENT'S LATEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY...:

The Natural History of Unicorns by Chris Lavers (Helen Brown, 08 Jan 2009, Daily Telegraph)

The written history of the Western legend begins in 398 BC with an account from a rather credulous Greek physician called Ctesias of Cnidus, who spent two decades in Persia ministering to the king and his court. Like his famous predecessor, Herodotus, Ctesias had a characteristically Greek curiosity about exotic peoples and places and wrote down all the tales he heard to ship home. One was of a wild, Indian ass with a white body, dark-red head, blue eyes and one horn of white, red and black. “Those who drink out of these horns,” he wrote, “are not subject, they say, to convulsions or to the holy disease [epilepsy]. Indeed they are immune to poisons if, either before or after swallowing such, they drink wine, water, or anything else from these beakers.”

Delving into the possible origins of this tale, Lavers takes us on a tour of some Indian animals that share some of the characteristics of Ctesias’s miracle beast. We meet the Indian rhino, a fearsome ass called the kiang, a Tibetan antelope and a wild yak. Lavers is good at fitting the properties attributed to the mythical creature to the characteristics of the real animals, although readers may sometimes find themselves wondering why. People have always just made things up, and that probably says more about our species of ape than it does about the Himalayan yak.

I found Lavers’s chapters on unicorn lore more revealing, particularly the way in which Ctesias’s ass made it into the Bible. Lavers reveals that the numerous references to unicorns in the King James Bible are a consequence of mistranslation from the Hebrew to the Greek. Most probably the Bible’s authors were talking about an ox.

Things get interesting when the pagan myth of how to catch a unicorn (send a pretty young virgin into the forest, wait for her to attract and pacify the beast, then spring out from behind the bushes to kill it) fuses with Christian tradition. So the unicorn becomes a symbol of Christ, brought among men by a virgin and killed by mankind.