The Talmud relates some curious legends of the phœnix, which the Jews believed to be immortal. One story is that when Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit she gave some to all the animals in the Garden of Eden, and that the phœnix was the only one which refused. Hence it escaped the curse of death which overtook the rest of the animal creation. Another legend is that when it was in the ark, and when all the other animals were clamouring to be fed, the phœnix was quiet. Noah, observing it, asked if it was not hungry, to which the phœnix replied, “I saw you were busy, so would not trouble you,” an answer which so pleased Noah that he blessed it with eternal life. In the book of Job, xxix, 18, recalling his earlier glory, the patriarch says, “Then I said I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand.” Many Jewish scholars believe that the word translated sand should be phœnix, and our Revised Version gives “phœnix” as an alternative rendering. It is easy to appreciate how aptly this would express Job’s idea. Some of the Hebrew commentators translate the verse in Ps. ciii, 5, “So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle,” by substituting phœnix for eagle.
The Unicorn
had not quite passed into the region of fable when Pomet wrote his History of Drugs very early in the 18th century, for though he does not believe in the animal himself, he quotes from other authors not so very long antecedent to him who did. He states, however, that what was then sold as unicorn’s horn was in fact the horn or tusk of the narwhal, a tooth which extends to the length of six to ten feet. The unicorn, or monoceros was referred to by Aristotle, Pliny, Aelian, and other ancient writers, and in later times it was described by various travellers who, if they had not seen it themselves, had met with persons who had.
Unicorn (after Bochaut’s Hierozoicon).
The details given by Aristotle are supposed to have been derived from Ctesias, whose description of the Indian wild ass is what was adopted with many embellishments for the fabulous unicorn. It is this author who first notices the marvellous alexipharmic properties so long attributed to the unicorn’s horn. Drinking vessels, he says, were made of the horn, and those who used them were protected against poison, convulsions, and epilepsy, provided that either just before or just after taking the poison they drank wine or water from the cup made from the horn. In the middle ages the horn of the unicorn was esteemed a certain cure for the plague, malignant fevers, bites of serpents or of mad dogs. It was to be made into a jelly to which a little saffron and cochineal were to be added. Some writers allege that poisoned wounds could be cured by merely holding the horn of a unicorn opposite the wound. These horns are said, however, to have cost about ten times the price of gold, so that not many sufferers could avail themselves of them as a remedy.
The unicorn is mentioned several times in the Old Testament, the translators of the Authorised Version having followed the Septuagint in which the Hebrew word Re’em was rendered by the Greek term Monokeros, which corresponds with our unicorn. It is agreed that the word in the original had no reference to the fabulous animal, but that the wild ox, or ox antelope, a strong untameable beast, known in Palestine, was intended. In the Revised Version wild ox is uniformly substituted for unicorn. This animal is believed to have been the Urus mentioned by Julius Cæsar as existing in his time in the forests of Central Europe, and not entirely extinct until some 500 or 600 years ago.
The translators evidently found a difficulty in associating the unicorn with the Hebrew Re’em in Deut. xxxiii, 17, where we read of “the horns of the unicorns.” In the Hebrew the horns are the plural but Re’em is singular. But the horns of the unicorn would have been a contradiction in terms.
The allusions to the unicorn in Shakespeare all seem to show unbelief in the legends. In the Tempest (Act 3, sc. 3) Sebastian says when music is heard in the wood, “Now I will believe that there are unicorns.” In Julius Cæsar (Act 2, sc. 1), Decius Brutus, recounting Cæsar’s superstitions, says, “He loves to hear that unicorns may be betrayed with trees”; and Timon of Athens raves about the unicorn among the legendary animal beliefs (Act 4, sc. 3). An authority on heraldry, Guillim, in 1660, however, comments thus on the scepticism of his contemporaries: “Some have made doubt whether there be any such beast as this or not. But the great esteem of his horns (in many places to be seen) may take away that needless scruple.”