The New Age Of The Unicorn
I have a confession to make. For the most part I detest the representations of the Unicorn that abound today’s world. They tend to embarrass me rather inspire affection. The reason is that 99% of items produced to capitalise on the popularity of the idea of the Unicorn are the most appalling kitsch! I mean really. A search on the Internet will yield hideous results, (See toy below at right) an unending line of commercial exploitation
of both childhood innocence and an inculcated attraction to brightly coloured junk and repulsive ‘plush’ toys modeled on Japanese-style animes with huge perfectly round eyes designed to appeal to devotees of “cute”. This trend is not, of course, limited to the case of the Unicorn. The infantilisation of everything imaginal has cheapened what was once the realm of the Archetypal, the mysterious, priceless realm of the deep unconscious of the human race. The cult of “cute” has distorted the relationship between the realm of Faerie (used here to stand for all imaginal archetypal creatures inhabiting the deep psyche), and the messages of self-knowledge they evolved to convey to the conscious mind. As shallow commercial icons replace the tenuous link between the conscious and unconscious use of symbols, we become increasingly alienated from our essential selves – the subtle level of awareness that made life meaningful before marketing and “branding” (repulsive notion) subverted individual creative life.
The New Age Of The Unicorn
The Unicorn is only one example but I chose it because despite the abuse it has suffered at the hands of brand-mad marketers, the Idea of the Unicorn has not entirely lost its psychological meaning nor its power over the imagination of the innocent of heart, that part of humanity that has no interest in exercising ‘power over’ anyone or anything, the almost vestigial remnant of our intellectual virginity that survives in the mature appreciation of the value of deep consciousness. No, not the value; the inescapable reality of deep consciousness that resides in human symbols and archetypes. Those symbols and archetypes are what ground us in consciousness. The painting of the Young Woman With Unicorn by Raphael (above) from 1505-06 captures a moment of unity between the innocence of the baby Unicorn sitting in perfect trust in the girl’s hands and her union with the spirit of the animal reflecting her own innocence of heart. But there is more to the image than that. The girl wears a large ruby pendant with a most unusual pearl depended from it. The thickness of the pendant’s setting suggests that it may be a locket or perhaps contains a vial of perfume. The landscape behind her sets her apart from nature yet the Unicorn connects her to it. He is the symbol of both her innocence and her instinctual life. The rich scarlet velvet of her gown repeats the colour of the square-cut ruby and suggests that this portrait may have been painted to announce her ‘debut’ as a marriageable young woman.
Archetypes Wield Power
Symbols and archetypes are not ‘superficial’ or childish or unimportant. Deep consciousness is where we actually exist and we are paying a very high price for the
systematic distancing we achieve through relentless reductionism in every aspect of life from the toys and stories we give our children to our apparently inexhaustible supply of denial of what we can observe with our senses to be true: that we have created a living catastrophe in the simultaneous destruction of our physical environment and the innocent side of our nature that knows we don’t need the way of life we have created. We need the planet as our home and we’re turning it into an uninhabitable wasteland, mentally as well as physically.
The Union of Mind and Imagination
And that is where the Unicorn comes in. Remember in my previous post that I mentioned the kinship amongst the Unicorn, the Narwhal, and the Rhinoceros? I wasn’t being fanciful; there is a kinship amongst these amazing creatures. One that goes back to the origin of our Universe – and perhaps to the origins of all universes. Before there is ‘the thing’, there is the idea of ‘the thing’ – the concept, the numinous level of existence that precedes everything that we perceive through our physical senses. ‘The thing’ exists in the same place we came from: the place that existed before there was ever any ‘place’, the Heisenberg/Schrödinger virtual domain of pure potentiality. That is universal consciousness and within it is the potential for both analytical intellect and imaginal intellect. Yes, imaginal intellect.
Imagination is absolutely essential to Intellect, without it we could not conceive of anything. Schrödinger imagined the cat of his famous ‘thought experiment’. Every thought we have involves imagination in as much as we use language – in itself an imaginal tool – to think with. Written language is the result of imagining a way to communicate information to others at a distance in space or time. Mathematics is the result of imagining a way to communicate such abstractions as size, number, weight, volume, speed, etc. Imagination is what Einstein valued above all other faculties of human intellect because he recognised its primacy. Amongst my favourite of his quotes are these:
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
Now, imagine a rhinoceros. Don’t bother about which species – just imagine a generic rhino. Some rhinos have one horn and some have two but either way the horn is centrally placed above and between the eyes. Recall to mind an image of a Narwhal with its beautifully twisted tusk jutting through its jaw and growing to a length of two meters. Why does the Narwhal have a tusk? Unlike the rhino, the Narwhal does not use the horn to fight other Narwhals. (Nor do they use their tusks to ‘spear’ fish for food). Narwhals do engage in what we call ‘tusking’, rubbing their tusks against each other’s but this is not carried on in an aggressive manner. It seems to be more of greeting ritual although no one knows for certain, yet. The Narwhal is still a mystery. His tusk is oddly constructed with tubules – whose function is unclear – lining the tusk. It appears to be an exquisitely sensitive navigational and communications instrument but again we don’t know for certain. We do know that two species hunt the Narwhal: Orcas and Homo sapiens. Occasionally, Polar Bears will eat the flesh of a Narwhal but it is not their primary prey. The mysterious Narwhal is rather like the Unicorn in that it lives in a shadowy and remote world. It also paid a heavy price for it’s kinship with the Unicorn. The Narwhal was hunted because its tusk was deemed a ‘reasonable facsimile’ for the prized Alicorn. I tend to see the trinity of Unicorn, Rhinoceros, and Narwhal as symbolic of three realms: Air (soul or psyche), Earth (the physical body), and Water (the deep unconscious as well as the giver of life). We could not exist without all three and although we don’t ‘see’ Air, we don’t doubt it’s importance to our survival. But there is yet another important consideration.
Thought As Creation
It seems that the idea of a parallel universe is not just a figment of the imagination of writers of Science Fiction. As of one year ago, the mathematical model of a parallel
universe was confirmed. If String Theory is correct, there are 11 dimensions to what we call ‘reality’. And if astronomers are correct in their speculations there could be an infinite number of universes. And we may be creating them. The theory is that every thought we have creates another reality in which it is realised. In essence, every thought spawns a universe. Scary stuff, I’d say. Think of the responsibility we have! It seems to me that in such a complex cosmos we need all the allies we can get to avoid creating a monstrous universe founded on cynical, hateful, spiteful, sadistic, endlessly destructive ugliness. The opposite of all that would seem to be the answer. We need Wisdom as much as Knowledge. We need a sense of Wonder to protect that which is vulnerable in our world. We need Patience and Tolerance in dealing with each other. We need Imagination to conceive of a livable future at all. But mostly, we need the desire to act innocently in the world rather than hatching fantasies of revenge or domination and destruction. We need what we have left behind: the capacity to be inspired by the inhabitants of the virtual domain of pure potentiality, the domain of the Unicorn.
Once Upon A Unicorn
Some years ago an adopted niece gave me a bookmark for Christmas. Knowing I was fond of pewter she had visited a local pewter shop and as she perused the items on offer, she was drawn to a small pewter Unicorn that was part of a bookmark. The colt-like figure of the mythical beast was very delicately fashioned but there was nothing ‘Disney-ish’ about it. Rather, the young Unicorn was the picture of innocent – motiveless- instinct flicking his tail with the tip of his horn as he prepared to trot off. I have an acute allergy to ‘sentimental art’ (Now there is an oxymoron!) but there was nothing sentimental in the rendering of the Unicorn. He body suggested both youth and strength but most importantly, potential. It wasn’t until several years later that I again encountered a Unicorn. This time it was Michael Green’s remarkable manuscript: Unicornis: On The History And Truth Of the Unicorn. My Unicorn bookmark had found a home.
For those of you who haven’t yet read Unicornis, I won’t spoil it by giving a synopsis. But I can say that the value and delight of the book is its ageless appeal. Written in the form of an ancient Latin manuscript complete with illustrations and ‘translation’ into English, the book was utterly unique when it was published in 1983. The author/illustrator had led a ‘colourful’ life after getting his BA from New York University and a stint at Sao Paolo University. He lived and worked with Timothy Leary and the Castalia Foundation, spent time in India and became a follower of Rumi’s teaching, became a wandering monk, did sign painting and landscaping, became a television art director and finally a writer and illustrator of his own books as well as illustrating books for other authors. Today he lives in Eastern Pennsylvania and has refurbished the barn used by Buffalo Bill Cody and his troupe in the heyday of traveling spectacles. The Barn now houses Green’s studios. What I like about Michael Green is that he seems to have retained the humane and artistic counter-culture values of his youth and added the perspective of years of spiritual practice in the Sufi tradition which emphasises the cultivation of the spontaneousness of creativity with the internal discipline of meditation. The combination makes Green’s approach to the place of imagination in everyday life a joy to explore through his published work. I highly recommend Unicornis as a refresher course in seeing the world through the eyes of the soul. You can visit Green’s site HERE
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Picture credit: Raphael’s Young Woman With Unicorn: Wikimedia Creative Commons.
