The Legend of the Unicorn…

–The Woman with the Alabaster Jar

Poetry for the ritual of the hieros gamos, written in ancient Sumer to the love goddess Inanna, includes these lines:

            The king goes with lifted head to the holy lap,
            He goes with lifted head to the holy lap of Inanna,
            The king coming with lifted head
            Coming to my queen with lifted head . . .

        The Bridegroom/King with “lifted head” or “horn” inevitably seeks the lap of the Bridge for the consummation of the Sacred Marriage. So does the mythical unicorn. The erotic meaning of the imagery should not be ignored. Although the tapestries were woven at the dawn of the Renaissance period (A.D. 1500), the story of the unicorn with his head in the lap of the maiden originated in the classical world, where the imagery of the sacred king and his marriage to the love goddess was familiar.
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The Grail Heresy and the Hunted Unicorn

 In the third panel of the tapestry, the hunters are trying to prod the unicorn across a stream. And in the fourth, he is defending himself, kicking and ferociously goring one of the hounds. This is odd symbolism for Christ, who is supposed to have gone willingly and docilely to his fate on the cross. But it is an accurate portrayal of the Albigensian Cathars, whose menfolk bravely defended their homeland of Provence against the rapacious mercenaries of the Vatican and the French king for a generation before succumbing to superior force at Montségur.
            The fifth panel is unfortunately comprised of two fragments from which a large piece is missing. The unicorn has found his way to the garden, which is surrounded by red and white roses growing along the fence. The woman in the tapestry fragment is the serving woman of the lady of the garden, whose delicate hand (the only part of her that remains) is caressing the neck of the unicorn. The rest of the tapestry, the portion portraying the lady herself, is the only piece missing from any of the seven panels. One must wonder whether this loss was intentional—it often is! In all probability, the lady was holding the mirror universally associated with the love goddess. It is unlikely in my opinion that this part of the tapestry was destroyed accidentally while the rest of the panels were left intact. The unicorn may have had his hooves in her lap, as in the other tapestry series. Or some other symbol in the panel may have made the identity of the love goddess so obvious that it was deliberately destroyed by a well-meaning custodian of the orthodox faith, as the tarot trumps portraying The Papess and The Empress in the Charles VI deck were most probably destroyed for bearing heretical symbols.
          In the sixth tapestry of the hunt series, the unicorn has been brutally sacrificed, his carcass thrown over a horse. The establishment has hunted and slain the marvelous unicorn; the Christ of the heretics is dead, along with their doctrines, their families, and their hopes for the Millennium. According to John Williamson’s study, the flora and fauna of this panel reflect the death of the unicorn, defeated and betrayed, and his journey to the realm of the underworld.