The unicorn

Description

It is the pacifist among mythical creatures, symbolising purity, innocence and fragile uniqueness par excellence: the unicorn. And in recent years, pop culture has rediscovered it for itself. No children's channel can do without unicorns, inflatable swimming aids with rainbow manes have enjoyed summer popularity and even toilet paper is printed with the wonder animal, which, at least in European culture today, is always imagined to resemble a horse.

The oldest mythogenetic traces of our unicorn ideas lead to Mesopotamia, to the advanced civilisations of the Indus Valley and to the Indian subcontinent. From there, the idea of a horned magical creature is said to have spread eastwards to distant Japan and far into the West, where it was appropriated and reinterpreted in the Christian imagination as an allegory of Jesus, his single horn as a symbol of monotheism.

No wonder, then, that the unicorn has pranced through art and cultural history for centuries and lived through cultural cycles. Diagonal sets out in search of the last "horned ghost".