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“There are spells
to make everything speak.
The master wizards were great listeners and
they devised ways to charm
all things in the world, living and dead,
into talking to them.
"That is the most of it, being a wizard —
seeing and listening.
The rest is technique.”
Schmendrick to Molly, p191
The Legend of the Last Unicorn
A Conscious Awareness of Aloneness
One moonlit night,
the last unicorn on earth starts wondering,
“Why am I all alone?”
Spurred
on by a divine discontent arising from her consciousness of aloneness, the unicorn had left her own enchanted forest
and set out in a mode of exploration on a magaical quest, on a dangerous road to the end of the world, to discover what
had happened to all of the other unicorns.
In
her adventures outside of her enchanted forest she became increasingly entangled in the mortal coil, caught up in the webs
of space and time, fates and feelings. She discovered that she had a universal problem to solve on her quest: how to
maintain a unique mortal identity while at the same time avoiding the loss of her immortal self, even as she found herself
entering the gates of the mortal, dismal castle of King Haggard at the end of the world. There, she inquired about what
had happened to her people.
Requisite for Magicians
The
unicorn had entered Haggard's castle of nightmares with Schmendrick, a magician who, with the careworn Molly Grue, an
outlaw woman with a pure heart, had joined her on the road. He thought of himself as a quite incompetent
magician, dim witted and slow to learn. In fact, years before his teacher had cast a spell on him to make him immortal, to
insure that he would live long enough to realize his true potential. That is to say, his teacher had made him immortal to
give him more time to learn, he being such a blockhead. As we might say today, he had major self-esteem issues , which issues
alone clouded his awareness of his magical powers.
The Eternal Dyad: Immortality and Love
Interplaying in our drama of the Last Unicorn are the twin themes of immortality and love. Mortal
life can be seen as the lack of divine consciousness during the imprisonment in “the shackles of my skin” but
only as mortals do we see beauty and experience love: immortals see it and know it not.
We identify ourselves while we are living in the realms of
the mortal things around us and we know we love them for their beauty and, on a subconscious level,
we know that mortal things are all the more beautiful because they, as beauty, don’t last forever. Only
mortals are lovers yet love similarly can exist only because it is temporary.
Only Humans (Mortals) Can Love
The Last Unicorn came to realize that immortals cannot love, regret or cry, for these she had experienced only after she
was transformed by Schmendrick into Amalthea, a young woman. This transformation occured just before entering into the
castle of Haggard, in the realm of darkness at the end of the world. She became aware of these feelings as new and astounding
discoveries, wonderful feelings totally absent in the realms of the immortals.
Inside, the young woman fell in love with the son of king Haggard, prince Lir and, the deeper in love she falls, the more
she becomes human, mortal, temporary. She begins to forget her quest. Prince
Lir had tried everything a hero can do to win his Lady Amalthea’s love before he finally realized that she cannot
be won by great deeds, only by true love.
At
the climax of the adventure and the confrontation with the fire-breathed Red Bull, Amalthea is transformed by Schmedrick by
a magical spell back into her unicorn form and back into immortality. Now, the Red Bull could see her for who she really was,
the last of the unicorns which he had hated. He moved to drive the unicorn into the white foam of the waves of the sea,
where he had previously driven all of the other unicorns.
In
her titanic struggle with the Red Bull her prince Lir is killed trying to save her. Her human grief surged and
transformed into an astounding force capable of driving the Red Bull itself into captivity in the white foam of the waves
of the sea. In truth, she had remembered her invinceable and eternal powers. In that moment, all of the unicorns who
had been trapped there in the white foam of the waves of the sea surged out of the sea, on to their native land. In their
escape the liberated unicorns trampled to dust the dreary, vast labyrinth that was the castle of King Haggard,
During its destruction, the castle moves and changes its shape
like a living creature acting out its own strange mood swings as the king enters a mood of mad triumph
in this drama of decay that is the end of his kingdom. Immediately, the barren lands around and about the ruins of the
castle began to be transformed by greenery and life and soon prince Lir became its good king. The unicorn and Molly,
now her friend forever, returned with all the unicorns to their enchanted forest.
 TRANSFORMATIONS
The unicorn on her adventures had paused to bring her
prince of love back to mortal life
before she returned to her enchanted forest.
Because his teacher had made him immortal
Schmendrick could never escape from
his destiny to become a
true magician.
Indeed, he did realize himself during his adventure
in consciousness as such a master magician, a wizard.
He looks young but is really 30-40 years older. He disguised
a unicorn as a woman and became proficient in conjuring up visions to distract people. He once tricked a talking skull into
believing he had transformed water into invisible wine. He learned to communicate deeply with all beings,
living and dead, real and illusory. One day he accidentally caused a tree woman to fall in love with him and she so deeply
moved by his goodness vowed to "keep the color of your eyes when no one else in the world remembers your name."
His name is Schmendrick, a master of charm and the spoken Word who, when he had
rediscovered his courage, had become an adept practitioner of the arts and sciences of communication, and of illusion
and make believe.
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A Magician Learns to Witness
Schmendrick was a witness as prince Lir fulfilled a prophesy by his own actions. The prophesy was that he would one
day destroy the castle of his father, King Haggard.
He witnessed that the mad old witch Mommy Fortuna had the wisdom not to try to avoid her fate after she learned
that her captive harpy was destined to kill her. Mommy, the magician and the unicorn recognized that in Mommy Fortuna's Midnight
Carnival almost everything is an illusion, including her featured acts, the Harpy, the Manticor, the Dragon, the Satyr and the
Midnight
Serpent. In the Carnival they are all badly treated poor animals, kept in cages, living under a spell. Here, the magician
learned the ways of theatrical subterfuges and soon frees the desperate animals from Momma Fortuna's MIdnight Carnival.
On her adventures the unicorn had once been on display there onstage at the Carnival
but she had needed an imaginary horn so that the carnival-goers could recognize her as a unicorn. Otherwise, they could not
seem to see the unicorn's actual horn because nobody believed in unicorns anymore.
The wizard learns to notice the religious undertones and the interplay of symbologies
as they seemed to dance together in a timeless manner, creating a sense of places and adventures in no discernable time. He
can see his own story as a legitimate, unfolding fairy tale and, in the same moment, he can see his story as a living
satire on fairy tales.
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| SCHMENDRICK the WIZARD |
The magician witnesses the Lady Amaltthea as she sacrifices her human love to
free her fellows, the unicorns of the Earth. Now she will always be unique among the other unicorns because she will always
be the only unicorn who has experienced a sense of what beauty
and regret are - and what are the feelings of love and of crying,
"Only
to a magician
is
the world forever
fluid,
infinitely
mutable and
eternally
new.
"Only
he knows the secret of change,
Only
he knows truely that all things are
crouched
in eagerness to become something else, and
it
is from this universal tension
that
the magician draws his power.
"To
a magician, March is May,
Snow
is green and grass is gray;
This
is that or whatever you say.
Get
a magician today!"
Schmendrick to King Haggard
in the barren throne room of
his dismal castle, p137
“There are spells
to make everything speak.
" The master wizards were great listeners and
they devised ways to charm
all things in the world, living and dead,
into talking to them.
"That is the most of it, being a wizard —
seeing and listening.
The rest is technique.”
The Last Unicorn was authored by Peter S. Beagle
and originally published
in 1968, the Age of LSD.
TOP
HEART IN BALANCE
THUNDER
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MADmin Readers’ Digest
Šrogmios, custodian of the two holy monkeys
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