I discovered new levels of absurdity on the internet when I encountered a video from a conspiracy theory channel on YouTube called Truthstream Media (no doubt a horrifically bad pun on the phrase “mainstream media”), in a video entitled “Why Are We Becoming Inundated with Unicorn Symbolism?”. I had only recently discovered it, though it is actually a few months old. Nonetheless, I think it would be fun to try and dissect this take and bring to light the level of absurdity being dealt with, as well as in general indulge once again in talking about bizarre conspiracy theories about mythology and the occult, something I don’t believe I’ve done too often in a quite a while now. So strap yourselves in, you’re in for quite a ride.
In that pursuit, let’s first establish what the basic concept of a unicorn is supposed to be in the popular imagination. On some level, we are all familiar with the myth of the unicorn, no doubt thanks to various fantasy media as well as a litany of consumeristic entertainment marketed towards girls (not to mention the prehistoric mammalian beast known as Elasmotherium, which some consider to be a kind of “real life unicorn”). A unicorn is supposed to be an elusive equine creature, typically a white horse and always brandishing the famous singular horn on its head, embued with positive magical qualities such as the ability to heal the sick and purify poisoned water and can only be found and captured by a virgin woman. In this sense, the unicorn is very much a symbol of purity in the Christian context, which is very much tied to sexual purity, namely virginity and chastity, considering the role of the virgin woman in the unicorn myths, and it probably goes a long way towards understanding the generally fluffy connotations of the representation of the unicorn in modern products.
But apparently, according to Truthstream Media, the unicorn is in reality a sinister occult symbol, connected with (drum roll, dramatic silence) the Rockerfellers, the New Age movement, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Lucifer (for some reason) and from there the Antichrist, all wrapped up in some sort of anti-Christian occult agenda to brainwash your kids into becoming transgender.
Yep. You heard me.
There’s a lot to unpack in the video, and you can go and watch it here if you want, just if you truly want to subject yourself to what is simultaneously the equivalent of a particularly boring and insufferable night of lame drug trips, kale and Jack Chick tracts, but let’s go over a lot of the main premises of the video.
For a start, the speaker claims that there’s some sort of intense marketing campaign centered around promoting unicorn symbolism. One that, we are assured, is separate to the fairly common marketing campaign for products commonly aimed at young girls. Supposedly, this marketing campaign is uniquely intense. As proof of this, the speaker says she took her daughter to two major American supermarkets – Walmart, Target, and specifically – as well as a mall and a local Texas grocery shop and took photographs of random unicorn-themed items (excluding My Little Pony merchandise) finding several unicorn-themed clothes, toys, accessories, food, drink, and other merchandise. Already I get the sense that this isn’t some sort of coordinated push for unicorn products at the hands of some New World Order, but a product of the ebb and flow of capitalistic markets, which are not necessarily the product of elitism but rather complex economic incentives inherent in the system. In fact, right from the outset it seems that the speaker is unaware of the tendency of market forces and corporations to appropriate all sorts of tropes, icons (even those from the domain of radical left-wing movements), narratives, myths and even morality. Indeed, Slavoj Zizek gives a good explanation of the way ethics is appropriated by the system in much this way to present a commodity for the purpose of our regular consumeristic rites.
For roughly seven or eight minutes after the prologue of the video the speaker goes on about just how many unicorn products she can find in the store and how much photos she snapped, all while failing to demonstrate how this is any different from common marketing in any way other than, essentially, “just look at all these unicorn products I found”. In fact, most of the video is just her talking about how much unicorn-themed items she can fit in her camera. But this is only the least absurd aspect of this video or its claims.
The real meat of the speaker’s conspiracy theory is found about ten and a half minutes into the video, after some pointer about unicorn-themed commercials, and we get into the supposed message of unicorn symbolism in the products and commercials being presented to us. The speaker points to a lot of the unicorn-themed products as carrying some sort of message about magic and the belief in magic and personal uniqueness, and then immediately jumps to discussing Jennifer Doudna’s book about genetic engineering.
I’m not kidding. That’s actually part of a video that is still ostensibly about unicorn symbolism in contemporary merchandise.
The book, entitled A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, seems to be a discussion about a DNA sequence named CRISPR (short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; what a mouthful) and its possible use in gene editing in order to make changes to human embryos, as well as cure diseases like HIV/AIDS, many genetic diseases and certain cancers, and an attempt to caution the public about the gravity of such a discovery, including possible dangers. Now, as profoundly important as such subject matter is, I’m still absolutely bewildered as to what this has to do with consumerist unicorn symbolism. Well, the speaker mentions how CRISPR scientists are reportedly aiming to use this technology to resurrect extinct animal species such as woolly mammoths, as well as create new and previously fantastical species of animal such as unicorns and winged lizards, and how Doudna herself claims that “it won’t be long before CRISPR allows us to bend nature to our will”.
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This may seem like particularly neurotic attention to detail applied to what is essentially media hyperbole (not to mention personal hyperbole from Doudna herself) meant to puff up and gloss over the real story – namely that gene editing might, just might, be technologically feasible in the future – still disconnected from the actual premise of the video. But, that would seemingly be mistaken. For you see, because the “unicorn craze” is more over the top than ever (which, in reality, it isn’t; it’s just market forces and consumerism at work), there’s supposedly a deeper meaning behind the unicorn symbol, besides the Christian symbolism of sexual purity that was already established for the mythical creature. After a less than subtle remark about “the elites” having their own set of idols that they worship (referring of course to classic conspiracy theory tropes such as the Bohemian Grove, Masonic Ba’al worship, Illuminati “Satanism” and so forth), we arrive at the central claim surrounding unicorn symbolism.
It turns out that unicorns are actually a New Age occult symbol, tied to a movement allegedly pushed by the Rockerfellers through the Lucis Trust, which is supposedly tied to Luciferianism because during the 1920s it was known as the Lucifer Publishing Company for five years before it was changed to Lucis Publishing Company. Yep, you heard me. Of course it’s worth noting that the Lucis Trust has nothing to do with the Rockerfellers in reality, or at least, there’s no evidence that the Rockerfellers actually funded it, and in fact it was started by Alice and Foster Bailey as a non-profit organization promoting New Age spiritualism and goodwill – a fact that, as the speaker said, a quick search on the Internet easily provides. In fact, the connection between unicorns and the Lucis Trust is never explained from that point onward in the video, you’re supposed to just take it at face value that the unicorn is somehow a Luciferian symbol. But then what to expect from a video that cites an unnamed book claiming that unicorns and 666’s are part of the same category of esoteric symbolism connected to the New Age movement.
Citing Dr. Kathy Burns, who herself is a documented conspiracy theorist known for her reticence to cite her academic credentials in her own books despite supposedly having a doctorate in religious studies, the speaker claims that the unicorn is actually a modern symbol of the Antichrist, supposedly a universal symbol of the arrival of the Messiah and by proxy the arrival of a new age of peace (wait, how exactly is this anti-Christian?), which supposedly, means the arrival of a conqueror who will establish a new political order by force from above. This, apparently, is the Antichrist.
Of course, one immediate and rather glaring problem with that that I can think of is….well….
The Bible literally says that Jesus Christ is supposed to emerge as a divine warrior conquering the enemies of God at the end of time! This is very clear from the Book of Revelations, specifically chapter 19. Revelation 19 in particular makes it explicitly clear that Jesus will appear as a warrior figure, identifiable as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who will lead an army of angels to defeat and capture the forces of Satan. We get good sense this right out of the gate from the first six verses.
“I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war.
His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns.He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.
He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.
Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.
On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:
KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.”
– Revelations 19:11-16
Is this not a conqueror figure, who brings about his thousand-year reign through war? By the speaker in the video’s own logic, Jesus himself is the Antichrist! I guess that means the Rothschilds, who are directly implied to be the Antichrist family through juxtaposition, are actually the family of Jesus in this case. My mind is blown on so many levels by just how amazingly absurd this whole premise is, even by the logic we’re presented! So absurd was this that I was forced to laugh out loud after hearing it.
Oh, wait, never mind. It turns out the Antichrist is actually supposed to be Shiva, the Indian deity of destruction and transformation, because according to Nancy Hathaway (a supposed “occult author” who may or may not just be another New Age quack) the unicorn (again, Antichrist symbol here according to this batshit insane lady talking to us) is a symbol of transformation and the powers of destruction whose purpose is to destroy the old and establish the new, which is also rather overtly tied by the speaker to CERN just to throw in that other ridiculous theory that CERN are some sort of Hindu Satanists. Outside of the quote from Nancy Hathaway, the exact relation between the unicorn and Shiva is never actually explained, and a simple search offers up no actual evidence of any historical connection between the unicorn and Shiva, and there is very little that suggests the unicorn was a creature of significance in Indian mythology and religion, let alone as a symbol of destruction. Thus we are simply dealing in New Age pablum with no evidence to support it.
But 13 minutes in it somehow manages to get even more ridiculous. After a throwaway assertion that unicorns are a symbol of fertility going off of random online articles and the alchemical element of Mercury, we arrive at yet another aspect of this conspiracy theory: it turns out that unicorns are actually an occult symbol of the gay agenda teaching kids to reject their assigned gender and embrace transgenderism.
Yes. The unicorn is actually an occult symbol of transgenderism because of that motherfucking “Gender Unicorn” designed by Trans Student Educational Resources. This is actually a real take that someone spent 14 out of 17 minutes building up to in a video.
Apparently by transformation, they mean the transformation of sex and gender roles, the transformation of binary male and female into androgyny. And somehow I doubt this is what Nancy Hathaway intended by transformation by any stretch, so this is most likely just her extrapolating transsexual symbolism from a modern symbol that was most likely chosen without any input from Hathaway, or for that matter Manly P. Hall who the speaker immediately shifts gears to by saying that Hall viewed the unicorn’s horn as symbolic of the pineal gland, the “spiritual cognition center of the brain” (oh no, not this shit), and apparently a symbol of the illumined individual according to “the mysteries” who defends their doctrines with his horn, the flaming sword that portrudes from his head. That last detail, it goes without saying, sounds more like the angel protecting the Garden of Eden than the Antichrist. But, more importantly, what do the pineal gland, esoteric mysteries and fiery angelic swords have to do with transgenderism and modern progressive ideas about gender identity? This question that would logically follow from the exposition we’re dealt with is never answered, or even touched upon, at all within the video, which leads me to think that all of this is pulled out of the speaker’s multiple orifices. Literally the only explanation for the unicorn being a symbol of transgenderism is that god damned Gender Unicorn that TSER desgined, which was almost certainly designed without any esoteric context or input from some magicians.
Citing Carl Teichirb, yet another Christian conspiracy theorist ranting about the “globalists” and their “new world order”, the speaker claims that the unicorn as a symbol is closely tied to the Practicus ritual from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The speaker also claims that this Order was singularly responsible for the occult revival of the 20th century. Now it must be said that the Practicus ritual does indeed make reference to a “Unicorn of the Stars”, and the specific context of that grade is made crystal clear in Grade of Practicus.
You are qualified to receive in this Grade and — by the power to me entrusted — I now confer upon you the Mystical Title of Monokeros de Astris, which means the Unicorn from the Stars, signifying the imputed purity of soul and the restored virgin state which you have received in the ceremonial consecration of your desire part.
This is very explicitly a reference to the Christian connotations of virgin purity associated with the unicorn, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with Shiva or transsexualism, and it is never explained within the video how those concepts have anything to do with each other.
By the way, just as a brief aside, the video seems to reference a “winged unicorn” depicted at the Palace of Darius in Susa, located in Iran. The problem with this is that that’s not a unicorn, but in fact an aurochs – a species of cattle that once co-existed with humans and was the ancestor of modern cattle before being driven to extinction in the 17th century. In fact, you need only look at a side by side depiction of the aurochs from both Persia and Babylon to see that the winged animal in question is in fact meant to be an aurochs, not a unicorn.
On a tangent, the unicorn actually does make multiple appearances in the Bible as a strong and fearsome animal that is difficult to tame. However, the actual Hebrew name of the creature is “re’em”, and its identification as a “unicorn” is simply a product of the King James translation. The Hebrew word “re’em” is often translated as “wild ox” or “oryx”, but the description of the creature as a powerful and wild creature suggests that it likely refers to a wild species of cattle. Now this description seems somewhat different to the modern conception of a gentle and pure creature of peace, but it makes perfect sense in the context of the likely origin point of the myth of the unicorn: the Greek monoceros. This animal, like the re’em, is described by Pliny as “the fiercest animal” and said that it was impossible to capture one of them alive due to its sheer strength. Unlike the Christian conception of the unicorn, the monoceros was considered by the Greeks and Romans to be a real creature, the subject of natural history, rather than a mythical creature suited for mythology. But while the Biblical “unicorn” is actually a wild bull, likely an aurochs, Pliny the Elder said that the creature had the feet of an elephant, which combined with its singular horn suggests a rhinoceros (likely the Indian rhinoceros considering the many excursions to the Indian subcontinent undertaken by the Greeks and Romans), which came to be interpreted as the unicorn after a long period of tales and accounts getting lost in translation. Speaking of India, some claim that a one-horned creature depicted in seals that were excavated in Harappa, in what was the remains of the ancient Indus Valley civilization, is the earliest depiction of a unicorn. Considering the shape of the animal’s body very obviously resembles a bull and the way that the aurochs were depicted in Babylon and Persia, the animal is very likely to be a bull rather than a unicorn.
It is also worth noting that the unicorn’s great strength continued to be a theme in its character as it was transforming into the modern image of the unicorn. Like Pliny before him, Isidore of Seville in the 7th century described the unicorn as a very strong animal and having the ability to pierce any creature it attacks with its single horn while adding that that the unicorn is impossible to capture unless a certain trick is played on it: “If a virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and she bares her breast to it, all of its fierceness will cease and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus quieted is easily caught.”. It’s from this that the medieval Christian symbolism surrounding the creature develops, and after that the unicorn goes from being a dangerous beast that can’t be tamed (except by virgin breasts of course) to a gentle and magical creature that was essentially the animal symbol of Jesus Christ himself.
Anyways, after all that the speaker claims that the unicorn is supposed to be the symbol of an illuminated initiate and spiritual being and that this is the context for all of the unicorn symbolism she keeps seeing in supermarkets because she clearly never pays attention to what kids like or what market trends are. The symbolism of the unicorn as that of an initiate is true only in a very limited context, in that it is specific to Golden Dawn rites rather than universal symbolism, and even then the context of that illumination is defined not on some weird transgender Illuminati mumbo jumbo that the speaker pulled out of her vagina, but rather by already existing Christian symbolism about virginity. Apart from that, the symbol of the unicorn in general has barely anything to do with what the speaker is claiming it to be associated with.
Towards the end we get some drivel about how the Baileys wanted to expand the growth of a new world religion, which knowing them almost certainly means sort of banal and cynical but relatively benign New Age spiritualism rather than whatever sacrifical diabolism that the speaker seems to imagine, and it’s here that we come back to the central theme of the alleged unicorn-based inundation of society. The entire reason for the speakers retarded conspiracy theory is, in her words, “there is nothing rare or unique about a symbol that is being flaunted everywhere and overused more than toilet paper”, at which point I am inclined to point her in the direction of dragons. But at least here in Wales the dragon is a national symbol so its mass proliferation here is directly tied to national identity, unless of course that fact in itself is yet another conspiracy by the Rockerfellers to promote Satanism. Oh and did I mention that the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland? Were the Rockerfellers responsible for that as well? Do a cabal of Anti-Christian Jews (let’s not kid ourselves here, we all know what these theories really are) secretly control Scotland and are they planning to turn the country into a beacon of transsexual religion? More to the point though I must ask: what’s the point of going on about how a fucking fictitious animal isn’t rare or unique just because there’s lots of products bearing its image? What the hell kinds of fools should we be taken for with this tripe?
This theory, at its base, is incredibly weak, forced to draw together disparate symbolic interpretations and the writings of other conspiracy theorists who believe basically the same god damned thing as her and each other in order push this idea of the unicorn as some sort of mystic symbol of the New World Order and mystic initiation into its new religion based on concepts and themes that are otherwise unconnected to each other. It’s a hodge podge of Christian paranoia and New Age bullshit mashed together by a sense of bewilderment that market forces exist and that a mythical creature that has been embedded into the public consciousness as a symbol of goodness and purity for centuries would become a widespread product for girl things.
And, by the way, as a final note, I have mentioned this a few times but there is a recurring problem with the video and its central claim: the relation between all of these concepts of transformation, purity, esoteric initiation and illumination, gene editing, genetic engineering and transgenderism is never elaborated on sufficiently. You’re just supposed to take it as read that these ideas and the disparate sources for them are connected to each other, but without any explanation as to how this is the case. Hell, the Lucis Trust is mentioned once, is subtly referred to again, but their role in all this and their relation to unicorns (let alone why the name Lucifer Publishing Society is actually a sign of diabolical connotations) is never explained. The only reason that Jennifer Doudna’s work is thrown into all this is that one time where she mentions creating unicorns through gene editing, and we’re supposed to take that as symbolically relevant with no further elaboration. Frankly, the only way all of this makes sense is if you already agree with the general mode of conspiracy theory presented in Truthstream Media’s videos (or for that matter buy into all the same conspiratorial garbage that literally every Christian wackjob before this channel has been promoting for decades).
All in all, this is surely one of the most hilariously absurd and pointless things I’ve seen in a while and I’m amazed I had so much to write about it.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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