“Caught with Ourselves in the Net of Life and Time”: Our Spiritual Lives with Animals

On the first floor of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, an adult male skeleton is on display. Excavated in Galilee, the Natufian remains date anywhere from 10,500 to 8,300 BCE. Very close by his upper body lie the bones of a small dog. The man was buried on his side in a fetal position with one arm extended toward the dog’s curled skeleton. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to know the meaning of this particular burial, which could range from mutual affection during life to sympathetic destruction after death: the man died, so his dog was killed, too, to accompany him into the next world. But it is not difficult to sense that, no matter what the nature of their relationship, it was strong and deep, leaving these two enfolded even in death. “Until one has loved an animal,” wrote Anatole France, “a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”

Monotheistic theologies maintain that animals themselves do not have souls. Descartes monstrously held that animals are machines that cannot think and are incapable of feeling pain. Despite anti-cruelty regulations, the law still holds that animals are private property , or wards of the state. But the depth of our response to them reveals that we know otherwise. We experience a connection with them that is ancient and abiding. When they — mammals, reptiles, birds, insects — appear in huge numbers, we are astonished. And mixed with our awe or horror, there is perhaps a nostalgia for the primordial “swarming” of creatures during Earth’s earlier years: hundreds of pink flamingoes, balancing on elegantly thin legs, or thousands of stampeding bison, or millions of migrating monarch butterflies, or majestic heaps of braying sea lions on the rocks — even hordes of locusts destroying months of labor in a matter of minutes — may cause us to reflect, this was how it used to be. This was what our ancestors saw: this was the world they knew. In the words of Mary Oliver, this is the country of “original fire,” where the humpbacks breech and dive together in their “tonnage of barnacles and joy,” singing, crashing back into the sea. We think: My God, they are with us still. We have not yet annihilated them. This is as close as we can get to Paradise anymore.

Apart from their epiphanies en masse, individual animals have always been central players in human lives. Their idiosyncrasies affected us deeply from childhood ; this is not due to sentimentality, but is instead, as human ecologist Paul Shepard argued in his book The Others (1), because we need them to become fully human. And when they die, if we have known and cared for them, we are bereft. My older daughter still wordlessly mourns the crippled baby squirrel she rescued three years ago at the foot of a tree from our Samoyed. We couldn’t find a trace of the squirrel’s mother; but had she ever wanted him in the first place? In shifts, every four hours, through five long days and nights, we nursed little Shadow using a medicine dropper filled with a ridiculously expensive formula for orphaned kittens. Still, one autumn afternoon, for no apparent reason, he wrapped his tiny question-mark tail around himself in his nest of old socks and stopped crying. Using one of the nicer old socks as a shroud, we buried him in the backyard. That was very sad — but, as it turned out, not over. Now none of our family sees squirrels in the same way. We know what their very young look and smell like, and how their piercing cries sound; we know how they cling like burrs to sweaters and how they passionately guzzle their milk between slender, clawed feet. We know because we tried to parent one of their tribe. As a result of our brief intimacy with Shadow, and our disproportionate, aching sorrow at his death, all squirrels weirdly changed for us from furry pests into relatives.

Counselors at Angell Memorial Hospital in Boston maintain that the grief we feel at the death of beloved animals runs to the same depths that it does when our core people die (2). That this grief is often unacceptable does not help human beings to deal with it. Our hearts, apparently, do not know Darwin, nor do they honor evolutionary principles that make the human self” (3) valuable and the animal self inconsequential. “It was only a cat.” (A frog, a gerbil, a parakeet, a millipede, curled around a cucumber slice.) Such hierarchies crumble when an animal we love passes on. The word “totem” comes from the Ojibwa “ototeman.” This is a verbal phrase meaning “he is a relative of mine.” In totemic societies, the animal is not merely a fetish or a symbol: he is a relative of mine. The cat who died last week was a crabby old uncle, or a beloved little brother, or my heart’s companion. The relationship was rich and real, although we were of different species. Cat’s death, and the loss of the communion between us, is unbearable. Contra mindless media rhetoric and much popular psychology, the wound left by Cat’s absence will not “heal” in my lifetime, any more than will the wound left by any death: change, but not heal. “Getting another cat” will not salve the original wound any better than would “getting another brother.”

This is hard to face, and harder still to articulate, given our inhibitions. The denial of this almost universal experience contributes to the alienation we feel in the postmodern world, our digitalized, over-stimulated, oddly hysterical society. Our relationship to animals is one of our anchors to the earth, to ourselves and to the spirit world. Relegated either to the safe world of domestic pet ownership or to the managed brutality of factory farming, that relationship has somehow lost its cultural legitimacy. Yet it has not diminished in its power. We are born with animals, live among them, die as they do. In John Mercer’s poem, a deep ocean sunfish, trapped in a shallow pond without ruddering tail, and without any real hope, somehow escapes death, somehow is swept back to the open sea to live another day. The weird flopping fish is caught up, along with his human witnesses, in processes over which neither man nor beast has any control. Those watching know this, know that they and the sunfish are both perishable, “caught,” as Henry Beston wrote, “in the net of life and time.” The “accident of his living” reminds the watchers that their own release from wicked death that day, that week, any time, is just as arbitrary as his.

How old are these associations in human experience? The new locus classicus for studying animals in prehistoric religion is the Chauvet Cave, discovered in Southern France in 1995 by three amateur speleologists — whose initial response to what they saw inside on the walls was to kneel. Chauvet represents the oldest collection of animal art known, with most of the paintings radiocarbon-dated to 31,000 BCE. These fluid, astonishing images of lions, bears, horses, rhinos, aurochs, wooly mammoths and even an owl testify to an sophisticated knowledge of, and intense preoccupation with, animals. Hunting magic? Perhaps. Hunted animals are painted here, as one might expect, but so are carnivorous predators, animals who were not stalked and eaten but rather were themselves hunters. On a hanging triangular rock in the most remote chamber of the cave is drawn a figure half-human, half-bison, a kind of proto-shaman.

Oddly, the Chauvet cave was apparently never inhabited by humans, but only by bears, both before the paintings were made, as bear nests and bear claw marks under their surfaces attest, but afterwards as well, as there are claw marks scratched over the paintings. At some point in time, a bear skull was deliberately placed at the edge of a fallen stone from the ceiling of the cave next to the Panel of Horses. At least thirty bear skulls without skeletons seemed to have been arranged around the circumference of the stone. Was this a bear altar?

The Chauvet Cave also shows a feature known from other Paleolithic sites, namely reduplication —backs, bellies, horns, or entire individuals drawn eight or nine times, not just re-traced, but drawn with each new line slightly separated from its predecessor. Were the artists trying to depict a herd? Or motion, a stampede? Or, as some suggest, were the artists trying ritually to renew the animals they drew with such care, so that the food source might not be exhausted? (4) Does the repeated portrait magically “re-create” or resurrect its subject, the slain animal?

We know that the Chauvet artists hunted animals. But did they love them? Fear them? Worship them? Do these murals belong to the realm of religion? If we accept a broad definition of religion as systematic thought and action that orients human experience to metaphysical powers through cultural forms, I think there can be no doubt on this point. The cave offers us a map both pragmatic and spiritual. It reveals part of the observable world of our ancestors: a world lost to us, peopled by animal powers.

In indigenous cultures, it is still keenly observed how animals can move outside human physical constraints. To invoke them in ritual, to become eagle or elk in dance, or wolf in healing trance, like the Chauvet cave bison-man, makes it possible for a person to gain these extra-human powers for herself. But now we are past short-term metamorphosis and into a world in which we may not be as comfortable. This world-view says that human beings and animals can turn into one another because they share the same essential nature. Bear with White Paw, a Sioux, commented in the early 20th century, “The bear has a soul like ours, and his soul talks to mine in my sleep and tells me what to do.” (5) In fact, many cultures see animals as metamorphosed human beings. Differences were not always so fixed as they are now. Consider the Inuit words preserved by the Dane Knud Rasmussen: “In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. The human mind had mysterious powers. A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences. It might suddenly come alive and what people wanted to happen could happen — all you had to do was say it. Nobody could explain this: That’s the way it was.” The inua, the human essence of any animal, is shown over and again in the art of circumpolar peoples.(6) Wooden doors open in Alaskan Yup’ik ceremonial masks of fox or bear to show the human face within.

Henry Beston’s concept of animal species as “other nations,” paralleling ours, is mirrored in visionary traditions throughout northern native America, as in the famous childhood dream of the Oglala Sioux leader Black Elk: “I was taken away from this world into a vast tipi, which seemed to be as large as the world itself, and painted on the inside were every kind of four-legged being, winged being, and all the crawling peoples. The peoples that were there in that lodge, they talked to me, just as I am talking to you.”(7) The uncanny idea of bugs as “crawling peoples,” of animals as having their own societies is by no means limited to non-literate or animistic religions. The Qur’a–n, for example, refers to animal species as “communities,” as in Su–rah 6:38, where Alla–h tells believers: “There is not an animal (that lives) on the earth, nor a being that flies on its wings, but (forms part of) communities (ummam) like you.”

In his famous work Totemism, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that animals are “good to think”:(8) in other words, human beings often define their own kinship, values, or laws in terms of animal species. For human children, animals, while “good to think,” also stand for themselves: in their own right, animals are peers, friends, enemies, or mysteries. They are as vitally important to children as other human beings are, and the child seems to require their presence. Even when stuffed animals are realistically made, children turn them into little people in their imaginative play. Perhaps there is a reason for this. Children’s stories around the world echo a kind of yearning for that lost Inuit age when animals and human beings could indeed speak the same language, and co-existed as equals.(9) In these stories, the child as hero or as reader is usually the symbolic center of the picture of peace, as in the Isaianic vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the lion with the calf, “and a little child shall lead them.”(10)

Paul Shepard calls the “profound, inescapable need for animals” part of a critical stage in children’s psychological development.(11) Shepard argues that “ecstatic involvement” with animals is essential for the child. “By pretending that animals speak to one another, he imposes on them a pseudo-humanity which, although illusory, is the glue of real kinship.” As observable, living, co-inhabitants of the world that are like the child but different from her and also different from one another, they help her mentally to create the cosmos, to map terrain, and to begin to establish identity.

Interestingly, science is beginning to ratify what traditional religions and children everywhere have always known: animals are not just identical members of a group channeling, say “rabbithood” or “seagull-ness,” but are instead individuals, as distinct from one another as we are. Maybe this is a disturbing idea. Animal personality research reveals that not only creatures “higher” on the evolutionary scale, like monkeys and cows, but also those “lower” invertebrates, such as stickleback fish or fruit flies, manifest wide ranges of temperament. In the Seattle Aquarium , Giant Pacific octopus Mikala is passive and moody ; Achilles is aggressive and jealous of anyone who pays attention to Mikala; Leisure Suit Larry is a chronic groper of female marine biologists and videographers, and turns bright red when his tentacles are rebuffed; Emily Dickinson is shy and dislikes change. Various personality types are not only manifest within animal populations, even the ones we think of as robotic swarms, but also, mirroring human types, tend to remain consistent for each individual in a variety of situations. So what we have called the anthropomorphizing of animals by children — their love for that rabbit or their knowledge of that seagull — may all along have been something more like the recognition of different family members.

Shepard goes on to argue that animal lives are also metaphors for the transgressive and ambiguous psychology of adolescence. Then, he writes, “in maturity, [animals] are the perfect tutors for . . . adult realities; metamorphosis, birth, puberty, healing, courtship, fertility and protection.” Participation in animal nature through religious dance or vision used to allow mature human beings to be part of the larger cosmos. In industrialized societies we encourage the childhood stage of Shepard’s model. But the adolescent stage is lost to all but a few, as in the notorious love of teenage girls for horses. And we have most surely lost the value of animals in our adult spiritual lives. Shepard laments this. “The bearless cosmos deprives us of personal experience of the sacred paradigm, substituting for it an abstract, verbal exegesis. . . . The carrying of a positivistic, literal attitude toward animals into the adult sphere marks the failure of initiation and maturity in human life. . . . Our dreams, however, remain true to a different world from that in which we now live.”(12) In myth and ritual, creatures were the magic ones, the messengers, the bearers of omens. The liver of slaughtered sheep was the forecasting device of the ancient Near East, and the carapace of the tortoise that of Bronze Age China, but living birds are ubiquitous oracles. The highly intelligent raven, for example, was credited with knowledge of the future from ancient Ireland to Tibet and across the Bering Strait into the Pacific Coast. So in our dreams, animals may appear to warn, to heal, to show us some pain we are carrying, to carry that pain for us. The dream animal, a divine being, wants something: wants to do something for or to the dreamer, or wants to communicate. In other words, as adults, it is only our dreams left to remind us of our original sacred connection to animals.

The affinity between children and animals has probably contributed to a persistent tendency in the history of religions known as developmentalism. Developmentalist theory posits that religions have “evolved” from theological naïvité or crudity to theological sophistication. The bigger the role that nature, but particularly that animals, played in a given religion, the more likely it was up until recently to be taken as literally, “childish.”(1) Animal gods, hunting rituals, shamanic possession, or covenant through sacrifice were seen as atavisms — survivals, throwbacks to the Stone Age: primitive and immoral. It is also strongly influenced by Freud, for whom all religious belief was the neurotic sublimation of unresolved infantile conflicts and desires. In Totem and Taboo, Freud called any separation from animals “still as foreign to the child as it is to the savage or primitive man.”(1) For Freud, true maturity, “outgrowing” childhood, would entail shedding our need for both gods and animals. Highly advanced civilizations with animal-gods, like ancient Egypt, stand as stark challenges to this calculus.

We may know of the sacred cows of Hinduism, the adventuring spider Kwaku Anansi of the Ashanti people, the smeared blood of the paschal lamb of Exodus, and think we know how animals are valued in the various religions of the world. But things are always more complex than they seem. Cultures that sacrificed animals such as the Celtic held them in far more knowledgeable reverence than many non-sacrificing cultures like our own. Eastern traditions teach reincarnation; in the Ja–taka tales we learn of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisattva water buffalo, an elephant, or a monkey. Along with Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism teach ah=imsa–, the radical principle of non-violence toward all living things, and so are seen as more compassionate than Abrahamic traditions where only human beings are made in the image of God. But the Jain version of ah=imsa–, seemingly infinitely compassionate, may seem infinitely cruel after one has seen non-intervention in action in Jain “hospitals” in India for dying animals as they are allowed suffer through karmic residue. As for the Abrahamic traditions, a text such as Genesis 1:20-28 that is excoriated by many as anthropocentric and oppressive to animals may reveal instead a divine mandate for human stewardship of non-human creatures. In the Bible, it is Balaam’s she-ass, not Balaam, who can see the angel blocking the road, and God is a mother eagle stirring her nest. The Talmud tells how Leviathan plays with God in the sea every afternoon because he is the only creature big enough to do so. The great redactor of the Mishnah, Judah ha-Nasi, was afflicted by the angels with kidney stones for thirteen years because he refused sanctuary to a calf on its way to kosher slaughter who hid under his robes. He was only healed by the same irate angels when he stopped his maid from sweeping a nest of weasels out the door. The ox, donkey, and sheep blew their warm breath on the shivering Christ child in Bethlehem and so, legend says, can speak at the stroke of midnight each Christmas eve. An Islamic h==adi–th tells of the spider who spun a web across the cave’s mouth to save Muh=ammad and his wife Aisha from the pursuing Quraysh, and another story of the little green lizard who was the first to utter the blessing of peace upon the prophet, clinging to his robes in devotion as he walked in the desert. Animals in all of these traditions, Eastern and Abrahamic, are spiritual players in their own right, with their own relationships to the divine.(13) In the words of Jesus, not one sparrow falls to the ground without God’s awareness: “not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” (Lk 12:6).

Awareness of animals as subjects of their own lives, lives that are value to heaven, is for any person a kind of initiation. In a legend of the Gitxsan people from the Canadian Pacific Northwest, a boy who will not stop shooting squirrels is returned by the chief of squirrels to his family as a skeleton hung in a tree. When he is miraculously sung back to life through sacrifice and fasting, the resurrected boy orders the flesh of the squirrels he hunted to be burned, thus releasing them to the next world. He becomes a great shaman whose name is Squirrel, and he sings: “Ia heiaha a, heia’aya negwa iaha!" This means: “I become accustomed to this side; I become accustomed to the other side.” “This side” is this world. “The other side” is the land of the spirits and animal powers.(14) Because of the squirrels, he lived in both. Due to the distance we now feel from animals, due to our unfamiliarity with them, initiation into their reality is even harder for us to undertake. Yet the deeper we encounter the animal nature that is ours, and the more we accept the human nature that is theirs, the greater our wisdom will be. We will see the world as a place of gathered subjectivities, of consciousness that extends from our children to bedbugs and octopi. We will understand that we and they constitute, as Thomas Berry says, “a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects.” The implications of this I cannot myself parse for you, because they have only just begun to dawn on me.

What of our Natufian man from Galilee, buried with his arm reaching to his little dog? The deep rapport still clinging after twelve millenia to the bones of these two interlocked beings must surely be something charged, something holy, something at which we can only guess. But it is something that still reaches into the depths of the human heart and reminds us that our lives and theirs have never been separate. Kimberley C. Patton

Footnotes

1. Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).

2. See, among other studies, Wallace Sife’s acclaimed The Loss of A Pet: A Guide to Coping with the Grieving Process When a Pet Dies (Stafford, Australia: John Wiley & Sons, Howell Publishing, 1998).

3. Gene Myers, Children and Animals: Social Development and Our Connection to Other Species (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), p. 165.

4. Alexander Marshack, “Images of the Ice Age,” Archaeology 48:4 (1995): 28-39.

5. Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music, Smithsonian Institution, Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D.C.), 1918.

6. See especially Agayuliyararput: Kegginaqutm Kangiit-llu [Our Way of Making Prayer: Yup’ik Masksand the Stories They Tell], ed. Anne Fienup-Rirordan, trans. Marie Meade (Seattle and London: Anchorage Museum of History and Art in association with the University of Washington Press, 1996).

7. Interview with Joseph Epes Brown, PARABOLA VIII: 2 (1983), “Animals,” p. 7.

8. Lévi Strauss, Claude, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 89.
Particularly in the American continents, there was and is a strong belief, as noted by Joseph Epes Brown, in archetypal “essences” appearing in animal form, that not only guard or even own real animals but are also available through dreams and vision quests. The Cree elder Raining Bird explains, “Each animal has its own Master Spirit which owns all the animals of its kind . . . so all the animals are the children of the Master Spirit that owns them. It is just like a large family.” (8)

9. Things do not move smoothly for a child raised in the West from “primitive” identification with animals to calm Darwinian hierarchy. Melson is quick to point out that later trajectories regarding animals are determined, not “natural,” and are often highly difficult for children to parse: “Cultural messages are considerably more complex than an initial fusion of child with animal, followed by a simple assertion of human supremacy at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder. Children grapple with a complicated, often contradictory, mix of social codes governing animals and their treatment. There are creatures incorporated as family members, stamped out as pests, saved from extinction, and ground into Big Macs. The result is that children often mirror societal unease with culturally sanctioned uses of animals. . . .” Melson, Why the Wild Things Are, pp. 20-21.

10. The painting by the eighteenth century Quaker painter Edward Hicks, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” which charmingly represents the vision of Isaiah 11:6 that Andrew Linzey courageously undertakes as a literal eschatological promise, one that describes the transfigured future. It is also the cover design chosen by Gail F. Melson for Why the Wild Things Are.

11. Paul Shepard, “The Ark of the Mind,” PARABOLA VIII: 2 (1983): 54-59.

12. Speaking of the substitution of the resurrected Jesus for the ceremonially hunted bear who is born again in the spring is, according to Shepard, a collective psychic disaster. He writes, “Hunger for the wild animal’s significance is reflected . . . in the vicarious imagery of decorative arts, virtuoso and eccentric originality, pets, and media stereotypes.”

13. See Kimberley C. Patton, “‘He Who Sits in the Heavens Laughs’: Recovering Animal Theology in the Abrahamic Traditions,” Harvard Theological Review 93:4 (2000): 401-34.

14. Michael D. Blackstock, Faces in the Forest: First Nations Art Created on Living Trees (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), pp. 57-58.