The Great Chain of Being that dominated Western thought throughout the Middle Ages made human beings both the highest of the animals and the lowest of the gods. The human body was like that of the animals: corporeal, sensate, and mortal. But the human spirit or intellect resembled the gods: incorporeal, rational, and immortal. The great surge of ethnological and biologic data and theories from the 16th century on tended to undermine this point of view. New types of human beings were encountered (e.g., the “savage”) who seemed to their first describers closely akin to the brute; new biologies were proposed that placed humans wholly within the animal kingdom, merely as one species among many, and postulated their descent from animals. More recently, psychology and ethology have emphasized the irrational (or brutish) elements of human beings and suggested close analogies between animal and human behaviour. Since the 18th century humanity has been defined in a new, nonbiological way: as a cultural being rather than as the inhabitant of a natural realm. There have been many forms of this dichotomy: a human is the only being who has a language, uses symbols, employs tools, freely plays, is self-conscious, or possesses a history. Humans, in short, create themselves as cultural beings in distinction to animals or plants, which are created by their environment or heredity. These questions of human identity and the way humans resemble or differ from other sentient beings may be found in every culture and during every age.
Human beings tend to draw boundaries, both conceptually and practically. Not only does their existence demand that they find a position in a complex system of relationships, but also their social life and biological survival depend on the making of distinctions. To speak with the gods, to have relations with another human, to take possession of another’s territory, or to eat this or that plant or animal involves individuals in a host of decisions upon which their existence depends. One of the chief resources for answering such questions is that of the myths and legends mapping the world in which individuals dwell.
Myths and legends concerning animals and plants employ a wide variety of motifs but express a limited number of relationships. Humans, animals, and plants may stand in a relationship of (1) opposition or difference, (2) descent, (3) mixture, (4) transformation, (5) identity, or (6) similarity. These are determined by and expressive of the total worldview of a people. The hunter, for example, has a different understanding of the animal from that of the agriculturalist or pastoralist; the tuber planter has a different view of plants from that of the cultivator of grains. Even within these broad categories sharp differences occur. The Kalahari San of southern Africa, who, alone, naked, and crawling on the ground, blends in with his environment in order to kill an animal for food, reveals a way of looking at the human relation to nature different from that of the Masai tribesman of eastern Africa, who, costumed and walking upright as part of a line of chanting hunters in order to slay a lion as a symbol of his manhood, stands forth visibly as the ruler of the world through which he moves. The Cretan bull dancer of ancient Mediterranean culture, playing with the animal by somersaulting over his back, expresses a conception of the human relation to this powerful animal and the forces of fecundity and death that it symbolizes different from that of the Spanish bullfighter who slays the beast. Relationships of opposition or difference
The fundamental religious boundary is that between the sacred and the profane, the sacred being conceived of as a sphere of power superior to or opposed to the mundane. That which is sacred may be either creatively or chaotically powerful. If the former, it is primarily expressed in creation myths; if the latter, in demonic traditions. Cosmogonies
The notion of a creator deity in animal or plant form is comparatively rare. There are stories of animals, birds, or insects creating the world and of creators with animal attributes or animal companions, but these are isolated traditions. Even in the widespread motif of the birth of the world from a cosmic egg there is rarely the notion of a bird laying or incubating the egg (the most notable exception is the world egg laid by a beautiful bird in the beginning of the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland). There are, however, a number of cosmogonic (origin of the world) motifs that employ a fundamental animal or plant symbolism: the cosmic tree that supports and nourishes the world; the earth surrounded by a serpent or supported on a turtle or on some other animal’s back; the features of the present world created by the actions of some primeval animal—e.g., lakes and rivers caused by the digging of an animal or hills raised by the flapping wings of a bird. Sacrificial motifs abound, such as the world being formed from the cut-up parts of an animal or restored by its primordial sacrifice.
A number of important traditions associated with animals occur in dualistic creation accounts in which animals oppose creation, acting as a foil to the creator, or creation is accomplished by combat between the creator and animal monsters representative of chaos who must be slain or bound before the world can be established. The widely distributed earth-diver myth is the most familiar example of dualistic creation (see above Myths of origin).
Other oppositions occur with respect to the creation of the human species (see below Relationships of descent). Perhaps the most frequent myth of the origin of death is that of the “perverted message” or “two messengers.” In one, an animal is sent with a message from the creator that humans are immortal, but the animal alters the message to state that humans must die. In the other, two animals are sent, one with the word that humans are immortal, one with the message that humans will die. A mishap occurs to the first, and only the fatal message arrives.
In some traditions, there is a union of disparate features or opposites in a given mythic being. This does not express a chaotic hybrid but rather a creative totality (the “coincidence of opposites”). Though most frequently expressed by androgyny (having both male and female characteristics), either in traditions of an androgynous creator or first human, the theme is present in some animal and plant traditions as well (e.g., the emergence of the human species from the androgynous rīvās plant in Iranian mythology). Although it occurs in cosmogonic settings (e.g., the tree that unites heaven and earth), motifs of the reconciliation of animal and plant opposites more usually occur in paradisiacal imagery that promises the harmonious mingling of realms (e.g., the “peaceable kingdom” of Isaiah 11:6–8 or Virgil’s Eclogue IV). Animal and plant deities
Belief in sacred plants or animals is widespread. Common to all of these is the notion that the plant or animal is a manifestation of the sacred and thus possesses the dual attributes of beneficence (in healing, hunting, or agricultural magic) or danger (as expressed in taboos against their destruction or consumption). More rarely, gods are believed to have animal (theriomorphic) or plant (phytomorphic) forms. Influenced by ancient Greek disparagement of contemporary Egyptian religion and Judeo-Christian antipathy to “idolatry,” Western scholars have tended to speak of such traditions as “animal worship,” although it is usually not the animal itself but rather the sacred power revealed by the animal that is being revered. Other deities possess animal or plant attributes or are incarnations associated with particular animals or plants. Here the animals or plants possess a symbolic function. Certain qualities are associated with certain species (e.g., wisdom with the owl, strength with the lion, immortality with the eagle, inspiration with the grape), and the god’s possession of these qualities is indicated by his being identified with the appropriate animal or plant. In other traditions, natural phenomena are associated with the actions of certain species (e.g., wind as a bird, lightning as a snake), and the god who controls such phenomena is identified with the species. At times, the animal or plant achieves a divine identity of its own—e.g., the thunderbird or the earthquake monster. Hunting and agricultural deities