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Mythical Animals as Symbols in Cultural Narratives: Then and Now

 

The intentional use of animal figures is part of a long tradition in the art and literature of all cultures. Animal imagery dates back to cave painting times when the desired success of the hunt and the universal concerns over sexuality and fertility were often the subject of creative expression and symbolism. Comparing serpents and birds, old and new, shows how greatly the appearance of animals in contemporary cultural discourse differs from traditional animal myths. Ecologically, our connection with nature is now a matter of the domination over nature.

 

We are hard-wired to live in a world which, in evolutionary terms, is disappearing rapidly as we reshape the planet. At the level of subconscious, right in the brain stem part of our being, we are all biologically programmed to live side by side with animals in a symbiotic relationship. We have evolved primary instincts, manifested in such behaviour as the startle reflex to the sudden hissing sound of a snake, which were once critical survival mechanisms. However, as a phenomenal evolutionary success, smart homo sapiens learned to ignore instinctual and subconscious programming. By developing agriculture and animal husbandry, science and technology replaced the hunting and gathering mode of existence. We evolved the ability to manipulate the environment and make tools, especially for weaponry and defence, resulting in the domination and decimation of the animal kingdom.

 

Contrasting Ancient and Modern Animal Symbols

 

Our connection with animals and nature needs to be reinforced by myth, but increasingly our cultural symbols are more commercial than spiritual. Living in a decaying natural environment and alienated from animals, we surround ourselves with humanized animal caricatures. Sometimes they are real, like fashionable poodles or trained Chimpanzees, but more often they are like Mickey Mouse. How do we view animals today?  Lovingly?  Hungrily? Pitifully?  Humourously?  What do we normally see?  Crows, dogs, cats, little else beyond television caricatures and specimens in the zoo!  We eat them, wear their skins, race them, kill them for sport but, in the greater part of the industrialized world, we do not naturally coexist with other animals. Our original state of nature, our evolutionary past, was once a reality that is now only imaginatively recreated in such classical forms as the biblical `Garden of Eden' and the Grecian `Golden Age.' Such literary archetypes are a mythical means of escaping modern life and our growing alienation from nature and animals.

 

The Greeks were well along the road of civilization, and they had put much distance between themselves and the natural world. Animals were domesticated and eaten, raced and hunted for sport, used for ploughing, transportation, and, significantly, sacrifice. Apart from this last detail, the Greek attitude towards animals was much like ours today. In the iconography of Zeus there is a sharp-eyed white eagle which functions as an effective metaphor for the omniscient sight of the great one. On an instinctive level an eagle is neither threatening like a serpent nor appealing like a lamb. A hint of Jungian archetype exists in the mental connection between the eagle as a bird of flight and as a symbol of far-sightedness or freedom. Perhaps that is why the symbol is suitable for Zeus, the all-powerful.

 

The fear of snakes is of primal importance, and that may partly explain why serpents so commonly serve as opponents for Greek heroes. The two snakes crawling towards the baby Heracles cause him, perhaps instinctively and unconsciously, to instantly throttle them. We understand this reaction. What we might not know is that this first heroic act parallels the ritual initiation underwent by Athenian youths in their early military conscription.  For these youths Heracles was no doubt an inspiration. On a more philosophical level, the defeat of the serpents not only validates Heracles' heroic and masculine status, it also enshrines the supremacy of the human over the animalistic, civilization over barbarism, law over chaos, reason over passion.

 

To the modern reader familiar with the Bible, Zeus’s arch enemy, Typhon, inevitably suggests the snake in Eden. Typhon is half-human and half-snake. Our reptilian part of the brain quivers at the image. To enhance this visceral impact, Typhon is described as having a hundred vipers coiled around him. Strands of subconscious meaning automatically accompany this image. Typhon is serpent-like and is therefore, like the biblical snake, an instinctively life-threatening adversary, and its destruction by Zeus has numerous possible meanings: it explained why Zeus rules the heavens; it reassured the Greeks that divine law ultimately reigns over monstrous chaos; it is part of a ritual or rite of passage; it justifies the domination of human over animals and nature. This last point finds parallel in Genesis where the world is reduced to a garden where we are the gardeners. Likewise, since both the biblical and Classical serpent have, at least to a Freudian or Jungian, sexual significance, Zeus can be said to have conquered animal passion.

 

However, applying Hebrew theology to Greek mythology is historically inappropriate. Animal symbols convey meaning that is specific to the ethos in which they were created. Looking back on a particular animal in myth as a historical symbol of a successful hunt or as part of a fertility folktale will not reanimate the creative impulse and original meaning. Singling out historical or folktale elements of an animal figure will not yield a complete understanding of that figure because the required cultural elements are missing for the outsider. Time's linear sequence acts as a cognitive barrier to the understanding of what a mythical animal might have meant to its creator. Some collective archetypes, a hissing snake for example, remains meaningful regardless of time and place. Instinctual and subconscious responses to lunging poisonous reptiles are probably in line with those that have been felt by humans for millennia, but the same cannot be said with the cultural and moral associations attached to many animal symbols.

 

Interpreting Animal Symbols

 

To uncover ancient mythical meaning we can use inter-textual comparisons to see how a snake or whale tends to function in any and all myths, regardless of chronological or ethnological considerations. Otherwise, much of what we read into a myth may not have been intended by the culture in which it was produced. Retrospectively, and with a built-in bias, we construct idiosyncratic theories of how a myth came about as, say, an explanation for natural phenomenon, a moral exemplum or a mythologized ritual. Only when a story comes alive within its original context is it fully functional and understood. Then the animal symbol is no longer mythical but truly spiritual, like the Eden serpent and Moby Dick still are for many.

 

We can consider an animal symbol like the timeless serpent literally, as denoting a mere taxonomic division or a set distinct details (including the fact that a snake bites), or we can see the serpent figuratively, as a disgusting, Satanic creature. The denotations of an animal's name are empirical and depend upon our knowledge and the availability, or, increasingly, the lack of, accurate models of comparison. What determines the more subjective, figurative connotations associated with an animal is an ever-changing thing called culture. For example, a `shark' is a large and voracious sea-fish but for those who have seen Jaws the word evokes a monster of mythical proportions. Movies and other commercial products are sold using animal figures to capitalize on the various culturally assigned meanings an animal image has to people. In the Dove Soap ad campaign the word `dove' to us,  though perhaps not to an Amazonian, has the appealing connotation of freedom which, combined with the subliminal attraction of a cute, non-threatening animal, makes the image an effective trademark.

 

In the Bible animal figures rely on pre-conditioned instincts and associations to function as rhetorical devices for religious persuasion. The word `serpent' denotes a potentially poisonous reptile and instinctively evokes the intellectual and emotional responses of fear and disgust. Such negative reactions serve a didactic purpose by aligning the reader against the snake which is therefore an appropriate metaphor for the morally poisonous Satan. Once a biblical narrative associates a religious connotation with a compatible denotation, whether attractive like a lamb or repelling like a serpent, the animal becomes symbolic and thereafter functions to amplify or simplify highly sophisticated moral or religious precepts.

 

Animal Symbols Losing Cultural Significance

 

Cartoons and books are modern sources of fictional animal figures which, like the Mickey Mouse and Moby Dick, are assigned abstract significance accessible only to those within that particular cultural milieu. For example, we all know Mickey Mouse as a character and a personified animal but an Amazon Indian might think the bizarre talking mouse a god of sorts for North Americans, clearly a wrong association yet not unlike those we might make upon an obscure hermeneutical analysis of an Amazon’s animal tattoo. Who knows what an aboriginal might make of Melville’s whale. And imagine a future critic trying to guess what Moby Dick literally and figuratively meant to Herman Melville when whales are extinct and when their cultural and historical significance exists only in books, not in anyone’s actual life. If the symbolism of Melville's whale can diminish in perhaps a century, it is difficult to imagine how important truly mythical animals were to those who originally created them thousands of years ago.

 

Comparing, say, two lions, the Nemean one vanquished by Heracles, with the Disney figure of the Lion King, we notice that the former lion is a monster, the latter a hero. This reversal in roles reflects a change in attitude towards animals and nature. The Greeks still faced a physical threat from wild animals like lions, but for most of us that would only be true for those rare hikes in the deep woods. Instead, an increasing alienation from real animals creates a need in us for animal stories that justify our dominion over the wild and untamed, like Jaws, or that portray humanized caricatures, like Bambi, in sympathetic way in order to reaffirm our diminishing connection with the world of nature. In Hollywood, sensationalism and sentimentalism combine for entertainment and escape, hardly heroic enterprises. What is worse, our need to avoid unpleasant and unnatural aspects of our lives makes us prone to powerful commercial forces of exploitation.

 

There is not much symbolic depth in the caricatures of Jaws or Bambi. They lack the cultural resonance of a Classical or biblical serpent. In part this is because they have little if any literary context and thus no allusive richness, and in part because of the incoherent variety and use of animal figures for sales and spectacles. Electronic images flicker before our eyes faster and faster with less and less actual meaning.  We are losing the ability, as a society, to create mythically effective symbols, to imagine, create and interact with animal icons.