Mastery
The rule of the Master of Animals was a long and stable one—the longest and most stable, in fact, in the history of humankind. Though life in the age of the hunter-collectors was far from perfect (indeed, by our modern standards it was often difficult, brutal, and short), from a spiritual perspective it had a certain essential healthiness to it: one that has inspired a note of wistful envy in many of those who have studied it from afar. “For a long period,”1 wrote Edward Carpenter, “the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There must have been a period resembling a Golden Age—some condition at any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet ‘golden.’”
Carpenter (who isn’t too fashionable these days, but who was as valuable a source to me in my unraveling of the spiritual story of early humanity as Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and other, better-known writers), wrote those words in 1921, and though it may ring a little romantic to our ears, the contemporary nature writer Paul Shepard agrees with him. For some three million years, Shepard writes, “humankind was few2 in number, sensitive to the seasons and other life, humble in attitude toward the earth, and comfortable as one species among many. Group size was ideal for human relationships and human freedom, health was good despite (or perhaps because of!) high infant mortality rates, diet was in accord with our omnivorous physiology and sapient flexibility, and our ecology was stable and nonpolluting.”
But by the end of the Paleolithic period, some ten thousand years ago, this easy balance between humans and the rest of nature began to slip. In Western Europe, with the warming of the climate and the retreat of the glaciers, humans emerged from the caves that had housed them during the centuries of the last ice age (during which all the great masterworks of cave art were created) and began to live out in the open. Wherever the glaciers retreated, securing game became much, much easier, and it appears that over the centuries that ease gave rise to a certain amount of ritual lassitude on the part of the ancient hunters. Wasteful hunting techniques in which whole herds of animals were driven off cliffs just to secure the meat from one or two of them took a severe toll on animal populations. In Europe, Russia, and eventually the Americas, entire species of prehistoric mammals—like the cave bear, the woolly mammoth, and the giant sloth—went extinct, in large part because of human predation.
Then—sometime after 10,000 BCE—came the invention of agriculture. Just as they had studied the movements and habits of animals for millennia, so humans now began to study plants. What they discovered was a whole new set of spiritual laws. No longer were the Master of Animals and the game herds he commanded the primary focus of the myths people told and the rituals they performed. Instead a new mythology grew up, centered on a new spiritual mystery: the one that occurred when a seed fell into the earth, died, and reemerged into the light.
As the spiritual life of the hunting societies had been focused on a supernatural figure that was at once human and animal, the planting societies were focused on one that was at once human and vegetable. Like the seed plants on which his life was modeled, this vegetable god was a child of his mother the earth (out of which he grew) and his father the sky (which nourished him with rain and sunlight). Also like those plants, his life was intimately tied to the cycle of the seasons. As the year turned and winter gave way to spring, the ancient agrarian festivals celebrated the miraculous birth of this vegetable god to his mother, the goddess of the earth. As the crops thickened in the summer months, stories were told of his youth and early manhood. Then, in the fall—when the days shortened and the time of harvest arrived—stories were told of his early and tragic death.
Winter was the time when this god of vegetation was most thoroughly and painfully absent. Dead and buried within the cold body of his mother, he became little more than a memory to the peoples who had celebrated him in the seasons of his strength. But just when the days were at their shortest and it seemed as if the vegetation would never again return, a shift occurred. Slowly but surely, the days grew longer. The sun grew in strength, the rains fell … and the vegetable god rose again.
Youthful by nature, the vegetable god was usually represented as either a baby nestled in the arms of his mother the earth, or as a beautiful, slightly feminine young man. Like the Master of Animals whose station in the human imagination he essentially replaced, the vegetable god could also appear, at times, as a woman. The Greek myth of the goddess Persephone, for example, who disappeared during the winter to live with Hades, the god of the underworld, is actually a story of the vegetable god in female guise. In Egypt, where the vegetable god was associated most strongly with corn, he was called Osiris. Cut to pieces and plowed into the ground by his brother Set, Osiris reassembled himself and rose back up into the light when his sister/wife, the goddess Isis, collected all the pieces and breathed life back into them. In Asia Minor he was Attis, a beautiful young shepherd beloved by the earth goddess Cybele, who was killed by a wound from a wild boar. Attis’s death and resurrection were celebrated in the spring, and these rites survived from the far reaches of the early days of agriculture all the way into classical antiquity.
In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer gives a description of the rites surrounding Attis’s death and resurrection that could serve as a general description of the celebrations of the vegetable god that occurred everywhere in the ancient world. Writes Frazer of the final night of the period of mourning of the god’s death:
When night had fallen,3 the sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphantly from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow, the twenty-sixth day of March, which was reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the form of a carnival. It was the festival of joy (Hilaria). A universal license prevailed. Every man might say and do what he pleased. People went about the streets in disguise. No dignity was too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with impunity.
Many and marvelous as the vegetable god’s manifestations were across the ancient world, his most miraculous incarnation of all did not occur until the dawn of our own era, when he appeared as neither god nor goddess but as a fully human baby, born to an equally human mother and father living in the Roman province of Galilee. So closely do Christ’s life, death, and resurrection follow the pattern of the ancient agricultural gods that for a long time it was fashionable among scholars to suggest that Jesus wasn’t a historical figure at all, but just a late—and largely unoriginal—addition to the virtually endless pantheon of similar young divinities who had been dying and resurrecting in the ancient world for thousands of years before his arrival. Jesus himself only encouraged this view when, in one of his most famous parables, he compared faith in the kingdom of heaven to a tiny mustard seed that falls into the earth, dies, and rises again as the mightiest of trees. That, after all, is the message of the vegetable god in a nutshell: die and sink into the earth like a plant, for like those plants you too will one day rise again.
But, these old scholarly arguments aside, to recognize in Jesus a model of the ancient agrarian gods isn’t necessarily to discount the truth of either the Gospels or the message they contain. An argument can be made that the fact that Jesus’ life took the pattern of a vegetation god’s doesn’t diminish the importance of Jesus so much as it provides the final demonstration of the centrality of vegetation imagery to the human spiritual imagination.
C. S. Lewis took this last idea a little further in his autobiographical account of his early years, Surprised by Joy. I discovered this book shortly after finishing my book on Mesoamerican myth, and it was the first time I encountered a writer who had made a compelling connection between Christianity (whose seeming dismissal of nature I’d found extremely troubling) and the primitive mythologies that spoke so much more appealingly to my imagination. Lewis had no qualms with the fact that Jesus’ life so closely followed the pattern of the dying gods of the older religions. In fact, it even seemed to please him. So what? he asked in essence. Whether or not the earlier cults of the dying god represented, as he somewhat dismissively said, “the childhood of religion,” and Christ represented its fulfillment, Lewis drove home for me the notion that whether one is a Christian or not, what matters is the strange organic integrity of the human religious impulse as it has unfolded over time. This appealed to me because the reason my whole quest had got going to begin with was the disconnect I experienced between Angus’s death and the equipment my own culture had provided me for understanding it. As someone who had not grown up with an organic affinity toward Christianity, I was interested to find out if, going back far enough in time, I could find a place where its rites and literature might take on life for me. The story of the dying god gave me that link. Not only did it bring the Gospel stories to life; it also showed me how a religion I had previously believed had nothing to do with the natural world had had, way back in the past, everything to do with it. And this fact was nowhere more clearly in evidence than in Jesus’ proclamation that the essential job of the soul, like the grain of wheat, was to die and be reborn.
As became ever more clear to me in my reading, if we are to understand what animals have meant to us over the course of history, we have to understand what vegetables mean as well; we also have to understand how the complex of spiritual meaning that grew up around the seed gradually disengaged itself from actual plants and became more abstract—so abstract that, entering a church today, we can very easily overlook the fact that we are entering a temple of the world’s most successful vegetation cult.
The most influential figure in this transformation of seed wisdom from earthy realism to the more rarefied realms of theology was the apostle Paul, who wrote in First Corinthians,
But some will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; star differs from star in glory.
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown in a physical body, it is raised in a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”: the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
Before Surprised by Joy, passages like this were completely opaque and alien to me. But with Lewis’s brief but illuminating remarks in mind, I began to see that the only way to unravel what had happened to the idea of the animal soul over history was to follow the plot all the way through, as it were, and look at the post-primitive religions—especially Christianity—as genuine continuations of the older nature religions. Doing so, I realized that much as it seemed not to be about nature and animals at all, Christianity was in fact the consummation of some six thousand years of wisdom derived from studying the spiritual nature of the seed; a wisdom that had in turn been born almost immediately at the conclusion of that vast chapter of human history and prehistory when animals had been the center of all of humankind’s deepest spiritual concerns.
The Christian concept of a spiritual resurrection body was a natural, almost inevitable outgrowth of the agricultural religions that had preceded it. In Christianity (in the Gospels but especially in Paul) the “living being”—the nephesh chaya that God created in Genesis when he breathed spirit into the earth-molded body of Adam—died and transformed at last into a truly immortal being: one no longer at the mercy of life or life’s seasons, for like the stars in the sky above it lived forever. But there was another force at work in this new incarnation of the concept of nephesh as well: one that came not from the Hebrew world but from ancient Greece. Christianity was born from a unique marriage of Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the soul. For the Greeks—and most especially Plato—the idea that the soul could exist free of the body was a perfectly sound and sensible one. But for the Hebrews, a soul without a body made no sense (which is why, as we will shortly see, the Hebrew Bible is highly pessimistic about the existence of the human soul after death in anything but a pathetically reduced form). Paul solved this problem by positing a body that was at once physical yet more-than-physical. A body that, like a seed, was sown in the corruption of earth, only to die and transform into a body that was not so much immaterial as more than material.
Which (at last) gets the story back to animals proper. On the heels of the invention of agriculture came animal husbandry—the keeping of domesticated beasts that could be milked, sheared, or slaughtered and eaten at human convenience. (We’re talking, here, about livestock animals like oxen and pigs. Dogs—a special case—entered human company long before other animals did, possibly as long ago as 30,000 BCE.) It used to be thought that the decision to domesticate animals was a fairly deliberate one on the part of our forebears. But anthropologists and archaeologists have recently begun to take a different view of the matter. It now appears that humans may not have played nearly the direct, conscious role in the process of domestication that scientists once believed they did. Only certain animals take readily to domestication, and the decision on the part of those animals to join the company of humans now seems to have played just as big a role in the process of domestication as did the efforts of the humans who gradually brought those animals into the human fold.
The historian Richard W. Bulliet suggests that while the original thinking on the domestication of animals like the ancestors of today’s pigs, sheep, and chickens was that it was a sudden and ingenious inspiration on the part of one or more early humans, it now appears much more likely that the process happened almost of itself over the centuries, without the humans involved even being fully aware of what was going on. The beginning of domestication, Bulliet suggests, “probably attracted little4 notice when it was occurring. When the first wild animals were being penned or tolerated as they skulked around the campsite catching mice or scavenging garbage, no one knew that ox-drawn plows, horse-drawn chariots, pinstriped wool suits, frozen yogurt, and Kentucky Fried Chicken were looming in the distant future.”
Another surprising aspect of domestication that is just coming to light is the reason it may initially have appealed to the people involved. Looking back from our perspective, it’s easy to imagine that a few village dwellers one day simply decided to fence in some cows or pigs so that they could have a constant food source available instead of having to go out and procure them by hunting. But Bulliet suggests that food, important as it was, may not have been the initial draw of domestication. The first domesticated animals, Bulliet believes, were welcomed into the human fold not so much for the ready supply of food they provided, but because humans needed a constant supply of live animals to sacrifice.
Unlike the animal gods that had preceded them, the new agricultural gods demanded more than simple praise and respect. In order to receive life—in the form of crops—humans needed to give life, and (not surprisingly) the lives they preferred to give were those of animals. As villages grew into towns and towns into cities, the earth’s planting peoples were increasingly dependent on reliable crops to feed their swelling populations. A bad harvest meant starvation, but it also meant the possible revolt of a city’s subjects against the rulers who had failed them by angering the gods of earth and sky. To prevent hunger and strife, sacrificial payments needed to be made, and made regularly.
“The meat from a sacrifice,”5 writes Bulliet, “is eaten. The patron or sponsor of the sacrifice gives it away freely after special portions of the slaughtered animal have been offered to the gods, the officiating priests, or other specially entitled parties.” By sacrificing a captive animal, the patron of the sacrifice could make himself look good before both his family and peers, and before the gods to whom the sacrifice was made.
The Manitou—the holy power that animals possessed—and particularly the large amounts of that holy power that came into play when an animal left its body to return to the spirit world, became in the agricultural age something it had never been in the age of the hunter-gatherers: a commodity. A ready supply of captive animals was not only a convenient source of food to these early planting communities but a ready supply of holiness that could be drawn on, like a stack of firewood behind one’s house, whenever the occasion demanded.
It was easy enough for me to see how damaging this new spiritual economy must have been to the human ability to perceive animals as fellow soul beings. Over the millennia during which our ancient forebears had survived by hunting and gathering, animals had been spiritual equals—possessors of a soul life that rendered them, beneath the skin, different from but not inferior to humans. But with the dawn of the planting cultures and the new agricultural spiritual universe that grew up with it, animals went from kindred souls and fellow traders within the larger economy of spirit to simple possessions: important but essentially inferior beings that we could use for our material or spiritual benefit, whenever and however we wished.
Animals were the first true property. The words cattle and capital derive from the same root, and the fact that the first letter in our alphabet is an upside-down representation of a cow’s head is a keen reminder that writing itself most likely originated out of the need to keep track of how many cattle the wealthy members of the earth’s first cities possessed. Animals didn’t lose all their old holy power with the rise of the first cities. The bull, in particular, remained a living embodiment of the sacred for the ancient cities of the Near East just as it had been for the cave artists of the Paleolithic. (The walls of the main temple at the city of Çatal Hüyük in present-day Anatolia, at nine thousand years the single oldest religious shrine in the world, is decorated with the massive heads of broad-horned bulls; Apis, the creator god of the ancient Egyptians, took the form of a bull as well.) But though still sacred creatures, the bulls, lions, he-goats, and other animals illustrated by artists in ancient Near Eastern cities like Sumer and Ur were in essence symbolic of human power (be it worldly or spiritual or both) more than embodiments of sacred animal power in and of itself.
Egypt appears to have maintained a respect for the spiritual potency of animals without completely subsuming that power to political or economic (i.e., human) concerns for much longer than other ancient civilizations did. But even it was ultimately unable to keep animals and their unique holy power free from the machineries of urban agricultural existence. Though the Egyptians never stopped both loving animals and celebrating them for their sacred power, in Egypt, too, these animals ultimately failed to manifest the pure spiritual force that they had for the ancient hunting peoples. If that force survived at all, it did so in the royal hunt, where Egypt’s kings would hunt animals celebrated for their beauty, bravery, and spiritual power. But no matter how brave or beautiful the lions, leopards, and hoofed animals look in the Egyptian paintings and stone relief sculptures of these hunts, it is the Egyptian rulers in their chariots, looming imposingly above their prey with their arrows drawn back, who are the true heroes of the drama. The animals, through their deaths, only serve to shine further glory on their royal killers.
One of the clearest descriptions of the loss of mystery and power that animals suffered with the shift from hunting to agriculture occurs in the story of Gilgamesh, a half-historical, half-mythic hero of the Sumerians, a people who inhabited Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE. The Sumerians were among the earth’s first true city builders. Their sizable populations depended on irrigation, extensive grain storage, and other sophisticated farming techniques that had taken thousands of years to perfect. Hunters and gatherers the Sumerians very definitely weren’t, yet they were close enough to that ancient heritage that a memory of the shift from hunting to farming, and the change in spiritual attitude that came along with it, is clearly evident in their myths and epics.
In the story, Gilgamesh6 is a great king who clashes with a figure named Enkidu. “His body was rough,” we read of Enkidu, “he had long hair like a woman’s; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. His body was covered with matted hair like Samuqan’s, the god of cattle. He was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land.”
Neither wholly man nor wholly beast, “Enkidu ate grass7 in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game.” One of Enkidu’s great pleasures was to destroy the traps that humans set for game in the wilderness, and to release the animals trapped within them. One day out in the wild, Enkidu encounters one of these trappers face-to-face. Terrified, the trapper returns to his home and tells his father what he has seen.
“Father, there is a man,8 unlike any other, who comes down from the hills. He is the strongest in the world, he is like an immortal from heaven. He ranges over the hills with wild beasts and eats grass; he ranges through your land and comes down to the wells. I am afraid and dare not go near him.”
The trapper’s father tells him to go to the capital city of Uruk and speak to Gilgamesh. “Extol the strength9 of this wild man,” the trapper’s father says. “Ask him to give you a harlot, a wanton from the temple of love; return with her, and let her woman’s power overpower this man. When next he comes down to drink at the wells she will be there, stripped naked; and when he sees her beckoning he will embrace her, and then the wild beasts will reject him.”
So it happens. Returning from his encounter with the woman to the beasts of the field, Enkidu receives a cruel shock. “Then, when the gazelle10 saw him, they bolted away; when the wild creatures saw him they fled. Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. And now the wild creatures had all fled away; Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart.”
Though Enkidu’s loss of primordial innocence is to some extent a parallel of the story of Adam and Eve and their own sexually tinged fall from the original happiness of paradise, it is also directly related to animals, and the new relationship humans had with animals in the age of agriculture. Enkidu, with his long, flowing hair and his easy commerce with the beasts of the watering hole, is clearly a holdover from earlier times, when humans interacted more directly with animals on a spiritual level. There are strong hints of the Master of Animals in him, and his transformation through his introduction into human company is in essence a distillation of what happened to humans themselves when they strayed out of the company of the Master of Animals and into the embrace of agriculture.
Enkidu’s fall was, it was easy for me to see by now, the fall of all humanity in the agricultural age. The “wisdom” of humans no longer allowed them to commune directly with animals and the spiritual realm from which they came. As the first great agricultural cities rose up in the sands of the Near East, animals underwent the final stage of their transformation from fellow spirits to mere possessions.
There are two basic ways of herding cattle: by keeping them in a stationary location, or by wandering with them. The first way demands wealth—primarily in terms of land on which to house and feed one’s animals. The second demands that a people be mobile enough to travel along with their herds as they move from place to place, wherever the grazing is best.
Farmers and pastoralists have, it seems, always been somewhat suspicious of each other. To the pastoralist, the life of the farmer is cramped and constrained. To the farmer, whose gods, laws, and very sense of self are wedded to the land he works, the wandering pastoralist is a person without a face, his laws incomprehensible and his gods untrustworthy.
Around 1000 BCE, a group of wandering herders with a greater-than-average prejudice against the agricultural mentality (and the religions of blood sacrifice that went along with it) appeared amid the empire-builders of the Near East. Single, all-powerful, moody but essentially benevolent (especially toward the people through whom he had chosen to make his word known upon the earth), the sky-god worshipped by the Hebrews was not, like so many of the gods before him, a mixture of human and animal qualities, but human and human alone. Agriculturalists tended to be liberal in their tolerance of other peoples’ gods. Pastoralists were less so, and the Hebrews proved to be the culture least tolerant of other peoples’ gods that the world had yet seen. In addition to condemning every one of the countless agricultural deities (that is, nature gods) worshipped by their neighbors, the Hebrews introduced a new set of moral proscriptions to humankind—a charter for the things people could and could not do down on the plane of earth. Here were laws in which the individual human being mattered as he (and, to a degree, she) had never mattered before.
These laws applied not just to people, but to the rest of creation as well. Though animals and humans were very definitely not equal in the Hebrew mind, all animals—even the most unsavory ones—were God’s creations: carriers of nephesh, the life essence breathed into Adam at the start of the world. And as God made it very clear in Genesis that all of his creation was good, all animals deserved a certain minimal measure of respect as parts of it.
Like any herding people, the Hebrews spent more time thinking about livestock than they did about other animals, and they devoted as much time establishing a code of conduct regarding them as they did every other central aspect of their lives. “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death,” advises Deuteronomy, “the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be clear. But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned and its owner also shall be put to death. If a ransom is laid on him, then he shall give for the redemption of his life whatever is laid upon him. If it gores a man’s son or daughter, he shall be dealt with according to this same rule. If the ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.”
While it was precisely passages like this that had long troubled me about the Hebrew Bible—just as they have so many other modern readers with an interest in connecting with the natural world instead of objectifying and dominating it—it’s a good idea to remember that along with ownership-centered passages like these, the Hebrew Bible is replete with many a passage describing the glories of God’s creation in tones of poetic admiration. “In wisdom you made them all,” we read in Psalms, “the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small … . When you send your Spirit, they are created and you renew the earth.”
And this, from Job: “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the air and they will tell you; or the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.”
It’s also important to keep in mind that the covenant God establishes with Noah after the floodwaters have withdrawn is one with all creation, not just humans. A basic respect for the value of animal creation runs throughout the Hebrew Bible, and that respect always contains at least a modicum of concern for the well-being of the animal itself. “A righteous man,” says Proverbs 12, “has regard for the life of his beast.” The animals with which the Hebrews shared their world were pieces of God’s handiwork, and as such deserved the respect due all of God’s creation.
But, cheerful as all this is, if we weigh all the books of the Hebrew Bible together, the fact remains that in it, animals are very definitely beings that exist on a qualitative level beneath that of humans. Though the Hebrews were absorbed as no people before them had been with the issue of nationhood, animal creation did not constitute such a nation in their minds. The Master of Animals, in other words, is nowhere to be found in the Hebrew Bible. In archaic times humans and animals had lived together under the roof of a heaven that had retreated from the world but was still, essentially, within reach. But now, as the sole and single God of the Hebrews took over the rule of heaven, all focus centered on the one and only being down on earth that had been made in his image. At the dawn of the Judeo-Christian era, animals had become what they in essence were to remain until the arrival of the modern world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: beings created by God for human use, with only a very secondary spiritual existence.
The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.
—Ecclesiastes
As should be apparent by now—and as I myself slowly discovered in the course of my Angus-inspired investigations—there is no way to understand what people have thought about the animal soul over history and prehistory without first understanding what they thought of the human soul and its relation to the divine. One day while writing this book, I rented a U-Haul van to move some of my possessions from my wife’s and my apartment in New York City out to our house on Long Island. The woman who ran the U-Haul place had two dogs with her. One was a small white mixed breed that, as we arranged for my rental, stood on her desk and issued a continuous series of lively, if not entirely unfriendly, barks. In the woman’s lap was another dog, slightly larger, that had lost most of the fur on its body.
“How old is she?” I asked, motioning to the dog on her lap.
“Fifteen,” the woman said. “She sits on my lap all day because she gets upset if I leave her. I had to put another of my dogs down last year and it pretty near killed me. I’m not looking forward to when this girl leaves me. So what are you picking up in the city?”
“Books mostly,” I said. “I have way too many of them. Actually, I’m writing a book right now on whether animals have souls or not.”
The woman paused in filling out her paperwork.
“Whether they have souls or not?” she asked, as if trying the idea on for size. “Well, I guess some folks believe they don’t. Of course, there’s some out there who don’t even think people have souls!”
It might be a good idea to keep that comment in mind during the portion of our investigation that follows. For in fact there are people out there—plenty of them—who believe that not only animals but people, too, lack souls. And if we are to arrive at an informed opinion as to why they just might be wrong about animals not having souls, we require a detour of sorts into some of the thornier questions that arose in the past about the human soul—especially in the two countries that between them are the parents of almost all the Western world’s spiritual ideas: ancient Greece and Israel.
Beliefs about the human soul in ancient times were often surprisingly different from what we might imagine. To begin with, ancient cultures typically believed that human beings had not just one but several souls. There was a “free” soul (the equivalent of the Greek psyche and the Hebrew nephesh) that journeyed out of the body when a person was asleep (and that left for good when a person died) and a “body” soul that took over when a person was awake. The body soul, in turn, comprised two or three different parts, each one of which was located in a different part of the body and connected with a specific mental or physical process.
Weird as this all sounds to us, it was much less so in a world where the brain had yet to receive unquestioned status as the organ of human thought. Ancient peoples took these various and sundry souls very much for granted, and saw them at work in the most ordinary activities. Sneezing, for example, was seen as a soul event in many ancient cultures—and a dangerous one, for it could actually rocket one’s psyche out of one’s head for a moment (which is one reason why, when a person sneezes today, it is still customary to offer a blessing).
How many of these souls could animals possess? All of them—at least according to the cultures that retained strong connections to the animistic past. Early Greek philosophers like Pythagoras, and early Greek philosophical systems like Orphism (named after Orpheus, the shamanic lyre-playing hero who we saw had connections with the Master of Animals), not only believed that animals had souls, but that, as the Buddhists and Hindus also believed, an individual soul could reincarnate in human, animal, or even plant form. (These early Greek notions of reincarnation/metempsychosis may have been borrowed, at least in part, from Eastern sources, for contact between ancient Greece and India is now thought to have been quite significant.) Jan N. Bremmer reports that the Greek philosopher Empedocles “specifically forbade the chewing11 of laurel leaves, since he regarded the laurel as the highest form of plant incarnations, and even claimed to have been a bush himself in a previous existence.”
What is most important about these early Greek philosophies (just as it is with those of the East) is their willingness to grant a genuinely spiritual consciousness to beings other than humans. For the Orphics and the Pythagoreans, life always entailed the existence of soul, and the shape and character of that soul was secondary to the fact that all physical life was irreducibly spiritual in nature.
But once again, as we saw with the Far East, spiritual doesn’t necessarily mean personal. In the case of ancient Greece, that distinction is especially evident as we move out of the esoteric world of the Orphics and Pythagoreans and encounter the more popular beliefs about the soul represented in Homer and the Greek tragedians.
When we in the modern Western world hear the word soul, we immediately connect it with personality. Our soul, we sense, is what gives each of us that feeling of mysteriously particular, unrepeatable me-ness—of being, beneath our names and our histories and the roles we play in the world, something more than all these things: something that, indefinable as it is, soul somehow manages to conjure best.
As we saw earlier, the word psyche carried similar associations for most of classical antiquity (that is, the thousand or so years of civilization centering around the Mediterranean leading up to the birth of Jesus at the start of our era) just as the word nephesh did in the Near East for the Hebrews during this same general period. But—and this is the most important part—these words only carried those associations during the time that an individual was alive on earth. Ancient Greece and Israel virtually created, between them, the modern idea of human individuality. From the Hebrew Bible and the great works of Greek drama and philosophy come the vast majority of the ideas about how to value, nurture, and define the individual human person to which we continue to subscribe today. Both cultures were also responsible for many of the beliefs about the soul and spirit that we continue to entertain, or half entertain, here in the modern world. But for both these cultures, the ultimate fate of the soul—that is, what happens to it when it leaves the body permanently at death—was surprisingly bleak.
Both the Hebrews and the Greeks focused their afterlife beliefs not on a heavenly upper world but on a grim and gloomy underworld. While the various body souls simply perished at death, the psyche or nephesh escaped from the body and traveled to the underworld (which the Greeks called Hades and the Hebrews called Sheol). Once there, it transformed into a new kind of being: one that both Greece and Israel described as a “shade.” (The word is repha’im in Hebrew, skia in Greek.)
The afterlife enjoyed by these Greek and Hebrew shades was a far from enviable one. “In the noontide of my days I must depart,” says Isaiah,
I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years.
I said, I shall not see the Lord in the land of the living:
I shall look upon man no more among the inhabitants of the
world …
For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you;
those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.
Not even God, this passage suggests, can reach far enough down to help the souls of the dead languishing in Sheol. The authors of other books of the Bible felt the same way. “In death there is no remembrance of you,” we read in Psalms, while Samuel reminds us that “we must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up.”
So it was over in ancient Greece as well. When Achilles, in the twenty-third book of the Iliad, meets the shade of his old friend Patroclus one night in a dream, it is not the man he knew in life that he discovers, but a dim, diminished, cardboard cutout who can barely remember what life on earth was like at all.
There came to him12 the spirit of hapless Patroclus, in all things like his very self, in stature and fair eyes and in voice, and in like raiment was he clad withal; and he stood above Achilles’ head and spake to him, saying: “Thou sleepest, and hast forgotten me, Achilles. Not in my life wast thou unmindful of me, but now in my death!”
Achilles held out his arms to clasp the spirit, but in vain. It vanished like a wisp of smoke and went gibbering underground. Achilles leapt up in amazement. He beat his hands together and in his desolation cried: “Ah then, it is true that something of us does survive even in the Halls of Hades, but with no intellect at all, only the ghost and semblance of a man.”
Love, laughter, companionship—for both the ancient Hebrew and the ancient Greek, these were joys of the living, and for the living alone. To die was, if not to vanish entirely, to become less—much less—than what one had been while alive on earth. Like over-medicated patients on a mental ward, the shades of the dead either sleep or wander about endlessly and pointlessly, scarcely remembering their life on earth or the people and things they had known and loved while there.
Just as most primitive hunting cultures felt a degree of guilt over the act of hunting because they knew it was essentially an activity that had not taken place before the fall out of the world of spirit, so most primitive peoples felt some fear of the human dead: a fear that was unavoidable given the mystery and invisibility of the land to which the departed soul traveled. Even in primitive societies where the afterworld was viewed as an entirely positive place, precautions were often taken with the newly dead (tying their limbs, burying them beneath large rocks) to ensure that their souls stayed where they belonged and didn’t try to sneak back into the world of the living once they were gone.
Though primitive religious thought harbored doubt and fear about the afterlife, the singularly grim visions of it entertained by Greece and Israel marked a definite—and disturbing—detour from the path that primordial humanity had laid out. At the start of Western culture as we know it, there lay a vision of the life beyond that was so uniformly depressing that it is scarcely even possible to connect it to the more positive visions held by so many primitive cultures. A character in Euripides’ play Meleagros sums up as well as anyone the situation for the souls of the dead in both ancient Greece and Israel: “After death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing.”
But of course, if this is how the afterlife began in Western culture, it is not how it remained. What changed the Western vision of the afterlife from that of a dim and hopeless twilight zone into the land of glory and fulfillment that the word heaven conjures up for us today? The first real rustlings of this change began in the Greek mystery schools—those carefully guarded secret societies that flourished in a number of Greek cities from the sixth century BCE till the early centuries of our own era. In the Eleusinian Mysteries—the longest-lived and most important of these mystery schools—initiates ate a communion-like cake made of cornmeal and underwent a mystical death-and-resurrection experience that allowed them to feel that, like the vegetable goddess Persephone who went down to the underworld but later returned from it, he or she had tasted death and been reborn.
The mystery schools operated on the very old and widespread premise that while the soul is potentially immortal, it requires certain procedures in order for this immortality to kick in properly. Through initiation into the mystery cult, the human soul is not only able to survive death, but to survive it personally. Not only does it have an unambiguously positive place to go to, but it is allowed to bring with it that essential piece of carry-on luggage that, in earlier Greek visions of the afterlife, it had been forced to leave behind: the full and complete sense of self that made humans truly human in the first place.
Important as they were to those fortunate souls who took part in them, the larger impact of the mystery schools was limited by their members’ extreme secrecy, and the primarily emotional rather than intellectual impact of the rites themselves. If an initiate in the mysteries came away no longer fearing his or her own death, that did not mean he or she possessed a philosophy about life that could be shared with others.
Then, in the fifth century BCE, came Plato. Together with his teacher Socrates, Plato completely revolutionized the Western view of death. Rather than a gloomy underworld of muttering, amnesiac shadows, Plato envisioned Hades as a light-filled wonderland: a place where earthly imperfections (and what was there on earth, when you got down to it, that wasn’t imperfect in some way or other?) were thoroughly and triumphantly left behind. In place of all the flawed, incompletely realized beings and objects that bumped and bungled about down on the plane of physical existence, the Platonic heaven contained only perfect, nonphysical objects: the Forms. Basically an updated version of the primitive idea of the species spirit (as we mentioned before in conjunction with the Paleolithic cave paintings), the Forms were spiritual models for everything found on earth, from living beings to inanimate objects.
This land of spiritualized perfection, Plato also said, is our only true country. Throughout the course of its earthly existence, the soul secretly longs to be reunited with the perfection of heaven. “For Plato,” writes the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “the soul13 is the non-material aspect of a human being, and is the aspect that really matters. Bodily life is full of delusion and danger; the soul is to be cultivated in the present both for its own sake and because its future happiness will depend on such cultivation. The soul, being immortal, existed before the body, and will continue to exist after the body is gone. Since for many Greeks ‘the immortals’ were the gods, there is always the suggestion, at least by implication, that human souls are in some way divine.”
If there is anything negative about the Platonic version of the afterlife, it is that it is just ever so slightly … sterile. Plato’s afterlife was a realm of pure thought, a place incalculably brighter, better, and more real than earthly existence ever could be. But because of its completely immaterial nature, it was also bloodless and pale. Even at its warmest, Plato’s heaven always remained just a little bit cold—much too cold to fully satisfy the human desire for an afterlife encompassing the full range of human emotion, and too cold as well to satisfy my own desire for an afterlife that embraced both people and animals in all their living individuality.
It struck me as an odd coincidence that the human element I found so noticeably missing from Plato’s vision of the soul and the afterlife was increasingly a subject of discussion right across the Mediterranean at just about the time he was composing his dialogues. Just as they had among the Greeks, changes were occurring in the Hebrew view of the life beyond the body. And these changes proved to carry just the ingredient that the bright, promising, but disappointingly abstract world of the Platonic afterlife needed in order to fill it out.
What was this missing ingredient? The body. Not the purely physical body that broke, got sick, and eventually died down on the plane of earth, but the spiritual body. Though for the great majority of its pages the Hebrew Bible entertains a consistently negative picture of the afterlife, in the later books certain passages appear that suggest a very different fate for the soul: a new kind of postmortem existence that is neither simply physical nor simply spiritual, but both at once.
“The hand of the Lord was upon me,” writes Ezekiel, “and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.”
Warmth, depth, and personality in all its complex, Technicolor richness: for most of the Hebrew Bible, all these qualities vanished at death. But in Ezekiel’s vision, something else seems to be going on. He witnesses a return—a restoration—in which death is overcome, and in which, miraculously, the dead arise as the full, flesh-and-blood people they had originally been.
This vision of Ezekiel’s is a pointedly political metaphor; it suggests that the Jewish nation, which had been scattered and laid low by the hand of history, would one day rise and cohere again. The several other resurrection passages in the Hebrew Bible relate to political renewal as well, but they are also talking about another kind of renewal, the kind that happens when a dead person actually returns to life. Proclaims Isaiah:
Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise,
O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!
For your dew is a radiant dew,
and the earth will give birth to those long dead.
Least ambiguous of all is the following, from the latest book in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Daniel:
“Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.”
No one knows precisely how the seemingly eccentric notion of bodily resurrection made its way into Hebrew thought. But however the Jews did come upon it, the idea that a living being could resurrect itself (and, in the lines of Ezekiel, resurrect itself from its bones) was not original to them. Bequeathed by the hunters of the Paleolithic, it is the kind of idea that could only be hatched by a people who were neither exclusively materialistic (the only true life is the life of the body) nor exclusively spiritualistic (the only true life is the life of the soul). To envision a human actually returning to full life and consciousness from his bones, one must respect the world of matter and the world of spirit equally.
And though we can never know it for certain, it seems very likely that the earth’s first peoples did just that. Heaven—the earth above the earth, where the souls of humans and animals traveled when they left their bodies behind—was not, for them, a wasteland full of ghostly shades, nor was it a cerebral, abstract realm of perfect but bloodless ideas. It was instead a heaven in the fullest and richest sense of the word: a place so tied to earth that when earthly creatures died and entered it, they left a portion of their immortal, imperishable selves behind in the form of bones—bones that, when the time was right, could magically re-clothe themselves with flesh.
Though Judaism started out as a religion that was theoretically unconcerned with the fate of the individual at death, the Hebrews were becoming, as the birth of Jesus approached, a people ever more interested in questions of individual survival—of what would happen not just to the Jewish nation, but to the soul of the individual person when it left the body behind. In Greece, meanwhile, the Platonic heaven of perfect, abstract forms lay as if waiting for someone to breathe a little more earthly life into it—to make it a place not just of perfection, but of fully personal, fully human perfection.
In both Greece and the Near East, a new vision of the soul was ready to come to birth: one in which the ancient hunter’s idea that the body can resurrect itself from its bones, and the ancient farmer’s idea that the soul was like a grain of wheat that falls into the earth, dies, and rises again, would meet and magically mingle. In this new vision, neither the blessings of the physical body nor those of the spiritual soul were to be completely lost at death, for the seemingly exclusive categories of body and soul were to be transcended through the birth of a spiritual body: one that, far from being a ghostly phantom, was infinitely more real and substantial than the fallen, purely earthly body that had preceded it on earth.
What was the form this new vision finally took? And—most important for our purposes—what did this new school of thinking have to say not just about the human soul, but about the animal soul as well?
The answer to the first question is obvious. The name of the new spiritual vision that so daringly and fruitfully combined Greek and Hebrew speculation about the nature of body and soul was Christianity.
But answering the second question, I discovered, proved a little more difficult.
The hand of the Lord14 has not neglected the bodies of the smallest animals—and still less their souls.
—Origen (c. CE 185–254), Commentary on Psalm 1
It may seem strange—for Christians no less than for anybody else—to envision Christianity as a religion that fulfilled the promise of Paleolithic spirituality. But that, I discovered, is exactly what Christianity managed to do—at least for a time. “The Greek tradition15 about the soul,” writes John A. Sanford, “especially as mediated through the mystery religions and through Plato, flowered in the Christian idea of the soul.” And the roots of that metaphorical flower reached back not to the Greeks but farther back—all the way back, in fact, to the Stone Age.
Why did early Christianity fulfill the Paleolithic promise? Because it returned heaven to what it had originally been: a place where earthly life—all of earthly life—was welcome. With Christianity the intellectual advances of the Greek genius and the moral advances of the Hebrew genius joined together to create a vision of the soul in which not only was the inner “me”—the irreducibly particular person, with all of his or her loves and hates, memories and hopes and dreams and desires—rescued from death and oblivion, but the entire natural world was as well.
This may be news to the many who, as I long did, think of Christianity as the quintessential anti-nature religion. God’s mandate to Adam and Eve to “subdue” nature and exercise “dominion” over it—words that allowed some less inspired Hebrews to believe that all animals were placed before them for their use—was, as everybody knows, intensified by Christian thought into a view of nature that made it not just secondary to humanity, but downright evil. Out there in the darkness of nature, much of Christian literature tells us, dwells the Devil. Because of this, the justification for the Western project of dominating and destroying the natural world has been laid squarely at Christianity’s feet.
All this is, unfortunately, true. But it turns out that another, less remarked-upon stream within the Christian tradition says just the opposite. “As for those who are far from God,” wrote the Greek Church Father Evagrius of Pontus, “God has made16 it possible for them to come near to the knowledge of him through the medium of creatures. These he has produced, as the letters of the alphabet, so to speak, by his power and his wisdom.” Central to the Christian message is the idea that the Logos, or word of God, has been sown like a seed into all of creation. By learning what the Greek prayer text the Philokalia calls the “language” of created life, according to certain voices within the early Church we can learn, as the Church Father Origen declares, that “the word is present17 in every creature, however small.”
Gone, in this line of Christian thought, is the image of the human being as the sole earthly embodiment of God’s wisdom that runs through so much of Jewish and Christian thought. In its place is a vision in which the human being is central, but in which, Orpheus-like, he stands beneath the shade of the cosmic tree with the species spirits of the world’s animals assembled all around him.
“It could even be,”18 wrote Origen, “that God who made the human race ‘in his own image and likeness’ also gave to other creatures a likeness to certain celestial realities. Perhaps this resemblance is so detailed that even the grain of mustard seed has its counterpart in the kingdom of heaven. And if that is true for seeds it must be the same for plants. And if it is true of plants it cannot be otherwise for animals, birds, reptiles and four-footed beasts.”
Beyond suggesting that all of earthly creation matters to God, Origen is restating, in Christian terms, the ancient idea that heaven is not some bloodless, abstract mental zone where only mental realities are welcome, but a second earth, one where all the creatures that we know on earth continue to exist in a spiritualized form that erases nothing of their earthly individuality. “It may be granted,”19 Origen continues, “that these creatures, seeds, plants, roots and animals, are undoubtedly at the service of humanity’s physical needs. However, they include the shape and image of the invisible world, and they also have the task of elevating the soul and guiding it to the contemplation of celestial objects.” Here was a message that I, animal-loving, confused, and disaffected member of the nominally Christian world that I was, could relate to completely. Though we have to make use of animals and plants to survive down here in the physical world, this line of Christian thinking declares that doesn’t mean we need to ignore the divine, celestial light that is hiding within every one of them after all.
The heaven described by many of the early Church Fathers was, remarkably, a heaven not of clouds and halos—or not just of clouds and halos—but of plants and animals as well: plants and animals that have lost not one iota of their earthly charm and particularity by leaving the terrestrial world behind. “Wisdom,” writes the Church Father Maximus the Confessor, “consists20 in seeing every object in accordance with its true nature.” And while human and animal “wisdom” certainly differed, all beings carried a measure of wisdom appropriate to their nature—as I had discovered the primitives knew so well from watching the animals around them build their perfect nests and houses, and move with perfect assurance across the earth.
Perhaps the most surprising (and reassuring) thing to me about this supremely nature-friendly school of Christian thought was that it was echoed in other faiths as well. Jewish thought underwent a series of transformations of its own during those early years of the Christian Church, and Jewish mystical schools developed their own maps of the multileveled cosmos, such as the Sephirothic tree of the Kabbalah, which places the earth, and physical life in general, within a hierarchy of worlds, at the top of which is a God who, at the end of incarnate existence, will welcome all of creation back into himself. (For, as the Talmud states, “this whole world is merely a vestibule for the world to come.”) In Islam, meanwhile, which possessed a strong mystical element from its very beginnings in the seventh century, the earth-above-the-earth was known as the Earth of Visions, and all of nature, down to the smallest plant and the most seemingly insignificant creature, was thought to have its true spiritual existence there, just as Origen describes the creatures of the Christian heaven doing. The distinction between science and religion that has become so pronounced in the modern West was, I discovered, never a part of Islam, and many of its greatest sages, like the twelfth-century philosopher and scientist Avicenna, devoted their lives to uncovering the connections between nature and spirit, the visible and invisible aspects of creation. Islam’s inclusive view of nature is everywhere apparent in the Koran, where it is repeatedly affirmed that Allah is both “the light of the heavens and the earth,” (24:34) and that “all creatures celebrate His praises” (17:44). Islam’s respect for animal creation specifically, meanwhile, is evidenced in the Koran’s admonishments to treat one’s animals decently, and in its belief that nature itself is a kind of holy book—one that, if read properly, discloses the glory of God as eloquently as does the Koran itself.
How, I wondered, is it that these entirely more nature-friendly aspects of the three religions of the Book are so little remarked upon today? Why, in particular, was it that the Christian thinkers who gave voice to the ancient cosmic vision of a nature every bit as worthy of rescue and redemption as humankind itself got so little attention in comparison to those for whom nature is at best a mere background to the human drama, and at worst the playground of the Devil?
To find out, I needed to go back to the Greek concept of multiple souls—in particular, to one of those souls called the nous. The nous was, according to Greek thinking, centered in the chest, and was responsible for thought, specifically rational thought. We are so at home with the notion that the brain is the seat of thinking that it is hard to imagine looking at it in any other way. But as we mentioned before, the brain was not always known as the thinking organ, and locating the origin of thought in the chest, and in particular the heart, was quite common in the ancient world. (This is an example of how hard it turns out to be to really place ourselves in the mind of a culture other than our own, for what we think about the world defines the way we experience it much more than we ordinarily realize.)
The really important thing about the nous for my investigations, however, was that animals were almost never said to possess it. In fact, the sole known reference to an animal possessing nous in Greek literature occurs in the Odyssey, when the dog Argus recognizes his master Odysseus after seventeen years away.
Plato was essentially a monotheist, and he sometimes described his Forms as living thoughts within the mind of God. This God-mind had a name as well. And as it turns out, Plato gave it the same name as the human rational capacity: nous. If humans have an immortal form, then, it must be their highest nature—their nous—joining with the nous of God.
So it was that I found myself at what turns out to be the very heart of the whole animals-don’t-have-souls argument. For if the highest part of the soul is the rational part, and if heaven is itself a place of reason rather than emotion, it follows quite naturally that creatures that possessed no nous to speak of could not be expected to partake in the life that waits beyond the body.
Did this mean that the Platonic afterlife, abstract as it no doubt was, was also really a realm in which nature had no place at all? Plato never actually says this in his dialogues. But his pupil Aristotle very definitely did say it. If Plato was in large part an otherworldly mystic, Aristotle was his down-to-earth counterpart. So down-to-earth, in fact, that he had considerable doubts about whether the soul could exist apart from material creation at all. But, said Aristotle, if the soul did survive the death of the body, it was only the nous—the rational part—that did so. As the historian of ideas Richard Tarnas writes, “In Aristotle’s view,21 the individual human soul might cease to exist with death, since the soul is vitally joined to the physical body it animates. The soul is the form of the body, just as the body is the matter of the soul. But the divine intellect, of which each man has a potential share and which distinguishes man from other animals, is immortal and transcendent. Indeed, man’s highest happiness consists in the philosophical contemplation of eternal truth.”
In other words, heaven, for Aristotle—if there was a heaven— was made of thoughts. Rational thoughts. And for the ancients (who had never heard a pair of whales conversing or seen a chimp solve a logic puzzle or an African gray parrot chastise its owner in English for failing to feed it), rational thought was the domain of humans, and humans alone. So if any part of the human being actually did survive to enter this heaven, it would have to be the rational part as well. And this rational part was precisely the component of the soul that the later philosophers of Greece were least inclined to see animals as possessing.
The later Greeks were unashamedly in love with rational thought, and justifiably so, for if rationality is a key component of human thought, they developed that component to a degree unmatched by any culture before them, and we remain, today, hugely in their debt for doing so. But precisely because the things they discovered and accomplished by means of reason were so many and so great, this capacity eclipsed all other capacities of the mind (and spirit) in their estimation.
This enthusiasm for ratio, the capacity to uncover the workings of God through reason, was shared by many of the more influential Fathers of the Christian Church. In fact, Aristotle was the philosopher with the strongest single influence on mainstream Church philosophy for the first fifteen centuries of the Church’s existence. And Aristotle’s views on the irrational nature of the animal soul—and of nature in general—were very much a part of the Church’s Greek intellectual inheritance.
It’s a commonplace that one of the first things to get forgotten when Christian philosophers argue the subtleties of some recondite spiritual point is the clarity and directness with which Jesus himself always spoke. If Jesus’ proclamations about animals are not plentiful (and if the episode of the Gadarene Swine always made me wonder if he had something against pigs), his general attitude toward them is more than clearly indicated in lines like “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them,” or “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?”
It was words like these that inspired Saint Francis to address each animal he encountered as a fully individual being, every bit as deserving of his attention—and his conversation—as the human beings he interacted with. In fact, as I got more at home with the semi-hidden nature-loving side of Christianity, it occurred to me that Saint Francis bore a resemblance to a talented archaic shaman. Like the shaman, Francis seemed to have possessed a particularly strong ability to see the soul being—the animal-behind-the-animal—in every creature he met. Whether preaching to a flock of birds or chastising a wolf for chasing sheep, Francis clearly felt in his bones the truth proclaimed by the Gospel that each individual creature is really and truly present to God’s eye.
Unfortunately, one reason Francis stands out in Christian history—and why for a long time he was the only animal-loving Christian I was even aware of—is that by the time of his birth in the twelfth century his spiritually inclusive attitude toward animals had become the exception rather than the rule. Despite the Gospels’ clear and undeniable assertions that animals have a share in the redemption Christ held out to the world, memory of this faded away very quickly in the centuries that followed Christ’s death on the cross. (Though at no single point did it ever die out completely, and in some sections of the Christian world, like Christian Ireland, animal-loving saints were seldom hard to find.)
Just a few scant centuries after the Gospels were written down, Saint Augustine stated that in heaven “there will be no animal22 body to ‘weigh down the soul’ in its process of corruption; there will be a spiritual body with no cravings, a body subdued in every part to the will.” This “spiritual body” is the body that Saint Paul, in one of his many seed-and-agriculture-inspired passages, speaks of as having been “sown in corruption” and “raised in glory.” But unlike Saint Paul, who, in spite of all his dogmatic thorniness on other issues, never seemed to deny animals and the rest of nature a place in the redeemed earth, Augustine is adamant that animals will not be present there. How could they be, when it is precisely the passionate, sub-rational aspects of our psyche that we share with the animals that we will most decisively leave behind when we enter the life of the world to come? “Because there is in man23 a rational soul,” wrote Augustine in The City of God, “he subordinates to the peace of the rational soul all that part of his nature which he shares with the beasts.” Human beings are, argued Augustine, the only creatures on earth blessed with the ability to think, and it’s precisely this ability—in combination with God’s grace—that allows us to survive death. This rational core is the part of us that God really cares about, and the sooner we can disentangle it from all those lower passions and desires that we share with the animals, the sooner we will be fit to enter into heaven—a heaven that will very definitely not be cluttered with any less-than-rational dogs, birds, or rabbits.
While fewer and fewer people in the modern world—and certainly precious few dog or cat owners—would subscribe to the idea that only human beings can think in any truly meaningful sense of the term, this idea was a surprisingly popular one for much of Western history. The idea that animals are essentially automatons reacting in a purely rote and mechanical matter to external stimuli has remained endemic to scientific thinking ever since René Descartes (who, oddly enough, had a dog of his own, of which he is said to have been very fond) brought it to the fore in the seventeenth century. Only in the latter half of the twentieth century did it become even remotely likely that a scientist studying animal behavior would see those animals through anything other than a purely mechanistic lens.
Students of animal behavior like Konrad Lorenz and contemporary writers on animal behavior like Marc Bekoff and Temple Grandin showed me that the key to appreciating animal thought is to accept it for what it is: animal rather than human. Like the hunter-gatherers who first studied and pondered the ways of animals millennia ago, the most perceptive modern students of animal behavior appreciate animals both for their commonalities with us and for their very real differences. All agree that the first step in respecting the workings of the animal mind is to stop demanding that it function exactly like a human mind.
This fact is made apparent to me every time I let Mercury, my Schipperke, out into the backyard of our Long Island house on his stationary extending leash. This leash goes just far enough for Mercury to make it around a tree that stands in the middle of the yard. Inevitably, Mercury will round this tree, start heading back to the house, and come to an abrupt and puzzled halt when the leash runs out of line. Looking at this dog of mine, whose personality I know so well and whose intelligence in other areas is so undeniable, standing there staring woefully back at the house completely stumped as to how to solve his predicament, I can understand how easy it would be for someone dead set against the idea that animals are thinking beings to leap on a moment like this as proof, pure and simple, that they aren’t.
But they would be wrong to do so. For if Mercury lacks the gift of spatial abstraction that allows me to find his plight so ridiculous, it does not mean he doesn’t possess the ability to experience himself and—even more important—communicate that experience of himself as an existentially situated being; a skill he demonstrates, loudly and pointedly, by barking at me to come help him out. Is Mercury acting mechanically when he does this? Not to my way of thinking. Mercury in these situations knows that he is in a fix, and that I can get him out of that fix, provided he can get my attention—just as I do when he is having one of the bad dreams to which, as he ages, he seems ever more susceptible. Though not a rational creature on the level that (at my better moments at least) I am, Mercury is a thinking being, and for me to see him as anything else would be to blind myself to the evidence he presents to me each day as my companion and friend.
The literature on the shape and nature of animal intelligence—what it is, what it isn’t, and how it differs from the human variety—is massive. But to understand the basic idea that the animal mind can be honored without equating it completely with that of humans, we need only summon up the key idea that lay behind the primordial mapping of the multilevel universe traversed by the spirits of humans, gods, and animals: the concept of hierarchy.
The word hierarchy sounds bossy and constrictive to modern ears, but in its original meaning (hiero + arche, or “holy structure”), it had much more to do with matters of spirit than with matters of power. (It’s very hard, unless one is an absolutely rigid materialist, not to take a hierarchical view of the world, and even such committed cosmic democrats as the Taoists, through their distinction between the phenomenal and spiritual levels of reality, betrayed themselves as hierarchical thinkers as well.) While the notion that the universe is a wedding-cake-like structure leading from the material up to the spiritual was, as we saw earlier, pioneered by primordial humanity, the version of this idea that has been most influential in Western thought is the Great Chain of Being, which comes to us from the Greeks. This version, if we examine it with the right attitude, allows us to see animals as thinking (and hence heaven-worthy) beings without claiming that their intelligence is equal or identical to ours.
At the bottom of the Great Chain is inert matter—the most obvious natural example of which is a rock. Rocks don’t move, and (if we leave out the tricky issue of crystals) they don’t grow. Basically, they just sit there. Above (and with that word we have, of course, already entered into hierarchical thinking) the world of inert matter we have plants. Plants are plainly alive. They grow, and if we watch certain species closely we can see that they move, too—if generally much more slowly than people or animals do. We could, then, say that plants are
Matter + Life.
Above plants, we get to the world of animals. Animals possess life the way plants do, but they also possess something more: a “something” that allows them to move around, make decisions, and take an active, conscious part in the world that is clearly a step above the part that plants take. (Whether or not insects and other lower animals can be said to do such things is a matter of much argument, but for our purposes we don’t need to get caught up in it. Suffice it to say that there is a general movement upward in the categories of existing things, with countless possible sub-gradations that could be added if we take the entire animate world into account.)
Using an equation again, we could say that animals are
Matter + Life + Consciousness.
Moving a rung further up, we get to humans. Once again according to the traditional Greek scheme, humans have a certain something-more-ness to them as well: one that all the levels beneath them lack. Like rocks, we humans possess matter (our bodies). Like plants, we possess life (that mysterious, invisible “something” that leaves at death, when our bodies transform from animated objects into lumps of inert matter). And like animals, we possess a mind that allows us to make decisions— to live and move actively upon the earth rather than statically and passively the way plants generally do. But … we also have something else: a something-else that is traditionally defined as self-awareness. Humans, this line of argument goes, not only think—we know that we think.
As the economist and philosopher E. F. Schumacher points out, these four basic levels of being are increasingly rare the farther up the scale one goes. “Matter,” he writes, “cannot be destroyed.24 Compared with inanimate matter, life is rare and precarious; in turn, compared with the ubiquitousness and tenacity of life, consciousness is even rarer and more vulnerable. Self-awareness is the rarest power of all, precious and vulnerable to the highest degree, the supreme and generally fleeting achievement of a person, present one moment and all too easily gone the next.”
And beyond humans? This, not surprisingly, was the point where the classical philosophers started to argue. Was there anything above humans, or did the ladder of creation come to a halt with them? According to traditional Christian thought (and the more esoteric branches of Islamic and Hebrew thought as well), the Great Chain had many links in it above humans: ones that were every bit as real as those below, even if they were largely invisible to ordinary sight. Each of these different levels was associated, as in ancient Greek thought, with a particular star or planet, and with the specific variety of spiritual being (gods for the Greeks, angels for the Christians) that was in charge of it. According to this hierarchical vision (which held sway right up to the advent of modern science, which abruptly dismantled it in the late sixteenth century), the universe was a house of many floors: one in which every object, every animal, every human being, and every angel declared in every aspect of its being the level to which it belonged. And because the house itself was good (how could it not be if it was made by God?) each being that dwelled within it possessed an essential soundness and goodness, too (which is why Aquinas, following Aristotle, could celebrate the essential goodness and integrity of animal creation, even if he denied it a place in heaven).
Seen in this light, the concept of hierarchy becomes a strangely generous, strangely democratic idea. Though easily given to perversion and misrepresentation, in its more benign and sophisticated versions the Great Chain is arguably the single most important and enduring idea about the basic nature of the cosmos in the history of human thought.
Though the idea of the cosmos as a spiritual hierarchy was born in the Stone Age, primitive humanity didn’t understand it in quite the same way that the full-fledged philosophers who took it over from them later did. To begin with, the primordial model of the Great Chain doesn’t have quite the tidiness that the later philosophical versions of it do. Stones, for example, were never seen as purely inert objects by primitive peoples (as the anthropologist Tylor knew very well when he coined the term animism). A stone was not only alive, it was also—to a degree at least—conscious, and a stone (either a natural one or a carved statue) that held a particular spirit could be highly conscious. Plants, too, according to the primitive model, were both alive and conscious as well. Plants knew things and, according to the views of many primitive peoples, had guardian spirits from whom important knowledge—such as whether a particular plant was safe to eat or not or whether it was otherwise of use to humans—could be gleaned.
But all these differences are, in the end, unimportant. What matters most about the Great Chain is not how one goes about dividing up the levels within it, but that one sees those levels as unified with one another, all sharing membership in a cosmos that is ordered, unified, and permeated by intelligence from the top (God or the Divine or the Origin or whatever name one chooses) all the way on down to the material level. (For even unthinking matter manifests, in its molecular and submolecular structure, the irreducibly intelligent nature of all creation.)
That sense of the universe’s all-pervasive intelligence is, in the end, the greatest single gift that the concept of the Great Chain gives us, for it allows us to look at all beings as manifesting intelligence and divinity, without necessarily being in conscious charge of that intelligence to the degree that we humans are. A common house mouse carries all the mystery and brilliance of creation within it, but it is not aware of this fact in the way that, say, Plato was. For me to look at my dog Mercury as my complete equal would be, to my mind, foolish, for even when he’s not staring at me from the end of a tangled leash, I know that I am in possession of a mind that is capable not only of comprehending more of the world than his is, but that I am also conscious of the fact that I am. But just because I acknowledge this fact doesn’t mean I need to write him off as an insignificant being. That’s the magic of the Great Chain: it allows me to embrace other beings without pretending to make myself one hundred percent equal to them in all respects. When I look at Mercury, straining hopelessly at his leash and barking for me to come let him loose, with the older, kinder versions of the Great Chain in mind, what I see is a being who is different from me, in some ways even perhaps inferior to me, but who is nonetheless part and parcel of the same multilevel universe that I am. By virtue of that common membership, it really doesn’t matter how much or how little intelligence we share, or how different his style of intelligence may be from mine. The very fact that we both live as members in good standing of that great multi-storied cosmic house seals our essential kinship.
But with Aristotle and his doctrine of the nous—and in particular his claim that humans possess it while animals don’t—a barricade seems suddenly to rise up at the midsection of the Great Chain. With the birth of the Aristotelian view of the cosmos, and the adoption of that view by the dominant fathers of the Christian church, animals lost all connection to the higher levels of the Great Chain. Though created by an intelligent God, they were not participants in that intelligence, but only passing manifestations of it. Rational thought, plucked from the complex matrix of qualities and abilities that makes us who and what we are, became equated with all that was uniquely valuable about humankind. And because spiritual survival demanded the ability to consciously exercise such rational thought, animals lost all hope of any place in any heaven or afterlife worthy of the name.
Ratio—the Latin root from which the word rational derives—was, for both Augustine and Aquinas, the equivalent of the Greek nous. Like the nose of a rocketship that penetrates the heavens after all of its lower sections have fallen away, it was ratio, and ratio alone, that made it into the spiritual regions stretching above the earth. Animals, like the rest of nature, were, to the Aristotelian mind, incapable not just of the rationality that humans are, but of any kind of genuine thought or consciousness whatsoever. And because they were, no heaven worthy of the name could grant them entry.
Once animals had been our spiritual peers who descended with us from the world above, and were on their way back to that world as well. Among the ancient Near Eastern agricultural cities they were spiritually charged beings who did not entirely lose that status despite the fact that they could also be owned, traded, used, and sacrificed as property. In the Christian era, animals suffered a further demotion. They now were little more than things: objects that we could use and abuse as we wished while stuck down here on the material level, but that we needn’t worry about running into when we left this world behind for heaven. With the denial of any kind of genuine mental life to animals, and by that association any kind of genuine soul life either, it was really only a step or two to the nightmare world of Cartesian science. The father of all the mechanistic conceptions of nature that we are so familiar with today, Descartes, his own pet dog aside, was convinced that animals were not even matter-plus-life-plus-consciousness, but simply matter-plus-life. So convinced was Descartes that animals were in essence unconscious robots that he would nail other living dogs to planks of wood in order that their struggles wouldn’t get in the way while he dissected them alive.
Before the fall, according to the primordial view, humans and animals were both soul-beings who took the plunge into incarnate existence together and would, by hook or by crook, return to the world of spirit together as well. At the dawn of the Christian era, many voices within that tradition (joined soon thereafter by voices in the Judaic and Islamic traditions as well) made that same argument. But in the ensuing centuries that view was doomed to be the minority one, thanks to the power of the idea that heaven was, above all else, a rational place, and that humans, as the earth’s sole rational animals, would alone be admitted. The original mystery that defined our relationship with animals for eons had been replaced by a cold and unfeeling mastery.
Was this really the best that we humans could do for the fellow creatures that had not only accompanied us on our journey out of nature and into culture, but without whom that journey would never have been possible? I, of course, didn’t think so.
Nor, it turned out, was I the only citizen of the modern world who felt that way. Not by a long shot.