HE DISTINCTION BETWEEN “HUMAN” AND “ANIMAL” IS BY NO MEANS universal to all cultures. Many languages, such as Classical Chinese, have no equivalent of our Western concept of “animal.” The closest thing to the concept of “human” among the Chewong, who live in forests of Malaysia, is a continually shifting sense of affinity, which may at times include trees or insects, while excluding some men and women. And even when such a distinction is present, it is not necessarily conceived in ways that are familiar to us. The Karam people of New Guinea regard the cassowary—a large, flightless bird—as human. Many indigenous people, as well as quite a few European royal and noble families, trace their genealogies to animals in myths. Modern Western culture is probably unique in the central role it accords to the distinction between “civilization” and “nature,” as well as to subsidiary distinctions such as the one between “people” and “animals,” but, even in the Occident, that differentiation has never been stable or unambiguous. Westerners have, at times, partially excluded groups such as Black Africans from “human” status. Several other creatures have, for limited historical periods, been granted this status, at least in many contexts. In the ancient world, foremost of these was the bear, and, in the peasant culture of Medieval Europe, that became the pig. For a relatively brief period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many people thought the beaver was the animal closest to being human. With the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it became the ape.
Another animal that might have been included here is, of course, the dog, except for its relative lack of autonomy in human society. It will be covered in Chapter 9, “Man’s Best Friends.”
APE AND MONKEY
How like to us in form and shape is that ill-favored beast, the ape.
Attributed to Ennius by Cicero, De Natura Deorum
For most of history, people have distinguished between human beings and apes at least as much by habitat as by appearance or biology. Human beings lived in houses, usually in urban centers or the countryside, while apes lived in trees. Folklore also makes the forest home to fairies, elves, and other nature spirits, which are often given simian features such as long arms and profuse body hair.
In the early sixth century BCE, the Carthaginian navigator Hanno led an enormous expedition down the West Coast of Africa. According to his account of the voyage, they sighted a huge mountain called the “chariot of the gods.” He and his crew confronted wild men and women covered with hair, which threw stones at them, and climbed adroitly up the slopes. Ever since then, people have speculated about whether the “wild men” were people dressed in animal skins, chimpanzees, baboons or, most likely, gorillas. Similar rumors of wild men have continued to circulate ever since, as mariners in distant lands reported seeing men with the heads of dogs, the feet of goats, their faces on their chests, and many creatures just as strange. Stories of hairy, wild men with clubs were told around the fire and sometimes acted out in Medieval pageants.
Among the most popular religious figures of China is Old Monkey, who was born when lightning struck a stone. Old Monkey broke into heaven, got drunk on celestial wine, erased his name from the book of the dead, and fought back the armies of heaven. Finally, he caused so much trouble that the gods and goddesses appealed to the Buddha himself for help. Buddha sought out Old Monkey, and their dialogue went something like this:
Illustration of various monkeys from a nineteenth-century book of natural history
“What do you wish?” the Buddha asked Old Monkey.
“To rule in heaven,” Old Monkey replied.
“And why should this be granted to you?” asked the Buddha.
“Because,” Old Monkey said, “I can leap across the sky.”
“Why” laughed the Buddha, “I will bet that you cannot even leap out of my hand.” He picked Old Monkey up, and said, “If you can do that, you may rule in heaven, but, if you can’t, you must give up your claim.”
Old Monkey made a tremendous jump and soon arrived at a pillar that holds up the sky. To show that he has been there, he urinated and wrote his name. Then, with another leap, Old Monkey returned to claim his prize.
“What have you done?” asked the Buddha.
“I have gone to the end of the universe,” said Old Monkey.
“You have not even left my hand,” laughed the Buddha, and he raised one finger. Recognizing the pillar of heaven, Old Monkey knew that the Buddha was right.
The Buddha imprisoned Old Monkey under a mountain for five hundred years. Finally, Old Monkey was rescued by Kwan-Yin, Bodhisattva of mercy. To achieve redemption, Monkey had to guard a Buddhist monk on a dangerous journey from China to India. Monkey gave the monk faithful, though not unwavering, service through fantastic adventures in which Monkey battled countless demons and sorcerers, to finally become a Buddha himself at the end. These adventures were chronicled in the epic novel Journey to the West, attributed to Ch’en-eng Wu, in the early sixteenth century. Old Monkey was often depicted alongside solemn portraits of Buddhist sages, but even as a Buddha he retained a mischievous streak.
The monkey-god Hanuman is similarly beloved in the Hindu pantheon, largely because he is capable of both childish mischief and noble sacrifice. When Hanuman was a child, he looked up, saw the sun and thought it must be a delicious fruit. He jumped to pick it and rose so high that Indira, god of the sky, became angry at the invasion of his domain. Indira hurled a thunderbolt at the intruder, striking Hanuman in the jaw. At this, the father of Hanuman, Vayu, god of winds, became furious, and started a storm that soon threatened to destroy the entire world. Brahma, the supreme god, placated Vayu by granting Hanuman invulnerability to weapons. Indira then added a promise that Hanuman could choose his own moment of death. Ever since, however, monkeys have swollen jaws. This story, from The Ramayana, an ancient Hindu epic, shows the amusement with which apes have generally been regarded throughout the world. Because Hanuman is a monkey, his divinity does not seem intimidating. In the Hindu Panchantantra and the early Buddhist Jatakas, the ape was one of the more sensible of animals, often a chief advisor to the lion king. People of the Far East regard the playfulness of monkeys and apes as divine serenity, not simple frivolity as in the West.
Renaissance illustration showing an apelike creature allegedly captured in 1530 in Saxony
To find a major simian figure in Western religion, we must go all the way back to Thoth, the baboon-headed god of the ancient Egyptians. Thoth was the scribe to Osiris, ruler of the dead, and inventor of the arts and sciences. Perhaps in those archaic times reading and writing, still novel and full of mystery, appeared more simian than “human.” Today, of course, we invoke language, especially writing, to proudly distinguish ourselves from all other creatures.
By contrast, the peoples of Mesopotamia and Greece often regarded apes as degenerate human beings. According to one Jewish legend, some of those who built the Tower of Babel were turned into apes. According to another, apes were the descendants of Enosh, the first son of Seth and grandson of Adam. On the other hand, some legends also told that Adam had a tail like that of a monkey. The debate over whether apes should be considered human probably goes back to the beginnings of civilization. In the religion of Zoroaster, the monkey or ape is the tenth and lowest variety of human beings created by Ahura Mazda.
In many mythologies, apes or monkeys were created as alternative human beings. In Philippine mythology, Bathala, the Creator of the world, was lonely and decided to make the first human being out of clay. When he was almost finished, the lump of clay slipped from his hand and trailed to the ground. That created a tail, and the figure became a monkey. Bathala created people on his second try.
According to the mythology of the Maya, the Creator once tried to fashion people of wood. They behaved so wickedly that all the animals and deities turned against them. The few people that remained retreated into the forest and became howler monkeys, and then the Creator made new human beings out of maize.
Wild men and women are intermediary beings related to both people and apes, at least in folklore. Among the earliest was Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a heroic epic from Mesopotamia from the early second millennium BCE. Being created not by human parents but out of clay by the gods, he jostled with the beasts at the watering hole. With more than human strength, he overturned the traps of hunters. All who saw him were filled with fear and awe. When his subjects appealed to King Gilgamesh for help, he sent a prostitute to Enkidu, and she taught the wild man the ways of men. Enkidu drank wine instead of water, and he began to dress as a human being. But then the beasts rejected him, and human sorrow slowed his step.
Body hair, especially on men, is traditionally a sign of wildness. In the Bible, Esau, eldest son of Isaac and brother of Jacob, was covered with hair. He was also a bit of a wild man, one who liked open country and hunting but was ready to sell his birthright for a bowl of soup. When Isaac was old and blind, he prepared to bless Esau. Aided by his mother, Jacob covered himself up with the fleece of lambs. Jacob then went to his father, pretending to be Esau. Isaac demanded to touch his son. Fooled by the fur, Isaac allowed Jacob to steal his brother’s benediction (Genesis 27). The story has often been interpreted as a triumph of civilization over savagery.
In the Islamic world as well, the resemblance of apes to human beings made them appear disconcerting, and they were often invoked to mock or parody human beings. The anonymous Medieval Arabian Nights Entertainments contained a story in which a cruel Jinni, finding his mistress in the company of a man, killed the woman and turned her companion into an ape. The man wandered in simian form until he came to the court of a king, who was amazed at his skill at calligraphy and chess. The King proudly ordered the ape to be dressed in fine silk and be fed on rare delicacies. A eunuch summoned the princess, so that she as well might see the wondrous animal. On entering the room, the princess immediately veiled her face, for she, as a Muslim, considered it improper that a strange man should see her features. She explained to her father that, without his knowledge, she had studied under a wise woman, was herself a great enchantress, and knew that the visitor was not an ape but a man. The King commanded his daughter to disenchant the ape, so that he might make that man his vizier. The Jinni appeared, his eyes burning like torches, and the princess began to recite some magic words. As the two traded spells, the Jinni became a lion, a scorpion, and then an eagle; the princess became a serpent, a vulture, and then a cock. They fought underneath the ground, in water and in fire, until at last the Jinni was burned to ashes. The princess as well received a mortal wound, but she was able to disenchant the ape before she died.
The Barbary apes (which are not really “apes,” but macaques) were once popular pets of nobles and of wandering entertainers in Medieval Europe. They were probably originally brought from Africa by the Moors, Spaniards, or Portuguese, though nobody knows exactly when. Feral Barbary apes were found scattered near the Mediterranean coast into modern times, and a small population still hangs on at the Rock of Gibraltar. The sight of them vanishing into the trees may have contributed to many legends of fairies and wild men. According to a popular saying, Britain will fall if the apes ever disappear from Gibraltar.
The word “monkey” was probably first used to refer to macaques. While the etymology is uncertain, it may originally have been an affectionate diminutive meaning “little monk.” Renaissance painters such as Albrecht Dürer often included monkeys in religious and courtly paintings, adding a playful touch to otherwise solemn occasions. In the Rococo art of the eighteen century, especially in France, pet macaques were often used to add a note of lightness and gaiety to scenes of luxurious rooms and gardens.
In Early Modern times, an expansion of maritime trade and exploration took Europeans to exotic corners of the world. Explorers began to discover both the great apes and people of cultures radically different from their own; sorting the former from the latter was not an easy matter. Scientists as well as sailors often conflated orangutans with gorillas and African tribesmen, all of whom were known mostly through fleeting glimpses and rumors. Tribes in West Africa regarded apes as human. Some believed that chimpanzees could speak but chose not to, so that they would not be forced to work. “Orangutan” was initially a Malay word for “wild man.” When the Dutch anatomist Nicolaas Tulp dissected a body of an orangutan in 1641, he thought that it was the satyr of classical mythology. A colleague of his, Jacob de Bondt, believed these creatures were “born of the lust of Indonesian women who consort in disgusting lechery with apes.”
Explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought tales back to Europe of apes that lived in huts, foraged in trees, and fought with cudgels. According to some accounts from the period, apes ravished human females or made war on human towns. The enormously popular History of Animated Nature published by Oliver Goldsmith during the late eighteenth century reported that, in Africa, apes sometimes steal men and women to keep as pets. Visitors to Victorian zoos complained that the apes tried to seduce human women. Sometimes apes were even made to put on clothes.
Literature as well blended folklore of wild men and women with recent accounts of primitives and other primates. In Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726), the hero was marooned on an island and adopted by highly civilized horses. In the woods on the fringes of their settlement were hairy men and women known as “yahoos.” These primates constantly wallowed in their own filth. They had long claws and swung through trees. They roared, howled, and made hideous faces. The narrator was filled with revulsion at them, yet he could not help but acknowledge that these creatures were his own kind. The reaction clearly showed the feelings of Europeans at the gradual realization of their kinship with apes. This disgust of Gulliver with the yahoos anticipated the racism that took such terrible forms in the next few centuries. He reported, with fear yet no suggestion of disapproval, that the horses proposed a complete extermination of yahoos.
Apes would later figure prominently in racist propaganda. We can see the beginning of this in the story “The Origin of Apes,” told by the late Medieval German folk poet and shoemaker Hans Sachs. Jesus, accompanied by Peter, was wandering through the countryside and stopped at a blacksmith’s house. Along came an elderly cripple, and Peter asked Jesus to make the invalid young and strong. Jesus promptly consented, and he told the smith to heat his furnace. When the fire had started to blaze, Jesus placed the cripple inside it, and the man glowed with light. After saying a blessing, Jesus took the man out of the flames, and dipped him in water; everyone was amazed to see the cripple transformed into a strong young fellow. After Jesus left, the smith’s elderly mother-in-law wanted to be rejuvenated as well. The smith, who had watched everything, agreed. After placing the old woman in the furnace, just as Jesus had done with the cripple, the smith realized that the magic was not working properly. He pulled his screaming mother-in-law out of the tub and dipped her in water. The cries summoned the smith’s wife and daughter-in-law, both of whom were pregnant; they saw the wrinkled, distorted face of the howling old woman, and were so terrified that they give birth to apes instead of human beings.
Apes have long had a reputation for lacking dignity and morality. Long before Darwin, the essayist Montaigne, chastising human pride, observed in “Apology for Raymond Sebond” that of all animals the apes, “those that most resemble us,” were “the ugliest and meanest of the whole herd.” Quasimodo, the hero of Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) was certainly based partly on reports of anthropoid apes that were filtering back to Europe during the time Hugo was writing. The character was deformed and could barely speak, yet he had superhuman strength and agility. He climbed like an ape among the gargoyles and demons in the remote corners of the cathedral. His tragedy was to be almost human, yet not quite. He could feel the same passions as other men, yet could not share their lives.
Just as the process of distinguishing apes and men was nearly complete, Darwin developed his Theory of Evolution with The Origin of Species in 1859. Not everyone could understand the book, and some thought that Darwin was either blasphemous or crazy. In a famous debate in 1860, Bishop Wilberforce asked Thomas Huxley whether the ape was on his mother’s or his father’s side of the family. Huxley replied that rather than be descended from a gifted man who mocks scientific discussion, “… I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” His brilliant rhetoric may have won the day, but wisecracks about apes for grandparents were constantly used in the vitriolic debate about evolution.
In the early twentieth century, racist caricatures, whether of Africans, Jews, Irish, or Japanese, usually showed people slouched over in an ape-like fashion. Adolf Hitler wrote in My Struggle that Germans must dedicate the institution of marriage “to bring forth images of the Lord, not abominations that are part man and part ape.”
In the early 1980s, experiments in teaching great apes to communicate with human beings, either by computers or by hand signs, generated a great deal of excitement. Jane Goodall and many others observed that apes use tools such as stones to crack nuts or sticks to extract termites from wood. It is a little odd, though, that these observations appeared surprising, since simian use of tools had been regularly noted in natural history books until about the end of the nineteenth century. In 1994, Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer published The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, a book of essays to champion the cause of extending human equality to apes. Few if any of the contributors realized that they were merely reviving a very old debate.
Today, rumors continue to circulate about ape-men such as the yeti. Tabloids announce such exploits as “I was Bigfoot’s Love Slave” in supermarkets across the United States and the world. Fantasies of anthropoid apes entertain people in film, from “King Kong” to “Planet of the Apes.” Our movies are also full of wild men, from Tarzan of the Apes to Rambo. Throughout the 1990s, middle class American men flocked to “wild man weekends” in the woods, during which they heard lectures and discussed their problems around a fire.
Bigfoot, an ape-like monster up to twelve or thirteen feet high, is regularly reported in the woods of Canada and the United States. Tales of bigfoot originated among Indian tribes of Northern California, and may be traced back to around 1850 in oral traditions. In the early twentieth century, bigfoot was conflated with sasquatch, a similar woodland creature from the legends of Native Americans in British Columbia, Canada. The creature was further conflated with other spirits, bogeys, demons, and specters from other Indian tribes, such as the flying heads and stone giants in the lore of the Algonquians. In the early twenty-first century, there have been hundreds of reports every year by people who claim to have seen bigfoot.
BEAR
So watchful Bruin forms, with plastic care,
Each growing lump, and brings it to a bear.
—ALEXANDER POPE, The Dunciad
Of all animals, the bear is probably the one that most clearly resembles human beings in appearance. Even apes cannot stand fully upright, and only walk with difficulty. The bear, however, can run on two legs almost as well as a human. Like a person, a bear looks straight ahead, but the expressions of bears are not easy for us to read. Often the wide eyes of a bear suggest perplexity, making it appear that the bear is a human being whose form has mysteriously been altered. Bears, however, are generally far larger and stronger than people, so they could easily be taken for giants.
Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of bears is their ability to hibernate and then reemerge at the end of winter, which suggests death and resurrection. In part because bears give birth during hibernation, they have been associated with mother goddesses. The descent into caverns suggests an intimacy with the earth and with vegetation, and bears are also reputed to have special knowledge of herbs. At Drachenloch, in a cave high in the Swiss Alps, skulls of the cave bear have been found facing the entrance in what appears to be a very deliberate arrangement. Some anthropologists believe this is a shrine consecrated to the bear by Neanderthals, which would make it the earliest known place of worship. Others dispute the claim; true or not, the very idea is testimony to the enormous power that the figure of the bear has over the human imagination.
The cult of the bear is widespread, almost universal, among peoples of the Far North, where the bear is both the most powerful predator and the most important food animal. Perhaps the principal example of this cult today is the one followed by the Ainu, the earliest inhabitants of Japan. They traditionally adopt a young bear, raise it as a pet, and then ceremoniously sacrifice the animal. Eskimo legends tell of humans learning to hunt from the polar bear. For the Inuit of Labrador, the polar bear is a form of the Great Spirit, Tuurngasuk. The name of Arthur, the legendary king of Britain, derives from “Artus,” which originally meant “bear.”
Countless myths and legends reflect an intimacy between human beings and bears. The Koreans, for example, traditionally believe that they are descended from a bear. As the story goes, the tiger and the female bear had watched humans from a distance, and they became curious. As they talked together on a mountainside one day, both decided that they would like to become human. An oracle instructed them to first eat twenty-one cloves of garlic, and then remain in a cave for one month. They both did as instructed, but after a while the tiger became restless and left the cave. The mother bear remained, and at the end of a month she emerged as a beautiful woman. The son of Heaven, Han Woon, fell in love with her and had a child with her, Tan Koon, who is the ancestor of the Koreans.
The Greek deity Artemis, whose name literally means “bear,” was the goddess of the moon, the hunt, and animals. The bear was also sacred to Diana, her Roman equivalent. In a story from the Roman poet Ovid, the god Jupiter disguised himself as Diana, and then raped her nymph companion Callisto. On realizing that Callisto was pregnant, Diana banished the young girl from her presence. Eventually Callisto gave birth to a boy named Arcas. Juno, the wife of Jupiter, turned Callisto into a bear and forced her to roam the forest in perpetual fear. Arcas grew to be a young man. He went hunting in the forest, saw his mother, and raised his bow to shoot her. At that moment, Jupiter looked down, took pity on his former mistress, and brought both mother and son up to Heaven, where they became the constellations of the great and little bear. This is only one version of the story among many, but the Arcadians traditionally trace their origin to Callisto and her son.
The enormous size of the bear, together with its similarity to human beings, often makes it an object of both awe and derision, and dancing bears were until recently a common feature of traveling shows.
(Courtesy of the Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History, #2A4017)
The ancient Hebrews, who were herders, regarded carnivorous animals as unclean, and the bear was no exception. In the Bible, the young David protected his flock against bears (1 Samuel 17:34). The bear became a scourge of God when small boys followed the prophet Elisha and made fun of his bald head. Elisha cursed them, and two she-bears came out of the woods and killed the children (2 Kings 2:23-24). According to tradition, however, Elisha was later punished with illness for his deed.
The Tlingit and many other Indian tribes on the northwest coast of the North American continent have told stories of a young woman who was lost in the woods and was befriended by a bear. At first she was afraid, but the bear was kindly and taught her the ways of the forest. Eventually she became his wife. She grew thick hair and hunted like a bear. When the couple had children, she at first tried to teach them the ways of both bears and human beings. Her human family, however, would not accept the marriage, and her brothers killed her husband, whereupon she broke completely with the ways of humans.
Many tales pay tribute to the maternal role of the mother bear. Repeating a bit of lore found in the works of Pliny the Elder and other writers of antiquity, Medieval bestiaries told of cubs that were completely formless at birth. Their mother would mold them with her tongue, literally licking the cubs into shape. The mother bear must constantly protect her offspring from their father, who would eat them out of jealousy and hunger. This fierce protectiveness is part of what has moved contemporary American author Terry Tempest Williams to posit a special bond between women and bears. “We are creatures of paradox,” she wrote in an essay entitled “Undressing the Bear.” She continued, “Women and bears, two animals that are enormously unpredictable, hence our mystery.”
Many European fairy tales suggest such a bond. For example, according to the Norwegian story “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” recorded from oral traditions by George Dasent, a bear went to the house of a poor family and asked the parents for their daughter in marriage, promising great riches in return. The father persuaded his reluctant daughter to agree, and the bear carried her home on its back. The bear visited the young woman every night, but always departed at the break of day, and she was forbidden to know where her husband went. Finally, one night she was overcome with curiosity and lit a candle, only to see him vanish. She made a long and perilous journey to the land east of the sun and west of the moon, where she was finally reunited with her husband. Her love had broken the enchantment of a sorceress, and he turned out to be a human prince. In another version of the tale, three sisters were talking about the men they would marry, when one said in jest, “I will have no husband but the brown bear of Norway.” That is indeed what finally happened, but the couple was permanently united only after many trials and tribulations. These stories belong to the cycle of “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tales in which a bride must learn to see past the bestial appearance of her partner in order to find a gentle young man.
One tale that seems to lament the loss of intimacy between bears and human beings is the Icelandic saga “King Hrolf and His Champions,” from the thirteenth or early fourteenth century. King Hrolf was drinking with his warriors when the army of Queen Skuld attacked them. Only Bothvar Bjarki, the greatest of the King’s knights, was not to be found, and all thought he must have been killed or captured. As the battle raged, an enormous bear appeared at the side of King Hrolf. Weapons simply rebounded off the bear’s skin, and it killed more enemies with his paw than any five heroes could have dispatched. One of King Hrolf’s champions, Hjalti the Magnanimous, ran back to camp, where he found Bothvar in a tent. Outraged, Hjalti threatened to burn the tent and Bothvar. Calmly and a bit sadly, Bothvar rebuked Hjalti, saying that he had proved his courage many times. He was ready to join the battle, Bothvar explained, but could offer his king more help by remaining behind. Finally, Bothvar reluctantly entered the fray, but the bear disappeared, for Bothvar and the bear were one. King Hrolf and his champions all fought valiantly, yet were overwhelmed by the enormous host of Queen Skuld and killed.
Still another such tale is Valentine and Orson, popular in the Middle Ages, which is preserved for us in French and English texts from around the end of the fourteenth century. The infant Orson was lost in the woods, but a mother bear took him home to her cave and raised him as one of her cubs. He grew up to be huge, immensely strong, covered with hair, and able to speak only in grunts. For a time, Orson was the terror of the woods, feared by both animals and human beings. When his beloved mother died, Orson let himself be taken by his brother Valentine to the court of King Pepin of France, where he learned the ways of men and became a knight.
A dreaded warrior known as the Green Knight had captured a princess and challenged anyone who wished to rescue her to battle. Many of King Pepin’s knights took up the challenge, but the Green Knight bested them all and hung them from a tree. Finally, the turn of Orson came. In the first round of their joust, Orson inflicted several wounds on the Green Knight, but they healed instantly. Realizing the Green Knight could not be defeated by weapons, Orson leapt from his horse, threw away his sword, tore off his armor, pulled the Green Knight from horseback, and forced his adversary to yield, rescuing the princess and winning her for his bride.
In ancient and early Medieval times, Europeans had considered the bear “king of beasts.” Several monarchs, particularly in Scandinavia, proudly traced their lineage to bears. The bear, however, had not been integrated into Christian imagery, since that religion had developed primarily in the Mediterranean, where the lion was the apex predator. Gradually, as it became rarer, the lion had gone from being primarily an object of fear and revulsion to being a symbol of Christ, so clergy promoted the “Christian lion” at the expense of the “pagan bear.” To accomplish this, bears were mocked by being forced to dance in chains, clumsily imitating a human being in marketplaces for public amusement. Bear-baiting, where a chained bear was set upon by fierce dogs, was also a popular amusement until about start of the nineteenth century. Bears were presented as both cruel brutes and pathetic victims in many stories, and then hunted to near extinction. In the Medieval tales throughout Europe since the end of the eleventh century, “Bruin” the bear is an aristocrat whose natural strength is no match for the peasant cunning of Renard the Fox. But the old awe of the bear continued to resurface in legends and heraldry well into the modern period.
Edward Topsell, the Elizabethan zoologist, reported in 1656 that a man was walking along carrying a large cauldron one autumn day when he saw a bear nibble a root, then descend into a cave. The man was curious and started to chew on the root of the same plant. Immediately he began to feel very sleepy, and he was barely able to throw the cauldron over his body. He remembered no more until he lifted up the cauldron to find the last snow melting on a beautiful spring day.
In William Faulkner’s short story “The Bear” (1942) a giant brown bear known as Old Ben becomes the symbol of a vanishing wilderness in the American South. As long as he was there, the land remained wild and strangers did not dare to intrude. The hero of the tale is a boy, learning to be an accomplished woodsman, who found the forests are deprived of both danger and romance after their guardian has been killed by hunters. Like all large meat-eaters, bears had become rare by the twentieth century. The terror that bears once inspired came to be remembered through a haze of nostalgia, and the teddy bear became a favorite toy of children. The name comes from a story that had President “Teddy” Roosevelt, an avid big-game hunter, declining to shoot a bear cub, thinking it unsporting to take advantage of the helpless creature.
No longer greatly feared, the bear has become a symbol of vulnerability. Everybody in the United States who was born before the 1970s or so has seen posters with Smokey the Bear, who was created during World War II to warn people that Japanese shelling might begin a conflagration in the woods of America. When the war ended, the United States Forest Service retained Smokey as a symbol in a campaign to prevent the careless ignition of forest fires. Far from being bestial, he has a rather parental image. He wears human clothes and a forester’s hat. His facial expression is mature, friendly, and a little melancholy. Yet if Smokey seems almost absurdly civilized, his role remains that of bears since archaic times—protector of the wild.
BEAVER AND PORCUPINE
What is the vaunted village of the beaver, the most ingenious of quadrupeds, compared with a human city, with hits ships and merchandise, its temples, churches, and dwellings, its libraries, and its monuments of art?
—S. G. GOODRIDGE, The Animal Kingdom Illustrated (1869)
According to a Mediterranean legend, when a hunter chased a beaver, the animal would bite off its testicles, which contained a medicine known as “castoreum” (actually in sacs between the pelvis and the base of the tail), giving the pursuer what he probably wanted and thus escaping alive. This account was reported by Pliny, Aelian, Horapollo, Cicero, Juvenal, and many others, and may at times have alluded to the self-castration by priests of the goddess Cybele in Asia Minor. The tale was later repeated in Medieval bestiaries, where it was interpreted as an allegory of the soul that, pursued by the Devil, must give up all lewdness.
The beaver, meanwhile, was a popular totem and often a bearer of culture for Native American tribes. According to legends of the Algonquin, Lenape, Huron, and many other Indians, the beaver first created land (often helped by the muskrat or otter) by dredging up earth from the bottom of the sea.
The Blackfoot Indians tell of a man named Apikunni, who had been temporarily banished from his tribe and took refuge during the winter in a beaver’s house. When he left in the spring, the patriarch of the beaver family gave him a pointed piece of aspen. Using the stick as a weapon, he became the first man ever to kill in war, and so he was welcomed back by his people and made their chief. The Osage tribe sometimes traced its origin to a chief named Wasbashas, who was taught to build by beavers after he had married the daughter of their king.
Often associated with the beaver in both Europe and America is the porcupine, a rodent known primarily for the spikes covering its back. The most widely spread legend about the porcupine, found in the work of Pliny and many other authors of the ancient world, is that it can shoot its spines when attacked. Aelian added that the porcupine can aim its quills at an attacker with considerable accuracy and that the quills “leap forth as though sped from a bowspring.” This fiction is still commonly believed today.
This early American print illustrates the indiscriminate slaughter of beaver due to importation of firearms and the demand for beaver pelts. Note, however, the great architectural sophistication of the beaver homes. The animals were reported to “Build like architects,” in the words of Oliver Goldsmith.
In Native American mythology, the porcupine frequently accompanies the beaver, usually as a companion but occasionally as an adversary. The Haida of the Northwest coast told a story of the war between the clans of Beaver and Porcupine. After Porcupine had stolen Beaver’s food, the clan of Beaver placed Porcupine on an island to starve, but the clan of Porcupine rescued their leader when the water froze and they could walk across the ice. The clan of Porcupine then captured Beaver and placed him high in a tree. Beaver could not climb, but he chewed his way down the tree, and the two clans finally made peace. Both are represented by animals that survive by ingenuity rather than power.
In the Romantic period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a revolt against the constraints of civilization led to the celebration of wild animals. Early explorers were amazed by the size of beaver lodges in the New World. Influenced by the tales of Native Americans, they brought back to Europe fantastic stories of a highly sophisticated beaver society. Beavers were said to build with mortar, use their tails as trowels, and have a system of parliamentary law. By the eighteenth century, the beaver was regularly mentioned—along with the elephant, ape, dog, and dolphin—as perhaps the most intelligent animal after man.
Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the most popular naturalist of the eighteenth century, believed that all animals once had a civil society with laws, before they were murdered and enslaved by human beings. The last remnants could be found in the New World, where beavers still built villages, created constitutions, and held courts of law. After keeping an imported beaver as a pet, he was disappointed to find it listless and melancholy. He concluded that the beaver did not possess extraordinary native intelligence but merely showed what all animals might be capable of if their social cohesion had not been disrupted by human beings. Oliver Goldsmith, in his enormously popular History of Animated Nature (1774), wrote of America, “The beavers in those distant solitudes are known to build like architects and rule like citizens.” He added that the homes of the beavers “exceed the houses of the human inhabitants of the same country both in neatness and in convenience.”
But the reputation for intelligence did not protect the beaver, any more than European idealization of the “noble savage” protected the Indians. While many Europeans were romanticizing the American beaver, colonial trappers were finding it a lucrative source of fur. Greed easily prevailed over sentiment, as the British, French, Dutch, and even some Indians engaged in the “Beaver War,” an intense competition for furs that often escalated into armed conflict and drove the beavers in North America close to extinction.
The stories of the sophisticated commonwealth of beavers were debunked by the explorer Samuel Hearne—an employee for the Hudson Bay Company, which traded in beaver pelts—in the late eighteenth century. They continued, however, to be repeated in books of natural history, often more interested in entertainment than science, well into the twentieth. Only Native Americans, particularly in tribes of the Northwest Coast, continue to regard the beaver as almost human, or more than human, to this day.
PIG
I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equal.
—Attributed to WINSTON CHURCHILL
Human attitudes toward pigs cover an enormous range, but they are consistent in one way. We almost always perceive pigs as being very close to the earth. They are indispensable in looking for truffles in southern France, since their ability to smell things beneath the soil exceeds that of even dogs. They also sometimes take baths in mud to escape the heat. If we see earth as a prison of the spirit, we are likely to hate pigs; if we long for contact with the earth, we may love them. For better or worse, they represent the joys and limitations of the flesh. The pig is holy, yet perfectly at home in Hell. The pig is gentle, yet harbors such wildness that even devils are terrified. The pig is revered, hated, loved, feared, admired, exploited, laughed at, and regarded as a friend. It is as if the pig were the entire animal kingdom in a single form.
Pigs have a large range of vocalizations, which are very expressive, as well as a keen intelligence. They are often used as substitutes for human begins, in myth as well as medicine. The internal organs of a pig are remarkably similar to those of a human being. This feature helped make pigs a favorite animal for sacrifice to the gods, since the sacrificial victim was generally a symbolic surrogate for a person. Whenever the Roman State entered a contract, a pig would be taken to the temple of Jupiter. As he slit the animal’s throat with a sacred sickle, the priest would say, “If the Roman people injure this pact, may Jupiter smite them as I smite this pig.” Today, the organs of a pig, especially heart valve replacements, are favorites for transplant into men and women, and pigs are often injected with human genetic material so that their tissues will function after transfer. But this, of course, further blurs the boundary between people and swine, accentuating the ethical problems of sacrificing animals for human health.
Pigs have large litters, which helped make them a symbol of fertility. Ancient Egyptian women who wished to have children sometimes wore amulets depicting a sow and piglets. Pigs would also assist in agriculture by turning over the soil so it could be more easily plowed. Nut, the beloved Egyptian goddess of the sky, was sometimes depicted as a pig. Nevertheless, Set, the evil brother who kills the god Osiris, was also sometimes given porcine form. He is a very early image of the Devil. Traditional devils in Medieval times and even today have the pointed ears and tusks of a boar.
Herodotus wrote that pigs were normally considered so unclean in Egypt that swineherds were banned from temples. Should an Egyptian accidentally touch a pig, he would immediately rush to a river and jump in, not even bothering to undress. Nevertheless, revulsion alternated with reverence. Osiris, the god of the dead, was associated with pigs. At his yearly festival, swine were sacrificed during the night of a full moon. On the next day everyone would eat pork, which was otherwise strictly forbidden. Those who were too poor to afford a pig would form one out of dough, which they would then sacrifice.
A monk placing the papal crown on a pig.
(Woodcut by Hans Weiditz, Augsburg 1531)
Several Hindu scriptures including the Ramayana contain a story in which the demon Hironyashka tried to hide the Earth, personified as the goddess Bhudevi (whose name means “beloved of the boar”), in primal waters. As she was captured, the Earth uttered a plaintive cry, and the god Vishnu (in some versions, Brahma) came to her rescue. He assumed the form of a boar, Vahara, raised the world above the waters on his tusks, and then killed Hironyashka after a thousand years of combat. The worship of Vahara was suppressed in India under Islamic rule, since Muslims consider the pig unclean, but it remains popular today.
In India, the bloodthirsty goddess Kali was represented as a black sow, perpetually giving birth and eating her offspring in an endless cycle. In Greece, Demeter (Roman “Ceres”), the gentle goddess of agriculture, was also associated with pigs. On the other hand, the Babylonian Tammuz, an agricultural deity, was, like the Greek Adonis, killed by boars while hunting. In the ancient world, boars were often feared not only for their fierceness but also for the damage they could do to crops by eating and tearing up fields. When heroes—such as Meleager, Theseus, and Hercules—killed wild boars, they gained great renown.
In Homer’s Odyssey, the sorceress Circe changed the crew of Odysseus into pigs for one year, after which Odysseus forced her to return them to their original form. She symbolizes any temptress who inspires men to behave in a bestial way. Nearly a millennium after the age of Homer, Plutarch wrote a delightful satire entitled “On the Use of Reason by So-called ‘Irrational’ Animals.” In Plutarch’s version, at the request of Odysseus, Circe agreed to change the pigs back into men, but only if they themselves wanted to change. She called on a pig named Gryllus to speak for the crew. When Odysseus said that human beings showed greater courage than animals, Gryllus reminded him of the Crommyum sow who, even without the use of weapons, almost defeated the hero Theseus. When Odysseus said that humans showed greater reason, Gryllus gave many examples of animal intelligence; pigs, for example, went to riverbeds and ate crabs to cure their illnesses. The debate ended abruptly and the manuscript may never have been finished, but Odysseus was so completely beaten that it is very hard to imagine a recovery.
In Norse mythology, the god Frey rode in a chariot drawn by the boar Gollinborsti, whose name means “golden tusks.” The boar’s head, traditionally served in England at Christmastime, was originally a sacrifice to Frey. The boar Saehrimnir had been killed every evening and served to the heroes in Valhalla, to be reborn the next day. In a similar way, pigs in Celtic legend were the food of the gods in otherworldly feasts. The pigs of Manannán, the Irish god of the sea, would also reappear after being eaten.
For the Hebrews, however, pigs were not merely “unclean”; they were the most repulsive of animals. Perhaps one reason was that pigs were carriers of the disease trichinosis, but just about every domesticated animal was capable of spreading some disease. Another possible reason was that pigs had been associated with many pagan mother-goddesses, divinities that the Hebrews abhorred. It could also be because pigs would eat just about anything, while the Hebrews were very fastidious about their food.
The Old Testament tells how the Greek emperor Antiochus Epiphanes tried to force Jews to eat pork, which helped set off the revolt of Judas Maccabeus. For the most part, Christians initially shared the Hebrew view of pigs as unclean. Matthew told us not to “cast pearls before swine” (2 Macc. 7:6). In Mark, when Jesus cast out demons from a madman, they entered a herd of swine, which then ran out into the sea and were drowned.
Various pigs from a nineteenth-century book of natural history.
To later Christians, the Jewish avoidance of pork appeared to be something like a taboo against cannibalism, and at times even worship of the pig. During the first century CE, Petronius Arbiter wrote in a poetic fragment, “The Jew may worship his pig-god.” The Spanish Inquisition tested Jews who claimed to have converted to Christianity by requiring them to eat the meat of pigs. In numerous popular stories, Jews were turned into pigs. A chronicle of wonders published in Binzwangen, Germany, in 1575 reported that a Jewish woman gave birth to two piglets. At the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, a popular anti-Semitic motif was “the Jew’s sow,” an enormous pig suckling Jewish men.
Medieval Europeans considered the pig to be the animal closest to human beings. Pigs were raised in a way that straddled not only the boundary between person and animal, but also that between pet and livestock. A pig would be allowed to run freely, fed scraps from the family table, nurtured primarily by women, and, for many purposes, regarded as part of a human family. Then, around the time of the winter solstice, after the members of a family had all paid their last respects, the pig would be ceremoniously slaughtered. This would be followed by the Feast of Saint Pig, during which feasting, games, singing, dancing, and plays would last throughout the night. The bones and inedible parts of the pig would later be ritually buried, in expectation of resurrection.
A pig, usually immaculate, was often painted alongside the hermit Saint Anthony. An Italian tale from the Mediterranean islands, retold by Italo Calvino, starts at a time when all fire was in Hell, and so no hearths warmed families in winter. People, shivering so badly that they could barely speak, appealed to Saint Anthony for help. The holy man went down to the very gate of Hell and knocked with his staff. At his side, as always, was his faithful pig. A devil opened the door a crack, looked out, and said, “Get out of here! We know you. You’re a saint. Only sinners are allowed in Hell!” The pig would not take “no” for an answer, forced open the door, knocked down the devil, scattered a pile of pitchforks, and raised so much hell in Hell that the devils were terrified. “Come in and get your pig!” shouted the devils to Saint Anthony. The saint walked in and touched the pig lightly with his staff, at which point the animal became completely calm. “Now get out of here, both of you, and don’t ever come back again!” shouted the devils. Without a word or even a grunt, Saint Anthony and his pig walked away. What the devils didn’t know was that Saint Anthony was carrying a spark of fire concealed within his staff. As soon as Saint Anthony and his pig reached the surface of earth, the holy man swung the staff above his head so that sparks flew in all directions. And so, thanks to Saint Anthony and his pig, people can tell stories in comfort around the fireplace while the ground is covered with snow.
But the near human status of pigs in the European Middle Ages could bring expectations of human behavior, often of adherence to human laws. In 1389, in the town of Falaise in Normandy, a sow was judicially condemned for killing an infant after a trial lasting nine days. As punishment, the pig, dressed in human clothing, was tortured and then hanged by the neck until dead in front of a crowd consisting of local gentry, peasants, and many other pigs brought in from the surrounding area. There were scores of such animal trials in Europe during the Early Modern Period, and the overwhelming number of them were of swine.
The fact that pigs foraged freely in woods and were even allowed to enter homes made them particularly vulnerable to judicial indictments. Prosecutors sometimes alleged that pigs had an infernal smell, showing their association with the Devil. Their grunts and squeals, which seemed disrespectful to the courts, made things even worse. Plenty of pigs were convicted, and some acquitted, in courts throughout Europe for such offenses as eating their own young or having sex with human beings. Those found guilty were usually either hanged or burned alive.
Aristocratic families of Medieval Europe largely took their animal symbolism from warrior religions of their pagan past rather than Christianity. The nobles admired boars for their military virtues, and boars were among the most popular animals in heraldry. When hunted, boars charge and fight to the end no matter how many dogs and men they face. Social position in Medieval times determined which animals one was allowed to hunt. As a noble animal, the boar was second only to the stag in status, and it presented an even greater test of a hunter’s skill and bravery. Metaphors for love were often drawn from hunting. In the late Medieval British romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the wife of his host tried to seduce Gawain several times. Once, when Gawain resolutely rejected her seductions, he was compared to a boar confronting a hunting party directly and without fear.
Since domestic pigs were allowed to roam relatively freely until around the start of the modern era, they would often interbreed with wild boars. Until the nineteenth century, they still had gray hair and tusks. What we usually think of when we think of as “pigs”—pink, almost hairless, and very fat—appeared only fairly recently, having been created from albino varieties. The physical change brought many modifications in both the use and the symbolism of pigs. They became an image of those spoiled by the comforts and privileges of civilization.
The boar is the last cycle of the Chinese zodiac, and those who are born in the year of the boar are said to be courageous but stubborn. The domestic pig in Asia shared a reputation with its Western counterparts for appetite and earthy charm. The sixteenth-century Chinese epic Journey to the West told of a monk who undertook a pilgrimage from China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures and save China from chaos. The animals that accompanied him included a monkey, a horse, a sea monster, and Old Hog, a pig that subdued demons with his rake. Old Hog may have been a formidable fighter, but laziness or appetite easily overcame him. As a reward for his good services, he was finally made not a Buddha but Janitor of the Altars, and he had the pleasant task of eating scraps left after celebrations.
In Berlin during the 1920s, there were several riots by veterans, working men, Nazis, and Communists. The police who were summoned to put down the violence were called “pigs.” In Nazi Germany, Minister of Agriculture R. Walter Darré wished to proclaim the pig the central animal of the Aryan people, but other Nazis identified pigs with Jews. Student rebels throughout much of the world took up this epithet again in the 1960s, taunting both politicians and law-enforcement officers by calling them “pigs.” In 1968, protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago held a mock convention and nominated a pig for president.
In his novella Animal Farm (1946), George Orwell used the modern farm as an allegory for the totalitarian state. Pigs, as the most intelligent of animals, lead a revolt against the brutal farmer Jones. “All animals are equal …” the pigs proclaim, but they later add, “some are more equal than others.” A Berkshire boar named Napoleon drives out his porcine rivals, learns to walk on two legs, and exploits the other animals as much as human beings had ever done. The very last sentence of the book is, “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Domestic pigs are generally looked on with affection in books for children, in part because of their dependence and vulnerability.
{Illustration from the early twentieth century by W. Heath)
That depiction of pigs may be good literature, but it is still rather ungracious. Pigs are among the most useful of animals to human beings. Just about every part of the body of a pig is used; pudding is made from the blood of pigs, and sausages are wrapped in the intestines; the leather of a pig’s skin is highly prized. The ability of pigs to digest almost anything and convert it into edible material makes them especially helpful to farmers. Many pigs receive remarkably little gratitude, and they are often kept in cramped, filthy conditions until the time of slaughter arrives.
Pigs are still among the most beloved figures in books and movies for children. These include Wilbur (from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web), Porky Pig, and Babe, all gentle figures who show little of either the valor or the filthy habits traditionally associated with swine. Miss Piggy, one of the biggest stars of The Muppet Show, is a modern heiress to ancient porcine goddesses such as Nut. She has starred in feature films, written a popular book on fashion, and been featured on posters and calendars. Miss Piggy is forever flirting. She may act vain and clumsy, but you had better not laugh at her too openly. She has the superhuman strength and fierceness of her porcine ancestors, which so impressed people in ancient times. The pig, in summary, is the only animal in the Western world that not only transcends the division between wild and domestic animals but even that between pets and livestock.