To imply that humans are sacrificial victims just like other animals, or to imply that neither humans nor animals should be sacrificial victims, is, in part, to imply the belief that animals are non-other: that we are like them. The decision not to kill and/or eat animals reflects, in part, the belief that animals are non-other and that to eat them is, therefore, a kind of cannibalism. The belief that animals are so other as to be gods, on the other hand, gives yet another swing to the pendulum, and produces a reason to eat such animals after all – to eat them ritually.
It is useful to arrange animals along a continuum of otherness; in any culture, different stories will be told about animals on different levels. In our culture, first come horses and dogs, the animals closest to us, with whom we have developed fairly elaborate systems of communication that tempt us to believe that we can think like horses. Next come wild animals that seem to be very much like us, like the bears and monkeys in the Ramayana who speak a human language and stand erect. After them come the wild animals unlike us, but still mammals, such as lions; and at the far end of the spectrum are animals that we regard as totally unlike us, such as fish.
Now we know that dolphins and whales can talk not only to one another but to us. This knowledge brings to life the myth of the fish and the bridge, and makes us wonder if perhaps someday dolphins will tell us their myths. But since dolphins are not fish but look like fish, and since they are animals but they talk to us as other animals cannot, they doubly straddle the boundary between our own categories of mammals and fish and thereby threaten our definition of what it is to be human. This accounts, in part, for some people’s reluctance to call what dolphins do “speech.” And in fact, the language that people use to talk to dolphins is neither the language in which dolphins talk to one another nor the language in which we talk to one another – it is a Rosetta stone language. Yet it is a language, and it joins us with the fish.
The belief that all animals may be, in some sense, less other than they seem to be is the source of the ever-enchanting myth of a magic time or place or person that erases the boundary between humans and animals. The time of this animal paradise finds a close parallel in the myth that tells of the time when gods walked among people or people walked among gods. The place, like the magic place in the Looking-Glass forest where things have no names, where Alice could walk with her arms around the neck of a fawn, is like the high mountains where people mingle with the gods. And the particular individual with these special powers finds a parallel in the myth of a particular person ( often a shaman or a priest) who has the special ability to traffic with the gods.
Famous examples of such people who live at peace among animals would include Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh, Francis of Assisi, and the many mythical children who are raised as cubs by wild animals, like Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan, like Pecos Bill (suckled by a puma) and Davy Crockett (raised among mountain lions). It might be extended to include children born and raised among domestic animals: Oedipus, raised among sheep, and Jesus, born in a manger. TH White (who once translated a medieval bestiary) imagined the young King Arthur’s education by Merlin the magician as taking place among ants and geese and owls and badgers, whose language Arthur understood. Our list might also include a group of women that we will soon encounter, the Bacchae, who suckle at their breasts fawns or wolfcubs, while snakes lick their cheeks. It is significant that the Bacchae abandon their own nursing children and dismember tame cattle; it is only in the wild that they are at home. The myths in which we speak the language of animals are myths about friendships with the wild animals that we normally hunt, not with the tame animals that we sacrifice.
In the parallels to these stories in which we commune with gods rather than animals, the gods do not become human; a human becomes one of the gods. So, too, the ideal state of humans among animals is not one in which wild animals become tame (as they often do in reality, like Elsa the lioness in Joy Davidson’s Born Free, as well as in myths such as the myth of Prithu). It is a state in which a human becomes one of the animals. Or rather, more precisely, a human becomes part of the society of the animals, but usually remains a human; the adopted child must eventually return to the human world. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra encountered a sage in the forest who urged him, “Do not go to man. Stay in the forest! Go rather even to the animals! Why do you not want to be as I am-a bear among bears, a bird among birds?” But Zarathustra rejected the “saint” and mocked him for not knowing that God was dead.
For the way to learn about others is not to become a fish forever (to convert, to become a Hindu) but to remain yourself as you get inside a fish for a little while or live among the fish, a Jew or Christian among the Hindus. To attempt to do this is to attempt to become a living Rosetta stone, not half one thing and half another, half human and half fish, a monstrosity, like the violent, bestial Bacchae, but both things at once, taking a fish or a Hindu into your head while maintaining it as your head at the same time.
A mediating form of the myth of the human among animals is provided by Gulliver’s voyage to the Houyhnhnms, magic horses. Since horses are, even in our world, tame rather than wild animals, the magic reversal here consists not in taming their wildness, but, on the contrary, in reversing the relationship of dominance between them and humans: the horses become masters of the barbaric humanoid Yahoos who pull their carriages. To this extent, the animals move toward the world of humans. But they do not speak a human language; Gulliver learns their equine tongue. To this extent, the human moves into their world.
The strongest form of the myth is the one in which wild animals are wild and speak their own language, and humans are also wild, innocent of civilisation, and can speak with fish and lions. It is a world where wild and tame have not yet come to have, or have ceased to have, any meaning for people, or therefore for animals. The Garden of Eden is such a paradise in the past, and another is described in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah, as existing in the apocalyptic future:
The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatting together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den.
In this magic time, the only companions of the animals are innocent human beings, children, still wild, still unpolluted by civilisation.
The nervousness with which our culture confronts this idyll (or, if you prefer, the stubbornness with which reality resists this particular myth) is revealed by a Soviet anecdote that I heard in Moscow in 1970. It seems that the Russians, who are justly famous for their animal-taming, decided to present the citizens of Warsaw with a zoo, in order to demonstrate their paternal regard for the Poles. The central exhibit was a cage in which a lion lived with a lamb. A Pole asked the Soviet zoo director how he managed this miracle. “Simple,” came the reply; “every day, a new lamb.”
Many mythologies of animals are haunted by the lost or unattainable paradise in which the lion does not eat the lamb. To be with the animals (or the gods) in this way would be to transcend our human condition entirely, to rise above it or to fall from it, depending upon one's point of view. In contrast with the rituals of cultural transformation, in which we cease to eat flesh by becoming quintessentially cultural and eating bread or rice instead, these are myths of natural transformation, in which we become quintessentially natural and eat what animals eat (food that may in fact include other animals). In the mediating myth of Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, the hero finds that he is unable to live on their vegetarian fare, but after living among them, he is also unable to eat the flesh that is the food of the horrid Yahoos, the deformed humans that are the beasts of the civilised equine Houyhnhnms. The solution appears: “I observed a cow passing by; whereupon I pointed to her, and expressed a desire to let me go and milk her.” Henceforth, Gulliver survives, in perfect health, on a diet of milk and bread made of oats – two civilised alternatives to the two natural extremes of raw flesh and grass.
In Hindu myths of this genre, the humans among the animals eat “fruits and roots”; in the Buddhist variants, they eat nothing at all (not being true humans yet) or they eat the earth itself, which is delicious and nourishing – the antecedent of the earth-cow that Prithu milks. These two strategies, one realistic and one fantastic, provide natural alternatives to the food that men do in fact share with unmythical animals: meat. Often, the myth does not tell us what the people and animals eat (though the author of the passage in Isaiah goes out of his way to assure us that those lions are no longer carnivorous). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who refused to become a bear, was nevertheless befriended by a dove and by a lion who “acted like a dog that finds its old master.” In this variant, though the lion laughs at the dove and Zarathustra says, “My children are near,” the human and the animal do not talk together. Yet such myths often tell us how they manage to speak to one another, and how they manage not to attack one another ( two closely related problems). It is language, not food, that ultimately separates us from the animals, even in myths. Only by speaking their language-learning their myths-would we really be able to know how we would think if we were a fish or a horse or a lion.
Excerpted with permission from The Cave of Echoes: Stories About Gods, Animals and Other Strangers, Wendy Doniger, Speaking Tiger Books.
