Sacred Animals: Messengers Between the Human and the Divine
No human spiritual tradition has been without its sacred animals. The eagle carries prayers to the sky. The serpent moves between the worlds of the living and the dead. The cow gives milk without being asked and is revered across three continents. The fox speaks in riddles. The bear is initiated in darkness and returns from the cave in spring. Long before writing, before temples, before theology in any formalized sense, human beings recognized in the animals around them qualities of the divine — power, wisdom, regeneration, connection to realms inaccessible to human consciousness — and built their spiritual understanding around those recognitions. The sacred animals of the world's religions are not primitive anthropomorphism or naive confusion of the human and animal. They are a sophisticated taxonomy of divine qualities, expressed through the beings who embody those qualities most completely. The Gayer-Anderson Cat, British Museum (664-332 BCE) — one of the fin...