The mythology of masquerading animals

The mythology of masquerading animals, or, bestiality - In the Company of Animals

Cultures throughout the world represent our deceptive relationships with animals as masquerades, which operate in both directions: in our rituals, humans often masquerade as animals, but in our myths we imagine that animals masquerade as humans. The most intense version of this universal theme is the tale of the bestial deception, the masquerade of an animal as a human in the most intimate of all relationships. What do the myths of bestial masquerade tells us about the ways in which humans have fantasized about their relationships with animals?

Even in folktales which lack an explicit religious agenda, the union of a human and an animal has theological implications. Midas Dekkers has suggested that the myth of Leda impregnated by Zeus as a swan is the source of the myth of Mary impregnated by God: "Christ was born of a virgin and a dove; Christianity too is founded on bestiality.... Bestiality is present at the very cradle of Christianity. Bestial tendencies can be discerned not only in the Christ child himself, but in the gathering assembled round the crib" (Dekkers, 1994, pp. 9-10). The assembled animals are evidence not so much of the bestial parentage of the Christ child but of his place in the mythology of the Family Romance. For Jesus, following the pattern of the birth of the hero already established by Oedipus, Romulus and Remus, and many others (and later continued in Tarzan and Mowgli), is taken from his noble parents (in this case, God) and nurtured by animals before being raised by parents of lower birth (Dunces, 1990). Like all the children of Leda and her swan, Jesus "is at the same time the product of bestiality (man x animal) and of theogamy (god beneath and above their station" (Dekkers, 1994, p. 10).

The Mutilated Equine Foot

Van het Reve's image of the donkey incorporates an important symbol, the wounded foot, in particular the wounded foot of the equine. The horse is one of the most evocative of mythological species, straddling the boundary between the wild and the tame (O'Flaherty, 1981, ch. 6). Mutilated feet are a central theme in European tales of equine masquerades to which the association of witches with horses adds another dimension, for abnormal feet were regarded as "a recurrent sign of contrariness, and, in women, of deviancy" (Warner, 1995, p. 121).

Why does the foot, particularly the mutilated foot, play such an important role in mythologies of the sexual masquerade of animals throughout the world? Feet function as signs that allow a particular individual to be recognized. Moreover, they are signs not merely of individual identity and class identity but of the identity of the species as a whole. In Hindu mythology, one identifying sign of mortals is that their feet touch the ground, while the gods float ever so slightly above it, like hovercraft(1)--just as Jesus walked on the water. Magic animals, on the other hand, cannot always walk on water: A hunter formed an alliance with a beaver woman who requested that he build her a bridge to prevent her feet from touching water. He neglected one spot and she reproached him for his carelessness: I only asked thee to help me dry-footed over the waters. Thou didst cruelly neglect this. Now I must remain for ever with my people (Lang, 1885, pp. 76-80). But why should feet that touch the ground be a sign of mortality? Perhaps, because it is the point of the body where we are earthbound. As Marina Warner has put it, "Feet are ascribed telltale marks of identity and origin, perhaps through the literal-minded wordplay of the imagination, since they are the lowest part of the body and in touch with earth as opposed to the heavens" (Warner, 1995, p. 115). We continue to speak of feet of clay as a metaphor for the weak spot, the mortal spot. The heel of Eve is bruised by the serpent (that sloughs its skin in immortality) as she is banished from Eden for her transgression--a transgression that resulted in her mortality, and in ours. In this context, we may recall the mutilation of the feet of Jesus on the cross--and note that in medieval texts Jesus is sometimes referred to as the hunted stag whose hoof is stained with blood.

The mutilated foot may function as a synecdoche for the mortality of the human body as a whole. We speak of the Achilles' heel and point to our own Achilles' tendons as the sign of our mortality, the place where Achilles was held when he was dipped into the waters that made the rest of him immortal, the place where he remained vulnerable and through which death entered him. (As anyone over fifty will testify, we might more properly refer to our fatal weakness as the Achilles knee: who ever had arthroscopic surgery on a heel?) Like Achilles, the incarnate Hindu god Krsna is killed when a hunter named, surely significantly, "Old-age" mistakes him for an animal and shoots him in the foot (Mahabharata, Book 16).

Animals themselves do seem to be structuralists, at least to the extent that they classify potential predators according to their gaits: your own horses do not recognize you if you limp badly enough (which is particularly galling since the limp is often a result of falling off them), and they shy violently at the sight of lame people and especially at lame horses. The category "human" or "horse" is defined by the gait, and a creature without that gait cannot be a human or a horse. "Category error!" their frightened eyes proclaim (to a structuralist rider), just as the shuffling gait of the homeless identifies them instantly to us who are well-heeled (sic), and we shy away from those who are "down at the heel."

The "wrong gait" may be natural (snakes move differently from birds) or unnatural, the result of a mutilation (a bird with a broken wing). Animals often suffer mutilations of their feet when they transgress the boundary between the human and the animal, a boundary established by their feet. We, by contrast, suffer injuries to our legs when we move in the opposite direction, trying to separate ourselves from the animals. The injury to the foot symbolizes the hobbling of uprightness and the inauthenticity of our relationship with the earth. But it also symbolizes the deal that we made with the devil: the use of our hands for the loss of the power of our (four) legs. By walking upright, we gain the use of the opposable thumb ("the organ with which he does all the mischief," as Orwell's pig put it). We win the privilege of being artisans by giving up the swift and secure movements of quadrupeds. The mythological sacrifice leads, in real life, to chronic lower back pain.

Hephaestus, the artisan of the gods, is lame. Achilles' heel was also the source of his great gift: Achilles is the man "swift of foot" par excellence. A similar sacrifice, in which the wounded foot stands as a metaphor for the artist, is implicit in Philoctetes' festering, stinking foot (wounded from the bite of a serpent, like the heel of Eve), which was the price for his skill as an archer.(3) The metaphor of the foot wounded by an animal--here, a serpent--makes clear the source of our problematic humanity. The particular association of horses and wounded legs is an intrinsic part of the myth of Chiron the centaur, who purchased his skill as a physician at the cost of his own constant pain from his wounded foot--and who was the tutor of Achilles with the fatal heel.(4) And, on the other border of the human, we suffer the mutilation of our feet when we cease to be gods (as in Eden) and become real human beings.

Feet distinguish us from animals, so that when we are bestial, the first thing to go are the feet. Hence, as Marina Warner has noted, devils still have animal feet--they are not yet fully transformed--and bestial women already have animal feet--they are beginning to be transformed. The sexist equation of women and animals gives rise to one of the great jokes about standing upright, Samuel Johnson's remark that "a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all" (Boswell, 1791, p. 287).

It may well be that the memory of this ancient and enduring way of knowing the identity of a creature operates, subconsciously, to bring feet and footprints into so many of the myths of masquerade in which identity is in question--the identity of the child, or the identity of the parent.

The riddle of the foot is the riddle of the Family Romance. Oedipus's foot is the the key to the Sphinx's riddle: the creature that goes on four feet, then two feet, then three feet, is the human being who crawls as a child (or an animal), walks upright as a man, walks with a cane as he ages--and then, we might add, dies. Oedipus himself is that man; his name means "Swollen Foot," and his feet are pierced when, at his birth, he is exposed on the hillside--among the animals. His mutilated feet further connect him, especially in Levi-Strauss's analysis, with other mortals who are paradoxically born from the earth and born from their mothers; they remind us, too, that we were born of the earth, not of the gods (Levi-Strauss, 1963).

The key seems to be that the true form is the one that appears at night--an interesting assertion of the primacy of what is hidden, the time of dreaming, over what is apparent, the time of the workaday world. Sometimes the true form, the nightly form, is human (when a man or woman has been bewitched into becoming a beast, as in some variants of the Swan Maiden theme, or in the tale of Melusine), but sometimes the true form is animal (when an animal or a demon masquerades as a human, like the snake lover in India or the fox woman in Japan). This pattern of diurnal and nocturnal images of women is expressed in an Oriya proverb that "captures this ambivalent attitude toward women succinctly: `Beautiful as a picture by day; a cobra-woman by night' (`Dinore citrini, retire naguni')" (Marglin, 1985, p. 242).

The two images of animal by day or by night are conflated in the film Ladyhawke, said (by the filmmakers) to be "based on a thirteenth-century European legend." A lady and her lover suffer a double curse: she is transformed into a hawk by day and-he into a wolf by night: "Only the anguish of a split second at sunrise and sunset when they can almost touch, but not." The curse was to be broken "when there is a day without night, a night without day." This supreme liminality was a solar eclipse; it being day, the knight was already a human, and as the moon obscured the face of the sun, the hawk became a woman and stood beside him. They rode off into the sunset, presumably to live happily ever after. In this story, riding off into the sunset is more meaningful than the usual Hollywood finale; at last the hero and heroine are able to bear the dangerous, liminal moment that separates the human from the animal.

...

Charles Rycroft offers the best answer I know:
The aptness of animals in general to provide metaphors must
depend on the fact that in some ways they resemble human
beings, whereas in other respects they do not, the most obvious
way in which they do being that they are born, live and eventually
die, the most obvious way in which they do not being that they
lack the power of symbolic thought. It must be this fact that
animals have drives, passions, motives, a will to live, but cannot
speak about them or, so far as we know, reflect upon them, that
they have biological destinies but cannot conceive of biological
destiny, which makes them such apt and such frequently used
symbols for precisely those passions and drives which are hardest
to put into words, both intrinsically and because they are liable to
repression (Rycroft, 1979, pp. 84-8).

That is, the animals want to do all the things that we want to do, but they lack the language and self-reflexion to tell stories about them. They share our sexuality but not our stories of sexuality.

E. M. Cioran, on the other hand, sees our sexuality not as animal but as an escape from our animality:"Ecstasy replaces sexuality. The mediocrity of the human race is the only plausible explanation for sexuality. As the only mode of coming out of ourselves, sexuality is a temporary salvation from animality. For every being, intercourse surpasses its biological function. It is a triumph over animality. Sexuality is the only gate to heaven" (Cioran, 1995, pp. 22-3). In this view, our sexuality is what separates us both from the animals and from the ecstatic saints--or, if you will, from the gods.

Social Research, Fall, 1995 by Wendy Doniger