To learn more about the upcoming Special Edition of Satya and Call for Submissions, click here.

June 1997 Animals on Our Minds: From Reverence to Adult-eration By Jim Mason

Animals have been embedded in cultures throughout the world. Some thinkers, such as the late Paul Shepard, believe that when we use animals symbolically, as in art and poetry, we are using animals as representatives of the natural world. It has been this way for millennia. When the temple friezes of ancient cultures depicted their soldier-warrior hero-kings slaughtering lions, they were symbolically conquering the earth, because the lion as the top-chain predator symbolized much of nature around him.

If what Shepard and other people believe is true - that animals are this important to us and have been throughout evolution, and that they're indelibly imprinted in our brains and our minds - we must ask ourselves about the repercussions of that. We have to think about what our treatment of animals is doing to us as human beings.

    We need to take a look at what has happened to us as we have moved from a primal and tribal existence to become what we call "modern" human beings with our so-called "civilizations." This process has been going on for about eight or nine thousand years, beginning roughly with the advent of agriculture and the rise of the cities, sophisticated trade, and written language. Recognizable history covers only the last four or five thousand years of it.

Back

Next