The Spiritual Nature of Animals. Karlene Stange
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the “Ant people” were people who lived underground like ants. Sometimes ideas in myth seem so strange we think they must be fiction. Then archaeologists discover something like these ancient underground cities, which had wineries, stables, and up to five hundred–kilogram round doors to close off the outside world — an ideal home for “ant” people.
When the First World cooled off, So’tuknang created the Second World. He changed its form completely, putting land where the water had been, and water where the land had been. This description concurs with what we know of geology. The movement of the continents caused dramatic shifts in landscape, so that in the southwestern United States today, what was once tropical forest with dinosaurs grazing along the ocean is now the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau, the regions where the Hopi reside.
So’tuknang thanked the Ant people for saving his people and told them to go into the Second World and take their place as ants. In the Second World, the people were close in spirit and communicated from the center at the top of the head, and they sang joyful praises to the Creator. They did not have the privilege of living with the animals; the animals were wild and kept apart. Being separated from the animals, the people tended to their own affairs. When they began to trade and barter, trouble started.
The more the people had, the more they wanted; they began to fight, and wars occurred. Again, the world was destroyed; and again, the Ant people protected the chosen people by allowing them into their underground world. This time the twins were told to leave the poles, and the earth spun crazily and froze into solid ice.
Many years passed and the people lived happily underground. Then the Third World was created. The people advanced rapidly, creating cities, but again, they eventually became wicked, killing each other. This time, the world was destroyed by water. Continents broke apart and sank to the bottom of the seas.
In the Hopi story, the current world is the Fourth World.
By one count, 272 cultures describe a great flood destroying the world, including the Hopi story of the end of the Third World.9 In many of these stories, the creator instructs people to save animals, as in the story of Noah’s Ark, and in others, animals are involved in saving humans, just as the Ant people saved the Hopi. Other examples include the birds in the Bible story searching for land and a great fish warning the first Hindu man, Manu, of the impending flood. The pervasive nature of the great flood myth, and of our cooperation with the animals to survive, supports the notion that this story represents a global Truth.
Numerous cultures also describe other times of destruction, such as fire and polar shifts, in which most of life perished. Modern science concurs with fossil evidence that indicates there have been at least five distinct mass-extinction events. During these periods, a significant fraction of all the species on earth became extinct in what was essentially a geological instant.10
These mass extinctions occurred before the time we currently believe the first humans inhabited the earth, so it is even more striking that human stories seem to contain a “memory” of them. Might there also be truth to memories of a time when humans and animals communicated easily and lived in peace? Some spiritual teachings believe humans existed on earth long before our current geological records show. Who knows what lies buried below, in depths where we have yet to dig? Archaeologists find new fossilized remains on a regular basis, opening up the possibility that some fantasy-like stories may contain more truths than we currently recognize.
The following creation and paradise story of the Australian Aborigines comes from Robert Lawlor’s book Voices of the First Day.11 The Australian Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on earth, beginning about fifty to sixty-five thousand years ago. As with all ancient tales, Lawlor’s version is just one version of their creation story.
Australian Aboriginal writer Goobalathaldin (Dick Roughsey) explains that creation on earth began when the first human beings arrived from the stars. They possessed supernatural powers and created the land and sea. Everything was good until floods, volcanoes, droughts, and earthquakes rocked the land. Out of fear, the first ancestors sought refuge in a most remarkable way. They transformed into animals, plants, insects, and rocks. As this Dreamtime creation commenced, the earth became populated with a multitude of life-forms.
The Creative Ancestors were vast, unbounded, vibratory fields of energy. They created with their breath by naming. Just as one creates sounds or songs with the vibration of breath, the Aborigines describe the Dreamtime creation as the world being “sung” into existence.12
As the Ancestors traveled across the barren countryside, their travels shaped the landscape. When they slept, they dreamed of adventures for the next day. They dreamed of things and created them: ants, wallabies, emus, crows, lizards, snakes, grasshoppers, plants, and humans. The Ancestors created all these things simultaneously, and each could transform from one to the other. Lawlor writes, “A plant could become an animal, an animal a landform, a landform a man or woman. An Ancestor could be both human and animal.” The Ancestors eventually retired into the earth, the sky, the clouds, and the creatures, to reverberate within all they had created. “All creatures — from stars to humans to insects — shared the consciousness of the primary creative force, and each, in its own way, mirrors a form of that consciousness.”13
The ancestral energy that shaped the earth was referred to symbolically as the “Rainbow Serpent.” It resonated in the shapes and lives of the earth as a usable force and nourishing spirit. The Rainbow Serpent represents the electromagnetic spectrum of light, a profound metaphor for the unity between the tangible and the invisible worlds.14 It connects the earth and celestial realms. Over vast periods of time, the Rainbow Serpent, like the earth’s magnetic field, alternately extinguished and re-created life over the whole earth.
The Aborigines believe the Ancestors created the world perfectly, and it stayed that way so long as humans adhered to the universal law. Abandoning the Dreaming Law forced humankind to leave the garden. Everything changed. The myth of the Southern Cross tells of the first death and how people faced a moral dilemma — whether to kill to survive or die.
The myth relates how drought caused a lack of vegetation, so a man killed a kangaroo rat, which he and a woman ate. A third man refused to eat it and died. A black figure with huge fiery eyes lifted the man into a hollow tree and raised the tree into the southern sky; following it were two yellow-crested cockatoos.
The tree planted itself near the Warrambool, or Milky Way, which leads to where the sky gods live. The tree gradually disappeared from their sight until all that remained were four eyes: two were the eyes of Yowi, the spirit of death; the others were the eyes of the first man to die. The pointers were the cockatoos. These stars make up the constellation of the Southern Cross, a reminder of the first death.15
“The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth,” writes Lawlor. Every meaningful life process or event that occurs leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, just as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. A seed vanishes the moment it germinates, becoming a plant. At this moment, the seed’s latent power springs into action. The seed dies in order to physically manifest, whereas the plant manifests and then dies, leaving seeds. The “seed of the archaic” is maintained in the universal myth of the Golden Age.16
The spiritual nature of animals remains today as it was in the beginning, a representation of the Creative Ancestors. The vibratory serpent energy that created the many forms lives on as platypus, plant, and person. The seed power and Rainbow Serpent correlate to a description of DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid emits photons at the visible spectrum of light. This double-spiral, serpent-like, molecule carries the genetic information or seed power present in every cell of every living thing, including bacteria, broccoli, and bison.
Perhaps these ancient tales describe something we understand today with modern science. Anthropologist Jeremy