The Spiritual Nature of Animals. Karlene Stange
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dog, and pot. They had fled Kamonu and returned to their real home.”
Kamonu asked Nyambi for the power to keep his things — with no intention of changing his murderous behavior, the real cause of his losses, but Nyambi refused.
Meanwhile, Kamonu’s descendants spread over the earth, killing animals. So Nyambi decided to move away from the earth altogether, and he ordered a spider to weave a web to reach an abode in the sky for Nyambi and his court.
The second African myth is from the Bantu and Yao of equatorial southern Africa.
In the story, the animals watch the people rub two sticks together and make fire. Here’s one description of what happens next:
The fire caught in the bush, roaring through the forest, and the animals had to run to escape the flames.
The people caught a buffalo, killed it, roasted it in the fire, and ate it. Then the next day, they did the same thing. Every day they set fires and killed some animal and ate it.
“They are burning up everything!” said Mulungu, the creator. “They are killing my people!”
All the beasts ran into the forest as far away from humankind as they could get. “I’m leaving!” said Mulungu.23
Humans tend to be more creative than other animals. Beavers make dams and birds make nests, but humans make hydroelectric plants and airplanes. These African myths highlight the creative nature of the human being. Humans take after the creator; we love to make things, and we become very attached to our creations. The ego is our personal identity. This idea that we are separate individuals lies in contrast to the monism of the garden paradise. Creativity relates to the ego; it drives us to create things and identify with them.
The first death and killing play prominently in many creation myths; inevitably, the first violent act means the end of paradise. Richard Heinberg explains that in nearly all African myths, God leaves humankind because of our cruelty, quarrelsomeness, and insensitivity to nature.
Theologian L. Robert Keck describes the beginning of violence as an evolution of the human soul. He sees the garden paradise as “Epoch I” of soul development. Humanity’s childhood is characterized by unity with nature, respect for animal powers, a nonviolent relationship among people and animals, and a focus on the feminine.
As the soul of humanity developed, humans acted like adolescents. They separated from the creator and gained immature notions of power and control. The social structure became patriarchal, and violence began. Dualism and reductionism were born during Epoch II; humans separated wholes into parts and binged on analysis.24
According to Keck, Epoch III is the less-violent future we are gradually entering.
Several animals play prominent roles in creation stories. Consider the symbolic meaning of the snake. According to the Native American Black Elk, “Any man, who is attached to the senses and to the things of this world, is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes, which represent his own passions.”25 According to the Hopi, the snake is the symbol of Mother Earth; similarly, the Sumerians believed the serpent represents the power of the Great Mother.
Other native teachings give the snake the power of creation, sexuality, and transmutation. The skin-shedding snake is considered a symbol of rebirth and transformation. For the Hindu, Kundalini energy is envisioned as a serpent that symbolizes sexual, creative energy. The Rainbow Serpent is the Australian Aboriginal symbol of the earth-uterus, or “universal energy.” Perhaps the twins mentioned in the Hopi myth represent the double-helix molecule DNA, which exists in all creatures from ants to zebras. In Greece, among other places, the snake symbolizes healing. The depiction of the snake in medical emblems comes from the biblical story in Numbers 21:8–9: God tells Moses to put a serpent on a pole so that anyone who is bitten by a snake can look at it and live. In Egypt and China, the snake is the symbol of inner knowing and clairvoyance — a subtler being, indeed.
Perhaps the wounded snake I saw in Dawn’s driveway symbolized my own passions, my obsession with healing and an immature notion of control, as well as my own needed transformation.
The spider also appears commonly in creation stories as another symbol of creativity and as the weaver of fate. To Native Americans, she is the grandmother, the benevolent Earth Goddess, the link to the past and future. She spins her web to catch her prey, much as humans are caught in the web of illusion (that is, the physical realm). The spider remains entangled in its web for food and survival as humans remain involved in their earthly affairs. To become enlightened, humans must detach themselves, as Hindus and Buddhists believe. The process of death is sometimes described as a veil or web being removed.
According to the myths, when paradise was lost to humanity, we gained dualistic thinking, moral judgment, and shame, but what about the animals? Are they still innocent, or do they have moral judgment? Although animals fight over territory, I wonder if nonhuman animals possess the same dualistic ego as human beings. Science has no way of telling us; we can only observe them and ponder their behavior.
Mid-June, in La Plata County, is all about foals. The snow melts off the fields, and baby horses sleep in the sun next to their grazing dams. Horse doctors drive from one ranch to another attending to sick neonates and helping mares get pregnant again.
It was a day in mid-June when I met a foal that I later named Iris. I was in the truck, as usual, when a client of fifteen years, Carmen Sherman, called.
“Silver just had her foal, and, well, I don’t know what to think. It looks like she doesn’t have any eyes. It’s just red where the eyes should be. Something’s wrong with her eyes. Can you come see her?”
I was en route to another ranch, but I detoured immediately and drove directly there. As I approached the chocolate-colored filly, I could see that Carmen was right. “Let’s tie Silver up so I can get a closer look.”
Carmen haltered Silver and tied her to the rail. The mare roared in frustration, calling to her foal, throwing her rear from side to side, stomping and stirring up the dust. Her tail wrung as she grunted and squealed, kicking out in frustration like a good mother being violently protective.
I grabbed the foal around the chest and rump, being careful not to get between her and Silver. Carmen stepped over to hold the neonate, one arm around the chest and one around the rump, while I looked at the orbits. They were much smaller than normal, with no ocular tissue at all in the right socket, just pink conjunctiva. The left opening contained a small amount of something that looked like a lens, smaller than a marble.
“Anophthalmia, no eyes,” I said. “I’ve never seen this before.” My mood sank to a quiet sorrow. I knew I would have to kill her. My emotions stirred memories of other deformed babies. Carmen started asking questions, but I was somewhere else, remembering a similar situation with another genetically imperfect neonate I once had to kill.
A baby llama was born with choanal atresia, no opening between the nose and throat. She was beautiful and lively but unable to breathe when she nursed — a condition that would eventually cause her to die slowly by starvation. Another unfortunate factor on commercial breeding farms is that they cannot afford to keep animals with genetic defects around that might deter potential buyers. In animal husbandry, one culls the unhealthy as nature would.
The llama owner could not bear to participate in the killing. So I had to steal the baby, called a cria, from her mother, restrain her myself, and inject a fatal solution into her vein as she struggled against me. I hated myself.
Now, the thought of killing this neonatal foal, as her mother