“The spirit wanders, comes here now, now here, and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into beasts, but never perishes.”
–Joseph Campbell
Animals have a significant presence in our mythologies. The meanings we ascribe to them illuminates our uneasy relationship to our other-than-human companions, and offer us a way to think creatively about our place in the world and human nature.
The exploration in this episode revolves around two stories, “The Tigress” jataka and a fairytale called “The Three Languages.”
Transcript of Listening to our animal kin
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
Today I want to talk some more about the significance of animals in mythology and our beliefs and attitudes about human nature and human life, as well as everything that is other-than-human. I have two stories for you: “The Tigress Jataka” from the Buddhist tradition and a fairy tale called “The Three Languages.” Animals are important to both of these stories and they offer an opportunity to reflect on common beliefs about animals and the implications of those beliefs.
In the last episode we started with a fable about frogs, and I mentioned that fables are a common form of teaching story. The jataka is another type of teaching story. Jatakas are stories about the Buddha’s various incarnations on the path to enlightenment. That moment of awakening under the bodhi tree was the result of many, many lifetimes. As the title suggests, this jataka involves an animal. A tigress.
“The Tigress Jataka”
A long, long, long time ago, before the Buddha as the Bodhisattva, achieved perfect enlightenment, he was born into a family of wealthy Brahmins. He grew up learning the wisdom, rituals and skills of his station. He was a naturally gifted teacher, so he decided to establish a forest hermitage and to guide others along a path of selfless generosity.
One day, he was out walking with one of his disciples. It had not rained for some weeks and the area was experiencing a very serious drought. The trees were bare, the stream beds were nearly dry. As they were walking, they heard a series of strange, coughing roars. They stopped to listen. The student said, “Master, those are the roars of a tiger, a hungry tiger. I think we better head back right away.” The teacher said, “No, wait, let’s listen a little more closely.” They listened. The teacher said, “I think those are the roars of a starving tiger. Let’s go a little bit further and see if there’s anything that we can do to help.”
The student reluctantly agreed. In a short time, they came to the edge of a cliff. When they looked down, they saw a starving tigress with two little cubs. The weak little cubs were trying to nurse. The tigress kept batting them away, roaring miserably. Her ribs were showing, her eyes were glazed over. The teacher realized that the desperate mother tiger might be driven to eat her own children.
“Quick, quick,” the teacher said to the student, “Run back and see if you can find some food for this starving animal. She is going to be driven to eat her own cubs if she doesn’t have food soon and the karma that will arise from that will be terrible. Run back, bring some food and I will wait here and do whatever I can to stop her from harming her cubs until you return.”
The student ran off. The teacher turned his attention back to the tigress. “This is really pitiful,” he thought watching them. The tigress tried to stand up. She was so weak that her hind quarters were dragging on the ground.
Finally, she managed to get up and made a couple tottering steps toward her two tiny cubs. “My disciple is not going to make it back in time with food,” thought the teacher, “and I can’t just stand idly by and let this happen. Mind is vast and empty and cannot be found. This body is so much matter. This body is merely the manifestation of my own past thoughts back into the endless past. My deepest wish is the liberation of all sentient beings. If I do not act, I’ll regret it.”
He removed his robe and hung it on the branch of a tree. Then he turned to the cliff and like a man preparing to dive into a lake, put his hands together and leapt off the edge. The startled tigress crouched down in fear. Then she saw the bloodied body of the man stretched out on the rocks at the base of the cliff. With her last remaining strength, she lunged forward and began to eat him.
Shortly after, the student returned, full of apologies and empty handed. He saw the teacher’s robe hanging on the tree at the cliff’s edge. He called out his teacher’s name. Fearing what he might see, he looked over the edge of the cliff and he saw the tigress feeding. The student knelt down on the ground and began to weep. And then he dried his eyes, and in awe, carried the robe as a sacred relic back to the hermitage. There he told the other students what had happened and led them back to the spot. They festooned the tree with flowers, and when the tigress and her cubs had departed, they climbed down and gathered up the Bodhisattva’s bones and built a jeweled stupa in which to house them.
They say that the gods themselves were stunned by what they had witnessed and covered the ground with precious incense made of sandalwood powder. Even now, the Bodhisattva’s selfless deed is remembered by the gods, and by every human who knows this tale. It will never be forgotten as long as there are those who understand the value of the deep compassion that motivates an act of such selfless generosity.
That’s the end of the story.
This kind of compassion is the Buddhist definition of wisdom, and selfless generosity is one of the key virtues to cultivate along the path to this kind of wisdom. The Bodhisattva has concern for the suffering and enlightenment of all sentient beings because we have a shared fate, we are one.
This viewpoint is found in other mythological traditions and in science. In the language of science, energy can’t be created or destroyed, all matter is recycled. This is an important topic in a range of scientific disciplines, from genetics and the commonality of DNA, to the biological life cycle, to physics and the continuous exchange of molecules and electrons, the stuff of matter. Being is a process. To exist is to be a process. Everything has been something else, will be something else, and is currently becoming something else.
A truly astonishing state of affairs when you think about it– and look at what we choose to think about instead. Right? Some things are hard to grasp; they’re too big, too complex, too abstract, or they fly in the face of what we perceive on a daily basis. Your body, for example, seems solid enough I’m sure and yet when you look as close as we can, you find that the materials of it are in a constant state of motion and it’s composed primarily of empty space.
It’s the meaning that we attribute to this fact, the meaning on an individual, personal level, this is what we grasp. What we can accept deeply enough to live. In the case of “The Tigress Jataka,” the meaning involves two ideas: karma and reincarnation.
Reincarnation is the belief that everything cycles through lifetimes in various forms until enlightenment is achieved. What is animal in this lifetime may be human in another, and what is human may return as animal, insect, plant, etc. In the jataka stories of the Buddha’s previous. lives, he is sometimes an animal. Karma is the good and bad that you do in your life. The lessons that you master and your failures. Your karma shapes your experience in this current lifetime and dictates future reincarnations.
You want to generate good karma in this lifetime. You treat everything with compassion because the law of karma rules every life. We are all subject to it. You also don’t know who or what you might be next. Being a human is the best incarnation because human consciousness can awaken and yet all sentient beings are on this path.
The actions of the teacher, the one who will eventually achieve Buddhahood, are not easily emulated. His students and the god in the story were in awe and you may not subscribe to the Buddhist paradigm. And yet, the relationship between human and animal in this story is worth some reflection. The idea that we have a common fate. What strikes you about it? Can you imagine yourself as the teacher?
The dominate cultures in the world today imagine crucial distinctions between humans and animals. For centuries, beliefs and assumptions about human superiority and specialness have sprung up to explain the capacities that are highly valued–by us: language, consciousness, cognition, technology, soul.
There are cultures and mythologies that offer an alternative view. They have been brutally sidelined although the tide is slowly turning I think, as scientists and thinkers in other disciplines question the old assumptions. And yet, it’s clear that belief is often impervious to science, isn’t it? To information or questions that pose any type of challenge? What do we gain through our insistence that we, humans, are so different from our animal companions?
Let’s leave that question hanging for now and turn to another story, “The Three Languages.” There are a number of variations of this story and on this particular. motif. My telling is based on the fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.
I invite you to relax and listen to the story. Let the story take you where you need to go. Note the moment or detail in the story that catches your attention as this opening can show you where this story touches on your life right now. After the story I’ll share my moment and say a few more words about this difficulty we have, in accepting our kinship with the other-then-human world.
“The Three Languages”
There once was an aged count who had only one child, a son. The son was stupid and could learn nothing, so one day the father said, “Look, I’ve tried and tried and I can get nothing into your head. I am sending you away to a celebrated teacher and we’ll see what he can do with you.” The youth was sent to a strange town and spent a whole year with the teacher. At the end of this time, he came home. His father asked, “Now, my son, what have you learned?” “Father,” said the young man, “I have learned what the dogs say when they bark.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” cried the father. “Is that all you have learned? I will send you to another town, to another teacher.” The young man was sent away and stayed a whole year with another teacher. When he came back the father asked, “My son, what have you learned?” “Father, I have learned what the birds say,” he replied.
Now the father fell into a rage. “Oh, you are a lost man” he cried. “You’ve spent all this precious time and learned nothing. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? I’ll send you to a third teacher, but if you don’t learn anything this time, I will have nothing more to do with you.”
The young man stayed a whole year with the third teacher. When he came home again his father asked, “My son, what have you learned?” “Dear father,” he answered, “This year, I have learned what the frogs croak.” His father was so furious when he heard this that he called the servants together and said, “This man is no longer my son. I command you to take him out into the forest, and kill him.”
The servants grabbed the young man and took him out into the forest but they pitied him and couldn’t kill him. They cut the eyes and tongue out of a deer and took them back to the old count as proof that his son was dead.
Now the young man wandered alone. After some time, he came to a fortress and begged for a night’s lodging. “Well,” said the lord of the castle, “you can pass the night in the tower but I warn you, it’s very dangerous. The tower is home to a pack of wild dogs and they bark and howl without stopping. At certain hours a man has to be given to them and they eat him, straightaway. The whole district is in despair because of them and yet no one can do anything to stop them.”
The young man listened. He wasn’t afraid. “Let me go down to the barking dogs,” he said, “and give me something that I can throw to them. They will do nothing to harm me.” Since it was his choice, they gave him some food for the wild dogs and led him down to the tower.
He went inside and the dogs didn’t bark at him. They wagged their tails quite amicably, ate what he set before them, and did not hurt one hair of his head. The next morning, he came out safe and unharmed. Everyone was astonished. He went to the lord of the castle and said, “The dogs have told me, in their own language, why they are living in the tower and doing so much evil. They are bewitched, and are obliged to guard a great treasure kept in the depths of the tower. They can have no rest until it is taken away. They’ve also told me how to accomplish this task.”
The people were overjoyed to hear this and the lord of the castle said he would adopt him as a son if he accomplished the task successfully. The young man went back to the tower and after some time he came out with a chest full of gold. The dogs stopped howling and left the country soon after, and the trouble was over.
Some time passed and the young man got the notion to travel to Rome. On the way he passed by a marsh. A number of frogs were sitting and croaking. He listened to them, and what he heard made him very thoughtful and sad.
Then he arrived in Rome. The Pope had just died and there was great doubt among the cardinals as to whom they should appoint as his successor. At length they agreed that the person who should be the next Pope would be distinguished by some divine and miraculous token. They had just made this decision when the young man entered the church. Suddenly two snow-white doves flew in, landed on his shoulders and remained sitting there.
The cardinals recognized this as a divine sign, and asked him on the spot if he would be pope. The young man didn’t know what to do. He hardly felt worthy. But the doves counselled him to do it and so he said yes. He was anointed and consecrated. It was time for him to sing a mass and he didn’t know one word of it, but the two doves sat continually on his shoulders, and said it all in his ear.
The end.
The two doves sat continually on his shoulders, and said it all in his ear. Three languages: of frogs, dogs and birds. I hear symbols of the speech of water, land and air creatures. Maybe you noticed that too. The son was truly a man of the world, capable of being in the world. Someone who could participate in every realm and so bring them together, an embodiment of wholeness or unity.
And he is called to be Pope, which may be a letdown depending on how you feel about the Pope. And yet, the story is a series of symbols and metaphors, and the Pope is someone who is so close to God, an integration of divine holiness and human will and love, a mediator between the spiritual and material worlds. A symbol of that bridge.
Assigning this role to the young man who communicates with everything and takes direction from doves elevates his gift, doesn’t it? And the uses to which it may be applied.
You may recognize the attitude of the father, who sees no value in this learning. How is the language of a barking dog practical or profitable? And maybe the Count’s problem with his son is more than a difference of opinion about what is practical and valuable to know. The Count ordered his son killed. That’s pretty extreme. There are stories about people learning the languages of animals and others in the natural world in which this learning must be kept secret or else it brings misfortune to the one who knows. It’s a powerful form of knowledge.
My moment in the story is the frogs. I wondered about their sad message. What did the young man hear them say? This led me to consider the dogs and the doves also. Each element in the story has significance on its own and they appear together, are related. They. make meaning together. I discovered an interesting commonality in the symbolic language of dogs, frogs, and doves that adds dimension to this story and points, I think, at the knot in our psychology that can create resistance to the fact of our kinship with the animal Others.
Our mortality.
Our mythological and symbolic vocabulary of dogs, frogs, and doves, connects each of them to the underworld and to goddesses that protected the dead on the journey to the afterlife. There are myths across cultures and loads of references. I’ll mention a few examples here, primarily from Greek mythology.
I talked about frogs in the last episode, so you may remember that the frog speaks to us of transformation. The life cycle of the frog involves several profound metamorphoses, from egg to tadpole to adult frog. Frogs are symbols of primordial matter and they were symbolic of the great goddess, the cycle of material and spiritual life. Over time, as the various aspects of this goddess figure were differentiated into a pantheon of deities, the frog was associated with the birth part of the cycle.
The Greek Aphrodite was associated with the frog and in the case of Aphrodite, her role as the escort and protector of the dead continued in the symbolic form of one her other animals, the dove. The dove is the last to appear in our story, so let’s take a look at the dogs first.
Dogs are the epitome of faithfulness, vigilance and protection. One of the interesting things I noticed in our story is that when the dogs are bewitched, they do that but in a perverted way. Now, the Pope appears in our story and in early Christian thought the dog was an allegory for the priest, the loyal guardian of the pact between God and his followers. The Dominican order of friars chose that name because it literally means “dogs of God,” to emphasis their loyalty and guardianship.
Canines wild and domestic eat carrion. Their habit of howling at the moon has linked them with the moon, imagined as death’s gate. Look at classic Tarot iconography, major arcana #18 The Moon, and note the howling dogs.
In ancient Greek mythology, the dog is the companion to the goddesses who accompany the dead. Hecate in particular. The hound of Hecate was her companion and the goddess herself was often represented with a dog head or body. Dog was her sacrificial animal. Anything associated with death and the underworld has frightening overtones but unlike snarling Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded passage to the palace of Hades, classic art depicts Hecate and her dogs as friendly.
There are a number of myths of dogs tearing people to death: Artemis and Actaeon, Ishtar and Tammuz, Aphrodite and Adonis, for example.
Dogs then, have a close mythological association with death and passage to the underworld.
The dove is associated with peace, purity, tenderness, love, hope, and also with spirit, soul, and the necessary purification of the soul at death. Those other aspects– peace, purity– we recognize as spiritual virtues, amplifications of this notion of dove as spirit and soul.
The dove is a primary symbol of Aphrodite, whom some say was born from an egg brooded by a dove. Later, the dove was associated with the Virgin Mary, who also shares the lily and the rose with Aphrodite, and with the Holy Ghost, and with the Christian image of the purified soul.
The dove is a carrier of messages and representative of spirit. In times past, the sound of rapid wing beats was the sound of an emissary or a soul departing. In the myth of Noah and the ark, it was the dove who returned as the flood waters receded, carrying an olive branch, a new peace pact with God.
The rock dove is highly intelligent. One offshoot is the passenger pigeon, which has superb navigational skill and can fly 60+ mph. Over 2500 years ago, doves carried the names of the winners of Olympic games from Athens to the other city states. They were aerial messengers in Europe and China as well. Passenger pigeons were used in WWI and WWII. They saved thousands of lives. They continued to fly, carrying their messages, despite mortal wounds.
So, I offer all of this to feed your imagination about the significance of these animals literally and metaphorically, in this story, and their shared underworld connections. The afterlife and death. Denying our kinship with other animals, the rejection of our animal nature and insistence on our specialness–that can camouflage the fact of one commonality in particular- our mortality. Animals die.
Joseph Campbell thought that death was the primary catalyst for our mythologies. We are conscious of death and need a way to explain it and build meaning around it. Myths do this. and they should help us come to terms with death and guide us in life. We no longer have a shared conscious articulation of myth that satisfies this need. This is a task that we must take on for ourselves, and our attitudes about animals are a valuable mirror in this regard.
The notion of kinship, relationship with difference, like siblings in a family, is common to a number of mythological traditions round the world. In the words of Joseph Campbell; “The spirit wanders, comes here now, now here, and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into beasts, but never perishes.” Are we ready to see ourselves as kin, my friend?
I’ll send you on your way with a poem by Fred LaMotte that I think you’ll like, but first I want to welcome new email subscribers Patty, Sami, Sonja, Gustavo, Steven, Carla, Jeremy, Sheryl, and Laya. Welcome! You can subscribe to Myth Matters on lots of podcast platforms. When you join my email list, you receive links to new episodes as soon as they post and periodic announcements about my other programs.
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Now in closing, here is the poem “My Ancestry” by Fred LaMotte:
“My Ancestry”
My Ancestry DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.
Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.
I am part larva, but part hummingbird too.
There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow.
My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine.
Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn’t get his dimples.
My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka,
but I descended from Ravanna, not Ram.
My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people in my saliva.
3.7 billion years ago I swirled in golden dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis.
More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.
I am the bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat.
I am made of your grandmother’s tears.
You conquered rival tribesmen of your own color,
chained them together, marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.
I was that brother you sold, I was the slave trader,
I was the chain.
Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden,
like mine, like mine.
You have sweat, black and salty,
like mine, like mine.
You have secrets silently singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.
Don’t pretend that earth is not one family.
Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don’t pretend we don’t ripen on each other’s breath.
Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive.
—Fred LaMotte
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself, and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.
