Animals and plants in myth

Animals and plants have played important roles in the oral traditions and the recorded myths of the peoples of the world, both ancient and modern. This section of the article is concerned with the variety of relationships noted between humans and animals and plants in myths and popular folk traditions and in so-called primitive and popular systems of classification.

Human beings have always been intrigued by the problem of boundaries: what distinguishes one individual from another; what marks off one culture from another; what the dividing lines are between humans and nonhumans, be they other forms of mortal life or divine beings. At times humans have maintained a rigid sense of separation and viewed the breaking of distinctions as transgression. At other times they have sought to cross the boundaries in order to gain power or knowledge. In some myths, they have glorified an age when distinct categories had not yet come into existence, and they have yearned for a return to this paradisiacal condition. In other traditions, they have viewed with horror the monsters that result when different spheres of being are mixed.

According to a view prevalent in many traditional societies, humans were formed by the gods. Human history is given in the myths of the primordial establishment of things, and the solemn responsibility of human individuals, along with every other living thing, is to fit themselves within this given world. This does not mean that people living in such traditional societies lack distinctions. Among the African Lele, for example, animals are distinguished from humans by their lack of manners, their immense fecundity, and by their sticking to their own sphere and avoiding contact with humans. Animals that violate this third characteristic are understood to be human-animals, the product of sorcery or metempsychosis (transmigration of souls).

The Great Chain of Being that dominated Western thought throughout the Middle Ages made human beings both the highest of the animals and the lowest of the gods. The human body was like that of the animals: corporeal, sensate, and mortal. But the human spirit or intellect resembled the gods: incorporeal, rational, and immortal. The great surge of ethnological and biologic data and theories from the 16th century on tended to undermine this point of view. New types of human beings were encountered who seemed to their first describers closely akin to the “savage”; new biologies were proposed that placed humans wholly within the animal kingdom, merely as one species among many, and postulated their descent from animals. More recently, psychology and ethology have emphasized the irrational (or brutish) elements of human beings and suggested close analogies between animal and human behaviour. Since the 18th century, humanity has been defined in a new, nonbiological way: as a cultural being rather than as the inhabitant of a natural realm. There have been many forms of this dichotomy: a human is the only being who has a language, uses symbols, employs tools, freely plays, is self-conscious, or possesses a history. Humans, in short, create themselves as cultural beings in distinction to animals or plants, which are created by their environment or heredity. These questions of human identity and the way humans resemble or differ from other sentient beings may be found in every culture and during every age.

Human beings tend to draw boundaries, both conceptually and practically. Not only does their existence demand that they find a position in a complex system of relationships, but also their social life and biological survival depend on the making of distinctions. To speak with the gods, to have relations with another human, to take possession of another’s territory, or to eat this or that plant or animal involves individuals in a host of decisions upon which their existence depends. One of the chief resources for answering such questions is that of the myths and legends mapping the world in which individuals dwell.

Myths and legends concerning animals and plants employ a wide variety of motifs but express a limited number of relationships. Humans, animals, and plants may stand in a relationship of (1) opposition or difference, (2) descent, (3) mixture, (4) transformation, (5) identity, or (6) similarity. These are determined by and expressive of the total worldview of a people. The hunter, for example, has a different understanding of the animal from that of the agriculturalist or pastoralist; the tuber planter has a different view of plants from that of the cultivator of grains. Even within these broad categories sharp differences occur. The Kalahari San of southern Africa, who, alone, naked, and crawling on the ground, blends in with the environment in order to kill an animal for food, reveals a way of looking at the human relation to nature different from that of the Masai of eastern Africa, who, costumed and walking upright as part of a line of chanting hunters in order to slay a lion as a symbol of his manhood, stands forth visibly as the ruler of the world through which he moves. The Cretan bull dancer of ancient Mediterranean culture, playing with the animal by somersaulting over his back, expresses a conception of the human relation to this powerful animal and the forces of fecundity and death that it symbolizes different from that of the Spanish bullfighter who slays the beast.