Animal magic

Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism Beryl Rowland (George Allen and Unwin £4.65)

Professor Rowland sets out to present "the most meaningful details of animal symbolism," and offers them in the form of a dictionary, from Amphisbaena to Wolf. The book is most attractively printed, with wide margins for one to add one's notes, and is charmingly illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of pictures from medieval manuscripts in the British

Museum, from what Professor Rowland calls the Bodleian Museum" and from two other Places. The text makes very easy reading, and contains much fascinating information, some of which I will extract.

The skin of an amphisbaena will protect one against chilblains. The woman who refuses to mate on earth will lead apes in hell. When the father of Pope Gregory XI tried to restrain his son from leaving Italy, the Pope passed over his prostrate body remarking, "It is written that thou shalt trample upon the asp and the basilisk." To dream of a boar presages misfortune, usually associated with lust. Alanus de I nsulis says that the Cathars derived their name from the practice of kissing the Posterior of the devil in the form of a cat. Aged

Prostitutes have found crocodile-dung useful as a rejuvenating cosmetic. During the Middle

Ages Aristotle was thought by some to have been so infatuated with "the queen of Greece" that he allowed her to ride him like a horse. The eminent psychologist Geza Roheim interpreted the riddle of the Sphinx to mean that the child saw its parents in bed with first four legs, then two and then three showing. But the subject is not only entertaining, it is also important. To understand it properly, one must go far back. Behind the natural histories of the Renaissance, and the popular natural history found in such works as the books of `emblems with their engravings with verses below, lie the medieval encyclopaedias and the popular natural history of the innumerable illustrated 'bestiaries'; behind the medieval works in turn lie classical works about history, many of which, including even some of the

most scientific, incorporate popular elements. It follows that no serious study of animal sYmbolism can fail to take account of the subject's origins in the ancient world.

These go back long before the beginning of Greek history. No literary genre can be traced back further than the beast fable. We know that it existed in Egypt before the end of the third millennium before Christ. Aesop, to

Whom the Greeks ascribed their chief collection of fables, lived according to tradition in the sixth century BC, and in the form in which we have it the fables of Aesop are not older than the

early Roman Empire; but many of the stories themselves were current in Egypt and _ esopotamia long before the age of Homer.

'Beast fables occur in Greek literature, notably 1,b. the work of the great poet Archilochus, who Ilved a century before the date assigned to "lesoP. Much other popular belief about animals found its way into the natural histories, verse as well as prose; on these the medieval encyclopaedias depend. It follows from all this that a scientific study the Subject, and even a reliable popular guide 0 t it, cannot be made except by a person !c,1-!iPped to deal with the ancient sources, on

'Itch the medieval and Renaissance sources are dependent. Such a .person should be

a

quainted not only with the ancient sources

and the relevant literature, but also with the psychological and the anthropological treatment of cults, rites and beliefs relating to animals, which often have a bearing upon later symbolism. I have so much enjoyed Professor Rowland's book that I wish I could say kind things about her scholarship, but I cannot. She claims to have taken her material from the primary sources, aiming to satisfy students who "would rather search the stacks forever or immolate themselves in the library carrels in silent frustration rather than suffer the humiliation of citing a secondary source." She does indeed supply a useful bibliography and some notes and references at the end of each chapter, and her book will be of some help to scholars. But it could have been a good deal more scholarly without losing its undoubted appeal to the general reader. First, there should have been an introduction sketching the history of the subject. and showing how the sources of the work relate to one another. Then, Professor Rowland is no classical scholar. Her Greek is rudimentary; "Ononychites" in Tertullian, Apol. 16 becomes "Onokoths," "Dionysus" is said to mean "the lame god," Homer's calling Eumaeus -the noble swineherd" is thought to show that the Greeks considered pig-minding an honourable profession. What is much worse in one who has written three b000ks about Chaucer is that her Latin is little better; in what is otherwise a well printed book, almost all the errors occur in Latin quotations. When she mentions false etymologies, and she rightly mentions many, it is often by no means clear that she does not believe them.

Professor Rowland seems unaware of the modern researches into bear and wolf cults in which the initiate had to impersonate the animal, so relevant to modern African "leopard men,",and of the use of masks and of animal impersonation in religious ritual. She does not mention that griffins originated in the Near East and from there made their way into Greek art at the end of the seventh century BC. The phoenix, lately the subject' of a whole monograph by R. van Broek, is not mentioned here. Nothing is said of the aspects oP the centaur lately discussed by G. S. Kirk in his book Myth. We are told that the lamb symbolised Christ, but not that it did so because it was a common sacrificial victim. We are not told that the earliest satyrs had the tails not of goats but of horses, nor that they were connected with the cult of Dionysus. We learn nothing of the connection of sirens with death and graves, nor of the early associations of the sphinx. About the Middle Ages Professor Rowland is better informed than she is about the ancient world; but even here I should have greater confidence in a better Latinist. She says little about heraldry, and little about the animals who found a place among the stars. Oriental authors are only sporadically cited. The articles make pleasant readin.g, but the facts are strung together with very little system; and though enjoyable and in a limited way instructive, the book cannot be regarded as a learned work.

Professor Rowland is no prude, and I feel grateful to her for not having suppressed some facts about animal symbolism which twenty years ago might have been thought indecent. But I do not like her saying that Actaeon "peeked between the bushes." In mentioning that a snake was placed upon Clarissa Harlowe's coffin, she remarks that while Richardson means it to have its traditional significance, "in connection with his inhibited, narcissistic heroine it appears to stand for ceaseless or self-consuming desire." Poor Clarissa, in our age your very virtue has become a crime! When -Professor Rowland tells us that "the story of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh tells of a homosexual phase, relatively brief, in the life of a child," I cannot be quite sure that she is not serious; in 1941 a German propaganda broadcaster, noting the increased sales of A. A. Milne, claimed that "the imminence of British collapse is shown by the increased vogue of this obscene satire against Churchill."