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3. Art marks
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3.3 Symbolic animals
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There is in the Florentine
Bargello a leaf of an ivory diptych which shows Adam
accompanied by the animals. He sits a little apart from them, but smiles down at
them with a dreamy expression on his face, and the animals seem perfectly at their
ease. It must date from the fourth century, when representations of Orpheus were
still common, changeable and contradictory, made up of fear, admiration, greed,
""cruelty and love. But why did the harmony of the Golden Age never exist? |
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We have no verbal evidence
of this early stage in man's history, except for some
traditions repeated by the African Bushmen and the Australian aboriginals. But we
have a quantity of visual evidence, going back to the stone age, in the remains of
painting on caves like those at Lascaux and Altamira. These are popularly known
through dishonest reconstructions by archaeologists, which give an entirely false
impression of them. In fact they are little more than blots and scratches; but amongst
them are undeniable likenesses of bison and other animals. We may ask what
induced man, who lived by hunting, to cover the walls of his caves with these most
vivid and accurate depictions of his antagonists. Prehistorians give different explan ,
arguments. These paintings, they say, were intended to give men power over the
animals, and so increase their success in hunting. That the representation of a
creature may be treated as a substitute for that creature, and confer magical powers,
was, and has remained, true. Witches and witch doctors transfix models of the
person they would destroy, and in at least one of the early caves, known as the Trois
Freres, the animals are shown pierced with spears. But can this be true of the lively,
energetic animals that can be dimly discerned on the uneven walls of Altamira? The
few men who appear in Lascaux cut very poor figures compared to the vigorous
animals. Can we seriously believe that they thought they were gaining power over
their magnificent companions? Are they not rather expressing their envy and
admiration? We must suppose, and Bushmen within living memory confirm it, that in
prehistoric times the relationship between men and animals was closer than we can
imagine. Man had barely learnt the use of tools, and his speech was rudimentary.
Animals were in the ascendant, and distinguished from man less by their intellectual
limitations than by their greater strength and speed. The message from the cave
artists may well be 'This is what we want to be like, these are the most admirable of
our kinsmen'. |
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The next stage in man's
relationship with animals was the choice of an animal as the
sacred symbol of their group: what is loosely called totemism. Hunting for their
necessary food, and admiring to the point of worship a life- endowment greater than
their own, from the earliest times there was established this dual relationship that
has persisted to the present day.
Totemism has existed,
perhaps spontaneously, all over the world. But it was
strongest and most complex in Africa; and, in so far as the early Egyptians must
have been in large part of African descent, it is in Egypt that we first see totemism
turning into what we may call religion. So strong were the vestiges of totemism that
in their art the Egyptians continually attempted to integrate.man and animal. Men,
whose bodies are models of human perfection, retain the heads of birds and animals
thro animal heads, especially that of the wolf Anubis, are an obstacle to our
admiration of Egyptian art: the reverse process of the Greeks, which produced the
centaur and the harpy, seems both biologically and aesthetically a more acceptable
form of integration. But at a very early date the Egyptians evolved the idea of the
sacred animal, the equal and protector of the god-king; and sacred animals are the
subject of the first pieces of sculpture that can, in the highest sense of the word, be
described as works of art.
Of all sacred animals
Horus was the most absolutely a god; the Horus relief in the
Louvre has the air of finality, the commanding simplicity, of a great religious image.
The other sacred animals of Egyptian art pass down a diminishing scale of sanctity.
Hathor, the cow, was particularly favoured by certain pharaohs like Hatshepsut; the
ram was sacred to Amun, as all visitors to Karnak will be painfully aware. Toth, the
ape, was sacred but, so to say, localized, without the universal power of Horus; the
same is true of the ibis, and of a much later arrival in the animal pantheon, also an
incarnation of Toth, the cat.
We may easily feel
that there are too many sacred animals in Egyptian art. Yet all of
them produced images of great sculptural beauty which gain some of their power
from the sacrosanct uniformity of the original idea. Small variations, which may have
passed, unnoticed by the believer, were due to the fact that these images were made
by artists - the Egyptian artist was far from being the self-effacing craftsman of other
early civilizations, and knew' how to give a prototype the life-giving force of variety.
Apart from this greater
life-endowment, there was another reason why animals were
held sacred. Their inability to speak made them mysterious. All gods should be
inscrutable. 'I am that I am.' If the Horus could have answered the questions
addressed to him or Hathor commented on the sudden rise in her status in the
Middle Kingdom, they would have lost some of their authority.
But beyond these godlike
attributes the quantity of semi-sacred animals in ancient
Egypt owes something to a state of mind that by no means always accompanies
religioloved animals. It is evident that the Egyptian feeling for animals was far closer
to our own than that of any other ancient people. We can see this in the reliefs that
decorate tombs around Sakkara. High officials, like Ti and Mereruka, took so
seriously the care of their flocks and herds that they covered the walls of their tombs
with scenes of husbandry. These reliefs show that the Egyptians tried to domesticate
animals of all sorts, but succeeded only with those which are our companions today,
dogs and cats, and those which still occupy our farmyards. What a strange operation
of nature that for five thousand years man has been able to domesticate sheep and
cattle, and not roe deer?
Cats were pets a thousand
years before they were considered sacred, and the story
in Herodotus that when a house is on fire the first thought of an Egyptian household
is to save the cats- 'they pass them from one to another, while the house burns
down' -is as much a reflection of love as of totemism. The reliefs of animal life in Old
Kingdom tombs are inexhaustibly informative and touching. One of the most familiar
shows a farmer carrying a calf on his back with the mother cow following and licking
it. Where in the Graeco-Roman or the Semitic world could such an incident have
been sympathetically observed and recorded?
Such were the feelings
of harmony that could be developed in the secure, continuous
pastoral life on the banks of the Nile. |
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In the harsher conditions
of that other early civilization which for convenience we may
call Mesopotamian such sentiments could not exist. The two great achievements of
Mesopotamia, from Ur onwards, were the creation of cities and the invention of a
written language. The cities accumulated wealth, traded and fought with one another,
but, in so far as animals entered the Mesopotamian mind, they were symbols of
strength and ferocity. This is how they appear in the earliest cylinder seals, and they
continue to confront one.
The generalizing historian
must always be prepared for surprises, none more
peculiar than the discovery of a harp from Ur, now in the University Museum at
Philadelphia, which shows a strip comic of animals enacting human roles,
somewhere between Goya and Disne another in a manner that we have come to call
'heraldic'. In later Mesopotamian art lions are the chief subject of sculptured friezes,
and appear as guardians outside the doors of palaces and temples. The sense of
kinship with animals has been superseded by an overawed recognition of their
strength, which can be used to symbolize the terrible power of the king. Love has
changed into an exploitation of fear.
There is no need to
explain why lions and bulls were the semi-sacred animals of the
Middle East. Their strength and potency made them the obvious symbols for a
succession of warlike kingdoms. In Persia they might have had wings which would
have made them supernatural, but hardly more awe-inspiring. But it is worth
recording two curious episodes in the history of the bull as a symbol of power, the
first quite early in the history of the ancient world, the other very late. The first is the
introduction of the bull as a spectacle in Knossos, in about the year 1500 bc. Of this,
of course, we have no information except what is provided by scanty, and often
suspect, visual images. But there is no doubt that a bull was let loose in an arena,
where athletes, both male and female, teased it with extraordinary agility.
Anthropologists would no doubt wish to interpret this as some kind of religious
ceremony; but the Cretans of the second millennium seem to have been less
religiously minded than their contemporaries on the mainland, and, in spite of the
legend of the Minotaur. The bull-ring at Knossos was something unique in the
ancient world, and the forerunner of the Roman amphitheatre and the Spanish bull-
ring, with the difference that we have no representation of the bull being killed, or, for
that matter, one of the athletes being gored, although it is almost unthinkable that all
of them survived. Perhaps the Cretan bulls were more formidable than the
fragmentary representations of them in the frescoes from Knossos would indicate,
for almost the most magnificent bulls in art are on a work of Cretan inspiration,
although actually made in Greece: the superb gold cups (known as the Vaphio Cups)
found near Sparta. |
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The humanizing spirit
of Greece treated bulls very differently. It was their potency
rather than their ferocity that impressed the Greeks, and thus the bull became a
favourite embodiment of Zeus, eloping with the not unwilling Europa, as we see him
on a Greek vase, and in Titian's masterpiece. Finally we must consider the confusing
part played by a bull in the legend of Mithras. At first a god, he becomes a man, a
barbarian soldier in a Phrygian cap, who is represented as killing a bull with his
sword. The sacred animal has become the victim of sacrifice. The importance of this
concept is obvious. Although we have no written records of Mithraism, for it was an
all-male freemasonry sworn to secrecy, there is no doubt that it was the most
formidable rival to Christianity up to the time of Constantne. The sacrifice of the bull
as the symbol of redemption and new life shows how profound were the spiritual
needs of the late antique world, which were answered so differently by the sacrifice
of Christ on the Cross.
Men had sacrificed
animals for thousands of years. It seems to have been one of the
most ancient human instincts. As we do not feel a trace of it today it is difficult for us
to see why the practice became a necessity all over the ancient world. Many books
have been written about the subject, in which the arguments are like vast bundles of
thread beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, and practically impossible to unravel.
But out of this confusing, and often contradictory, evidence a few skeins may be
extracted : propitiation, atonement, the need to assert kinship. While men still felt a
kinship with animals, to eat them was a crime against the group, and expiation could
be achieved only by a ritual feast in which all were involved. Communion was the first
basis of sacrifice. But quite soon the belief grew up that the gods were pleased by
sacrifice, particularly by the smell of burnt offerings, in which the food was given
solely to them. The more the gods had to be propitiated to avert disaster or secure
the success of some enterprise, the more sacrifices they required. Finally, sacrifices
could become an assertion of royal or priestly authority. The priest is seen as the
visible mediator between the people and the god. Thus in the relationship of animals
and what had been an act of kinship became an act of pure destruction, and led to
the animal carnage of the Roman amphitheatre. |
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