Every human culture has some kind of ritual to connect with something bigger than the self. Whether through organised religion or other spiritual practices, it appears to be a deep need in humans, but also in some animals, to acknowledge and celebrate wonder.
In How Animals Heal Us, Jay describes the chimpanzee engrossed in a waterfall dance: “His enthusiasm (from en-theos, the god within) jubilantly collides with the thundering waterfall and he shakes the branches to rattling, getting everything going, struck by his primordial imperative: dance. At the end of the dances the chimp often moves into a mood of reflection. Jane Goodall writes, ‘Is it not possible that these performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe?’ Given how alike they are to us, emotionally, she asks: ‘why wouldn't they have feelings of some kind of spirituality, which is really being amazed at things outside yourself. I think chimpanzees are as spiritual as we are.’”
Looking at the stars or mountains or looking at animals, we experience transcendence, a sense of the divine, but humans are not alone in this, Jay writes: “Animals including primates may be spiritual. They may also lead us towards the divine, and birds have long been considered messengers of the gods. A skylark transposes my soul into a higher key. It rises helical as it sings, spiralling in an ellipsis of space until its distilled song becomes brightness, magnetized to heaven's quintessence, pinpointing god. The dance of two mating cranes is a symmetry of pure, divine, grace. Their pas de deux is a pas de dieu.”
Jay, Joanna and John discuss the divinity of animals, and the way in which many cultures have animal gods; monkeys, mice, rats, cows, goats, foxes, crocodiles, ravens and bears are all revered and worshipped. As Jay asks, “Why wouldn’t all these be gods?”
“Animals ensoul the world, giving the collective psyche limitless dimensions of sacredness.
We could, with relief, acknowledge divinity again in the real and living world, knowing it as the truth that has so far vouchsafed humanity’s time on earth. Then the collective psyche could come to its senses and the individual soul come home to itself, letting the soul-medicine that has always surrounded us work its ordinary miracles, in the holy and reckless plurality of the animals, each one an iteration of life’s deepest prayer: let there be life.”
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