Book Description

A Saint Bernard, despite its name, is unwelcome in church. Any dog, cat, sheep, terrapin, or bird clearly faces this same prohibition. Do animals have any relevance to humanity's continuing search for a spiritually rich life? Have they ever? Modern religions have all but banished the animal kingdom from our places of worship, and the non-human world has become increasingly marginalized and left out of religious discourse. And yet, just beneath the surface lies a lush tradition of animal archetypes, a spiritual bestiary in which Satan appears as a serpent, Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the Holy Spirit as a dove. Jehovah tests the depths of Daniel's belief in a lion's den. Our cathedrals teem with stone eagles, stags, and other symbolic fauna. Our deepest moral ideas find expression through animal stories like Aesop's fables, the Buddhist Jataka, and Orwell's Animal Farm. At the prehistoric heart of humanity's attempts to articulate spiritual sentiments, we find the caves of Lascaux and images, not of white-robed deities, but of the giant beasts of the Ice Age. Christopher Manes's groundbreaking Other Creations uncovers this tradition as it flourished in the past and as it lives on today. In this fascinating study, unlike any yet published, Manes shows how animals embodied our first attempts to express spirituality - as seen in the cave paintings of Ice Age Europeand how they continue to do so today in subtle, even unperceived ways, such as through sports team mascots, horror films, and toys. Drawing on both his literary scholarship and his personal search for a deeper experience of faith, Manes demonstrates that animals do not simply decorate our religious lives; they are part of the very texture of human spirituality.