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Erm, the reptiles thing was sort of a throwaway, and more in relation to IRL ecosocial interactions than a spiritual plane - especially the big lizards, who generally give that unnerving impression that you are lunch. Komodo dragons, which are basically the biggest variety of monitor lizard out there, are also one of the few species that attack humans.
Actually, two of the many weird ethnic groups that I spent time around with as a child were nomadic tribes who worked with animals (that my father studied) - the Nath Jhogi, who are snake charmers, and the Qalandar, who train monkeys and bears to dance and perform tricks. by emic fictive kinship, I would actually be Qalandar through my father's "adoption" by an older community member (contestable, though, because I don't/didn't have the requisite skills of a Qalandar child - sufficient aptitude at begging to subsist, nor the rudiments of monkey training). This, again by emic (in-culture) logic, makes me kin to bears and monkeys, who are counted family members not on a spiritual level, but rather on the economic fact that they are the primary revenues generators (an amazingly atheistic people, oddly enough, but, as Kipling would say, that is another story).
[Aside: oddly enough, I recently saw a Jhogi turn up in a Rollins Band video called "Illumination" - there's a bit at the end with Rollins handling a cobra while sitting across from a very dark-skinned S Asian man wearing very bright clothing who couldn't be anything but a Jhogi. The world is waayyy to small.]
So, anyway, the point of that last paragraph was to lay down the grounds for my affinities for snakes (cobras, actually), simians, and bears. this subjective sense of closeness is grounded in lots of childhood exposure, no doubt compounded by a double shot of Hindu mythology, in which all three species hold axial roles. This is a bond felt not in a magico-social sense - working with the Spirit - but rather in the sense of to-tem (a NW Native - Haida? - word, I think) of a blood kinship or fictive kinship by adoption (as is often the case in shamanic initiation, where the god-spirit tests, marks, and adopts the worker). this sense is reinforced by a sort of spiritual genetics, in which I, and others who know me, can see the (admittedly anthropomorphized) "genetic (trait) link" between myself and these species. my affinity for felines, especially big cats, is something that manifested at a much later age, corresponding to adolescent change and the solidification of sexual identity. i have no doubt that as I age and change, my affinities and traits will change, also. I must admit, though, that on some level all of this is personal imagining, which is why it freaks me out when people who know me - or don't - characterize me in terms of the "animal" behavioral traits of these taxonomic groups. The whole thing has a sort of chicken-and-egg quality....
Speaking of anthropomorphism and chicken-egg, working in the realm of the spiritual, does the animal spirit make the traits that invoke it, or vice versa, or is there some sort of subjectivist tensor? Perhaps it varies from person to person...if you go out seeking Monkey, the Monkey that finds you is the sum of the traits that would you would consider essential to "Monkey-ness." Hence there are infinite possible Monkeys, generated and dissipated by the thought-matrix that called them forth...no form being more or less valid, just the lens through which a meme-set can be perceived.
To continue in example, were I to attempt to invoke-interact with the personified spirit of Monkey, what would be drawn in would express the meme-set conflict in my own mind between the qualities of Hanuman and the monkey army of the Ramayana, and the traits of Wu-tsu-Sun, the Monkey King from the (Ramayana-derived) Chinese epic Journey to the West. Not to mention, gods help us all, Mojo-Jojo from the Powerpuff Girls and Monkey! from Dexter's Laboratory [ahhhh, can you smell the promiscuous frames of references?]. Not to mention that Curious George is the benign latter-day incarnation of the Monkey King (and do you really think it's a coincidence that the Man in the Yellow Hat always reins him in?).
On a more macro scale, one could consider totemic affinity that various Khoisian peoples, such as the !Kung, have for the hyrax as a kind of benevolent trickster...I'm not sure anyone else has any characterisation of the hyrax as anything but small and fuzzy, and would be intrigued by the idea of a non-!Kung, uninitiated with !Kung thought, trying to invoke Hyrax within the Spirit.
Similarly, I wonder about textual and traditional derivatives that establish the personification sets/traits that we think of as native qualities of an animal. The case of the Monkey is particularly interesting vis-a-vis Western thinkers, since it is an animal wholly non-native to their surroundings, so their personified thought is somewhat second-order, and often unconscious of the precise routes by which their personification has been shaped. |
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) – Lothar Tuppan
