2.2 Animal souls and spiritual healing

In the history of human ideas concerning the origins and treatment of illness and disease, non-human animals play a variety of important roles. The precise characteristics of these roles depend, however, not only on the prevailing view of animals, but also on the particular supernatural or “scientific” belief systems in which they are imbedded.

Probably the most archaic of these belief systems, usually referred to as “Animism,” involves the concept that all living creatures, as well as other natural objects and phenomena, are imbued with an invisible soul, spirit or “essence” that animates the conscious body, but that is able to move about and act independently of the body when the bearer is either dreaming or otherwise unconscious. According to the typical animist worldview, all manifestations of sickness or misfortune are the direct result of assaults against a person’s soul or “essence” by other angry or malevolent spirits encountered during these periods of unconsciousness. In some cases, these spiritual assaults are thought to be retaliatory; the result of some deliberate or inadvertent moral transgression on the part of the person. Alternatively, the person may be the innocent victim of an attack by spirits acting on behalf of a malevolent shaman or witch. Clues to the origins of spiritual assaults are often provided by the content of the dreams or visions that immediately preceded a particular bout of illness, injury or misfortune (Benedict, 1929; Campbell, 1984; Eliade, 1964; Hallowell, 1926; Martin, 1978; Nelson, 1986; Serpell, 2005; Speck, 1977; Wenzel, 1991).

Animist belief systems are characteristic of all hunting and foraging societies, and among these societies, offended animal spirits are often viewed as the most common source of malignant spiritual influences. Many Inuit peoples believe, for example, that the spirits of hunted animals, like the ghosts of murdered humans, are capable of seeking vengeance. To avoid this happening, all animals, whether dead or alive, are treated with great respect. Otherwise, the hunter or his family can expect to suffer some misfortune: the animals will no longer allow themselves to be killed, or they may take their revenge by afflicting someone with disease, physical handicap or even death (Wenzel, 1991). As an Inuit informant once eloquently expressed it:

In other hunting and foraging cultures, more specialized sets of moral relations existed between people and the animals they hunted for food. For instance, many Native American and Eurasian peoples believed in the concept of personal “guardian spirits” (Benedict, 1929; Hultzkrantz, 1987). Among the Ojibwa (Chippewa) and their Algonkian neighbors, these spirits were known as manito and they were commonly represented as the spiritual prototypes or ancestor figures of wild animals. All of these manito were thought of in highly anthropomorphic terms. They were easily offended, capricious, and often bad-tempered, but they could also be appeased and, to some extent, cajoled by ritual means. Living animals were regarded as “honored servants” of their respective manito, and one such spirit apparently presided over and represented all of the earthly members of its species. At the same time, animals were also viewed as temporary incarnations of each manito who sent them out periodically to be killed by favored hunters or fishermen. For this reason, hunters invariably performed deferential rituals upon killing an animal, so that its “essence” would return to the manito with a favorable account of how it was treated.

According to the Ojibwa worldview, the activities of manito explained nearly all the circumstances of everyday life. Every natural object, whether animate or inanimate, was charged with spiritual power, and no misfortune, whether illness, injury, death, or failure in hunting or fishing, was considered accidental or free from the personalized intent of one manito or another (Landes, 1968). Animal guardian spirits were also believed to vary in terms of power. Some species, especially small and relatively insignificant ones, such as the majority of insects, and such things as mice, rats or squirrels, were believed to possess correspondingly limited spiritual influence, and rarely furnished people with useful guardian spirits. In contrast, more physically impressive species, such as bears, bison, wolves or eagles, were deemed to possess extraordinary spiritual power, and were therefore eagerly sought after as patrons (Benedict, 1929; Landes, 1968).

The methods used to obtain the patronage of these kinds of guardian spirits varied from culture to culture, but they almost invariably involved some form of physical ordeal (Benedict, 1929). Among the Ojibwa, young men at puberty were expected to isolate themselves in the forest and endure long periods of fasting, sleeplessness and eventual delirium in an effort to obtain visions. Those who were successful experienced vivid hallucinations in which their “souls” entered the spirit world and encountered one or more manito who offered their future help and protection in return for a variety of ritual obligations. Manito advice or assistance could sometimes be discerned through natural portents and coincidences but, more often, guidance came indirectly through the medium of subsequent dreams and visions. At such times the person’s “soul” was believed to re-enter the supernatural dimension and confer with its spiritual guardian. The content of dreams was therefore considered of primary importance as a guide to action in daily life (Landes, 1968).

In some societies, it was considered virtually suicidal to injure, kill or eat any member of the same species as one’s guardian spirit. Like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, it could result in the withdrawal of spiritual patronage, and cause general misfortune, illness, and death. On the other hand, and in an equally large number of cultures, the guardian spirit specifically awarded its protégé the authority to kill members of its own species (Benedict, 1929; Hallowell, 1926).

As in most fields of individual achievement, not all men and women were equally good at obtaining the support of animal guardian spirits. Some never obtained visions and were regarded as “empty, fearful and cowardly” for the rest of their lives. A small minority, on the contrary, displayed extraordinary visionary talents and were henceforth regarded as medicine men, sorcerers or shamans (Landes, 1968).

2.3 Animal powers and shamanism

Mircea Eliade (1964) refers to shamanism as an “archaic technique of ecstasy” derived from guardian spirit belief. Both represent quests for magico-religious powers, and shamans differ from everyone else only in “their capacity for ecstatic experience, which, for the most part, is equivalent to a vocation” (Eliade, 1964, p. 107). Although shamanic power was derived from the assistance of one or more guardian spirits, the relationship between the shaman and his spiritual “helpers” or “familiars” was both more intimate and more intense than that attained by ordinary persons. In most cases, the shaman not only earned the patronage of guardian spirits but also developed the capacity to control them.

Shamans, typically, could achieve this power at will by entering a state of trance or ecstasy, usually induced by monotonous chanting, drumming and dancing, and commonly assisted by the consumption of psycho-active drugs. Such states were considered to be analogous to death – the only other time when a person’s “essence” becomes truly detached from the body and capable of independent actions in time and space. According to Eliade, this ecstatic “out-of-body” experience enables the shaman to divest himself of human form and recover the situation that existed at the beginning of time when no clear distinctions separated humans from animals. As a result, he is able to re-establish friendship with animals, acquire knowledge of their language, and also the ability to transform himself into an animal as and when occasion demands. The result is a kind of symbiosis in which the person and the guardian spirit fuse to become two aspects of the same individual (Eliade, 1964).

Although they occasionally take human form, the vast majority of shamanic “familiars” are animals of one kind or another. Once he has adopted this disguise, the shaman is able to move about freely, gather information and perform magical acts at a distance from his body. It is unclear from the various anthropological accounts, however, whether the animal spirit had its own independent existence when not in the shaman’s service, or whether it was simply a material form assumed by the shaman when engaging in the practice of magic. Stories and legends concerning shamans provide conflicting evidence in this respect. In some, shamans are said to be able to disappear when attacked or pursued, whereupon all that will be seen is some swift-footed animal or bird departing from the scene. If this animal is injured or killed, the shaman will experience an identical mishap wherever his or her body happens to be. On the other hand, shamans never killed or consumed the flesh of animals belonging to their familiar’s species, implying that these spirits existed separately, and could easily be mistaken for ordinary animals (Speck, 1918).

Depending on their particular talents, shamans are believed to be able to foretell the future, advise on the whereabouts of game animals or predict impending catastrophes. Their ability to control the forces of nature can also be employed to manipulate the weather, subdue animals or bring them close to the hunter. Above all, since all manifestations of ill-health are thought to be caused by angry or malignant spirits, shamans possess a virtual monopoly on the treatment of sickness. Since the shaman is generally the only individual capable of visiting the spirit world at will through the agency of his animal “familiars,” he provides the only reliable method of discovering and counteracting the spiritual origins of physical and mental illness (Eliade, 1964; Speck, 1918).

2.4 Animism in classical and medieval times

Although animist belief systems are particularly characteristic of hunting and foraging peoples, they have also persisted in a variety of forms in many pastoral nomadic and agricultural societies where they often coexist, through a process of synchretic fusion, with more recently imposed religious creeds and practices. An interesting contemporary example still flourishes among Central American indigenous peoples such as the Maya. Although Christianized and agricultural, the Mayan inhabitants of Chamula in the Mexican province of Chiapas believe in the existence of individual “soul animals” or chanul that are assigned to each person at birth by the celestial powers, and which share reciprocally every stroke of fortune that their human counterparts experience. All chanul are non-domesticated mammals with five digits, and they are physically indistinguishable from actual wild animals. Indeed, a person may only discover the identity of his soul animal through its recurrent appearance in dreams, or with the help of a shaman (Gossen, 1996).

The Maya believe that most illness is the result of an injury inflicted upon a person’s chanul. These injuries may be inflicted deliberately via witchcraft, by another person mistaking one’s chanul for an ordinary animal and hurting or killing it, or it may be “self-inflicted” in the sense that the person may allow him or herself to experience overly intense emotions, such as intense fear, rage, excitement or sexual pleasure, that can frighten or upset the chanul. The people of Chamula are also extremely reluctant to kill any wild mammal with five digits, since by doing so they believe they might inadvertently kill themselves, or a friend or relative.

As far as curative measures are concerned, the only traditional remedy for an illness resulting from damage to one’s soul animal is to employ the services of a shaman who will use various rituals, and the influence of his own, more powerful soul animals, to discover the source of the affliction and counteract it. According to Mayan folklore, shamans and witches also possess the ability to adopt the material form of their chanul in order to gain access to the supernatural realm (Gossen, 1996).

The purpose of dwelling on this particular example of contemporary Amerindian belief in soul animals is that it illustrates, according to Gossen (1996), the remarkable tenacity of animistic/shamanistic ideas and practices in Central America, despite the coercive influence of nearly five centuries of imported Roman Catholicism. Similarly, in Europe and around the Mediterranean basin, it appears that vestiges of comparable belief systems survived in a number of local and regional healing cults, at least until the early modern period.

In the pre-classical period, the connection with animism was particularly obvious. In ancient Egypt, for example, the entire pantheon was dominated by distinctly shamanic images of animal-headed gods and goddesses, including the dog-headed Anubis who guided the souls of the dead on their journey through the underworld, and whose other roles included physician and apothecary to the gods, and guardian of the mysteries of mummification and reincarnation. Dogs and snakes were also the sacred emblems of the Sumerian goddess, Gula the “Great Physician,” and of the Babylonian and Chaldean deity, Marduk, another god of healing and reincarnation (Dale-Green, 1966; Schwabe, 1994).

In the classical period, the animist associations are somewhat less prominent but still readily discernible. Within the Greek pantheon, the gods were less often represented as animals, but they retained the shamanic ability to transform themselves into animals in order to disguise their true identities. Dogs and serpents also played a central role in the cult of Asklepios (Aesculapius), the son of Apollo, who was known as the God of Medicine and the Divine Physician. Asklepios’s shrine in the sacred grove at Epidaurus functioned as a kind of ancient health resort. Like modern day Lourdes, it attracted crowds of suppliants seeking relief from a great variety of maladies. As part of the “cure,” it provided an early instance of institutional, animal-assisted therapy. Treatment involved various rites of purification and sacrifice followed by periods of (drug-induced?) sleep within the main body of the shrine. During their slumbers the God visited each of his “patients,” sometimes in human form but more often in the guise of a snake or a dog that licked them on the relevant injured or ailing portions of their anatomy. It appears that the dogs that lived around the shrine may have been specially trained to lick people. It was believed that these animals actually represented the God and had the power to cure illness with their tongues (Dale-Green, 1966; Toynbee, 1973). Inscribed tablets found within the precincts of the temple at Epidaurus testify to the miraculous powers of the local dogs:

Although evidently material in form, the healing dogs and snakes at Epidaurus clearly fulfilled much the same function as shamanic spirit helpers. Through their ability to renew themselves periodically by shedding their skins, not to mention their potentially venomous qualities, snakes have always possessed strong associations with healing, death and reincarnation (Morris and Morris, 1968). Likewise, in mythology, the dog is commonly represented as an intermediary between this world and the next. Some authors have attributed this to the dog’s carrion-eating propensities, while others ascribe it to the dog’s proverbial watchfulness and alertness to unseen “spiritual” threats, as well as its liminal, ambiguous status as a voluntary occupant of the boundary zone separating human and animal, culture and nature (Serpell, 1995; White, 1991).

During the early centuries of Christianity, traces of ancient shamanic ideas and practices were still prevalent throughout much of Europe. In addition to being healers, most of the early Celtic saints and holy men of Britain and Ireland were distinguished by their special rapport with animals, and many, according to legend, experienced bodily transformations into animal form (Armstrong, 1973; Matthews, 1991). St. Francis of Assisi, who appears have been influenced by Irish monastic traditions, has also been described as a “nature mystic.” Among other feats, he preached sermons to rapt audiences of birds, and was able to pacify rabid wolves (Armstrong, 1973). One of his followers, St. Anthony of Padua (1195–1231), preached so eloquently to the fishes in the sea that they all lined up along the shoreline to listen to his words of wisdom (Spencer, 1993).

The particular notion that dogs could heal injuries or sores by touching or licking them also persisted well into the Christian era. St. Roch who, like Asklepios, was generally depicted in the company of a dog, seems to have been cured of plague sores by the licking of his canine companion. St. Christopher, St. Bernard and a number of other saints were also associated with dogs, and many of them had reputations as healers.

A faint ghost of older, shamanistic traditions can also be detected in the curious medieval cult of the greyhound saint, St. Guinefort. Guinefort, or so the legend goes, was unjustly slaughtered by his noble master who mistakenly believed that the dog had killed and devoured his child. Soon afterwards, however, the babe was found sleeping peacefully beside the remains of a huge, predatory serpent that Guinefort had fought and killed. Overcome with remorse, the knight threw the dog’s carcass into a well, covered it with a great pile of stones, and planted a grove of trees around it to commemorate the event. During the thirteenth century, this grove, about 40 kilometers north of the city of Lyons, became the center of a pagan healing cult. Peasants from miles around brought their sick and ailing children to the shrine where miraculous cures were apparently performed (Schmitt, 1983).

Centuries later, the close companionship of a “Spaniel Gentle or Comforter”—a sort of nondescript, hairy lap-dog—was still being recommended to the ladies of Elizabethan England as a remedy for a variety of ills. William Harrison, in his Description of England (1577), admitted to some skepticism on the subject: “It is thought by some that it is verie wholesome for a weake stomach to beare such a dog in the bosome, as it is for him that hath the palsie to feele the dailie smell and savour of a fox. But how truelie this is affirmed let the learned judge.” The learned Dr. Caius, author of De Canibus Britannicus (1570), was less inclined to doubt: “though some suppose that such dogges are fyt for no service, I dare say, by their leaves, they be in a wrong boxe.” He was of the opinion that a dog carried on the bosom of a diseased person absorbed the disease (Jesse, 1866).

Thus, over historical time, a kind of progression occurs from a strong, archaic belief in the supernatural healing power of certain animals, such as dogs, to increasingly vague and superstitious folk practices in which the special “spiritual” qualities of the animal can no longer be discerned, and all that remains is a sort of “quack” remedy of dubious therapeutic value. In medieval Europe, this trend was associated with the Church’s vigorous suppression of pre-Christian and unorthodox religious beliefs and practices. In the year 1231 AD, in an effort to halt the spread of religious dissent in Europe, the office of the Papal Inquisition was created in order to provide the Church with an instrument for identifying and combating heresy. Prior to this time, religious and secular authorities had adopted a relatively lenient attitude to the variety of pagan customs and beliefs that abounded locally throughout Europe. The Inquisition systematically rooted them out and obliterated them. Ancient nature cults, and rituals connected with pre-Christian deities or sacred groves, trees, streams and wells, were ruthlessly extirpated. Even the harmless cult of St. Guinefort was the object of persecution. A Dominican friar, Stephen of Bourbon, had the dead dog disinterred, and the sacred grove cut down and burnt, along with the remains of the faithful greyhound. An edict was also passed making it a crime for anyone to visit the place in future (Schmitt, 1983).

Although the picture is greatly distorted by the Inquisition’s peculiar methods of obtaining and recording evidence, it appears that the so-called “witch craze” that swept through Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries originated as an attack on local folk healers or cunning folk; the last degenerate practitioners of archaic shamanism (Briggs, 1996; Serpell, 2002). According to the establishment view, not only did these medieval witches consort with the Devil in animal form, they also possessed the definitively shamanic ability to transform both themselves and others into animals (Cohn, 1975). In Britain and Scandinavia, witches were also believed to possess supernatural “imps” or “familiars” most of which appeared in animal form. In fact, judging from the evidence presented in contemporary pamphlets and trial records, the majority of these “familiars” belonged to species we nowadays keep as pets: dogs, cats, cage birds, mice, rats, ferrets, and so on (Ewen, 1933; Serpell, 2002; Thomas, 1971). In other words, close association or affinity with animals, once a sign of shamanic power or budding sainthood, became instead a symptom of diabolism. Animal companions still retained a certain “otherworldly” quality in the popular imagination of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but mainly as potential instruments of maleficium—the power to harm others by supernatural means.

All of these trends also reflected the marked medieval tendency to impose a rigid separation between human and non-human animals; a tendency that was reinforced by ideals of human conduct that emphasized self-control, civility and chastity, while at the same time rejecting what were then viewed as animal-like attributes, such as impulsiveness, coarseness and licentiousness (Elias, 1994; Salisbury, 1994; Serpell, 2005).