Animal Energies

The following is excerpted from Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing by Coleman Barks.

____________________________

I like to think of the first mystical poem as that figure incised, and painted, into the farthest wall of the cave called Les Trois Freres in southern France. The Animal. Joseph Campbell called him “god of the cave.” He does the dance of human and animal at once, owl, lion, horse, stag, man. He incorporates them all visually and looks out at you with your own menagerie, who have gone inward far enough to meet his gaze. Animals can live inside the landscape without our noisy self-consciousness. When we turn and go with them . . . we enter a silence and a transcendence. We perceive through their eyes with their energies. This is a metaphor, a tremendously important one, as well as an experience.

The Shaman in the Cave

Hazrat Inayat Khan says that seekers should “accomplish their desires that they may thus be able to rise above them to the eternal goal.” At the core of each person’s nature are unique seeds of desiring, which flourish through the development of personality, not through any suppression of it. We are not to become pale renunciate ciphers with no wantings. The animals of desiring . . . are not to be thwarted but lived, transmuted, and incorporated. This is the art of forming a personality.


Only when we live the animal powers do we learn that those satisfactions are not what we truly wanted. There’s more, and we are here to follow the mysteries of longing beyond where they lead. The purpose of desire is to perfect the longings, for at the core of longing is the Friend, Christ, Krishna, the emptiness, wherever it was that Igjargajuk, the Eskimo shaman, was when he came back from forty nights on the ice floes with one sentence: “There is nothing to fear in the universe.” The great love at the center of longing has no fear in it . . .

There is a witness who watches the obstreperous play of flame and eros and says, This is the dance of existence. A great mutual embrace is always happening between the eternal and what dies, between essence and accident. We are all writing the book of love. Everything goes in. All the particles of the world are in love and looking for lovers. Pieces of straw tremble in the presence of amber. Isn’t that the deal? We’re here to love each other, to deepen and unfold that capacity, to open the heart . . .


This region of animal energies is where sexuality enters love’s book most obviously, although eros, as Freud showed, is a powerful ingredient in many motions that draw us. Sex is a basic and nourishing to human beings as baking bread. Rumi implies as much in the heroic simile of the breadmaking poem. Lovemaking is going on everywhere among the forms, and in a startling variation of the golden rule he says, Remember, the way you make love is the way God will be with you.

Opening image: “Full Moon” by Hannah Giffard.

Man Pretending

“Man Pretending to Be a Rabbit” by Maggie Taylor.

Hare in the Snow

Hare in the Snow
by Helen Dunmore

Hare in the snow cresting
the run of winter, stretching
in liquid leaps over the hill,

then the wind turns, and
hare stands so still

he is a freeze of himself, fooling
the shadows into believing
he is one of them.

Image: “Snowshoe Hare and Chickadee” by Larry A. Smail.

Morning Light III

Subject: Unknown.
Photographer: Fred Goudon.

Sacred

I find it fascinating that just as the hare, throughout history and across cultures, has been considered sacred by some yet “unclean” by others, so too have expressions of human sexuality that depart from traditional gender roles and/or the norms of heterosexuality.

In many Native American cultures, for instance, the “two-spirited” ones were held in high regard, and their unique role in community life honored, even revered. They crossed boundaries, blending, for instance, the genders. Accordingly, they were often the shamans – the ones who communed with and traveled to the spirit realm, the ultimate boundary crossing.

Within the ancient Jewish culture, the hare’s ambiguity stemmed from the strange and erroneous belief that every hare was both male and female. Such perceived blending of the genders made the hare ritualistically impure and unfit to eat. Writing in the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne observed that the ancient Jews believed that all manner of vices resulted from eating the flesh of the hare, with its “mixture of sexes.” Two such “vices” were “unnatural venery” and “degenerous effemination.”

Expanding on such ideas, Christianity (though not Christ himself) later declared that sexual activity between members of the same gender was “sinful,” that it separated those who engaged in it from the sacred.


Especially symbolic

Of course, all creation is sacred – infused with the divine spark of life. Yet, without doubt, certain creatures, including the hare, have been considered especially symbolic to humans throughout history. In pre-urban cultures, for instance, many animals and other naturalistic figures were seen to spiritually represent a group of related people such as a clan. Such an animal was considered the clan’s totem.

In various trickster tales found from Asia and Africa to North America, rabbits and hares are both good and bad. The Algonquin tribes of North America had as their chief deity a great hare to whom they went at death. According to one account this mighty hare lived in the east, according to another, in the north. In his anthropomorphized form he was known as Menabosho or Michabo.

Terri Windling notes that in Egyptian myth, “hares were . . . closely associated with the cycles of the moon, which was viewed as masculine when waxing and feminine when waning. Hares were thus believed to be androgynous, shifting back and forth between the genders—not only in ancient Egypt and, as has been noted, Native American culture, but also in European folklore right up to the 18th century. A hare-headed god and goddess can be seen on the Egyptian temple walls of Dendera, where the female is believed to be the goddess Unut (or Wenet), while the male is most likely a representation of Osiris (also called Wepuat or Un-nefer), who was sacrificed to the Nile annually in the form of a hare.”



Greco-Roman, Teutonic, Norse, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, and Buddhist myths all feature the hare. The ancient Germanic and Scandinavian peoples used the hare as a sacred symbol in association with the nature goddess Freyja. In a similar way, the Anglo-Saxons associated the hare with Ostara or Eostre, the goddess of spring. Later, Christianity appropriated many of these symbols in its celebrating of Easter, the commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.


The Easter Hare

There are unique associations in English folklore between hares and Easter. In 17th century Southeastern England, for example, there is evidence of a custom of hunting a hare on Good Friday, and in 18th century Coleshill there was a manorial custom in which young men tried to catch a hare on Easter Monday.

According to Stuart Buchanan, the English traditionally eat young spring lamb at Easter. Yet he suggests that “it was the early Christian monks who thought up the ‘paschal lamb’ as an alternative to the hare, totem of Oestre, pagan goddess of dawn, fertility and rebirth, whose annual festival took place, naturally enough, at the spring equinox.”

“The Easter Bunny,” says Buchanan, “is in fact the hare, one of England’s five noble beasts of venery under the ancient forest laws of William the Conqueror and his successors.”



Image 1: “I’m for the Hare that Runs by Night” (digital paint, 2003), part of Martin Herbert’s Totem Animal Series.
Image 2: Egyptian hare.
Image 3: “Hare” by Catherine Eaton Skinner.

Morning Light II

Subject: Levi Poulter.
Photographer: David Vance.

A Calendar of Hares

A Calendar of Hares
by Anna Crowe

At the raw end of winter
the mountain is half snow, half
dun grass. Only when snow
moves does it become a hare.

If you can catch a hare
and look into its eye
you will see the whole world.

That day in March
watching two hares boxing
at the field's edge, she felt
the child quicken.

It is certain Midas never saw a hare
or he would not have lusted after gold.

When the buzzard wheels
like a slow kite overhead
the hare pays out the string.

The man who tells you
he has thought of everything
has forgotten the hare.

The hare’s form, warm yet empty.
Stumbling upon it he felt his heart
lurch and race beneath his ribs.

Beset by fears, she became
the hare who hears
the mowers' voices grow louder.

Light as the moon’s path over the sea
the run of the hare over the land.

The birchwood a dapple
of fallen gold: a carved hare
lies in a Pictish hoard.

Waking to the cry of a hare
she ran and found the child sleeping.

November stiffens
into December: hare and grass
have grown a thick coat of frost.

In reflecting on her poem, “The Calendar of Hares,” Anna Crowe writes: “The hare is an archetype, is numinous. In these islands we are fortunate in having three kinds of hare: the brown or common hare, the Irish hare, and the blue or mountain hare of Scotland. It is this last, with its different summer and winter pelages, that features in my poem.

“Ideas about transformation, especially the sympathetic magic underlying the process of metaphor, interest me greatly, and the naturally elusive and mythic qualities of the hare readily embody this. Why a ‘calendar’? It offered a handy framework for conveying ideas about transformation through time passing, and also allowed me to focus intensely to produce brief snapshots like fleeting glimpses of the hare. Some verses are naturalistic, others more proverbial or emblematic in tone. I have also tried to ‘think haiku’, a form I see as a transforming-machine with a space at its heart, a gap across which we step from one place into somewhere else. But I have tried always to keep faith with the creature itself, bearing in mind its behaviour in the wild as well as the mythic, magical values it has acquired in human consciousness over the millennia. To see a hare is to be reminded of the mystery of lives tangential to our own, their beauty and vulnerability. . . .

“[In writing this poem] I have drawn on several memories of my own: watching mountain hares in parti-coloured pelage up at Dalwhinnie, when my cousin and I asked, is it snow or is it a hare; being pregnant and watching jack-hares boxing near Lochend and suddenly feeling my daughter quicken. Underpinning the poem there is a childhood memory of the first hare I ever saw, killed when we were driving down to Devon one summer. It was soft, gold, almost unmarked, and I remember its great dark eye and a feeling of loss.”


Image: Nick Clayton

To Dream

Because the hare has long been a symbol of fertility, it is said that to dream of one means that something wonderful and new is on the way.

Some believe that when women dream of stroking a hare, they are longing to have children. In men’s dreams, a hare is supposed to represent an unconscious need for love.

If in a dream you are watching a hare at play, it is a warning not to spread rumors about others. If you are shooting a hare in a dream, you are going to lose a friend.

For a man, to dream of chasing a hare means that he is willing to engage in sexual adventures.


Adapted from Dreamer’s Dictionary by Garuda.

Image from Pedro Almodóvar’s film, Bad Education (2004).

The Difference

Here’s how Wikipedia outlines the differences between the rabbit and the hare:

Hares do not bear their young below ground in a burrow as do other Leporidae, but rather in a shallow depression or flattened nest of grass called a form. Young hares are adapted to the lack of physical protection offered by a burrow by being born fully furred and with eyes open. They are hence able to fend for themselves very quickly after birth, that is to say they are precocial. By contrast, the related rabbits and cottontail rabbits are altricial, having young that are born blind and hairless.

All rabbits (except the cottontail rabbits) live underground in burrows or warrens, while hares (and cottontail rabbits) live in simple nests [known as forms] above the ground, and usually do not live in groups.

Hares are generally larger than rabbits, with longer ears, and have black markings on their fur.

Hares have not been domesticated, while rabbits are often kept as house pets.

The hare’s diet is very similar to that of the rabbit.


Image: European Hare.

Beauty

Welcome to the first in a series of four posts comprised of excerpts from Susan Bordo’s insightful book, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private.

_______________________________

Studying the ancient Greeks reveals a different set of attitudes toward beauty and the body than our contemporary ideals, both homosexual and heterosexual. As is well known by now (although undiscussed when I studied philosophy as an undergraduate), Plato was not above appreciating a beautiful young body. In Symposium, he describes the beauty of the body as evidence of the presence of the divine on earth, and the original spur to all “higher” human endeavors (as well as earthly, sexual love). We see someone dazzling, and he or she awakens the soul to its natural hunger to be lifted above the mundane, transitory, mortal world. Some people seek that transcendence through ordinary human intercourse, and achieve the only immortality they will know through the begetting of human offspring and the continuation of the human race. For others, the beautiful body of another becomes the inspiration for a lifelong search for beauty in all its forms, the creation of beautiful art, beautiful words, beautiful ideals, beautiful cities. They will achieve their immortality through communion with something beyond the body – the idea of Beauty itself.

So human beauty is a pretty far-ranging and powerful thing for Plato, capable of evoking worlds beyond itself, even recalling a previous life when we dealt among timeless, perfect forms. But human beauty, significantly (in fact, all earthly beauty), can only offer a glimpse of heavenly perfection. It’s our nature to be imperfect, after all, and anyone who tries to overcome that limitation on earth is guilty of hubris – according to the Greeks.

Our own culture, in contrast, is one without “limits” (a frequent theme of advertisements and commercials) and seemingly without fear of hubris. Not only do we expect perfection in the bodies of others (just take a ganger at some personal ads), we are constantly encouraged to achieve it ourselves, with the help of science and technology and the products and services they make available to us.

For Plato (unlike Descartes) there are no “mere” physical bodies; bodies are lit with meaning, with memory. Our culture is more Cartesian; we like to think of our bodies as so much stuff, which can be tinkered with without any consequences for our soul. We bob our “family noses,” lift our aging faces, suction extra fat, remove minor “flaws” with seemingly little concern for any “deep” meaning that our bodies might have, as repositories of our histories, our ethnic and racial and family lineage, our personalities. . . .

The fact is that we’re not only Cartesian but Puritan in our attitudes toward the body. The Greeks went for muscles, sure, but they would have regarded our exercise compulsions as evidence of a system out of control. They thought it unseemly – and a failure of will – to get too self-obsessed with anything. . . .

For all its idealization of the beauty of the body, Greek culture also understood that beauty could be “inner.” In the Symposium, a group of elite Greeks discourse on the nature of love. Everyone except for Socrates and Aristophanes is in love with someone else at the party, and they’re madly flirting, advancing their own romantic agendas through their speeches. Among the participants are the most beautiful young men of their crowd. Socrates himself is over fifty at the time, and not a pretty man to look at (to put it generously). Yet as we’re told at the beginning (and this seems to have been historically true), nearly everyone has at one time or another been “obsessed” with him, “transported, completely possessed – by his cleverness, his irony, his ability to weave a spell with words and ideas. Even the most dazzling Athenian of them all – soldier superhero Alcibiades, generally regarded as one of the sexiest, handsomest men in town, who joins the party late (and drunk) with a beautiful wreath of violets and ivy and ribbons in his hair – is totally, madly smitten with Socrates.

Alcibiades’ love for Socrates is not “Platonic” in the sense in which we have come to understand that term. In fact, Alcibiades is insulted because Socrates has refused to have sex with him. “The moment he starts to speak,” he tells the crowd of his feelings for Socrates, “I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face.” This is not the way it usually goes. In the more normal Greek scheme of things, it’s the beautiful young man – like Alcibiades – who is supposed to start the heart of the older man thumping, and who flirtatiously withholds his favors while the older lover does his best to win him. Alcibiades is in a state about his role reversal, but he understands why it has happened.

He compares Socrates to a popular kind of satyr statue, which (like the little lacquered Russian dolls we’re familiar with) could be opened to reveal another figure within. Socrates may be ugly as a satyr on the outside, but “once I had a glimpse of the figures within – they were so godlike, so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing, that I no longer had a choice – I just had to do whatever he told me.”

Excerpted from The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private by Susan Bordo.

Hare and Moon

“Hare & Moon” (mixed media, 300mm x400mm) by Carry Akroyd.

Writes Akroyd: “My subject is mostly the agricultural landscape, with forays into wilder retreats. Working both as a painter and printmaker, the crossover of techniques is perpetually stimulating; ideas evolve through the permutations of different media. I am absorbed by one discipline for a few months at a time.”

Morning Light

Welcome to the first in a series of posts displaying images of male beauty “in morning light,” or at least in what could be construed as the light of morning.

This series will present images that convey both beauty and simplicity. These images will show men looking as natural and non-posed as possible, going about their various morning routines and rituals – sleeping-in, rising, shaving, showering, dressing. (Of course, some morning routines are best kept private. So rest assured I’ll spare you any images of guys engaging in their morning constitution!)

Throughout the series I’ll do my best to identify the photographers and/or subjects of the images I share.

Accompanying this series’ inaugural image is a reflection on male beauty by Brian Vargo.

____________________
The Latin word bellus, the linguistic descendant of the modern term “beauty,” was intended as a compliment only to women and children. When used in reference to a man, it was meant as a form of mockery, a connotation that affects our usage of the word even today. Although the concept of “male beauty” has gained societal acceptance, it is still relatively rare that one would describe a man as “beautiful,” at least in terms of his appearance.

For men throughout the ages, the most consistently acceptable method of attaining the ideal body shape has been through exercise and conditioning. Whether for sport or as part of battle training, contests of strength and endurance between men have been integral parts of many societies dating back to at least the 6th century B.C., when the first Pythian Games were held. Since then, male beauty has had as much to do with the physique as with the face, a standard that has changed little since the establishment of the ‘Greek ideal’ . . . It is the form beneath the clothes that has traditionally been seen to make the man beautiful.

Excerpted from The Standards of Beauty – From Ancient Times to Today by Brian Vargo.

Image: Jonathan Vargas

Prince with a Thousand Enemies

All the world will be your enemy,
prince with a thousand enemies,
and when they catch you they will kill you.
But first they must catch you, digger, runner,
prince with the swift warning.
Be cunning and full of tricks,
and your people will never be destroyed.

Richard Adams
Watership Down

Although the archetypal “prince” in Richard Adams’ classic novel Watership Down refers to the rabbit and not the hare, it’s a close enough fit for the focus of this blogsite to warrant inclusion, wouldn’t you say? Indeed, except for the fact that hares aren’t “diggers” of burrows, I’m sure you’d agree that Adams’ words are equally applicable to the hare as to the rabbit.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Watership Down, here’s how critic Paul Hughes describes the book’s plot: “The story follows a warren of Berkshire rabbits fleeing the destruction of their home by a land developer. As they search for a safe haven, skirting danger at every turn, we become acquainted with the band and its compelling culture and mythos. Adams has crafted a touching, involving world in the dirt and scrub of the English countryside, complete with its own folk history and language.”

The book’s title refers to a hill in the north of Hampshire, England, where the rabbits eventually find a new home.



Watership Down was Adams’ first and most successful novel. It was originally published in the United Kingdom in 1972 and since then has never been out of print. It has been made into a successful animated film and television series.

SparkNotes.com observes that in Watership Down, “Adams presents rabbits as intelligent, caring, feeling creatures who undergo many trials and misfortunes for the sole purpose of finding a home where they can leave out their lives. The book often carries a tone that suggests that humanity has lost something it used to have — the ability to live free, as the rabbits do. The notion that people should live as a part of nature rather than apart from nature is a strong undercurrent that flows through much of the work. Indeed, the novel’s popularity stems not just from the enjoyable story itself, but also from the societal implications that can easily be found in it. At times, Watership Down is almost pleading in tone, suggesting that we still have time to stop our destruction of animals’ homes before it is too late – an idea that appeals to many.

“Yet the novel is not simply a message about the way we should treat animals. It is also a story about life, as the novel’s depiction of the rabbits’ lives in their warrens raises many strong parallels to human societies. However Watership Down is read – as a political, social, or environmental critique or simply as a book about the search for a home and life – it is undoubtedly greatly influenced by the state of the natural world in the twentieth century and the role that humanity must play within that world.”



I read Watership Down as a teenager in the late 1970’s and identified with the book’s rag-tag band of characters and their struggle to find a place of safety within an often hostile world. I related their struggle to my own: I was, after all, a weedy teenager coming to terms with the realization that I was gay. I was particularly drawn to the character of Fiver (pictured above), the “runt of the litter,” yet also the prophetic voice of the community, the visionary.

As a closeted young gay person, I too felt as if I had a “thousand enemies,” though, in retrospect, I realize the greatest of these was my own fear. I feared the truth about myself, and what this truth meant for me and for my future.

It took many years to fully accept and love myself for who I am. Yet through this proactive, risk-taking, and often difficult journey of self-awareness, I came to both discover and create a new life – or perhaps, better still, my true life.

And it is in the light of this truth that I am able to walk upon the sacred ground of my own Watership Down.

Image 1: European or Brown Hare by Martin McGill of WWT.
Image 2: “Visiting Watership Down” by Jeanette Peters.
Image 3: Fiver, runt and seer, as depicted in the animated film adaptation of Watership Down.

Recommended Off-site Link:
Bunnies in Jeopardy: Watership Down, an Unsung Animated Classic by Daniel Kraus.

Ambiguous

The [medieval] bestiarists [those who named and attributed human characteristics to animals] deemed the hare’s sex to be ambiguous, and its mode of reproduction strange. They included the hare in a group of several beasts that they asserted had been declared unclean in the Mosaic law because of their alleged sexual deviance.

Epstein, Marc Michael
Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature
Penn State Press, 1997
p. 131

Ancient and Enigmatic

Fine stone craftsmen Martin and Oliver Webb note that the “essential and defining feature” of the “ancient and enigmatic symbol” of three hares running in a circle is that “each hare shares its ears with its neighbors, joining them together and forming a central trefoil.” An interesting result of this configuration is that there are only ever three ears depicted.

Martin and Oliver suggest that the image of the Three Hares may be connected with the Green Man, and, in some cases, be seen as a representation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

“Three Hares” by Martin and Oliver Webb.

The Three Hares Project has documented the presence of this intriguing symbol in many different parts of the world and across diverse cultures, with the earliest occurrences of it appearing to be in cave temples in China, which have been dated to the Sui dynasty (6th to 7th centuries).

As to its meaning, the project concludes that: “the three hares motif was clearly revered in all the different contexts in which it is found, but, as yet, we have not come across a contemporary written record of its meaning. It may be expected that the motif would have had different meanings in different cultures but, as an archetype, perhaps there was an element of meaning common to all.”

Most likely, this meaning is related to the fact that the hare is “strongly represented in world mythology and from ancient times has had divine associations. Its elusiveness and unusual behaviour, particularly at night, have reinforced its reputation as a magical creature.”

The linking of this motif with the Christian Trinity, notes the Three Hares Project, “appears to be an association made long after the image was originally worked.”

One theory pertaining to the spread of the motif is that it was transported across Asia and as far as the south west of England by merchants traveling the Silk Road. This view is supported by the early date of the surviving occurrences in China. However, the majority of representations of the Three Hares occur in England and northern Germany. This supports a contrary view that the Three Hares are English or early German symbols.

Medieval roof boss in South Tawton, Devon,
photograph by Chris Chapman of the Three Hares Project.

Reflecting on the mystery of the Three Hares, Terri Windling writes: “Whether hovering above us in the arms of a moon goddess or carrying messages from the Netherworld below, whether clever or clownish, hero or rascal, whether portent of good tidings or ill, rabbits and hares have leapt through myths, legends, and folk tales all around the world – forever elusive, refusing to be caught and bound by a single definition. The precise meaning, then, of the ancient Three Hares symbol carved into my village church is bound to be just as elusive and mutable as the myths behind it. It is a goddess symbol, a trickster symbol, a symbol of the Holy Trinity, a symbol of death, redemption and rebirth . . . all these and so much more.”

An Iranian tray featuring the symbol of the Three Hares.

Dreams of Subversion

The association of hares with homosexuality is not unknown in late medieval kabbalah. An example of a clear adoption from a Christian context; Eleazar b. Moses Azikri (1533-1600) wrote that one who is involved in homosexual relations is reincarnated as a hare (Azikri 1836:141).

Epstein, Marc Michael
Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature
Penn State Press, 1997
p. 132

Leveret

A Young Hare, watercolor, 1502, by Albrecht Dürer.