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