… Here and not here, the tiger is like spirit or wind, “the mysterious rustling of the wind in a bamboo thicket, a sound that has an unearthly and eerie charm.”
Continuing through The Book of Symbols, eds. Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin (2010):
Ape/Monkey: … In distinction to the Western trajectory, the sixteenth-century Buddhist story Journey to the West or Monkey tells the adventurous tale of a monkey who finally became a god. Always a nuisance to man and the gods, hampered by drunkenness, foolishness and pretensions — but nevertheless in search of wisdom — Monkey uses his powers of trickery, perseverance and his lust for life to attain both immortality and an ever-lasting place in the Chinese pantheon, as the “God of Victorious Strife.” As with his cousin — the trickster Hermes, god of magicians and the transformations of alchemy — Monkey both shows us up as fools, but as a personification of instinctual activity also offers tremendous blessings.
A monkey’s transformed body weds
the human mind. Mind is a monkey –
this, the truth profound.
– Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the WestElephant: … Just about everything to do with African and Asian elephants (the last surviving species of their kind) is on a grand scale: their imposing architecture, the largesse of their souls; the eloquence with which they inhabit their splendid, and increasingly vulnerable, gigantism. Borne on cushioned feet exquisitely attuned to earth’s vibrations, absorbing a thousand olfactory and tactile clues with their uncanny trunks, they travel silently and fluently over the changeable surfaces of rain forests and foothills, of African savannah and desert periphery.
… It rests with the power of humans to properly accommodate the “size” of elephants — in every sense of the word. If we allow them to simply “be elephants” and thereby show us how to “be elephants” as well, we will also make room for something of size …
Great Cats: … Their prestige is not of swiftness but strength, and lithe elegance, lusty sensuality, sumptuous pelage.Conveying protective grace and noble authority, they have inspired everything from warrior societies and shamanic magic to some of our oldest, most commanding images of majestic divinity.
… Here and not here, the tiger is like spirit or wind, “the mysterious rustling of the wind in a bamboo thicket, a sound that has an unearthly and eerie charm.”
Bear: … For many peoples, this largest carnivorous land mammal, able to rise up to ten feet tall on its hind legs, has represented a sacred creature that could move between worlds, often functioning as a “tutelary figure” or spirit helper to mythic heroes.
… Associated with highly potent and thus dangerous spiritual domains, the bear is also emblematic of the drastic repercussions for the uninitiated who violate them. … In alchemy the bear corresponds to the potentially devouring affective energies of psyche’s unconscious realm that can seize us destructively, especially if we are naïve or disrespectful enough to underestimate their significance.
Wolf: … Wolves are hair-raisers. Traversing the Great Distances on their slender legs and prodigious feet they appear to float, silent and spectral, like emissary spirits. The gradations of color in their variegated pelages move from white and cream and ochre to orange and brown, gray and black. They might be transmutations into form and corporeity of the diffuse light of dawn and dusk, the intervals of transition and enchantment known in folklore as “the hour of the wolf.”
… Wolves accompany the war god Mars, connoting the ability to act forcefully and effectively out of instinctual clues and discriminated cunning. Geri and Freki are the robust wolf companions of Odin, the pensive, self-sacrificing Norse god of wisdom, poetry, magic and death. Like them, the vigilant forces of nature look to the appointed times of advent and departure.
Coyote: … That the world isn’t perfect made coyote a refreshingly less-than-perfect spirit himself, capable of error and getting duped. Among many Native American peoples, Coyote is both creator and destroyer, a shapeshifting character whose seemingly random actions and pranks have unforeseen consequences. Navajos refer to the coyote as God’s Dog, and the name of the trickster Aztec God Huehuecoyotl, means the Old, Old Coyote.
Having immense stamina and agility, opportunistic in every way and quick to colonize an open ecological niche, the coyote is one of the most adaptable creatures on earth, forever defying our attempts to define or exterminate it. Thus the coyote is particularly suited to personify psyche’s old, old unpredictability and changeableness, the way it adapts and extends its territory with time and evolution, its ability to be visible and invisible simultaneously, to shift shape and trip us up just when we think we have disposed of its more troublesome effects and got a grasp on it.
Previous symbols are here.
-Julie
