… And yet, … watching through the window of a passing bus the unmistakable silhouette foraging single-mindedly in the snowy darkness, you have to admire their tenacity, their eerie ability to beat the odds.
Continuing through The Book of Symbols, eds. Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin (2010):
Fox: … The fox’s fiery red coat, flamelike ears and tail and vertical pupils in glowing amber eyes give it a volatile appearance, embodying the elusive, flickering, transformative qualities of fire itself. The fox seemingly possesses its own inner light, like the shifting, mysterious “foxfire” that luminesces eerily in marsh and forest.
… In Medieval legend, the labyrinthine passages of the wily Reynard’s underground “castle” allowed him to be everywhere at once and nowhere at all, while the shimmering fluidity of his vulpine intelligence, anticipating and deluding all opponents, subverted the “proper” order of things. Called “son of the earth” by the Incas, the fox’s ability to hear through the earth about far-off events made him a diviner-curer, just as the fox-guide’s subterranean knowledge led North American and Siberian shamans through paths not ordinarily open or visible to humans.
… In Japan and China, no other entity has been endowed with greater “spectral potency” than the fox, regarded not only as the “most subtle of all beasts, but as a kami — an uncanny spiritual force likened to thunder, echoes and dragons.
Deer: … The deer’s graceful caution, elegant leaps, sudden appearances and swift disappearances link the animal to the alchemical Mercurius, the transformative intermediary soul substance, as well as to pilgrimage or initiation paths that are circuitous, indirect, constantly shifting direction or, like the deer, disappearing altogether.
… The stag is revered worldwide for its tall, annually renewed, treelike antlers, symbols of fertility, rejuvenation, rebirth, the ebb and flow of spiritual growth and the passage of time.
… Hunting societies, from ancient Europe to medieval Japan and Native North America, acquired such a profound experience of the deer’s movements that the belief was born that the creature could travel from one world to the next in a graceful bound.
Rabbit/Hare: … Survival defenses of the rabbit include eyes at the side of the head, which see both forward and back, sensitive ears and nose, and the ability to run at high speed with erratic shifts in direction and sudden “freezing,” which allows it to vanish from sight. Furthermore, wild rabbits, if cornered, will use their sharp claws and teeth to fight. But it is the rabbit’s remarkable birthing capacity that keeps it inhabiting almost every continent of the world.
… The great mother goddess in her maternal aspect is sometimes depicted with giant rabbits standing beside her, emblems of fertility and rebirth, later interwoven even into Christian mysteries as the Easter Bunny with his basket of brightly colored, magical eggs.
Rat/Mouse: … Rats and mice are hard to pin down. Elusive by nature, surreptitious, they appear and disappear like diminutive magicians. Living in tandem with human beings, they are always coming from behind. They shadow us wherever we go, perpetual stowaways on our voyage through history and our passages to brave new worlds. They slip through the cracks of our physical and psychic terrain, privy to our closeted and cupboarded secrets. Like time, anger and guilt they gnaw incessantly. They personify the labyrinthine restlessness beneath the surface of things.
… Vilified as vermin, feared as vectors of disease and death, despised as voracious plunderers of our amber waves of grain, mice and rats mostly exist at the margins. … And yet, … watching through the window of a passing bus the unmistakable silhouette foraging single-mindedly in the snowy darkness, you have to admire their tenacity, their eerie ability to beat the odds.
… The most prolific of any mammal, they persist, by sheer numbers, against the onslaught of their raptorial, mammalian and reptilian predators and the relentless persecutions of humankind. Curious, sociable, agile; endowed with an excellent sense of smell, fine-tuned hearing and taste buds as sensitive as ours, mice and rats are portrayed in folklore and popular culture as heroes, helpers and even five-star restaurant chefs.
Bat: … “Hand-winged” (Chiroptera), their thin, spidery fingers are elongated to support the rubbery membrane and living tissue that cloak these flesh-and-blood gargoyles. Bats have a clawed, opposable “thumb” and possess brain pathways consistent with those of primates, but have retained the body of a rodent.
… Alchemy sometimes depicted the mercurial spirit of the unconscious with bat wings. It is a way of conveying not only psyche’s darkness, mystery and ambivalence, but also its provision and unforeseen agency, the way it can lead consciousness into spheres requiring a different kind of orientation and in which can be found the fructifying unconventionality of nature.
Previous symbols are here.
-Julie
