D. CATHERINE | 2018
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“On every line of research we discover that the representation of nature was pre-anthropomorphic at first, as we see on going back far enough, and on every line of descent the zoomorphic passes ultimately into the human representation … Primitive men were all too abjectly helpless in [the] presence of these [nature] powers to think of them or to conceive them in their own similitude … Also they themselves were too little the cause of anything by the work of their own hands to enter into the sphere of causation mentally. They could only apprehend the nature-forces by their effects, and try to represent these by means of other powers that were present in nature, but which were also necessarily superior to the human and were not the human faculties indefinitely magnified.” (Gerald Massey)
In human perception as well as in astro-mythology, darkness and light are primordial. The earliest mythical representations of these two elements were zoomorphic; for example: the snake of darkness and the bird/cat of light, or the night jackal and the day hawk, or the wolf of darkness and the raven of light, etc. Alternatively we might find these two elements combined in e.g. the black-and-white ostrich or sacred ibis, or more symbolically in e.g. the double-headed bird (i.e. this symbol possibly originated in the alternating display of darkness and light perceived in the skies above; later adopted in the solar mythos to represent the setting western sun and the eastern rising sun—compare the Ancient Egyptian Hor-akheti as “Horus of the Horizons”). Read more
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