Animal Soul

There are many serious attempts to restore our connection to the divinity of animals or more broadly the sacredness of nature, emerging from within the ecological or environmental movements, by appeal to the psychology of C. G. Jung and his notion of the archetypes. Since we no longer experience the divinity of animals or nature outwardly, Jung “discovered” that we can find our way to that experience inwardly or through the unconscious where dream animals may “speak” to us, guide or terrify us as they once did outwardly. We may even have an archetypal experience of the animal “within”. This is felt by some theorists to be the way to a restoration of what seems to be an outwardly irrevocable loss. The argument is that if we can recover that connection inwardly through numinous experiences then we will be opened up to the sacred dimension of nature and animals outwardly once more. In this way we can, the argument goes, somehow restore a balance to our dealings with nature, and oppose or counter the seemingly unstoppable rape of nature taking place today.… The effort of re-awakening our connection to the sacredness of animals and nature by persuading us through arguments based on the discovery of, for example, numinous animal images “in” the unconscious are doomed from the start. Our ancestors (probably as far back as the hunter-gather times) had no need for such persuasion. That nature was an expression of divinity was self-evident. Nature spoke to human beings, initiated them through her Master animals, and gave freely of her wisdom so that human beings could align themselves with life, even to the point of going to their own death with dignity. The fact that a case has to be argued for the sacred nature of animals is an affirmation that we have irrevocably lost what our ancestors took for granted. We have no chance of any such immediate experience of nature. Our relationship to the world today is a highly reflected one.… The 20th century came to understand that we are inextricably enclosed in language and our experience of the world cannot be separated from our interpretations. This is a highly reflected state of being. To put it another way, the soul once reflected its realities in the natural things, and presented itself to human beings in an immediate sense. Nature and animal divinity was self-presentational, innocent, taken as “just so”. Today the soul, now withdrawn from the natural things as medium for its self-expression, has transformed and is reflecting itself in the syntax of our language and we modern people can only discern soul processes in and through language.… No longer “invested” in substance or content the soul today is exploring its own mediality.… Our human mode of existence is correspondingly so abstract, so far removed from animals and our own animal nature that even the possibility of reconnecting in actual experience to them seems remote. Under these modern circumstances of existence, how can we even begin to think the “animal” soul as a possibility?