Animal Ancestors

Kinship with the wild

Most shapeshifter stories are about a single life: a man who becomes a wolf, a seal who becomes a wife. The stories on this page tell instead how a whole people, clan or royal house began, with an animal at the root of the family tree.

They come in two kinds, and it helps to keep them apart. In the first, an animal is truly an ancestor, and a people descends from it. In the second, an animal fosters, guides or rescues the founder without being of his blood. Both kinds honor the animal. Only the first makes it kin. The overview of shapeshifter mythology counts the animal ancestor among the motifs found almost everywhere.

The she-wolf of the Turks

Chinese histories compiled in the seventh century record the origin legend of the Ashina, the ruling clan of the early Turkic empire. Their people, the story goes, were destroyed by enemies, and only a boy of about ten was left alive. The soldiers maimed him and left him in a marsh. A she-wolf found him and fed him with meat, and when he was grown she became his mate. When enemies came again, the wolf fled to a mountain cave with a hidden valley of good grass beyond it, and there she bore ten sons. One of them was named Ashina, and his line became the rulers of the Turks, who set a golden wolf's head on their standards.

Another legend from the same northern world tells of a steppe ruler who placed his two beautiful daughters on a high tower in an empty land, saying they were meant for heaven. In time an old wolf came and howled beneath the tower day and night. The younger daughter decided that heaven had sent him, went down, and became his wife. Her descendants, the chroniclers wrote, sang in long drawn-out voices like the howling of wolves.

The wolf still holds a place of honor in the stories of many Turkic-speaking peoples, and a gray wolf is often pictured leading them out of danger. In modern retellings the ancestress is sometimes given the name Asena.

The gray wolf and the fallow doe

The Mongol royal chronicle known as the Secret History, written down in the thirteenth century, opens with a pair of animals: a gray wolf, born with his destiny ordained by Heaven, and his wife, a fallow doe. Together they crossed a great water and settled at the source of the Onan River beneath a holy mountain, and there their son was born. From him the chronicle counts the generations down to Chinggis Khan.

Whether the teller meant two animals, or two people who bore animal names, has long been argued, and the chronicle does not explain. Either way the pair is a telling one: the hunter and the hunted, joined at the beginning of things. The same chronicle says that a later ancestress, a widow, conceived three more sons by a radiant being who came to her by night through the smoke hole of the tent and left on the beams of the sun or moon like a yellow dog.

The wolf who nursed the twins

The most famous wolf in European legend is not, strictly, an ancestor. In the Roman story the twins Romulus and Remus, sons of a royal priestess and the god of war, are left beside the Tiber to die. A she-wolf comes down to drink, hears them crying, and gives them her milk in a cave below the Palatine Hill, while a woodpecker, which like the wolf was sacred to the war god, brings them food. A shepherd finds and raises them, and Romulus goes on to found Rome.

The wolf fostered the founders. She did not give birth to them, and the Romans never claimed descent from her: through the twins they traced their line to the war god, and through older legend to the goddess of love. Even in antiquity some writers offered a plainer origin for the tale, noting that "wolf" was also Roman slang for a prostitute, and that the shepherd's wife might be meant. The famous bronze she-wolf of Rome has twins beneath her, but they were added in the Renaissance.

The tale has a cousin far to the east. Chinese historians recorded that the infant prince of the Wusun, a steppe people, was abandoned after his father was killed, and that a she-wolf suckled him while a bird brought him meat.

Bears and swans

The bear, so often called grandfather in the north, has a page of its own. The bear and the berserker tells of the Korean bear who became a woman by patience and bore the founder of the first kingdom. Europe has bear pedigrees too. A Danish chronicler writing around the year 1200 recorded the tale that the royal house of his day descended from a young woman carried off by a bear. In Greece the people of Arcadia traced their name to Arcas, son of a nymph who became a bear.

Swans are ancestors in the lands around Lake Baikal in Siberia. The Buryat tell of a hunter named Khoridoi who saw swans alight on a lake and become young women, and who hid the feathered robe of one of them, as in the swan maiden tales of Europe. She stayed and bore him eleven sons, whose descendants are the eleven clans of the Khori Buryat. Long afterward she asked to try on her old robe, and rose out through the smoke hole of the tent. In some tellings her husband caught at her feet with hands black from the hearth, which is why swans have black feet. Swans are honored in the region still.

Panhu, the dog ancestor

A Chinese history compiled in the fifth century records a legend of the peoples of the southern mountains. An emperor of high antiquity, troubled by an enemy general, promised his daughter in marriage to whoever brought him the general's head. The one who brought it was the emperor's own dog, Panhu (also written P'an Hu), whose coat was of five colors. The emperor hesitated, but his daughter said that a ruler's word must be kept. Panhu carried her away to a stone cave in the southern mountains, and their six sons and six daughters became the ancestors of the mountain peoples.

Imperial historians told this story of their southern neighbors with some condescension. The descendants tell it with honor. Among the Yao and She peoples of southern China, Panhu, often as King Pan, is remembered as the founding ancestor in songs, painted scrolls and festivals, and the princess who insisted that a promise be kept is part of the pride of the story.

Deer, birds and others

Medieval Hungarian chronicles tell of two brothers, Hunor and Magor, who followed a wondrous stag deep into the marshes until it vanished, and there found wives and founded the Huns and the Magyars. The stag is a guide here, not a parent. The same chronicles say that the ancestress of the first Hungarian royal house dreamed that a great bird of prey, the turul, came upon her, a sign that kings would be born of her. Among the Kyrgyz, a tribe whose name means deer honors a Horned Mother Deer who, in their legend, saved and raised the last two children of a ruined people.

Tibetan tradition holds that the Tibetan people descend from a monkey, a disciple and in some accounts an emanation of the bodhisattva of compassion, and a rock-dwelling ogress of the mountains. It is a sacred story, told with deep respect. In a Greek myth told by Ovid, a king whose island had been emptied by plague prayed beneath an oak full of ants, and woke to find the ants become men, the Myrmidons, named from the Greek word for ant.

Serpent and dragon ancestors, from noble houses of France to royal lines of Southeast Asia, are gathered on the page of serpent brides and dragon kings.

What ancestry stories do

Stories of animal descent do work for the people who tell them.

• They give a ruling house its right. A clan born of a wolf sent by heaven is set apart from ordinary families, and the claim was made openly on banners and in chronicles.
• They explain a name. Many began as an answer to a question: why are we called this?
• They bind a people to an animal. If the swan is your grandmother, you do not shoot swans.
• They bind a people to a place. The cave, the lake and the source of the river become the home the story proves.
• They keep a people's dignity. Where outsiders sneered at a dog ancestor, the descendants kept his story with pride.

These legends are not the same thing as personal identity. A story of descent belongs to a whole people and says who "we" are. It does not say that any one person is a wolf or a swan inside. People in the modern therian communities who identify as animals are describing something else, and the library keeps the shelves apart, as the essay Folklore Is Not Identity explains. Still, the old stories share one thought with them that is worth noticing: that the line between human and animal was never as wide as it looks.