Animal-Headed Gods and the Oldest Images

Two useful words

Writers on ancient art use therianthrope for any figure that combines human and animal features, and theriocephaly, animal-headedness, for the particular case of an animal's head on a human body. This is the scholarly sense of the word therianthrope, and it is a good deal older than its use as a name for people who identify as animals.

The Ice Age figures

About forty thousand years ago, in a cave in what is now southern Germany, someone took a mammoth's tusk and carved from it a standing figure a little over thirty centimeters tall. It has a human body, upright and alert, and the head of a cave lion. It took, by modern estimate, several hundred hours of skilled work, at a time when life was hard and every hour counted. It is among the very oldest sculptures known, and it shows a being that its maker can never have seen.

The painted caves of France and Spain hold others. In one, a figure with a bird's head lies before a wounded bison. In another, high on the wall of a small inner chamber reached by a long crawl, is a figure known as the Sorcerer: upright, with a stag's antlers, round staring eyes, a long beard, paws for hands, and a horse's tail. It is known best from a drawing made by an early investigator, and how much of it is truly on the rock has been argued over.

Nobody knows what these images meant. They have been read as gods, as masters of the animals, as mythic ancestors, and as shamans dressed for a rite or caught in the midst of a spirit journey. Any of these may be right. What can be said is that the idea of a being between human and animal is as old as art.

A caution. It is tempting to call these figures the first therians. The library does not. We cannot ask their makers what they felt, and to claim them for a modern identity would be to put words in mouths that have been silent for four hundred centuries.

The gods of the Nile

Ancient Egypt made the animal-headed figure into a complete and subtle language. The jackal-headed guardian of the dead, the falcon-headed lord of the sky and of kingship, the ibis-headed scribe of the gods, the lioness who sends plague and heals it, the gentle cat goddess, the crocodile of the river, the ram-headed potter who shapes each child on his wheel: these are among the most recognisable images in all of human art.

The Egyptians did not suppose that their gods walked about looking like this. The same deity could be shown as an animal, as a human, or as a blend, according to what was being said. The animal head was a kind of writing. It named a quality of the god that the animal displayed: the falcon's height and sight, the jackal's familiarity with the desert's edge where the dead were buried. The great sphinx reverses the formula and sets a king's head on a lion's body.

Other lands, other blends

• Mesopotamia set winged bulls with human heads at its palace gates, and carved wise spirits with the heads of eagles, or cloaked in the skin of a fish.
• Greece had the bull-headed prisoner of the labyrinth, the goat-legged god of the wild places, the horse-bodied centaurs and the snub-nosed satyrs.
• India honors the elephant-headed remover of obstacles, the mighty and devoted monkey god, the eagle who carries the preserver of the world, and that same preserver's descent as a man-lion who appears at twilight, on a threshold, to defeat a tyrant who could be killed neither by man nor beast, by day nor night, indoors nor out.
• China pictured its first ancestors, a brother and sister, as human above and serpents below, their tails entwined.
• Mesoamerica revered a feathered serpent, joining the bird of the sky to the snake of the earth.

Gods who change

Beside the gods of fixed mixed form are those who pass from shape to shape as they please.

The Greek king of the gods courts as a bull, a swan and an eagle. The old man of the sea, who knows all things, will answer a question only if he is seized and held while he becomes a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a boar, running water and a tall tree, until, exhausted, he returns to himself and speaks. An enchantress on a lonely island turns sailors into swine, though they keep their human minds.

In the north, the trickster among the gods becomes a mare, a salmon, a fly and a falcon as his schemes require. In Welsh legend a boy who tastes three drops from a cauldron of wisdom flees its keeper as a hare, a fish, a bird and a grain of wheat, while she pursues as a hound, an otter, a hawk and a hen. In Ireland a battle goddess appears as a crow on the shoulder of the dying, and an ancient survivor tells a saint how he has lived through all the ages of the island as a stag, a boar, an eagle and a salmon.

What it suggests

To give a god an animal's head is to say that the sacred is not only human. It has sharper sight than ours, greater strength, other knowledge. Many ancient peoples seem to have looked at animals and seen not lesser creatures but other nations, each with its own share of what is holy. The gods who change shape say something further: that what is most real is not tied to any single form.

Both thoughts are a long way from the frightened tale of the wolf at the door, and they belong to the same great conversation. The overview gathers the threads.