Deity Appearances To Animals in Religious Lore
Human religious lore includes ancient literary recordings of deities appearing to animals, usually with the animals able to relate the experience to humans using human speech:
- In numerous creation stories, a deity or deities speak with many kinds of animals, often prior to the formation of dry land on earth.
- In the Hindu Ramayana, the monkey leader Hanuman is informed by deities, and usually consciously addressed by them.
- In Chinese mythology, the Monkey King speaks with bodhisattvas, buddhas, and a host of heavenly characters.
Read more about this topic: Theophany
Famous quotes containing the words deity, appearances, animals, religious and/or lore:
“Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What we must look for here is, 1st, religious and moral principles; 2ndly, gentlemanly conduct; 3rdly, intellectual ability.”
—Thomas Arnold (1795–1842)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)