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, the Deity disowns me.
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her everhungry mouths all
Bolted against me.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“The appearances of goodness and merit often meet with a greater reward from the world than goodness and merit themselves.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?”
—Jessamyn West (1907–1984)
“Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. 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)