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)
“Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph.... “Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?””
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
“A few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession; a religious church would not complain.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“OUR Latin books in motly row,
Invite us to our task—
Gay Horace, stately Cicero:
Yet there’s one verb, when once we know,
No higher skill we ask:
This ranks all other lore above—
We’ve learned “’Amare’ means ‘to love’!””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)