Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

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The Fat Lady and the Animal Man

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Some 30,000 years ago, they first appear: the Fat Lady and the Animal Man.

For 20,000 years after that, the ancestors kept making Fat Ladies and Animal Men.

We find their likenesses across Eurasia, literally from Spain to Siberia.

We don't know who they were or what they meant to the people that made them. Across such vast distances and time-spans, it's likely that they meant many things to many different people.

What's maybe most amazing is that, across those vast distances and time-spans, they're still recognizably themselves.

Some decades ago it became intellectually fashionable to deny that the Fat Lady and the Animal Man were gods. In the case of the Animal Man, the word shamanism got bandied about a lot: an explanation that explains very little, really.

Still, one thing that we know about human beings is that we're mythological animals. We tell stories, and our stories have characters. When the Man with Horns turns up in cave after painted cave, or naked Ladies with similar proportions are found across two continents, it seems gratuitous to claim that they lack mythological significance.

After the Stone Age, when we stopped our hunting-gathering and became agriculturalists and pastoralists instead, we kept on making them, Fat Ladies and Animal Men.

10,000 years later, some of us still do.

We'll never know what the Fat Lady and the Animal Man meant to the ancestors.

But we know what they mean to us now.

 

Above: The Lady of Willendorf

ca. 28,000-25,000 BCE

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

Comments

  • Tasha Halpert
    Tasha Halpert Saturday, 16 September 2017

    Nicely said.Cheers, Tasha

  • Andrew
    Andrew Tuesday, 19 September 2017

    "Some decades ago it became intellectually fashionable to deny that the Fat Lady and the Animal Man were gods."

    Do we have any proof they were gods? Many cultures didn't have a concept of gods until agriculture arrived.

    "After the Stone Age, when we stopped our hunting-gathering and became agriculturalists and pastoralists instead"

    Actually we started farming during the stone age.

    "In the case of the Animal Man, the word shamanism got bandied about a lot: an explanation that explains very little, really."

    Well that depends on how one looks at it; if it depicts a Shaman then it can be showing him (or in some cultures her) as a shape-shifter, or trickster (being seen as two things at once), or taking on the aspect of a prey animal in order to find them for the tribe.

  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch Wednesday, 20 September 2017

    Thanks for the close reading and the corrections, Andrew. The development of agriculture is, of course, exactly what distinguishes New Stone Age from Middle. On the off chance that anyone thought that I know what I'm talking about, be warned.

    Re. gods: Well, we don't know for sure that anyone anywhere worshiped gods per se before writing, although it doesn't seem unlikely. It seems probably that some peoples did, and some didn't, depending on how one defines "gods." We'll just never know.

    I don't find "shamanism" a useful concept for the most part because the historical shamanisms of different cultures differ so much from one another. "Shamanism" is no one thing. So that's something else that we'll never know. Sigh.

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