This is more a curiosity than anything else but it'd seem a fox was a pet some 16,000 years ago in Jordan, being buried with its human symbiont.
Full story at Past Horizons (originally from AiE).
January 29, 2011
2 comments:
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Foxes had religious significance as the Mesopotamian polytheistic religion, in Greek fables, and figured in lore as far back as anyone can discern in every indigenous culture from Finland to Japan (with the coyote having parallel significance in the New World), so it would have been quite a coup for a priet or shaman to have a semi-tame fox.
ReplyDeleteLots of the Japanese mythology of foxes forming bonds with humans involve injured foxes that are nursed back to health by a human. Perhaps this was something like that.
Sounds plausible. I only knew the fox had mythology among Sahel peoples but nice to known. However, explaining this that way is like explaining dogs on wolf mythology: it lacks something - after all mythology is just talk about real life in a poetic way.
ReplyDeleteSo I could equally say that all those myths only talk about real people befriending animals... in a poetic way. It's what you consider primary: the heart or the tongue (to borrow a metaphor from ancient Egyptian mythology).
All Yavihstic, and maybe also Hinduism-derived, religions emphasize the word but I'd say that what really matters is the heartbeat. Words are just stories, songs... about the heartbeat, along the heartbeat and because of the heartbeat.