Aesthetic Animals

Abstract

Our attitudes towards animals may be traced to biblical imperatives, and the Hebraic creation myths – ‘myths’, in the plural, because two separate creation stories open Genesis: the ‘seven day’ and ‘garden of Eden’ myths. While they were written at different times, they are crudely juxtaposed in the text, as we know it. The seven-day creation story that opens the Old Testament is actually the later myth, dating from the 4th century BC, where the Eden myth was written between 930 and 721 BC (Fokkelman, 1987). These stories offer two different versions of human–animal relations. The later, seven-day creation story puts the human ‘in command’ of all other creatures, as crown of creation (reiterated in Psalms 8:4–8): ‘God said, Let us make man . . . let us put him in command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on the earth. . . . Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and make it yours; take command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and all the living things that move on the earth’ (Genesis 1).KeywordsAnimal LifeAnimal PresenceBiological AnimalCreation MythIndirect RealismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.