Why Animals Have Always Been How Humans Explain the Unexplainable 🦋

Before we had language sophisticated enough to describe what we were trying to understand, we had animals.

The oldest cave paintings are not landscapes. They are not abstract marks or attempts at self-portraiture. They are animals. Horses, bison, aurochs, bears, drawn in firelight by people who had no writing, no philosophy as we recognise it, no organised religion. But they had this: an understanding that certain creatures carried something worth marking down. Something worth pressing a hand against stone for.

We do not know exactly what they meant by it. The honest answer is that we cannot know. But the consistency is striking. Across cultures that never met, across thousands of years, across every continent where humans settled, the same pattern recurs. The animal is not just an animal. It is also a teacher. A carrier of something. A way of pointing at a truth that plain language cannot quite reach.

The Egyptians gave their gods animal heads because they understood that each creature embodied a quality in its purest form. Anubis was not a man who happened to have a jackal’s head. The jackal’s qualities, the ability to navigate between the living world and what lies beyond it, were so complete and specific in that animal that the animal became the symbol. They worked backwards from nature to meaning.

Indigenous traditions across North America, Australia, Africa and South America arrived at similar frameworks through entirely different routes. The bear carries courage and introspection. The eagle carries perspective and clarity. The snake carries transformation because it sheds its skin and lives. The rabbit carries the threshold between seen and unseen because it disappears into the earth and returns. These correspondences are not arbitrary. They emerge from close, sustained observation of how each creature actually moves through the world.

This is what interests me most. The symbolism was not invented and then projected onto the animal. It was observed first. The snake genuinely sheds its skin. The hummingbird genuinely cannot stay still. The koi genuinely swims upstream. The orb weaver genuinely builds an invisible architecture that only becomes visible at certain angles, in certain light. The meaning grew from the fact.

At some point in the development of modern Western thought, this way of reading the world got classified as superstition. As pre-scientific. As the kind of thing we grew out of. And yet it never entirely went away, because the underlying impulse is not primitive. It is pattern recognition. It is the mind doing what it has always done, which is find in the observable world a language for the things that resist direct description.

What does it mean to keep starting again? The snake knows. What does it mean to build something beautiful and then let it go? The spider knows. What does it mean to carry the memory of everything and still keep moving forward? The elephant knows.

I did not choose these animals because I wanted to make pretty paintings of wildlife. I chose them because each one carries a specific kind of intelligence that I wanted to think about carefully. The painting is the thinking. The animal is the teacher.

Every tradition that has ever paid close attention to the natural world has found the same thing: the creatures that cross our paths are not neutral. They are showing us something, if we are paying attention.

We have always known this. We just keep forgetting, and then remembering again.

Bring Animal Spirit Guides into Your Home.