Depth symbols do not develop overnight but over generations. And they may be lost, corrupted or eclipsed. If so, should we recover and renew them? Yes, because in an age of utility and efficiency–“news we can use,”– we may lose track of deeper, richer, soul-nourishing language. American poet William Carlos Williams wrote that “It is difficult to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day from lack of what is found there.” 

How can we recover symbols? We can begin by remembering our cultural heritage and recapturing stories and legacies lost to our conscious minds. They linger in our souls. No one wants to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages, but revisiting the past can give us a glimpse of some valuables we lost along our way.

In the thirteenth century, Christianity and European culture formed a synthesis. Sacred and profane intermingled, for better and worse. Symbols expanded. In European art, paintings of the life of Christ and Mary are full of symbols that people shared and understood. Later, in the secular art of the Unicorn Tapestries, woven around 1500, dozens of plants and animals appear as symbols for virtues and vices, with the unicorn a symbol for Christ.

As far back as the fourth or even the second century, a collection of animal legends called the Physiologus became popular and captured the imagination of later generations. The Middle Ages compiled animal legends that told more about Christ than about the animals themselves. In that spirit, let’s look at some symbols of Christ that may help your prayer, or at least lure you into the leisurely realm of youthful imagination.

The childlike enter the Kingdom, and children live in the world of symbol. “We are coming today to understand something of which the nineteenth century could have had no idea: that symbol, myth, image belong to the very substance of the psychic life; that you can camouflage them, mutilate or degrade them, but never extirpate them,” according to historian of religions Mircea Eliade.

Symbolic thinking “is consubstantial with the human being, preceding language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality—the deepest aspects—which defy all other modes of knowledge.” The atrocities of our age may be “due in great part to a growing sterilization of the imagination.” Or maybe our imaginations are not so much sterilized as “downsized” to include only militaristic myths of demonization and materialist myths of ever-more wealth and consumption. Rich symbols or even simplistic allegories can be a respite, a taste of wonder in such a shrunken milieu.

They show up in surprising places even today, for example, in the Harry Potter stories. Young wizards in need of protection learn to conjure the Patronus charm. This skill involves remembering the happiest moment in one’s life in the face of grave danger. With the aid of the wizard’s wand, a Patronus appears, a luminous animal-figure with the power to drive away dark forces with the power of joy.

These thoughts so far make up an egghead introduction to a queer and quaint list of saintly beasts. Just keep this in mind: in their caves some thirty thousand years ago, our ancestors drew and painted splendid animal images, as you can see in the extraordinary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Our progenitors seem to have revered the creatures who fed, clothed, sheltered them, and provided them with materials for tools and weapons. We owe them our lives.

Dogs teach us to be faithful. They may have been domesticated fifty thousand years ago! We were a great team: human eyes and wit united to canine nose and speed. According to the twelfth-century Cambridge Bestiary,

… none is more sagacious than the Dog, for he has more perception than other animals and he alone recognizes his own name. He esteems his Master highly… the house-dogs look after the palisade of their masters, lest it should be robbed in the night by thieves, and these will stand up for their owners to the death.

Homer’s Odyssey includes a touching dog story. After twenty years away from home, Odysseus returns, incognito, to drive out his wife’s suitors. Disguised as a beggar, he approaches his beloved dwelling and speaks with his companion.

A dog lying near lifted his head and ears. Argos it was, the dog of hardy Odysseus, whom long ago he reared but never used. Before the dog was grown, Odysseus went to sacred Ilios…. Now Argos lay neglected, his master gone away, upon the pile of dung which had been dropped before the door by mules and oxen, and which lay there in a heap for slaves to carry off and dung the broad lands of Odysseus. Here lay the dog, this Argos, full of fleas. Yet even now, seeing Odysseus near, he wagged his tail and dropped both ears, but toward his master he had not strength to move. Odysseus turned aside and wiped away a tear.

For safety’s sake, Odysseus had to maintain his role as a stranger and could not acknowledge the dog. “He entered the stately house and went straight down the hall among the lordly suitors. But upon Argos fell the doom of darksome death when he beheld Odysseus, twenty years away.”

We don’t always have to look to Homer or the Middle Ages for animal allegories. In The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker, we meet another model of fidelity: the swan. A young American cowboy travels across Siberia with a herd of cattle, some compatriot cowboys, and a troop of Cossacks. Rostov, the Cossack leader, is far more sophisticated than the Americans. The boy, Levi, rides alongside Rostov one day and spots two beautiful swans high overhead “crossing gracefully under the lowering sun.” Rostov takes time to describe to Levi the swans’ attributes.

They choose a mate when they’re very young. And they stay together for all the rest of their lives…. When I first came out east to Siberia, I was just a youngster, about your age. That’s when I saw my first pair of them…. We’d been out hunting, and we’d made camp near the end of the day, when two swans flew overhead. The other men were also new to the country, and one of them grabbed his gun and shot the female of the swans. It fell almost at our feet, dead…. All that night the male swan flew overhead, circling the camp in the dark, never landing anywhere to rest, and crying pitifully in its low, keening way for some answer from its mate. I’ve never heard cries more pleading, more terribly sad…. The next morning, it continued to circle high over us, still in its own soft, searching way, making those tragic, weeping sounds…. Then at noon, with the sun nearly directly above us, the swan finally lost all hope. It flew up and up, as high and as far as its weakened wings would take it into the sky. And then that great bird simply folded its wings and plummeted down like a stone to smash itself to death on the earth far below…. It had done the one thing it possibly could do to rejoin its mate.

The pelican is a symbol of self-sacrifice or sorrowful witness.

Christian churches sometimes include paintings or mosaics depicting a pelican piercing its breast in order to feed its blood to its hungry nestlings. Medieval bestiaries described the pelican as an Egyptian bird whose offspring lash out at their parents. Like fairy tales, some of these legends were not cute. They included harrowing violence and convey theological attitudes many no longer accept. In the pelican tale, the adults end up killing the ungrateful and gluttonous chicks as punishment. But after three days, they take pity, spill their own blood into the chicks’ beaks, and the chicks rise from death. We may reject the wrath-and-punishment theme, but the image of a parent giving life-blood to nourish offspring still speaks to me, as does the Eucharist, in which Christ’s body and blood nourishes, heals, and transforms us.

In Revelation 13:11, the author describes a beast which “had two horns like a lamb.” Maybe the writer is thinking of wild sheep rather than domestic. So the resurrected Lamb becomes the Ram, leader of the herd. As a ram vanquishes wolves, Christ battles with Death and is victorious. The ram, the animal Abraham found in a thorny bush and sacrificed in place of his son Isaac, represents Christ crowned with thorns and rescuing us. I imagine a bighorn ram when I read, “Next in my vision I saw Mount Zion and standing on it a Ram” (Rev. 14:1) and “Alleluia! The reign of the Lord our God Almighty has begun; let us be glad and rejoice and give praise to God, because this is the time for the marriage of the Ram.” (Rev. 19:7)

The stag can be a symbol both for Christ and for his followers, who pray, “like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God.” A collection of medieval writings on the lives of the saints recounts the conversion and life of St. Eustace, who encounters Christ in a stag. Before his conversion, Eustace was “master of the chivalry of Trajan, the emperor.” He was a good man but was not Christian. While hunting one day, he spied the most beautiful stag in a herd of deer. The stag darted into dense forest and Eustace pursued alone.

The stag climbed onto a high rock and Eustace considered how he might get a good shot. As he studied the stag, Eustace “saw between his horns the form of the holy cross shining more clear than the sun.” Jesus spoke to Eustace through the stag’s mouth: “Wherefore followest me hither?… I am Jesu Christ, whom thou honourest ignorantly… and therefore I come hither so that by this hart that thou huntest I may hunt thee.”

The legend of eighth-century Belgian St. Hubert tells a similar conversion tale. After his wife’s death, Hubert spent all his time hunting until one Good Friday, he encountered a stag:

Hubert sallied forth to the chase. As he was pursuing a magnificent stag or hart, the animal turned and, as the pious legend narrates, he was astounded at perceiving a crucifix standing between its antlers, while he heard a voice saying: “Hubert, unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into hell.”

Like Eustace, Hubert indeed became a Christian and went on to become a bishop. He is the patron saint of hunters, and you can find an image of Hubert’s cross on the label of Jagermeister, an herb-infused liqueur marketed as an ideal drink for hunters coming in from the cold!

In The Spiritual Canticle, St. John of the Cross says it is “characteristic of the stag to climb to high places and when wounded to race in search of refreshment and cool waters. If he hears the cry of his mate and senses that she is wounded, he immediately runs to her to comfort and coddle her.” 

In an interview introducing Archbishop Anthony Bloom’s classic Beginning to Pray, Bloom says, “to meet God is to enter into the ‘cave of a tiger’—it is not a pussy cat you meet—it is a tiger. The [divine] realm…is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it.

Awe of the Adonai of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus is the beginning of wisdom. The Spirit is love, but this love can feel feral because it harrows the ego. In T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion, an old man expresses the “thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.” The poem is full of images of decay, apathy, and the vanity of life. But twice the poem gives us sparks of light and life:

The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger…
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Christ consumes us with love and transforms us into himself. What mystery can compare with this? The Creator approaches as both lamb and tiger, and we stand in awe:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? …
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

—William Blake

If you enjoy reflecting on animal images for the Divine, visit my “Animal Oh Antiphons” that you can reflect on in preparation for Christmas .