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part of the plot of a myth that it was originally an incarnation of the god or that since Athena is
clad in a goatskin and a goat is sacrificed to her once a year that she was once a sacred goat.
Lastly, while many of the gods dealt with in this study do have quite ancient roots, the
blending of animal and human form in the iconography of a god does not always indicate early
imagery or cult practice. For example, gods such as Aesculapius and Charu do not become
prominent in Italy until the Classical and Hellenistic periods, which can hardly be considered
“primitive.” Aesculapius’ entry into Rome is recorded by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, and in
this text, the god journeys to Rome in the form of a sacred snake who chooses the location of his
shrine on the Tiber Island. In the case of Charu, he, like the other Etruscan “death-demons,”
does not appear until Etruscan culture experiences a depression in the Classical Period, and
snake imagery is a key part of his iconography. 75 The use of animals and the blending of human
and animal bodies to express the nature of the divinity remained a popular and poignant form of
artistic expression for some time.
As mentioned earlier, one approach to the study of myth which is useful for examining
therianthropic deities is that proposed by Jung. The “collective unconscious” and the use of
archetypes has been applied to bull deities by M. Rice in his text, The Power of the Bull. 76 Rice
claims that
The tendency to represent gods in animal form… is common to all mankind, at all
periods of human history. It offers, in itself, most convincing proof of the
accuracy of the vision of the collective unconscious, the inheritance of all men
and of the archetypes which well up out of the unconscious and the common
neuro-physiological and neuro-psychological mechanisms of which they are a
part. 77
I agree with Rice that the use of animals to symbolize the divine is common to many cultures,
but I do not think that we need fully accept Jung’s biodeterministic propositions. Man’s basic
curiosity, facility of observation, and need to find meaning are reasons enough for the creation of
these gods. Because animals appear to demonstrate various traits that man finds admirable or
reprehensible, he is going to see in an animal a representation of himself or a god. Man’s
closeness to animals in antiquity was greater than ours is now, and thus animals offered a
75 Hostetler (2003) makes much of this in her thesis.
76 Whether or not one agrees with his Jungian approach, Rice does compile a great deal of information concerning
bull worship. Rice (1998, 8) also claims to discuss bull cults which span from “south-Western Europe to the borders
of India” but his work falls short of dealing with Italy.
77 Rice 1998, 10.
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