The Lord Of Animals

excerpted from the post at Europa Soberana and originally translated into English by Kolarov.

“Instincts are a better protection than all the wisdom in the world”

– C G Jung

The outstanding Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung believed that animals and ancestral forces – gods, heroes, myths – lived inside man as archetypes and manifested themselves in genetically inherited patterns of “automatic” instinctive behavior (therefore dissociated from the rational mind). He also thought that the denied, repressed or simply unrecognized instincts could come to dominate a man or even kill him, and that to avoid that it was necessary to find a way to integrate the animal part into human life, since the “dark side” had extremely twisted ways to take revenge if it was ignored. And so it is that man has a series of triggers related especially to violence and sex, and therefore, if he moved away from the world of animals and locked himself in four walls away from Nature, he would pay dearly, since negative instincts would continue to manifest themselves, but in increasingly aberrant, sinister and unnatural ways. It was necessary, then, to maintain a collective archetype that referred to a “lord of animals”, a man fully in touch with what is natural and, therefore, integrated into the upward current and eternal order.

Well, one of these animal archetypes, and the oldest and most recurrent, is the archetype of the male divinity of the Great Father or eternal hunter, the inevitable counterpart of the Mother Goddess. This is a god with horns (in this case, usually deer horns, but also ram, goat or bull), which for many millennia was the “patron” of our hunter ancestors. In an era (Paleolithic) in which hunting was done with bow and arrow or throwing a spear, being able to shoot down a creature so elusive and sensitive to movement as the deer, must have been proof enough that the hunter had great abilities and that therefore, he was a “lord of animals” and was directly in touch with the right order and with Nature – both the one that surrounded him and his own inner nature. It is precisely in the Paleolithic that we find the first representation of the figure of the horned divinity, in a cavern associated with the Magdalenian culture and therefore the Cro-Magnon man.

Far from the negative connotations they acquired later, in Antiquity the horns were a symbol of wisdom and “connection with the sky”, that is, with the spirit world, due to its archetypal form of branches, lightning rods or cup ready to gather celestial forces. They were also signs of virility and fertility, since in the horns of the deer there are a series of androgenic receptors that are activated by the action of testosterone during puberty, and that make the antlers grow to a size according to the hormonal levels: large, long, twisted horns indicate higher levels of testosterone. For this reason it is not surprising that in traditional China, the most coveted aphrodisiac to increase male libido was manufactured precisely based on adolescent stag horn, since it was the product where the highest amount of testosterone was concentrated. It is not coincidence, either, that in English, the word horny (derived from horn), designates in informal language a state of sexual stimulation characterized by the alteration of the hormonal environment. In addition, and as it had happened with the tusks of the mammoth, the horns of the deer were a colorful trophy (much more than the claws of a bear, the fangs of a sabretooth or similar) and full of symbolism of power. This whole series of signals places the deer as a powerful androgenic sign – that is, opposed to the estrogenic.

The Man rune is a symbol of the summit, of the crown of the tree, the branches and the horns of the horned god, that is, of what constitutes a connection with the celestial world. As its name suggests, it is the rune of masculinity, and the counterpart of the rune Yr – an inverted Man rune symbolizing the roots, the cavern, the feminine and the chthonic.