Other Creations

by Christopher Manes

A Saint Bernard, despite its name, is unwelcome in church. Any dog, cat, sheep, bovine, terrapin, or bird clearly faces this same prohibition. Modern religion seems to be for humans only, and the absence of animals in our places of worship is taken for granted. It is as if we have built glorious temples to zoophobia, showing that we prefer to worship not in the richness of creation, but rather in what Yeats called the "artifice of eternity," the purely human spaces of our own making.



Or do we? What would human spirituality be without animals? The Bible portrays Satan as a snake, Jesus as the lamb of God, the Holy Spirit as a dove. Cathedrals team with stone birds, stags, and other animal images. We express our moral ideas through animal stories, whether the Buddhist Jataka, Aesop's fables, or Orwell's Animal Farm . At the prehistoric heart of humanity's attempts to articulate spiritual sentiments, we find the caves of Lascaux and images not of white-robed deities, but of the giant beasts of the Ice Age.



Other Creations details the pervasive effect of animal life on the human psyche, and ties it all together from past to present in a fascinating study which is unlike any yet published. What is most impressive is that as beautiful and evocative as animals are, they do not simply decorate our spiritual lives but form the very texture of human spirituality. Indeed far from being dead in ancient religion they are very much alive today as immensely significant icons of popular culture, as seen in phenomena such as stuffed animals, Disney movies, and sports team mascots.

Genres: Animals

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Christopher Manes is an award-winning author, journalist and documentary film-maker

His books include Green Rage (Little, Brown), nominated for a Los Angeles Times book award in science; and Other Creations: Rediscovering the Spirituality of Animals (Doubleday). Portions of Other Creations were anthologized in The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy Of Industrial Animal Factories (Univ. Of Cal. Press), which is the 2011 Winner of the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Reporting, and the 2011 Independent Publishers Award for Outstanding Book "Most Likely to Save the Planet."

His articles have ranged from solo treks across the interior of Iceland to Beowulf scholarship to explorations of environmental ethics. They have appeared in numerous publications, including Los Angeles Magazine, Mother Earth News, Environmental Ethics, Orion Nature Quarterly, Northern Lights, Houghton Mifflin's Encyclopedia of the Environment, English Language Notes, Human Ecology Review, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and have been widely anthologized and quoted.

He wrote and produced the documentary Earth First!: The Politics of Radical Environmentalism, which was screened at the 1st Annual Environmental Film Festival in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with excerpts appearing on 60 Minutes, MTV, Inside Edition, and numerous news programs.