What does a study on medieval Chinese religions have in common with a book on the Roman festival of the Lupercalia and a third one on Greco-Roman views about the question of what makes us human? On the face of it, not very much. And yet there is a shared thematic focus, a shared purpose here that brings all three works together and that makes reading them side by side a rewarding and productive exercise: all three books pursue a common interest in the roles and functions of real and symbolic animals at a particular time and in a particular place. Moreover, in all three cultures to which the books relate, the entanglement between humans and animals extends to and includes that of the gods/the supernatural as a third player and point of reference. Evidently, despite all temporal, geographical, and cultural differences that set ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval China apart, they all housed religious traditions that generated complex symbolic relationships between gods, humans, and other animals to create meaning. And in all three societies, the meanings generated in this way were directly entangled in negotiations of power, control, and belonging.
In this way all three books – albeit in different ways and to different extents – entertain an interest in what has been termed ‘political theology’ – the exploration of the ways in which religious ideas, concepts, and modes of thought intersect with the political sphere at a particular time and in a particular place. Traditionally, political theology has focused mainly on the exploration of one particular religious tradition: that of Christianity. More recently, however, this focus has been widened to include different religious traditions, both past and present. As a result, political theology has become an important research interest not merely in the study of Christianity, but in the interdisciplinary study of religions more generally. The three books put in conversation here then represent this larger interest: all three of them draw attention to the real and symbolic relationships between gods, humans, and animals, and the ways in which these relationships are forged and manipulated, and how they intersect with existing and emerging power structures.
Political theology primarily points to the way in which meaning is generated and circulates within a particular cultural system. It is here that real and symbolic connections between gods, humans, and animals are forged, that power discourses intersect, and that the categories in play receive their cultural meaning. And yet, at least in its more recent applications, the interest in political theology also always includes a certain inclination to compare. This is because insights into how any given group, culture, or society generates cultural meaning, implicitly also raises the question about how this relates to other times and places. To be able to say what is culturally and historically specific (and what is not), we have to consider more than one place and time.
While in The Trojan Horse. Ten Ancient Creatures that Make us Human (Cambridge 2024) I do not engage in cross-cultural comparison myself, this perspective is absolutely central to Krešimir Vuković’s project. This is because in Wolves of Rome. The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives (London, 2023), he does not limit himself to the Roman material. Rather, he sets out to compare the Roman sources with early Indian (Vedic) religious traditions. For this purpose, he revisits a concept that was once at the forefront of cultural studies (broadly conceived) but which has for some time fallen out of fashion: that of Indo-European roots or origins of certain cultural and linguistic phenomena. Vuković duly acknowledges the problematic legacy of this concept – most notably its links to Western imperialism (see e.g. pp. 12-14). He then goes on to make the case for reviving it. By drawing on the Vedas (a set of religious texts from ancient India), he brings out revealing parallels between the Vedic material and Roman mythology and ritual. This is a bold move that runs against the grain of how the comparative focus currently features in much classical scholarship. But in this case at least it pays off: The comparative dimension allows Vuković to explore the roots of the symbolism and ritual practices relating to wolves and to show how they have influenced the Lupercalia. The result is a convincing interpretation of the festival as emerging out of old Indo-European Initiation rituals drawing on the symbolism an imagery of the wolf among Indo-European speaking peoples.
A comparative dimension is also inherent in Huaiyu Chen’s In the Land of Tigers and Snakes. Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (New York, 2023). But here it is applied to a single cultural system. Chen considers how the individual religio-philosophical traditions that make up medieval China conceive of humans and other animals and how this relates to the way in which they engage with each other and the local communities, and the kind of larger political, cultural, and ideological factors at play. As a result, medieval China emerges as a diverse and dynamic religious landscape featuring Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian influences which all relate to and draw on animals in different ways to assert their place.
This kind of comparison, too, is invariably productive: For example, it brings out revealing differences between how individual animal species can fare when they become part of the self-representation and discursive affirmation of individual religious groups: in medieval China both tigers and snakes posed considerable threats to human life and wellbeing. And yet, the two species differ fundamentally in the way they have been framed in the cultural appropriation: snakes always retained the status of a threat to be eliminated. Tigers, however, as Chen shows, took on a fundamentally different role: In Buddhist hagiographic tales they feature as animals that could be tamed and, under certain conditions, even converted to enlightenment. As such, they helped to articulate the extraordinary religious powers of medieval Chinese Buddhist monks as evident in their capacity to pacify wild and ferocious animals. Once again, human, animal, and supernatural identities reference each other in more ways than one.
Overall, then, it appears that there are different ways to compare: Chen’s study brings to our attention that there can be competing modes of sense-making within a single cultural system; Vuković’s study draws attention to the benefits of comparing the ancient world with even earlier related material in order to find out about its possible origins. And yet, reading the three studies side by side also harbours the possibility to engage in another kind of comparison: that between ancient Greece and Rome as internally related cultures, on the one hand, and a more or less fully separate cultural and symbolic tradition such as that of medieval China.
What does this larger focus reveal?
When I first picked up Chen’s In the Land of Tigers and Snakes, I expected to be introduced to a world radically different from Western anthropocentrism. And to some extent, that is exactly what I found: Buddhism, for example, acknowledged the sentience of animals – in distinct deviation from some of the most harmful stances on non-human animals prevailing in much of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, the religious traditions that make up medieval China focused on other animals than the Greeks and Romans and attributed altogether different values and meanings to them in line with their own experience of these animals in the wild and their own cultural, literary, and religious traditions.
And yet, what stood out among all such differences were the apparent convergences: In all three cultures, human-animal relations were used to make sense of the world and to generate order. And in all three cultures, this order sustained (and was sustained by) both anthropocentrism and the classification of animals (including human animals). While medieval China partly operated with its own unique categories, others, such as the separation between purity and pollution, or wild and domesticated animals (or between nature and culture more generally), recall those in place in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Western tradition emerging from it. Differences, then, merely apply to how the line was drawn in each instance and to the particular meanings and values the individual categories took on in a particular time and place.
What, then, do we make of such parallels between ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval China? What does all this add up to?
Individually and taken together, the three books put in conversation here illustrate that there are general principles at work in what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has termed the ‘anthropological machine’ and how it operates in different cultural and historical contexts. No matter whether we are in ancient Greece, Rome, or Medieval China: In all three societies conceptions of the human emerge as a result of the connections that are drawn between the human, the non-human, and more-than human; and in all three societies the emerging identities are powerful players in the negotiation of social and political identities.
