ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a lot of detail about the way the mind generates animal and human symbols – but do not lose sight of the main goal, which is to understand how this system as a whole creates symbols that come to be understood as spiritual entities. It shows that humans have an innate system for recognizing, categorizing, and organizing animal data in distinct, essentialist categories. Human subjects, for example, can rapidly pick out pictures of snakes and spiders from arrays of fear-irrelevant objects such as flowers and mushrooms much more quickly than they can do the opposite task. Snakes and birds are well represented in somewhat more consciously influenced symbolism such as that of mythology, religion, and the quasi-religious symbolism of medieval European, Middle Eastern, and Chinese alchemy. The lion is associated with instinctive forces, like the snake and many other aggressive animal symbols (Gnostic mysticism) and is sometimes depicted as “linked” with fire.
