Animals play various roles in mythology, depending on the culture. They can be characters, objects of worship, or symbols of negative concepts. They can also serve as narrative devices or have extraordinary intelligence, as seen in Egyptian and Native American mythology. Imaginary creatures are also used to test heroes or represent the dark side of human nature.
There are many possible roles for animals in mythology, often depending on the culture from which the myths come. Animals are often used in stories as a way for a character to be helped or harmed, seemingly by acting as a capricious force of nature. There are also a number of mythological traditions where animals are characters themselves, often acting as deities or spirits in animal form to represent different ideas or actions to people. In some cases, animals in mythology might be objects of worship, while in others they are monstrous creatures that represent evil or destruction.
Animals can be represented and used in many different ways in mythology, although one of the most common is simply as a narrative device. While some myths give animals supernatural powers or human thinking, there are other stories where they are simply animals. They can serve symbolic purposes, such as the owl which is synonymous with Athena or dolphins which indicate the presence of Poseidon. They can also simply change the course of a story by being present, such as the story of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice, who steps on a snake on their wedding day and is bitten and dies.
There are a number of instances where animals in mythology are given extraordinary intelligence, often acting as deities or spirits. Egyptian mythology, for example, is replete with images of deities that combine human and animal characteristics, often a human body with an animal’s head. Native American stories also tell of animals that can assume human form, such as men and women who look like bears, but are actually people with bear skins, or the stories of the coyote trickster. A number of African stories also contain animals that act like people, talking and thinking, including spiders and trickster hares.
Animals in mythology can also be seen as symbols of negative concepts. There are numerous stories of people being turned into animals, often as punishment for displeasing gods or goddesses; such tales are quite common in Greek and Roman mythology and collected in a work by Ovid entitled Metamorphoses. Some animals in mythology are purely imaginary creatures, sometimes simply an unusually large version of a normal animal or an odd combination of different traits and characteristics of other animals. These monsters are often used to test heroes in stories, such as Perseus and Medusa, or as a reminder of the dark or savage side of human nature, as seen in the Minotaur.
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