The beast within.

At six, Bethsabee had never spoken, never hugged. An autistic child, she had been confined to her room and was continually drugged. She avoided touching or looking at anyone, and when someone tried to touch her she stiffened. Crying was her only sign of feeling. One day, Bethsabee met a dog for the first time in her life. She stiffened, then briefly touched the animal with a block. Her eyes flickered for an instant: then she withdrew again to her blocks.

On another day, a dove was brought to Bethsabee. Within moments, something miraculous occurred: Bethsabee sat before the dove as it suddenly took flight; her eyes followed the dove, and she broke into a smile -- the first one of her life. The child's face, which had never shown expression, now radiated fascination and joy. From that moment on, Bethsabee began to come out of her shell. She reached out to touch the dove when it stood still. She began to accept touching from her teacher and her classmates. At times, she would take her teacher's hand and bring it up to touch herself. Within months, Bethsabee was joining in games with other children and speaking her first words.

In another example, young Donney Tomei suffered a serious head injury and lay in a coma at Connecticut's Yale-New Haven Hospital for 10 days. Doctors, friends and family made repeated efforts to revive him, but he showed no response. Then one day he moved slightly as his parents talked about his dog, Rusty. Encouraged, doctors and family arranged to bring Rusty to the boy's bedside. The moment the dog jumped on his bed, Donny reached out to hug him. As Rusty licked his face, Donny revived -- and was soon laughing and smiling. Within moments, the boy spoke his first words in almost two weeks. Within days, he started physical therapy.

A UNIQUE CHANNEL

What is it about animals that they "get through" to the most severely impaired children? How can animals reach a human mind dead-ened to anything else? It's not mystical or spiritual, but elementary biology. Animals are and always have been throughout our evolution the most stimulating, fascinating things in the world around us. Today, dulled as we are by the high-tech, fast-paced world we have made for ourselves, we see animals as remote and irrelevant.

We may not have animals consciously on our minds very often today; nonetheless they are alive at the deepest levels of our consciousness. Their importance to the human mind and culture is well known to art historians, folklorists and anthropologists.

The animal presence was best explained by biologist Paul Shepard in his 1978 book, Thinking Animal Animals, he said, got our attention more than anything else in nature as we were evolving. "Animals," Shepard wrote, "are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from the series of events in each human life. indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense."

Throughout our evolution, animals have helped us come to terms with the strange and wonderful world around us. When we lived as foragers with Earth-bound religions, animals were the First Beings and world-shapers, and the teachers and ancestors of people. When we became agriculturists and looked to the heavens for instruction about the seasons and the elements, we saw animal forms among the stars. Of the 48 Ptolemaic constellations, all but a few are organic, and 25 are named for animals. Of the 22 more that were added in the 17th century, 19 have animal names. When we built colossal earthworks to appeal to the power in the heavens, we built them in animal forms.

In Ice-age eaves, the first art shows the human fascination with animal forms. Animals were thought to embody the spirits and powers of nature, and, as art historians know, animals have been used to symbolize nature ever since. In ancient Egypt, Hathor, the cow goddess of the sky, was believed to have given birth to the sun. The sky was seen as a giant cow, her legs the four corners of the world. Ancient astronomers explained the workings of the universe by reference to the zodiac, which means, literally, "the circle of animals." Universally, animals have bonded us to the rest of the living world.

Animals must feed and empower the human mind like nothing else, for we see their presence also in children's toys, in nursery rhymes, in Aesop's fables, and in other moral tales. And we see the animal presence in language, where they provide the basis for some 5,000 expressions.

A GRADUAL ALIENATION

We tend not to think about the importance of animals anymore. In taking over the world, we have marginalized animals, reduced them from kinfolk, powers, and spirits to commodities, sources of spare parts and pests. Animals no longer matter -- or so we like to think.

But they do matter, and in powerful ways that we need to understand if we are to come to terms with nature. In reducing animals' stature, we reduced all of nature and constructed a world view in which people are above and apart from nature. This "dominionist" worldview was built, most agree, during the transition from foraging to farming that occurred between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. Marginalizing animals was a cornerstone of the whole edifice, for more than any other agricultural development, it broke up the old ideas of kinship and continuity with the living world.

When early herders and farmers intensified their uses of animals, they needed ways to suppress their older beliefs in animal spirit-powers. People were, after all, gradually enslaving their former gods, teachers and ancestors. Before animals could become tools and commodities, they had to be brought down from their pedestals. Over time, the emerging culture came up with a new set of beliefs about animals' essential evil and baseness. Those combined to form an attitude of hatred and contempt for animals.

Today, we describe serial killers and other criminals as "animals" or "beasts" when we want to describe their lust, cruelty or senseless violence -- all behaviors that are, nature writer John Rodman notes, "more frequently observed on the part of men than of beasts."

Suppressing our respect for animals was supposed to simply reduce them and detach them from nature. But it did more. Like a bad drug, it produced side effects that have been destructive in human society. In permitting a greater exploitation of animals and nature, it wove nature hating, ruthlessness and alienation into our world view. Our older tradition of a greater sense of kinship, of belonging in the world, got cut off, and our potential for a more loving and whole human spirit was maimed.

Because of that, our feelings for the living world are now stunted. We feel negative -- uneasy at best -- about our place in nature. Our deepest feeling for this life is malaise, so many of us long for the next. Our deepest feeling for the living world is horror, so we strive to destroy it.

In loading our culture with animal hatred, we despise even the animal nature we see in ourselves. By this I mean our animality, which is several things. One is the simple, biological fact that we are animals -- primates, in fact. If this amuses you or makes you uncomfortable, then you are living proof. We don't like to think of ourselves as animals or in anyway related to animals. Our animality includes also the body and its natural cycles and functions. These tend to remind us of our closeness to animals, so we control, hide and deny them. When the body's natural functions break through our restraints, we are terribly embarrassed and humiliated. We are base and crude -- like an animal.

Nevertheless, we are still aware of our own animality at the lower levels of our consciousness. We don't dwell on it, but we know that some parts of our lives are animal-like. At the same time, we tell ourselves that human beings are exalted. We have a schizophrenic view of ourselves, exalting some of what we are and debasing the rest. We are set up for deep conflicts about our collective selves, that is, our humanity. We also fear the sexual, sensual, emotional and playful sides of human life, for these are animal-like and they must be kept in check.

ANIMALS AS SYMBOLS

Throughout history, we have used animals to symbolize the lust, danger and deceitfulness we see in ourselves, and tend to project upon women, Jews, Africans, and various "others." Beryl Rowland's Animals With Human Faces catalogues the animals of the medieval bestiaries and what they symbolized. These books were used in an age when few people could read or write, so animals were convenient and powerful messengers. Most of the animals, Rowland notes, symbolized some human sexual or sensual trait, usually lust, lechery or promiscuity. A few animals, especially bulls, goats, camels, boars and apes, were much more loaded with human sexual projections than others. The hare portrayed female sexuality, usually as libidinous, wanton or willing -- "nearly always pejoratively," Rowland says.

Indeed, animals dominate many of the notions of feminine evil that were common in late 19th- and turn-of-the-century popular art, according to Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity. Here we see how Paul Klee depicted women as bestial in the painting, Woman and Beast. The same ideas shows up in the paintings of many lesser-known artists. One, The Muting of Animalism, shows a male warrior in armor holding down a tiger who has the head of a woman. Another shows the evil Eve holding a huge menacing snake. A particularly good example, bringing together beast hatred, racism and misogyny, is The Temptation of St. Anthony by J.C. Dollmam, which shows dark, hulking figures, vaguely Semitic or African, who join female forms symbolizing beasts of desire nipping at the saint's soul.

Such ideas fed the racism of Europe's "Age of Discovery" in the 16th and 17th centuries. (It fed it so well that it still lives today.) For Europeans, the world was full of strange, inferior beings, many of them evil and dangerous. It was a zoo of largely imagined beasts, of course, and the most terrible of the lot were the beasts within.

The Europeans were dedicated masters of nature, and they noted that America's natives were not. George Louis Leclerc Buffon, the 18th century French naturalist, argued that they were brutes "mired in animality" because they had no domestic animals and did not subdue nature. These attitudes made it easier for Christian Europe to enslave the natives and take their land.

Within two centuries of first contact, European diseases and mistreatment reduced the native population in the Americas by 90 percent, according to the estimates of three different scholars. As Native American numbers dwindled, colonial planters turned more and more to Africa as a source of slaves. Like other native people, Africans were seen as savage and wild. Their blackness was a great difference and it made them seem of a greatly different order of life. Africans' image was made even worse by European attitudes about the "dark" continent, which was seen as an especially mysterious and dangerous wilderness.

Unfortunately, only a handful of intellectuals -- and the few remaining indigenous cultures -- appear to understand how important animals are to human culture. When seen as spirit powers and as kin, as they once were, animals gave us a vital bond and a sense of belonging to the living world. When reduced through the evolution of agriculture, animals gave contempt and detachment to our relations with the living world.

Animals, it seems, are much more important than we are willing to admit. Despite all our attempts to write them out of our lives, animals are still influencing and helping to form our consciousness. If we want to come to better terms with nature, we will have to come to better terms with animals.

JIM MASON is the author of An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other (Simon and Schuster, 1993). It is available for $20 postpaid from: Kinship Inc., P.O. Box 381, Mount Vernon, MO 65712.