animals, as in the story of Noah’s Ark, and in others, animals are involved in saving humans, just as the Ant people saved the Hopi. Other examples include the birds in the Bible story searching for land and a great fish warning the first Hindu man, Manu, of the impending flood. The pervasive nature of the great flood myth, and of our cooperation with the animals to survive, supports the notion that this story represents a global Truth.
Numerous cultures also describe other times of destruction, such as fire and polar shifts, in which most of life perished. Modern science concurs with fossil evidence that indicates there have been at least five distinct mass-extinction events. During these periods, a significant fraction of all the species on earth became extinct in what was essentially a geological instant.10
These mass extinctions occurred before the time we currently believe the first humans inhabited the earth, so it is even more striking that human stories seem to contain a “memory” of them. Might there also be truth to memories of a time when humans and animals communicated easily and lived in peace? Some spiritual teachings believe humans existed on earth long before our current geological records show. Who knows what lies buried below, in depths where we have yet to dig? Archaeologists find new fossilized remains on a regular basis, opening up the possibility that some fantasy-like stories may contain more truths than we currently recognize.
The following creation and paradise story of the Australian Aborigines comes from Robert Lawlor’s book Voices of the First Day.11 The Australian Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on earth, beginning about fifty to sixty-five thousand years ago. As with all ancient tales, Lawlor’s version is just one version of their creation story.
Australian Aboriginal writer Goobalathaldin (Dick Roughsey) explains that creation on earth began when the first human beings arrived from the stars. They possessed supernatural powers and created the land and sea. Everything was good until floods, volcanoes, droughts, and earthquakes rocked the land. Out of fear, the first ancestors sought refuge in a most remarkable way. They transformed into animals, plants, insects, and rocks. As this Dreamtime creation commenced, the earth became populated with a multitude of life-forms.
The Creative Ancestors were vast, unbounded, vibratory fields of energy. They created with their breath by naming. Just as one creates sounds or songs with the vibration of breath, the Aborigines describe the Dreamtime creation as the world being “sung” into existence.12
As the Ancestors traveled across the barren countryside, their travels shaped the landscape. When they slept, they dreamed of adventures for the next day. They dreamed of things and created them: ants, wallabies, emus, crows, lizards, snakes, grasshoppers, plants, and humans. The Ancestors created all these things simultaneously, and each could transform from one to the other. Lawlor writes, “A plant could become an animal, an animal a landform, a landform a man or woman. An Ancestor could be both human and animal.” The Ancestors eventually retired into the earth, the sky, the clouds, and the creatures, to reverberate within all they had created. “All creatures — from stars to humans to insects — shared the consciousness of the primary creative force, and each, in its own way, mirrors a form of that consciousness.”13
The ancestral energy that shaped the earth was referred to symbolically as the “Rainbow Serpent.” It resonated in the shapes and lives of the earth as a usable force and nourishing spirit. The Rainbow Serpent represents the electromagnetic spectrum of light, a profound metaphor for the unity between the tangible and the invisible worlds.14 It connects the earth and celestial realms. Over vast periods of time, the Rainbow Serpent, like the earth’s magnetic field, alternately extinguished and re-created life over the whole earth.
The Aborigines believe the Ancestors created the world perfectly, and it stayed that way so long as humans adhered to the universal law. Abandoning the Dreaming Law forced humankind to leave the garden. Everything changed. The myth of the Southern Cross tells of the first death and how people faced a moral dilemma — whether to kill to survive or die.
The myth relates how drought caused a lack of vegetation, so a man killed a kangaroo rat, which he and a woman ate. A third man refused to eat it and died. A black figure with huge fiery eyes lifted the man into a hollow tree and raised the tree into the southern sky; following it were two yellow-crested cockatoos.
The tree planted itself near the Warrambool, or Milky Way, which leads to where the sky gods live. The tree gradually disappeared from their sight until all that remained were four eyes: two were the eyes of Yowi, the spirit of death; the others were the eyes of the first man to die. The pointers were the cockatoos. These stars make up the constellation of the Southern Cross, a reminder of the first death.15
“The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth,” writes Lawlor. Every meaningful life process or event that occurs leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, just as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. A seed vanishes the moment it germinates, becoming a plant. At this moment, the seed’s latent power springs into action. The seed dies in order to physically manifest, whereas the plant manifests and then dies, leaving seeds. The “seed of the archaic” is maintained in the universal myth of the Golden Age.16
The spiritual nature of animals remains today as it was in the beginning, a representation of the Creative Ancestors. The vibratory serpent energy that created the many forms lives on as platypus, plant, and person. The seed power and Rainbow Serpent correlate to a description of DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid emits photons at the visible spectrum of light. This double-spiral, serpent-like, molecule carries the genetic information or seed power present in every cell of every living thing, including bacteria, broccoli, and bison.
Perhaps these ancient tales describe something we understand today with modern science. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby calls DNA the ancient energy of the creator.17 Indeed, the art and stories from many ancient cultures relate the same idea. Images of twin creator snakes appear in art from a Mesopotamian seal dated circa 2200 BCE. Aztec art from 400–600 BCE depicts DNA-like, double-helix serpents, and the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl translates as “serpent” and “twin.” Ancient Greek stories describe Zeus as a serpent; Scandinavian rock art depicts serpents with a cross; and in ancient Egypt, a serpent crown found on a mummified pharaoh depicts two conjoined serpents, and the serpent symbolized the beginning and end of time. Paintings from Peruvian shamans depict images that resemble snakes containing chromosomes. All appear synonymous to rock paintings of the Australian Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent from six to eight thousand years ago. Perhaps Narby, the Peruvian shamans, and Australian stories are true: The creator “God” vibrates in every living thing, actively creating through the physical wisdom embodied in DNA.
Chapter 7 discusses the Hebrew and Christian beliefs about the spiritual nature of animals in more detail. Here, I briefly discuss the biblical creation stories.
As in the Hopi and Aboriginal stories, creation begins with sound as the “word” of God. According to the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Two different versions of the creation story appear in the Book of Genesis, chapters 1 to 3. In Genesis 1:20–21, the animals are made first: “And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.’ So, God created the
