Theriomythological Approach: Religious Animal Ethics

in German > https://simorgh.de/about/tiermythologischer-ansatz-religiose-tierethik/

[draft 05.01.25]

Yes—but what, exactly, is meant by religion here, and which history of religion is considered acceptable?

(also: spiritually instrumentalizing animal ethics; secular-religious meaning-production used to elevate religious claims to authority)

Definition

A discursive mode in which animals are not primarily regarded as autonomous subjects, but as carriers of moral, spiritual, or metaphysical meaning for humans. They receive recognition only insofar as they mirror human virtues; their own interests remain optional.

Description

• Animals appear as moral mirrors, sources of meaning, or “cosmic teachers,” whether framed religiously or in language that sounds modern and natural-scientific.
• Even in secular discourse, the classical logic often persists: animals symbolize human virtues, while their political autonomy and concrete lived realities remain invisible.
• Authors openly or covertly demonstrate how animals serve human ethical self-assurance—without this being socially noticed. A true delight for feuilleton pages and publishing houses.

Religious Framing

Not every form of spiritual meaning-making is problematic. It becomes problematic when religion is hegemonically anthropocentric from the outset—this is a narrative and epistemic foundational problem. In such systems, animals remain projection surfaces for human morality.

To address animals in a genuinely respectful way, the concept of God would have to be thought non-humanly and radically freely, so that animals could appear as autonomous subjects rather than theological accessories.

Moral Attribution and Animal Mythology

• In many cultures and mythologies, animals stood on an equal or even higher level than humans and functioned as agents of wisdom.
• Fairy tales, fables, and animal mythologies depict animals as possessing their own perspectives, logics of action, and forms of knowledge—not merely as mirrors of human morality.
• The major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have largely rendered this invisible, symbolically reducing animals and making them reflect primarily human order, virtue, and divine norms.
• Even discourses legitimized through modern natural science often reproduce this reduction in disguise: animals remain dis-ensouled, turned into projection surfaces for human self-assurance.

Theoretical Context

Kim Socha emphasizes that even modern, secularly framed animal-rights discourses can reproduce concealed religious logics. Within this system, animals remain dis-ensouled, serving as projection surfaces for human constructions of meaning—even when the language sounds objective or scientific. (simorgh.de)

Core Elements

• Concealed meaning-production: animals as projections of human self-elevation.
• Instrumentalization: animals confirm human virtues rather than their own autonomy.
• The secularism problem: modern discourse structurally adopts religious modes of thought—only more elegantly packaged.
• Mythological alternative: in traditional animal mythologies, animals can be autonomous carriers of meaning and wisdom.

Short Thesis

Where animals are used as carriers of moral or spiritual meaning, they remain dis-ensouled—and once again become projection surfaces for human self-assurance. Still, one must admit: they appear very virtuous in the process.

Discursive Effect

• Socially compatible, low-conflict, morally visible.
• Empathy permitted; political consequence optional.
• Reproduces anthropocentric power structures while simultaneously smelling faintly of modern feuilleton culture.

Delimitation

• Not antispeciesist: animals are not treated as autonomous subjects with their own interests.
• Not radically secular: animals are not consciously released from systems of meaning, but remain symbolically overcharged.

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What is radically secular is to include—and truly perceive—Animal Sapiens. Once that happens, an entirely new epistemology emerges anyway, with or without religion.