‘The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ is September Book of the Month. In this month’s author interview, Elizabeth Sulis Kim speaks to Tallulah Brennan about whale worship, gods wrapped in bearskins, and how our rituals and stories must adapt to modern life.

Find an extract from the interview below.

Elizabeth Sulis Kim, photographed by Michael Vince Kim

The first thing I wanted to ask about is your discussion of transitioning from childhood to adulthood. In your words, that meant becoming sharper, less animal, ‘more bordered and exact’. Can you explain how loneliness followed from this process, and perhaps also, if and how this loneliness led you to writing The Book of Beasts?

It wasn’t so much loneliness but a reprieve from loneliness. As I write in the introduction to the book, when I was very young I felt a strong sense of kinship with other animals, and there was this sense that every hedgerow, tree, river, was teeming with life. As I got older, I would walk into a forest and I would feel alone. It wasn’t just aloneness, it was a real sense of existential loneliness. I had this feeling that everything around me at the time was inanimate, even though I knew it was there. I knew that there were animals, but I felt a severance. When I had travelled to other countries, where they have a stronger relationship with their ecology, I had a sense that these places were more alive. As I read about prehistoric Europe, I realised that actually our culture was once more lively; it hasn’t always been as it is now. I experienced this on a personal level too — the child I was versus the adult I became. I’m cautious to say that other children have a natural affinity for animals. I’ve seen children my daughter’s age squish bugs, but I do think that their sense of self is less categorical. I didn’t have such intense self-focus as a child, and I didn’t have such a bordered sense of self.

I trained as a forest school assistant a few years ago, and something which always stuck with me was one of my tutors talking about discipline. He had this story of a little boy who was accidentally, or unintentionally, torturing a woodlouse. Instead of immediately disciplining the child, he asked what he was doing, and the child said ‘I’m trying to find the cure for COVID. To find a vaccine.’ So the child was replicating an adult behaviour — experimenting on an animal — in a primal way. There was no lab, no layers of human explanation to distance yourself from what is a violent act. So when you were talking about children’s relationship with animals, I was thinking about how early we begin to reproduce the society in which we find ourselves, and maybe this is what your loneliness consisted of too.

I think it’s also worth saying that being in the woods for a forest school session, or enjoying close proximity to animals in any way is not necessarily a freeing exercise, right? In the Wolf chapter, for example, you talk about the Turkish far-right’s use of the wolf and about Hitler’s preoccupation with the wolf pack and his view of himself as a wolf. Could you speak about the incidences of reclaiming animal wisdom for sinister reasons, and how that has in turn shaped your thinking?

To first go to the children in the play park or the forest school. As well as absorbing culture at large, young children don’t have a strong concept of death. Do they know what they are doing, then? As regards to the nefarious use of animals as symbols, there are really chilling stories. They point out that humans across the world have a strong emotional resonance with animals, and of course this is not always going to be used for good. But it does point out that we see animals through our projections, we’re not always looking at the animal for its own sake. The Nazi regime used the wolf, as you mention. The Klu Klux Klan used the eagle. There are so many cases of fascist groups using animals, as many as there are examples of pacifists using animals. The Klu Klux Klan used the eagle as a motif — it is a strong, predatory animal, and so they use it. Brands also use emotional resonances with animals all the time, and this is quite insidious. Red Bull, Puma, Jaguar, the list goes on. We’re often thinking of the verocity and virility of animals, we very seldom tap into their other facets.

I’m thinking of an advert I saw at the cinema a few months ago. A gorgeous man driving a Land Rover around the grounds of an estate, surrounded by beautiful manicured horses, deerhounds, the shadow of the country house. It’s tapping into what I think is a really sinister idea of the natural order — expensive car-driver equals land-owner, equals pedigree human amongst his pedigree animals. It’s like saying the quiet part out loud, because who isn’t part of the picture, and why? And I think this links to the problem of charismatic versus uncharismatic animals, which is what I wanted to ask you about next. I was thinking about this particularly in your chapter on birds, when you write about the cultural distaste for corvids like jackdaws, ravens and crows. I loved when you wrote about the contrast represented by chickens: ‘Is there something intrinsically lacking in them which disqualifies them from the role of heavenly emissaries?’ Some of my favourite churches have these beautiful emblems of birds in their stained glass windows. Birds like owls and wrens which are obviously seen as worthy of veneration. I wonder how you make sense of how culturally constructed endearments affect our conservation priorities, and how our society facilitates this kind of hierarchy of life?

In answer to the question of charisma, I think there isn’t really such a thing as an intrinsically charismatic animal. These things are very much created through cultural institutions. Animals have different meanings at different times and different places across history. The polar bear can be an emblem of conservation in one moment, but for a community in Alaska it can be a beast, a menace. My sense is that the things we have commodified, we have collectively, culturally, all played a role in changing narratives about certain animals not being charismatic. If we trace the story of the auroch, for example, an incredibly important part of our culture, but it is now something hardly thought about. When we think of cows we might think of fields or abattoirs, not a sacred art-worthy creature. It’s hard to discern which came first, but it does often happen that we facilitate commodification by devaluating things in our stories. I would imagine these are not distinct processes but parallel ones.

*

Sign in or subscribe via Steady to read this interview in full. Paid memberships help us secure the future of the site, in exchange for monthly author interviews, seasonal reflections, discounts in our Bandcamp shop and more.

Elizabeth Sulis Kim’s The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom is out now and available here, published by Chatto & Windus. Read an extract from the book here.

Elizabeth Sulis Kim is a writer and editor based in Edinburgh but originally from England’s rural West Country. Her writing has appeared in publications such as BBC Culture, Mslexia, the LA review of Books, The Guardian, Hellebore, Fiddler’s Green, Litro, Stylist, and Dazed, among others. She is the author of ‘The Book of Beasts: Reclaiming Animal Wisdom’ (Chatto/Vintage) as well as ‘The Art of Folklore’ (Frances Lincoln/Quarto). Her fiction was shortlisted for Penguin’s #WriteNow scheme and she is currently working on a novel. She is also editor of Cunning Folk magazine and the occult writing anthology Spiritus Mundi. 

Tallulah Brennan is a writer based in England, interested in the relationships between humans and their environment, and how they in turn shape each other. She is also a contributing editor at Caught by the River. Follow Tallulah’s Substack here.