Offering: December 20, 2025
Animal grief
“When you [recite the first spell you will] charm the sky, the earth, the netherworld, the mountains and waters. You will discover what all the birds of the sky and all the reptiles are saying.” — from Stories of the High Priests of Memphis1
There was once an Egyptian prince named Setne Khamwas, known for building and restoring sacred monuments and who was imagined popularly after his death as a magician. When he learned about a book of magic written by the god Thoth himself, he knew that he needed to have it. And he eventually got it, by robbing the grave of another prince named Naneferkaptah, who’d given his own life as well as the lives of his wife and son in order to get his hands on the book.
As Setne is poking around in Naneferkaptah’s tomb, the ghost of the dead prince’s wife Ahwere shows up and begins telling him how it all happened. Ahwere’s husband Naneferkaptah was obsessively curious, and would read everything he could find. One day, as he was out walking and reading the writing on tombs of pharoahs and shrines to various Gods, a priest saw him and started to laugh.
It was clear to the priest that Naneferkaptah had an insatiable hunger for knowledge, but he was looking in all the wrong places. If he really wanted to read meaningful writings, he should go find the book that was written by the god Thoth himself. In that book, there were two spells and when he recited the first, he would “charm the sky, the earth, the netherworld, the mountains and the waters.” He would also “discover what all the birds of the sky and all the reptiles are saying.”
This past week, I was following up on something the Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot had written, namely the legend that the tarot was based on the Book of Thoth. Skimming the wikipedia entry for Book of Thoth, I came across a citation that there was a spell in the book that would allow the spell caster to understand the language of animals. The citation led me to another book on literature of ancient Egypt, which included the tale of the curious priests that I’m now telling you. Reading it was a reminder that since time immemorial humans have been intrigued by the prospect of understanding the psychic lives of more-than-human beings.
I keep a list of papers, chapters, and books about grief that I work my way through bit by bit. And so when I opened it this week—because I’ve been thinking of animals—it was natural to choose an article called “Can Animals Grieve?” by philosopher Becky Millar. In short, Millar argues in favor of the possibility that more-than-human animals can and do grieve. And, as self-absorbed as it sounds, I think what I found most interesting about the paper was that it helped me understand the process of human grief better. And while it may turn out that human interpretations of other animals’ experiences will never be more than a way of defining and knowing our selves better, I appreciated Millar’s efforts to apply contemporary theories of grief to speculations about what animals might go through after significant loss.