Animals have always been a source of awe for humans. If through their uncanny gaze we can simultaneously recognize ourselves in them and as a separate species, it also allows us to come into contact with a deeper aspect of the natural world:  

The animal’s silence, and its distance, hold a secret for man, and in Paleolithic times this resulted in the animal’s being seen as a possessor of power.¹

Because of this hunting was a sacred and magical activity, “an act of communion and reciprocity with the animal kingdom.”² It implied a deep identification with the prey, a becoming. This primitive form of hunting represents a state of equilibrium between self and other in which both parties, the human and the animal, organize themselves as a polar unity. The recognition as one or the other is possible for modern humans, but for our ancestors their double nature was an immediate matter—that is, not mediated—that implied being simultaneously self and other. Man and world, self and other, remained continuous.

This matter explains the profusion of images during the upper Paleolithic that depict animals with human traits and viceversa; hybrid creatures that persist in more recent mythological figures such as the minotaur or the mermaid, which occupy a threshold between the human and the animal (1.4). This indistinction between “self” and “other” is the twilight from whence the first figure of sovereignty emerges: the shaman. Given the sacred status of the animal as a bearer of power, the man or woman who occupied an intermediate position between the human and the animal world could also act as a bridge between the material and the immaterial (0.21). Thus, sovereignty arises from marginality, from the ban (0.17) where liminal creatures like the werewolf dwell, and which, by virtue of their ambiguity, are analogous to the homo sacer and, through it, to the sovereign.

It is from the marginality between self and other where we find a partial explanation for the “indeterminacy” of the term sacer ,both sacred and profane, which also figures in the Hebrew term kadosh, which means both “holy” and “separated.”

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1. Morris Berman, Coming to our Senses, 65 ↩︎
2. Ibid., 147. ↩︎