A Storm in the Head - Animals Dreams and Desire

Abstract

This article analyses the long history of the “storm in the head” as a recognisable image-constellation in art, mythology, dreams, and folk-culture. Some very old components – hybrid animal imagery, a set of mediations on the mystic identity between man and beast, and a rhetoric of commotion associated with ecstatic ritual – were drawn together around the evolving identity of the heroic warrior at some point in the Bronze Age. They can subsequently be seen in dream representation and North European folk-culture, briefly moving to centre stage in Renaissance Neo-Platonic art and thought.The constellation expresses itself in many ways: in myths of the warrior’s animal alter ego (shape-shifting), in the emotional “climax” of war and its symbolism, in the configuration of hostile dreams, in conventions for describing dreams, in the phenomena of panic. While it exhibits marked elasticity, tenacity and longevity as a cultural package, over many generations, the meaning of the constellation was effectively altered by rearranging its component elements, so the “storm” came to be understood in psychological rather than supernatural terms.

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