became evident only in her posthumously published autobi-
ography. Eighteen months before her death she manifested
signs of a fatal tubercular condition, and her last months
were plagued by extreme pain and even nagging temptations
against faith. She died at the age of twenty-four, exclaiming,
“My God, I love you.”
During the last years of her life Thérèse wrote her mem-
oirs in three separate sections, mostly at the request of the
convent’s superior. One year after her death the memoirs
were published under the title L’histoire d’une âme (The Story
of a Soul). The simple book, written in epistolary style, is a
candid recounting of her own unfailing love for and confi-
dence in the goodness of God, and it achieved instant and
enormous popularity in translations into many languages. In
the next fifteen years alone more than a million copies were
printed. This worldwide response prompted the Holy See to
waive the usual fifty-year waiting period, and Thérèse was
beatified in 1923 and canonized in 1925. In the bull of can-
onization, Pius XI said that she had achieved sanctity “with-
out going beyond the common order of things.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Of the many English translations of L’histoire d’une âme, perhaps
the most readable is Ronald Knox’s Autobiography of St.
Thérèse of Lisieux (New York, 1958), which is done in Knox’s
usual felicitous style. Other of Thérèse’s writings are con-
tained in Collected Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, edited by
Abbé André Combes and translated by Frank J. Sheed (New
York, 1949). For a short but incisive biography, see John
Beevers’s Storm of Glory (New York, 1950); for a more criti-
cal study, see my book The Search for St. Thérèse (Garden
City, N. Y., 1961).
PETER T. ROHRBACH (1987)
THERIANTHROPISM is a term derived from the
Greek compound of th ̄er (“wild beast”) and anthro ̄pos
(“human”) and is usually used to denote a deity or creature
combining the form or attributes of a human with those of
an animal. As an analytic category, it has little salience, since
scholars have variously included under its rubric not only an-
imal-headed gods, were-animals, mythological demihumans
and monsters (such as centaurs, sphinxes, and minotaurs)
but also examples of animal impersonation in rituals, spirit
possessions by animals, mythological beings of animal aspect
but human character (such as the North American Indian
figure Coyote), and anthropomorphic gods (such as Zeus
and Dionysos) who sometimes transform themselves into an-
imals. Ideas about the supernatural linkage of humans and
animals are probably universal—even in cultures with an-
thropomorphic monotheism, there are ideas of were-
animals, therianthropic demons, and the possession of
human souls by animals. Visual or literary images of ther-
ianthropic beings can be found in virtually all of the world’s
cultures, where they contrast with and complement represen-
tations of other forms of supernatural beings.
HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS. Discussions of ther-
ianthropy were most prevalent during the nineteenth centu-
ry, when the idea of a part human, part animal deity was seen
as a critical development stage in human history, midway be-
tween the totemic identification of hunter and prey that was
supposed to characterize savage religions and the anthropo-
morphic deities of civilization. The occurrence of ther-
ianthropic deities was interpreted either as a survival of sav-
age ideas in later religions or as the result of a historical
diffusion of these more advanced representations of the di-
vine from their Egyptian/Mesopotamian point of origin.
The fact that most therianthropic figures known at that time
came from the civilizations of the Middle East, where most
of the archaeological research was being conducted, and that
these civilizations were seen as midpoints between savagery
and civilization gave added weight to the idea that ther-
ianthropy was a partial progress toward a rational, anthropo-
morphic religion. (Interestingly, Plato uses an account—one
that is probably spurious—of a rural Arcadian cult of lycan-
thropy to contrast with the rational religions of urban
Athens.)
CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS. The categorical dis-
tinctions between primitive and civilized mentalities that
provided the rationale for developmentalist interpretations
of religious history have not been supported by anthropolog-
ical research, and most contemporary interpretations of ther-
ianthropic symbolism take a semiotic approach to the sub-
ject. Animals are seen as emblems of principles, as vehicles
for symbolically expressing existential truths about the
human condition. Therianthropic images juxtapose two
principles in a unified being. Thus, it is not the animality
of the image that is important but its duality, its ambiguity,
its nature as a dialectic category that simultaneously contrasts
and synthesizes two opposing metaphorical principles—
images of noncontiguous categories made continuous (cul-
ture-nature, wild-domesticated, rational-emotional, inde-
pendent-submissive, etc.). Therianthropic images, given
their nature as a category of representation betwixt and be-
tween other categories, as a category whose elements are nei-
ther separate nor unified, are frequently associated with ritu-
als of transition and liminality (as in initiation rites and
carnivals) or with the intermediate stages of creation, when
the world is in neither its primal nor its finished state.
Only as the psychology of religion and the theory of
symbolism permit the development of new modes of under-
standing can we hope to deal with the historical and theolog-
ical questions that are posed by differentiating therianthropic
images of the divine from those that are theriomorphic or
anthropomorphic. All three kinds of images may exist simul-
taneously in the psychologies, if not the artistic representa-
tions, of the world’s peoples. Therianthropic ideas simulta-
neously differentiate and synthesize the qualities that define
humanness with those that define the nonhuman other, and
they may not represent significantly different, historically
traceable, understandings of the nature of divinity so muchTHERIANTHROPISM 9155