NOTES 1 While our predecessors in the field of the history of religions were interested in the roles that animals played in religion, they usually limited animals’ religious significance to the earlier evolutionary stages. In these earlier stages of human cultural development, people believed that animals had souls and that mystical links existed between animals and human beings. | NOTES Introduction 1 While our predecessors in the field of the history of religions were interested in the roles that animals played in religion they usually limited animals religious significance to the earlier evolutionary stages. In these earlier stages of human cultural development people believed that animals had souls and that mystical links existed between animals and human beings. As anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor put it in 1871 Savages talk quite seriously to beasts alive or dead as they would to men alive or dead offer them homage ask pardon when it is their painful duty to hurt and kill them Tylor 1979 . Nearly a hundred years later in his posthumously published work The Meaning of Religion Brede Kristensen the historian of religions pointed out that there are also a large number of sacred animals in Greek Indian Persian and Egyptian religion but nevertheless he emphasized that Animal worship brings us close to a primitive sphere which is far away from us Kristensen 1971 153 . 2 Jean-Pierre Vernant has pointed out for instance basic differences between the sacrificial systems in Greece and India Vernant 1991 . While Vedic religion reinvented the creative sacrifice of the original man Purusha and saw it as contributing to generating sustaining and interconnecting the universe as a totality according to Vernant the Greek sacrifice modelled on Prometheus offering of a bull divided men from gods and animals by establishing rules as to which parts of the animal the gods should eat and which parts humans were allowed to consume. 3 Important contributions to this field include Beard et al. 1998 Brown 1988 1995 Cameron 1994 Engberg-Pedersen 2000 and Williams 1996 . 4 However Achilles does not furnish lions with new characteristics. The target domain of the metaphor does not in this case change the source domain. About metaphors see especially Lakoff and Johnson 1980 1999 . 5 A metaphor evokes a network of cultural associations has a superfluity of meanings
