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Religious aspects
Top: The Greek supreme god Zeus assumed the form of a swan in order to seduce Leda, the queen of Sparta.
(After an ancient Greek sculpture)
Bottom: The sculptures of some ancient Hindu temples displayed all forms of sexual activity.
(Shown here is an example from the Lakshmana Temple, Khajuraho, Central India)
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The myths and folk tales of many cultures contain references to sexual intercourse between human beings and other species of animals, such as bears, wolves, horses, snakes, and crocodiles. The attitudes toward this behavior were not always negative. For example, religions that believed in the “transmigration of souls”, i.e. in the idea that a person can be reborn in another life as an animal, had a quite different attitude than those that saw man as exceptional and without any spiritual connection to the animal world.
In most ancient tales, the animals are objects of sudden human passions, but ancient Greek and Roman writers also tell of some cases in which an animal takes the initiative. For example, in a famous story by Aelian (Claudius Aelianus, 2nd century A.D.), a dolphin falls in love with a boy, courts him and makes him his companion. When the boy dies in an accident, the broken-hearted dolphin loses his will to live. The Greeks also believed that Zeus, their highest god, occasionally assumed the form of an animal in order to win the sexual favors of an otherwise inaccessible human female. Thus, he approached Europa as a bull and Leda as a swan. Greek mythology further tells us that Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete, had intercourse with a bull and then gave birth to the Minotaur, a human monster with a bull's head. Similar tales were told by various preliterate peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. For instance, a certain Eskimo tribe believed that the “white” human race resulted from sexual intercourse between a woman and a dog.
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