From the Mud to the Cosmos

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that the details about different animals also mattered because the post-imperial West was a largely Christian culture that viewed the complexity of the physical world as a kind of key to the logic of God’s creation. The more attentive a person was to the particular features of a certain animal, plant, wind pattern, or planetary cycle, the more that the structure of the cosmic system as a whole would come into focus. Even pigs could speak to hidden secrets about this divine structure.