The Jackal, Fox, and Coyote in Myths, Mythology, and Folklore

Both of these canids are renowned for their cleverness. The sagacity of animals in folklore is often a rationalization of magic, and archaic manuscripts confirm that these animals once appeared as powerful sorcerers. The coyote is a canid of about the same size as the fox and jackal, but it is indigenous to the New World. In a striking instance of the universality of animal symbolism, the coyote has much the same role in Native American lore as that of its cousins in Eurasia. In one of the very earliest literary manuscripts that have come down to us, written in Mesopotamia about the middle of the third millennium, a fox brings back the son of Enlil, god of the air, from the netherworld.

The Sumero-Babylonian god of magic, Enki, was closely associated with a fox. In another cuneiform manuscript, Enki had disobeyed Ninhursag, the great earth mother, and she punished him with the curse of death. The other gods gazed on helplessly as Enki sank into oblivion, when the fox appeared and brought the deity back.

The tale probably originated with a shamanic trance, in which Enki entered the realm of the dead as his body was possessed by a fox. By the second millennium the role of the fox as a trickster was already established in Mesopotamian animal proverbs, which are the ancestors of the fables attributed to the legendary Greek Aesop. A Babylonian tablet known as The Fable of the Fox from around the middle of the second millennium told of a fox, a wolf, and a dog who brought suit against one another before a lion. They accused one another of sorcery, theft, and, most especially, of provoking the gods into sending a terrible drought that threatened to destroy the world. Much of the manuscript is missing, but the fox seemed to carry the day with its cleverness. In the final tablet we learn that rain had come and the fox was entering the temple in triumph. The Egyptian equivalent of this magical fox was the god Anubis, shown with the head of an animal that may be either a dog or a jackal. The jackal’s burrowing instinct may have suggested intimacy with the earth, while its habit of scavenging may have contributed to an association with the dead. Anubis was a psychopomp, who guided the dead to their place of judgment. He would weigh the heart of the deceased against Maat, the spirit of cosmic order, which was often represented by an ostrich feather. If the heart sank on the scales, the deceased would be devoured by demons, but if the heart rose, he or she might join the god Ra and sail across the sky in the boat of the sun. The fox was a trickster in the fables attributed to Aesop in Greco-Roman civilization. It constantly matched wits with other animals, though it was generally obsequious to the lion. The most famous of these tales was known as “The Fox and the Grapes,” and the story could hardly be simpler. Afox looked up at grapes on a trellis. It tried repeatedly to reach them by jumping, but without success. Finally, the fox said, “They are probably sour anyway” and walked away. This anecdote has been told in various eras with different morals. In medieval versions the fox is called wise, while in modern ones he is mocked as foolish. For a trickster, even a frustrated one, wisdom and foolishness are often very close indeed.