Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism means giving human traits—like personality, appearance, behavior, thoughts, or speech—to things that aren’t human, especially animals. In stories and folklore, this often shows up as talking animals, trees that speak, food with human qualities, or toys that can think and feel. People tend to do this naturally; it’s built into human psychology. A related idea is personification, a literary device that gives human form or qualities to non-animal things, such as plants, objects, or abstract ideas like nations, emotions, or weather. Both practices go back to ancient times as ways to tell stories and make art, and nearly every culture has traditional fables featuring animals that act like people. Humans have also long attributed human emotions and behaviors to both wild and domesticated animals.

The word “anthropomorphism” comes from the Greek *ánthrōpos* (“human”) and *morphē* (“form”). It was first recorded in 1753, originally used to describe the heresy of picturing the Christian God in human shape.

The oldest known examples of anthropomorphism may be zoomorphic (animal-shaped) artworks from the Upper Paleolithic period, around 40,000 years ago. One of the earliest is the Löwenmensch figurine from Germany—a human-shaped ivory carving with a lion or lioness head, about 32,000 years old. What these pieces meant is unknown. A later example is The Sorcerer, a cave painting in France’s Trois-Frères Cave, often thought to represent a spirit or master of animals, though its true significance is unclear. Archaeologist Steven Mithen has linked such art to the development of more organized hunting. He suggests it reflects a shift in the human mind, where natural history and social thinking became more fluid, letting hunters empathize with prey and predict their movements.

In religion and mythology, anthropomorphism means seeing gods or divine beings in human form or with human qualities. Ancient myths often portrayed deities as human-like in appearance and personality, with behaviors that explained nature, creation, and history. These gods fell in love, married, had children, fought, used weapons, and rode horses. They ate special foods and sometimes demanded offerings of food, drink, or sacred objects. Some represented specific human ideas like love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. They showed human strengths—beauty, wisdom, power—and weaknesses like greed, hatred, jealousy, and rage. Greek gods such as Zeus and Apollo were depicted with both admirable and flawed traits. This specific form is called anthropotheism. For believers who think humans were made in the divine image, the reverse is theomorphism—giving divine qualities to humans. Anthropomorphism was considered a Christian heresy at times, especially in third-century Syria (Audianism), and later in fourth-century Egypt and tenth-century Italy, often based on a literal reading of Genesis: “So God created humankind in his image.” Hindus don’t reject the idea of a formless, abstract deity, but the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 12, Verse 5) notes it’s harder to focus on an unmanifested god than one with form, which is why they use anthropomorphic icons (murtis) that people can perceive with their senses.

Not everyone has accepted anthropomorphic gods. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570–480 BCE) was an early critic, pointing out that people create gods in their own image. He argued that if horses or cattle could paint, they’d depict gods that looked like horses or cattle, and that Ethiopians and Thracians each imagine gods with their own features. He said the greatest god resembles humans “neither in form nor in mind.” Judaism and Islam reject an anthropomorphic deity, holding that God is beyond human understanding. Jewish prophets explicitly denied any likeness of God to humans, and this rejection was reinforced after the Islamic Golden Age in the tenth century, later codified by Maimonides in the twelfth century as part of his thirteen principles of faith. In Ismaili Islam, assigning attributes to God—or denying them—is approached through *via negativa*.