Monkeys
MONKEYS. Monkeys have played a complex and ambiguous role in the religion and folklore of diverse cultures. Although deities in monkey form have occasionally been venerated as psychopomps, tricksters, or intercessors, simians have more commonly been viewed as comical or degenerate simulacra of human beings. Both responses suggest a perception of these animals as challenging boundaries and categories, a theme that in the modern world remains implicit in much visual representation and fictional and scientific narrative. Despite a tendency among premodern authors and artists to be vague and generic about nonhuman primates (a confusion that persists in nontechnical discourse conflating, for example, tailed "monkeys" and tailless "apes"), human responses to simians, especially in regions in which the latter abound, have often been species-specific, reflecting characteristic features or behaviors of particular primate groups.
Perhaps the most widely attested response to anthropoid primates has been the notion that they are degraded or fallen humans, whose bestial status reflects punishment for a transgression. Thus a Jewish legend holds that the men who contrived to place idols atop the tower of Babel were turned by God into apes, and in a Greco-Roman tale a diminutive race of humans who attempted to deceive Hercules were punished by the gods by becoming "tailed ones" (cercopes).
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