The term ‘Coats of Skins’ — drawn from Genesis 3:21, wherein God clothes Adam and Eve after the Fall — receives sustained though largely oblique treatment across the depth-psychology corpus. The central interpretive tension concerns what the assumption of animal skins signifies ontologically: is the skin a veil concealing a prior luminous nature, a necessary vessel enabling embodied existence, or a symbol of the soul’s entanglement with instinctual, mortal life? Gregory of Nyssa reads the expulsion narrative as marking the entry of infirmity, aging, and affliction into a nature originally divine — the skin thus figures the entire somatic inheritance of fallen humanity. Von Franz, working through the fairy-tale tradition, treats animal skins worn by unredeemed figures as the psyche’s neurotic disguise, protective shells that must be washed away before positive unconscious contents become available. Eliade illuminates a shamanic parallel in which the donning of animal costume accomplishes ritual transformation — one literally becomes what one wears. Esthés, reading the ‘soulskin’ motif in seal-woman lore, interprets the pelt as the wild essential nature that can be lost through exhaustion or improper love. Taken together, these voices converge on the skin as a threshold symbol: at once exile and protection, instinctual inheritance and potential resurrection garment.
Skins of animals and of trolls are evidence of an unredeemed nature. In alchemy the anima may wear dirty clothes and, in alchemical parlance, be ‘the dove hidden in the lead.’
Von Franz reads animal skins as symbols of psychic contents still imprisoned in an unredeemed, instinctual state, directly paralleling the alchemical motif of the hidden soul awaiting liberation.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
one becomes what one displays. The wearers of masks are really the mythical ancestors portrayed by their masks.
Eliade articulates the shamanic principle that wearing an animal skin or costume effects genuine ontological transformation, providing a ritual-anthropological analogue to the theological concept of the coats of skins as identity-altering garment.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
man was a thing divine before his humanity got within reach of the assault of evil; that then, however, with the inroad of evil, all these afflictions also broke in upon him.
Gregory of Nyssa frames the coats of skins as the somatic wrapper of fallen existence, the ensemble of infirmities and mortality that clothed humanity only after the entry of evil.
, On the Soul and the Resurrection, 2016thesis
it is being overdrawn that causes the loss of the skin, and the paling and dulling of one’s most acute instincts.
Esthés frames the soulskin as the wild instinctual nature that, like Adam and Eve’s garment, can be taken away, with its loss marking psychic death and disconnection from essential selfhood.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
All this secreting away of a woman’s natural pelt and her subsequent drying out and crippling reminds me of an old story that circulated in our family among the several old country tailors.
Esthés extends the coats-of-skins motif into a feminist depth-psychological register, reading the suppression of a woman’s ‘natural pelt’ as a culturally enforced Fall from instinctual wholeness.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
the Tungus shaman’s costume represents a stag, whose skeleton is suggested by pieces of iron. Its horns are also of iron.
Eliade’s documentation of shamanic costumes that replicate animal anatomy provides comparative ethnographic grounding for the symbolic logic underlying the biblical coats of skins as transformative second nature.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
various figures of snakes, and game skins, are fastened. This is called dalabci (‘wing’) or azber (‘fin,’ also ‘wing’).
The incorporation of game skins directly onto the shaman’s ritual coat establishes a cross-cultural parallel to the Genesis motif in which animal covering mediates between human and non-human realms.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
he wore an hair shirt, stiff and rough, from his loins to his knees, and over his shoulders there hung a coat of like sort.
The ascetic’s hair shirt in the Barlaam and Ioasaph narrative echoes the post-lapsarian coats of skins, here redeployed as voluntary mortification, transforming the symbol of punishment into an instrument of spiritual discipline.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
the bird costume is indispensable to flight to the other world: ‘They say that it is easier to go, when the costume is light.’
Eliade’s observation that lighter animal costumes facilitate shamanic otherworld travel implies a spectrum of skin-coverings calibrated to degrees of spiritual accessibility, tangentially illuminating the Genesis garment’s function as earthly encumbrance.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside
the worship of animals, the sense of their divinity, is a falling from God, a worship of the organic and corruptible and the mortal rather than the immortal; the creature rather than the Creator.
Hillman, summarizing Augustine on theriomorphic worship, articulates the theological polarity between spirit and animal nature that underlies the symbolic resonance of the divine bestowal of skins upon fallen humanity.
, Animal Presences, 2008aside