Ultimately, all animals carry an enigma which makes them mythological in human eyes. When Oedipus sees the Sphinx, a fabulous beast with the attributes of different animals, he listens to the question she asks him and makes that question his destiny. The confrontation between these two voices, so full of their own difference, has echoed to us through time. Like a disembodied strain of music, the part we can only hear inside our uneasy imagination.

Sometimes, animals offer the closeness of a friendship expressed with the clear words of their eyes. With animals, it is not unusual to find that we are better than we are with men and women. But on other occasions, with animals, human cruelty bears the added infamy of being unleashed on the misunderstood or the defenceless.

From their beginnings on a planet without humans, animals have now arrived in the age of mankind. They come alone in elegant singularity or in the strength of vast numbers, inhabiting a multitude of collective nouns. They advance in packs, bands, shoals, herds, flocks, schools, swarms, troops, caravans and colonies. These marching bands were cinema before the invention of film.

The ages of the Earth are marked by the animals that appear and then vanish as if with the magic of the glaciers. Human culture abounds in animals, as symbols, proxies, allegories and fables. From the wild beasts of Gilgamesh to Spielberg’s dinosaurs and sharks; from the lion of St. Mark and St. Jerome to Ernst Jünger’s butterflies; from the Birds of Aristophanes to those of Hitchcock and Olivier Messiaen; from the goats and deer of Lascaux to the dogs and horses of Velázquez; from the bulls and tigers of Pomar (and also Borges) to the pigs, rabbits, ostriches and dog-women of Paula Rego; from the sheep in Brokeback Mountain to the ape in Tarzan; from the cockerels of Joana Vasconcelos to Miguel Branco’s antelopes; from the wolf of St. Francis of Assisi and Prokofiev to Flaubert’s parrot; from Dürer’s rhinoceros to the lions of Delacroix; from Orwell’s pigs to Walt Disney’s mice; from the serpent in the stories of Adam and Eve and Bergman to Edgar Allan Poe’s raven; from Kobayashi Issa’s cranes to the flogged horse that made Nietzsche faint and to Kafka’s insectomorph; from the cats of Eliot, Doris Lessing, Patricia Highsmith, Vieira da Silva and Cesariny to Yourcenar’s bestiary; from Schubert’s trout to the swans of Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns; from Murnau’s Nosferatu to David Lynch’s Elephant Man – the worlds we have created in art and literature to gaze on our own faces and our myths, secrets, crimes and dreams are inhabited by animals. And you can hear them chirp, neigh, roar, growl, bellow, croak, squawk, quack, whistle, bray, howl and cry.

Animals are found in the genealogies of the gods and the cosmos, in biology and zoology, in narratives and representations, in words and images, in sounds and meanings, and in the shadows and the light. They are found on the peaks and in the abyss, in the heavens and in the underworld, in the air and in the seas, in the soil and in the subsoil, in caves and in houses, in temples and in tombs, on altars and in cribs, in Noah’s arks and in zoos, in aviaries and in slaughterhouses, on flags and on coats of arms.

At the start of a text to which she gave a title drawn from Ecclesiastes – ‘Who knows the spirit of the animal, whether it goes downward to the earth?’ – Marguerite Yourcenar recalls: ‘One of the tales in the Thousand and One Nights tells us that the Earth and the animals trembled on the day that God created Man. The full power of this remarkable poetic vision is clear to us, who know far better than the Arab storyteller of the Middle Ages how right the Earth and the beasts were to tremble.’

One of the key books of the twentieth century – Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss – concludes its journey with the ‘wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat’.

In one of the poems he wrote in his own voice, Fernando Pessoa offers an ontology of the paradoxical privileges of the animal condition over the human condition:

This is one of the most desolate poems in literature: a cry in the desert of Being, a long march on no ground, a confession without absolution, a testamentary witness with no testament. The cat is the object of the poet’s envy, and he makes this envy and the reasons for it the foundation for a work of genius that matches the magnitude of the peril.

Our time looks at animals with a gaze that makes them others and makes us others when we look at them. That is why, in talking about animals, the ‘topic’ for this edition of Electra speaks about a world where both animals and we ourselves are endangered and the cause of danger. It talks about our place and their place in that world. It speaks of the concave mirror in which we look at ourselves, when we look at each other. It speaks of a history replete with alliances, struggles, hunting and abandonment.

This history and its associated lines of thought are inhabited by concepts such as humanism, anti-humanism, animalism, mechanical philosophy, vitalism, ecology, ethology, behaviourism, Buddhism, reason, conscience, guilt, instinct and rights; and by names such as Aristotle, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Buffon, Darwin, Emerson, Freud, Konrad Lorenz, John Berger and Desmond Morris.

These are the days when animals talk – when animals start to talk again! What is the meaning – for anthropology, politics, ethics, sociology, cultural psychology and science – of the emergence of movements to protect or even liberate animals, as one of the great causes of the early twenty-first century? The seventh edition of Electra takes a critical look at these issues. In this age we call our own, we continue on our quest to depict some of the features of the changing and mysterious face of our time.

When acceleration is the only speed setting, the world has made change a presence and an omnipresent present, with no future or past, as if time has reconciled in itself the linear and the circular.

In this edition of Electra, the photographers and publishers José Pedro Cortes and André Príncipe spend a week in Tangier to converse with/interview Hisham Mayet.

The voice of this publisher-director-archaeologist-musical researcher-traveller, born in Libya and a citizen of the world and the worlds he has created over time, conveys the voices he has met over the years (even those of insects in Asia) or that have shattered against him into many pieces. This is voice-as-memory, telling the stories of history and the visions of life. This is a voice that has seen, heard and speaks.

The words spoken by this voice are shot through with images that endow them with a fresh understanding and a fresh conviction. For this reason, they often become word-icons. These words restore the past to the future, in a present that flows like a river in whose water animals quench their thirst, gazing at their reflection without being able to pin it down.

*Translated by Clive Thoms