The White Deer: Ecospirituality & the Mythic with Melinda Reidinger

The motif of the white deer has haunted our arts and culture for millennia; however, until my book The White Deer: Ecospirituality & the Mythic was published earlier this year, it had not been subjected to comprehensive investigation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, this  lecture will focus on what it means when these animals appear – both as living beings and as omens and mythic beings in our cultural representations – and what we might understand from encounters with them. 

When the white deer appears, it reminds us that we have confined ourselves inside stories that are too limiting and that we are over-taxing our ecosystem. This can be observed at the level of deer population genetics: for instance, roads, walls, and settlements can block gene flows, causing related animals to breed and express their recessive genes (e.g. leucism). Turning to the narrative and mythopoetic, traditional tales about white deer have…