How did you become concerned about animal rights? And how would you describe how they matter to you now?

I have lived on a houseboat in Seattle since 2014. Every spring, I take delight in the ducklings. I love them and want them to be safe. In 2019, I was eating a chicken’s wing while admiring baby ducks. It hit me that there’s no difference between these ducklings I love and this chicken I’m eating. Why care so much for the well-being of the ducklings yet be indifferently violent toward the chickens? I went pescatarian, vegetarian, veganish, vegan in diet, and, eventually, fully vegan.

In January 2023, I read my first book about animal rights. It was Henry Stephens Salt’s 1892 Animals’ Rights. I was inspired to learn about historical fights for animal rights. From the bibliographic appendix in Salt’s book, I learned about Thomas Taylor’s 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Taylor’s Vindication is a parody of Mary Wollstonecraft’s trailblazing A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man).

Taylor attempts a reductio ad absurdum of Wollstonecraft’s feminism by “advocating” for the Rights of animals. He even cites his own translations of Porphyry’s treatise on Vegetarianism (3rd century CE) and Plutarch’s writings on animal intelligence (1st century CE). See also Plutarch’s On the Eating of Flesh.

This mockery of women by way of animals was my first insight into the intertwined oppressions of non-humans and humans.

Then, in Egypt in September 2023, I had my inspiration to write Lament of Hathor when I saw a wall carving depicting this ancient Egyptian cow goddess nursing the pharaoh Hatshepsut at her temple (see Question 2 below).

While writing, I learned about more variations of animal rights going back millennia, from Sumerian legal codes to the Torah, from the Laws of Manu to the Edicts of Ashoka. And ancient Egyptian post-mortem judgments against harming certain animals.

With the passage of time, I came to understand that rights are not enough. After all, in the present day, some animals in some places do have some rights. Yet, these rights are diminished by loopholes, exceptions, and omissions. Rights can be unenforced or revoked overnight. Despite rights, most animals are still oppressed. The same is true for humans and the environment.

So, rights, like welfare reforms, while good and necessary as part of institutional and legal changes, are insufficient, whether for humans, animals, or the environment. We must champion not just rights and more rights (or welfare and more welfare), but liberation. Liberation for the animals, for humans, and for the environment.

Their oppressions have been intertwined since at least the post-Ice Age Agricultural Revolution and the rise of patriarchal civilizations built and grown on exploitation, violence, and imperialism. So must the resistance be intertwined. Will we achieve Liberation? For everyone everywhere forever? I don’t think so. Not Now. Not In One Generation. Not In Our Lifetime. Not in thousands or tens of thousands of years. Even if achieved, liberation would require constant defense. Lament of Hathor is one of my contributions to that ancient fight.

When did your interest begin in ancient Egyptian civilisations? What prompted you to link it and animal rights? Is this why you wrote and published Lament of Hathor? What are you seeking to accomplish with the book?

I was into ancient Egypt as a kid. My earliest memory of Egypt is my grandmother giving me and my brother the VHS of Sesame Street’s Don’t Eat the Pictures, filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But I really returned to Egypt in university around 2005. I took a course on early Christian monasticism and was fascinated by ascetics who left places like Alexandria for the desert, for example, Anthony, Evagrius, Syncletica, Melania the Elder, Pachomius, and Moses the Black (3rd & 4th centuries CE). Around 2021, I became interested in Egyptian Islamic Sufi mystic poets like Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari and Ibn al-Fāriḍ (circa 7th c. AH / 13th c. CE).

In autumn 2023, my parents invited me on a trip to Egypt. On the second day, we crossed the Nile from Luxor to the west side and started at the temple of Hatshepsut, one of the female pharaohs. She had a massive mortuary temple complex in this area. The sun setting in the west is a common symbol of death and the afterlife.

Walking around, I suddenly saw a carving on one of the walls: the goddess Hathor in cow form nursing Hatshepsut as a small person. I knew Hathor, a cow goddess, symbolised motherly love among other things.

It hit me immediately in the heart. People looked at all the animals and asked

Which one is a great mother that we can have as a symbol for motherhood?

They saw the cow with her calf and chose her. Yet the way we (and the ancients) treat actual cows and their calves is horrendous…within the dairy, meat, leather, rodeo, transport, and other industries.

That contradiction, hypocrisy, and symbolic use of power all hit me at once. I called my mother over and told her what I felt. How they revered the cow as the perfect mother, while we tear calves from their mothers in dairy farms. We stood together and got a picture. I knew something was happening, though I didn’t fully understand it at the time.

Once I got back, it stayed in my mind. I couldn’t stop feeling it. That feeling birthed my book and mission:

1. To awaken people to the cognitive dissonances that suppress their views about animals.
2. To show how the same systems that exploit animals have exploited humans and the environment for millennia. And, relatedly, to (a) help bring animal activism into broader social justice advocacy and (b) show animal-only activists the intertwined contexts of oppression and liberation.
3. To demonstrate ancient lineages of animal activism. I want to uplift the voices of people across millennia who advocated for animals. To honor them and inspire future activists.
4. To use the book to support the movement, giving it to sanctuaries and grassroots groups to use in fundraising so that the book materially serves the movements, not just philosophically or artistically.

What can the reader expect to learn from reading the Lament of Hathor? How is it relevant to vegan, animal rights advocacy?

Here’s what a reader says:

The book has a clear message of advocacy for animals without ever feeling trite, saccharine, or ham-fisted. It is eloquent, beautiful, poetic, thought-provoking, and haunting. This book is intense and otherworldly; it truly accomplished a sense of traveling to another realm out of time and space as we know it.

Even the cover of the book tells the story. It features the circa 2,000 BCE sarcophagus of Queen Kawit, Priestess of Hathor and King’s Beloved Wife of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II. The engraving shows a mother cow crying. Her male calf is tied away from her milk, which a human takes from her. This is emblematic of present-day dairy practices that have been taken to further extremes.

On other funerary objects, Queen Kawit, Priestess of Hathor, is shown giving and receiving slaughtered cows, ducks, and other animal offerings.

Lament of Hathor illustrates how animal exploitation has been inextricably linked to and fed the growth of patriarchal imperialist civilisations, from reproductive systems to precious minerals; from grazing lands to the instruments of war.

We see Pharaoh Seti I capture people and cattle as spoils of war. He forces the conquered chiefs of Lebanon to chop down their famed cedar trees as tribute. On his temple wall, he depicts himself and his son Rameses II capturing a bull. He proclaims himself “a young bull, stout-hearted and sharp-horned, who cannot be subdued.”

We see horses and men dying in battle. We see donkeys suffering under the weights of war supplies and mined wealth. Like the laborers whose backs break in the mines alongside them. And all the while, there’s a Temple of Hathor at the mining camp. Even in the ancient Egyptian afterlife, the peasants and cows are forced to plow fields for the elites.

But Egypt was not unique in these systems and symbols of exploitation. In her lament, Hathor summons other cow deities whose mythologies reveal similar stories across cultures and time. The Zoroastrian Soul of the Cow lamented to the deity Ahura Mazda about human cruelty and called for a savior. The Hindu cow goddess Kamadhenu lamented to the deity Indra about plowmen beating her bovine sons. Hathor learns that Gilgamesh killed the Mesopotamian Bull of Heaven. And Mycenaean cultural imperialists killed the Minoan Bull and Minotaur.

She is joined by people who advocate for the animals. These include the Hebrew prophets Amos, Micah, and Zechariah and the Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka. Ashoka sent his stone edicts concerning animal and human rights to his subjects and neighbors, including Egypt, in the mid-3rd century BCE.

This is all strategically important for the activist for three reasons:

1. To understand how the historical roots and present-day forms of oppression ensnare humans, animals, and the environment.
2. To see that there have been people who resisted and advocated on behalf of animals across cultures as far back as we know.
3. To find inspiration and comfort within an ancient lineage of those who saw how the animals were being treated and fought back.

Lament of Hathor incorporates many ancient texts within the story. How and why do you utilize these works?

It is common within mythological and scriptural genres and oral traditions to incorporate pre-existing works. This puts later reformers and commentators in dialogue with their peers, and the people, societies, and cultures that predate them.

In Lament of Hathor, I do this for several reasons. First, to honor, uplift, and share our ancestral animal advocates’ words in their own voices to their times and ours. Hathor quotes a 12th-century BCE papyrus: “Give your attention to the chariot donkeys and to the men who are in the field as well.” One of Hathor’s priestesses quotes the Book of the Dead Papyrus of Nu directly: “That which is held in abomination to me is the block of slaughter of the god.” This mirrors the Hebrew prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah, who speak on behalf of the god Yahweh to direct people not to kill animals as offerings. I hope to share these antecedents with contemporary and future readers.

Second, to subvert ancient texts and call out the ethical hypocrisies that existed then and now. The critic-reformer holds up a mirror to their times. By taking actual ancient source texts and subverting them, Hathor demonstrates incongruities in people’s treatment of some animals versus others, as well as of some animals and some humans. For example, the ancient Egyptian Negative Confessions is part of the afterlife judgment process. One must deny having done 42 prohibited things to continue towards an eternal rebirth in a heavenly setting. These include: “I have not taken milk from the mouths of children.” The Egyptian wisdom literature The Instructions of ‘Onchsheshonqy similarly admonishes: “Do not give your son to the wet nurse and so cause her to set aside her own.” Hathor points out that, like the human wetnurse whose children one should not deprive of milk, the starved and slaughtered calves should also be considered.

Third, to situate the work within ancient pasts. By using ancient texts, I hope to give the work the feeling of being an ancient document that might have been written back then. For example, Hathor cries out to the gods who have abandoned her, using their own lamentations. She echoes Isis’s cry to her murdered husband and brother, Osiris, “I call to you, weeping to the height of heaven! But you do not hear my voice” (from Plutarch’s The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys).

I hope that all of this leads to a work that would have fit in alongside other historical mythologies during ancient times. And that it speaks to people now and in the future, using durable mythological symbols and sources. What if such a document existed? We would be so excited to see this work of advocacy. Through the quilt-like nature of the book, I show that such advocacy did exist and create something that could have.

What are your hopes and fears for the future, including our relationship with animals and the Earth? What would you like to see accomplished in the short- and long-term?

The lamentation is one of the oldest forms of oral and written literature within Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant (and myriad forms globally). It is a raw, inconsolable expression of grief and rage at the destruction of a city-state, society, or the deaths or disappearances of loved ones or deities. In this sense, the book is fundamentally a Lament. Yet it also contains a message of fighting on despite despair. Whether we can win or have hope, we can fight anyway.

As some among us have always fought and some who succeed us will continue to fight. For those alive and dying today, those to come, and those who fought and suffered before us. I have hope when I wake up every day and see thousands of people around the world passionately advocating for the animals. Whether it is at their tables, in the streets, in the classrooms, in the legislatures and courtrooms, at sanctuaries, or in prisons.

Our economic-political systems are making the planet uninhabitable, including species extinction, ecosystem annihilation, interspecies climate refugees, and offensive wars. And so, ultimately, I despair. Despair can destroy us. Hope can delude us. But we can have both. Despite the woes and resignation, we can and must fight anyway as long as possible. In the community. At home and across the world. Now. And with a view toward eternity. Community and history can give us hope. Not that we will ultimately win, but that we are not alone in resistance. Though we’re outnumbered, countless people fought before us against even greater odds.

How can we give up when they fought with even less hope? For every heart we can touch, every animal we can rescue, every law we can pass, every community, every child, every field, every sea, and every sky. To increase our impact for animals in the short- and long-term, I believe we must continue to bring animal rights and liberation into the scope of other human and ecological justice causes and movements.

This reflects a historical pattern. Slavery abolitionism, black and women’s suffrage, and socialism were often common causes alongside anti-vivisection and animal rights among advocates of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and earlier. I hope to see a growing consciousness of how animal exploitation is fundamentally baked into the systems and institutions of oppression that so many are vocally opposed to. This will put advocates for animals into formal and informal positions of social, economic, and political influence in governments, institutions, and communities. And outside and beyond them.

I’m really grateful for your time to be here and discuss your work with us. It’s clear that you put a lot of research into it, and you were personally present in many of the locations where the story originated. I’m curious what led you to this topic and how your interest initially blossomed.

Thank you for having me. This is wonderful. Having spent so much time to then be able to share it with people and have them interested…it’s incredible.

So yeah, my parents told me they were going to go on a trip to Egypt with my mom’s cousin who’s a travel guy. And they asked me if I wanted to come. I’d always been intrigued by Egypt and it seemed like a great opportunity to spend time with my parents.

So I went on the trip and the second day we were–we had started off in Luxor where Karnak Temple is, which is a massive temple complex and it was one of the main seats of power for much of ancient Egyptian history. And in the morning we went over to the west side of the area across the river and started off at the temple of Hatshepsut.

She was one of the female pharaohs. And she had a massive temple/funerary cult complex in this area west of the main city. The sun sets in the west…it’s a common symbol of death and the afterlife in many cultures. So, her temple’s over there. I didn’t know much about her at all at that point, just a little bit.

But we were walking around and suddenly I saw this carving on one of the walls and it was the goddess Hathor nursing Hatshepsut as a small person. And I knew Hathor was a cow goddess…a symbol of motherly love among other things.

And it just hit me immediately like people looked around at all the animals and were like, “Which one is a great mother that we can have be a symbol for motherhood?” And they saw the cow with her calf and they chose that.

And yet the way that we treat actual cows and their calves is horrendous. Within the dairy industries as well as of course all the others.

So that contradiction and hypocrisy and symbolic use for power just all hit me at once and I was like, “What’s going on?”

So I called my mother over and we stood in front of it and I got a picture. I knew something was going on. I didn’t fully understand it at the time.

And then once I got back from the trip, it just stayed in my mind. I couldn’t stop feeling it. And yeah, that’s how it started.

Did you have the kind of knowledge that you do at this time?

I was very surface level. Like, I didn’t even know what a cartouche was, which is how they write the royal names within the oval. I was very basic. I had done some research, but very very basic. So while I was there and when I came back went down the rabbit hole.

Were there percolating themes going through your mind before…I know you mentioned the aspect of the motherly maternal care kind of thing. Were there ideas around these things percolating in your mind before when it comes to animals and animal rights?

A couple years earlier I was at a park out here in Seattle and I for some reason was thinking about people egging houses and how would a hen feel if she knew that she was undergoing all this suffering…not even having her eggs being used to nourish people, but just thrown in jest. Like how devastating that might feel to a hen. So that was a few years earlier. I had thought from the perspective of a mother animal about how the exploitation was happening.

That’s awesome. I mean, not that that had to dawn upon you, but you know that you made that connection. I think there’s a strong aspect of Hathor from what I can gather from the book that has to do with this kind of overseeing care, you know, care over all of the inhabitants of the earth in a way. Is there a particular aspect of Hathor that you identify with the most?

Yeah, there’s a couple things. For one, my mother’s maiden name is Baca and she’s from New Mexico and would be teased as a child like “Baca Vaca” [“vaca” means cow] like how women are called cows and that’s derogatory. And I was named with just my father’s last name. But in the course of writing the book, I realized, if I’m looking at misogyny and patriarchy and whatnot, why not bring my mother’s name in and with the cow connection. So, there’s that. And I’m a Taurus, which is the bull.

But then for Hathor’s more specific symbolism…so, she has this motherly nature and she also has aspects of music and dance and ecstatic drunkenness and the sound of performances within the temples where it would just become a racket. And people were dancing. And another maternal cow goddess, Mut, has this one ritual where people show up at the temple and they all get wasted and then they’re woken up in the middle of the night and someone’s pounding on drums and it takes you sort of transcendent psychedelic state in which you’re participating with the gods. And I’m a musician myself and a lot of what I make is very cacophonous and overwhelming in order to oversaturate the mind and then empty it in kind of a mystical way. So, I definitely relate to that part of her and her cult where people were getting down.

I noticed in reading the book that this kind of oversaturation that you described was very much present within the text of the book. I would say like in terms of the density…it’s something that you just to be really forthright, I really struggled with being able to parse the different proper nouns like historical figures or positional orientations of different entities or stories. I found myself having to go back and say, “Wait, is this the same person or same entity?” Reading the first half of the book especially, felt much more dense. And then I noticed upon finishing it, the second half seemed to flow a lot more with the ideas of veganism specifically coming through. Was it a little bit reflective of this dynamic which you’re seeking to engender within the person’s psyche of this kind of density filling the positive node or fuller polarity and then the emptying? Am I interpreting this correctly? Do you think that there is that kind of an aspect to the book?

Yeah, there is. It’s trying to really bring you into some other world of time and space in which, it’s crossing thousands of years and trying to get you into this zone where you feel like you’re transported there.

And with the the density and the overwhelming…like in the lists of the animals that show up and the the deities that are invited in…that I was really inspired by the Lotus Sutra, a Buddhist text and some other mythologies where they there are these sort of endless lists of people who are summoned or animals.

A big inspiration is this work from 10th century CE (340s AH) Basra, Iraq. There’s this group called The Brethren of Purity and they created this encyclopedia and they were studying all sorts of knowledge. But the longest piece within it is called The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of the Jinn. And in this the animals basically take the humans to court and there’s again these very extensive lists…it gets kind of monotonous even of all these different animals and the different points that they’re making.

And so I was definitely paying homage to and referencing especially those two works in the overwhelming lists. You know, you can picture maybe within a temple where there’s the layers and layers and layers of Buddhas or that kind of thing.

Thank you for elucidating that. That’s something that again to be really forthcoming I was just letting some fellow readers know. I was like “man, I am overwhelmed with this book to the point where I feel like my comprehension is really not hitting the bar that it normally does.” But I think it’s important to remember when going into this that this is really very much a historical work with all the footnotes clarifying what the previous thing you just read is about. Would you say when writing this were you surprised by the amount of research that it required? Or was there another aspect of the writing process that was not what you expected?

On the footnotes and the overwhelmingness, I do hope that one could read it without glancing at the footnotes and still follow through what’s going on. And that those will enrich or send people onto other paths. And same with the overwhelmingness is if you do glaze over a little and kind of skip through, I hope that the reader is able to still follow it. I also use the imagery to try to tell the story visually.

But as far as the research…it was just one thing leads to another. Every time I went further I realized how much less I actually understood. And then I saw more and more connections within the themes of the intertwined oppressions and the ancient lineage of exploitation and resistance.

And the most shocking thing was discovering that there were and are cow goddess laments within other traditions.

I was sitting down to write a cow goddess lament and then I found within Zoroastrianism and Hinduism there are cow goddess laments from thousands of years ago.

And so then I was like, “Oh my, I’m sitting within this tradition and feeling a connection to the people that were writing and reading and listening to those works as well as the animals that were around back then. And the people that were also being exploited by these systems of power.”

And just feeling this through-line in history and prehistory in which people understood how the animals were being treated and that it was wrong and they were advocating…even the people who aren’t recorded.

I want to also touch on with the you know notion of humans also being exploited throughout history. I know that with Hathor (or this or that being or entity), this name is also, if I understand correctly, imposed upon this entity, right? Originally it was Het-heru, is that correct?

As I was in there, I was realizing that a lot of the names that we know some of these gods and goddesses and places by are actually Graeco-Roman. And these were occupying imperialist colonialist powers that took over Egypt and used it as a source of food and labor and granted lands to armies in order to keep them happy.

And so I understood that if I was about justice in doing this, I needed to be using the indigenous names. And so even places that are described that are outside of the bounds of what we might think of as ancient Egypt. I tried to use the names that the ancient Egyptians themselves used for them.

So that was kind of tricky to think about…like, should I use the Canaanite name for a place or should I use the name that the Egyptians would use for it?

With the frame narrator being this Egyptian priestess, I decided I would stick with how she would have referred to these places. And you learn a lot in the process, like Herakleopolis, which is Greek for Herakles and Hercules, who exploited cows.

As I started peeling back these Graeco-Roman names and going into the Egyptian ones, there were all these things where there was meaning within the Egyptian words that helped give a richer understanding of why these places had their names.

That’s really admirable that you went into so much depth with your research. Do you have a continued interest in learning more about Egyptology today? Like, if I can ask kind of a personal question, is this something that has become somewhat incorporated in your own spiritual identity or belief system?

I guess personally my spirituality or belief system for what it is draws on many different traditions and kind of always has. I’m not exactly a believer in anything but find spirituality and meaning in many different traditions. My earliest real obsession with Egypt was actually learning about the early monks of early Christianity who were leaving Alexandria and going out to the desert in solitude and then forming communities and stuff like that. And then I eventually started getting into some Egyptian Sufist poetry from Islam. And so yeah, part of me for decades has been drawn to Egypt throughout the ages.

And having done this work now, I feel very much that I have and can experience divinity or sacredness or transcendence through engaging with these deities and objects and practices and places.

Would you say that it was one of your motivations for writing this book to have the reader experience divinity…this version of divinity if that makes sense? Do you hope that people walk away and think, “Wow! Logically, I need to stop exploiting animals and wearing them and and you know eating them etc” or did you more hope that people have this more dare I say Egypt flavored divine experience and maybe some kind of a communion or something?

I guess there’s two sides to it.

One…I see the power of myth in history and scriptures, etc, and how those can be repurposed and have been repurposed over time. And that perhaps this might serve some people as a kind of myth or scripture that they can feel a connection to in their ethics.

And the book also goes not just into Egypt but into many other religions of the time as well as that are still active today. And showing their connections to advocating for animals. And so I’m hoping as well that there’s an ecumenical thing where people would see that there are many different traditions in which this is a thing and that if we can bring them into the room together maybe there’s something that is meaningful in that.

On the other side is wanting people who do follow some of the religions interacted with in the book that they will be reminded or learn sometimes even aspects of their own faith that do include a history of advocating for animals.

Like, I was raised Roman Catholic and I didn’t know so much that I learned through the course of this book. For example, that the covenant after the flood was made not just with the humans but with the animals as well and that that was when people were starting to be allowed to eat animals.

And so many of the laws (like in Deuteronomy about taking care of the animals) nobody taught us that growing up. And so hopefully it’s enriching for people who do have one of these religions themselves.

I think that’s really considerate of you and kind of also like you know laudable to want to speak to people in their own language and metaphorically speaking of course. So, I want to again thank you for interacting with these questions.

Elise Myslinski’s questions are in bold. Lightly edited for readability.

Elise: Hi Sam, thanks so much for being here. Before we get into the book, can you first tell listeners a little bit about yourself?

Samuel: Thank you. I live in Seattle. I’m involved locally with a lot of animal liberation and vegan organizing, as well as work related to Palestine, immigration, and other things. I grew up in Maryland, and moved to Chicago when I was 18 for university. I studied philosophy and got involved with the DIY underground noise and punk music scenes, where I learned about doing things yourself, building communities, and just making things happen…which has informed a lot of my writing.

I moved to Seattle in 2013 and onto a houseboat. I wasn’t vegan at all. Every year there would be ducklings, and I’d love them and want them safe. Finally, after a few years, I was eating a chicken’s wing while watching the baby ducks and thought, this is kind of a contradiction. That was an early formative experience.

I don’t think it was just one thing that pushed me in this direction. Learning about animal grief was part of it. Grief has played a large role in my life, and learning about the various ways animals grieve (together in community, independently, through ritual and wailing) showed me their inner worlds in a way that resonated. Early in COVID, I saw news articles about chicks dying in the U.S. postal system, and I thought, wait, what? We mail chicks? I had no idea. That made me look a little deeper at what was going on.

It happened over time. I went through periods of being pescatarian or vegetarian, or eating food that would have been thrown away otherwise, before eventually going vegan in diet…and then realizing there were all these other ways I was exploiting animals beyond my diet, and becoming more fully vegan.

Elise: That’s such an interesting story. It’s always amazing…even now, I’ve been vegan over a decade, but I’m still amazed by all the different ways we’ve used animals. You learn things for the first time and think, how could we do this? Also, you say you’re into punk music…would you consider yourself straight edge?

Samuel: I don’t drink or do drugs presently, and don’t really plan on it, but I don’t think I’m straight edge philosophically.

Elise: Okay. I just thought that was interesting, since punk has such a rich history of animal advocacy.

Samuel: It’s interesting. Coming up in punk and noise spaces, I didn’t really encounter many animal liberation people…I wish I had. It was honestly a lot more nihilistic. These days I still go to shows, and now I bring zines I’ve made, or leave books, or wear this Merzbow t-shirt (he’s a noise artist) that has an animal liberation graphic in the Crass font. So I do the part now that I wish others had been doing in the noise scenes I was in back then.

Elise: Right. That leads into another question…your presence on social media. You’re very active in ways I think I never could be, because I hate social media, but you’re very creative in how you find ways to promote your book and do general animal advocacy. Do you have any advice for other self-published authors, or animal activists in general, for improving their social media game?

Samuel: It comes down to who you are personally, what you’re trying to do, and where you feel comfortable. Even with resources…I leave books in Little Free Libraries, and that’s not free for me; it has a cost. Personally, I was already using Instagram on my personal page earlier in life. Once I started the book, I was running both accounts and it was too much, so I just don’t use my personal account anymore. I already felt familiar there.

It’s evolved a lot over the last nine months. I’ve gotten more creative and started sharing a lot more that isn’t strictly relevant to the book. I’ve found it works to treat it as a community space, where I’m meeting amazing people all around the world and talking with them in chats more than I talk to my parents or friends. It’s genuinely fun to be part of these communities…and not to approach it as hustling a book, but as engaging in the conversation and sharing my thoughts.

People have compared it to going to a party: you don’t show up waving your book around saying “buy my book.” You talk to people individually and get to know them, and if it’s natural to bring it up, maybe you do. You might learn something about a person and say, “you should talk to this other person,” or “you might like this.” Treat it like a community rather than a billboard.

I’ve also found people who talk about social media outside the literary or animal spaces inspiring. There’s a makeup artist, Kayleigh (her YouTube channel is By Kayleigh) who claims to make content for other makeup artists, but most of it is generally applicable and very insightful. There’s a podcast called the Manager’s Playbook, run by Mauricio Ruiz, a hip-hop artist manager who has other managers and independent artists on, and they talk about social media as well as real-world, in-person marketing.

When I was starting out, I looked into how to market a book or be an author on social media. There are all these playbooks about how to do a book launch, but honestly, I had five followers, so what’s the point? It’s hard, and some people feel more comfortable with it than others. If you’re more comfortable with written work, maybe do Substack; if you’re more comfortable with short-form, maybe TikTok. And you can always cross-post. Can I curse?

Elise: Oh, yeah.

Samuel: I’ll post some slides on Instagram, and then rather than fully making it into a TikTok or YouTube Live, I’ll just turn it into a video (there’s a shitty version on YouTube Shorts and a shitty version on TikTok, and I’ll put it on Reddit) without spending all that time. People recommend that if one platform is your focus, spend your time there. You can always do the others; I’ll just share crappy versions of what I’ve already made, and it’s out there.

Elise: It obviously seems to be working for you, from my perspective at least. I really like what you said about making it a community space, because we’re in need of that…as activists we’re spread all over the place, and it’s good to connect with people in a more personal way, even if it’s just online.

Samuel: It’s been incredible. I’ve met people, had conversations, and shared the book in ways that have already made it more than worth anything I could have hoped to get out of it.

Elise: Have you always been interested in writing? How did publishing a book converge with the veganism…which came first, and how did it come about, you wanting to write a book?

Samuel: In my late teens and early twenties, as I was finding my place in the world through underground music, philosophy, and literature, I felt a connection to these authors and musicians who were expressing my own thoughts in a profound way. Seeing the historical dialogue across centuries and millennia was enthralling. I kind of knew I had that drive toward authorship in me, but I wasn’t sure. I wrote philosophy papers and theses, but nothing creative. It was always in the background…I knew it was there, but I was going about life and dealing with a lot.

In early 2023, I finally started reading what people were saying about veganism. The first book I read was Henry Stephens Salt’s Animals’ Rights, from 1892. It was special to see this older text and the format he wrote in (much more polemic than rigorous analytical argument) and to see that that was acceptable. Coming from an analytical philosophy background, where everything is supposedly hyper-logical even though it isn’t, it was freeing to see that you can just write things…not falsehoods, but with a message.

From there he lists out earlier work. After Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, there was a dude-bro who wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, satirizing Wollstonecraft’s feminism and Thomas Paine’s rights of man by saying, “if we’re granting rights to humans, and to women as a separate category, what next…animals?” It’s actually a really good argument; he draws on many ways animals are exploited and ties it back to Graeco-Roman sources. If it weren’t satire, it would honestly be pretty good. That was my first insight into the eco-feminist understanding of how animal exploitation is intertwined with human and ecological exploitation. It also took me further back in time.

Then I read The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, from the 900s CE (the 340s in the Islamic calendar) from present-day Basra, Iraq. The animals get together and take the humans to court, and both sides cite the Quran and Hadith to make their case. That was super inspiring…these people a thousand years ago were doing all this. I was encountering an ancient lineage.

Then I went on the trip and had the moment of inspiration at the temple (Hathor nursing the pharaoh) and felt in my heart the contradiction of how the actual animals were and are treated. I came back, and the book just poured out. I wasn’t planning to write it, but I’d been setting myself up for it through the things I was engaging with, and I finally came around to that inner drive I’d had for so long.

Elise: That leads into more questions about the book. Can you explain what exactly a lament is? And can you walk us through your research process as you started working on the book…did it evolve as you were writing? You’re still sort of working on it; you asked me for feedback and you’ll update it as necessary. So walk us through that.

Samuel: I recently added maps, finally…I’d been meaning to do that forever. The initial idea was a lament. It’s one of the oldest forms of oral and written literature we have, from the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, and it exists all around the world from far back. It’s raw, inconsolable grief and rage, often at the destruction of a city-state or society, or the deaths or disappearances of loved ones or deities.

The Lament for Ur is a Sumerian lamentation after the Elamites destroyed that city-state around 2000 BCE, and it includes lamentations from some cow goddesses who I bring into the book. Within the Egyptian tradition there’s the Lamentations of Ipuwer, from roughly 2000–1900 BCE. It’s almost propaganda about the risks of loosening the authoritarian, theocratic grip on society and patriarchal rule…that all this bad stuff will happen. It’s in the lamentation tradition, but many scholars see it as justifying and upholding a strong centralized state.

Then there are the Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, recorded around the second century BCE through Plutarch, who was a priest at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece and spent time in Egypt capturing stories. This is the despair of the goddess sisters Isis and Nephthys after the brother married to Nephthys kills the other brother, married to Isis.

It felt natural to situate the book within those historical genres, and it was the right genre…I’m not out here saying, “it’s really sad how animals are treated, but I have hope we’ll achieve animal liberation in our lifetime.” This stuff is awful, and those experiencing it don’t need you to put a positive spin on it. It’s an expression of that suffering and rage, and it’s fine to just do that without trying to comfort people.

So initially it was going to be the lament, modeled especially after the Lament for Ur and drawing on the Egyptian laments. But, being the nerd I am, I knew there were also traditions of proverbs and sayings within ancient Egyptian literature (some of which are quoted in the Hebrew proverbs) and similar traditions in Mesopotamia and the Levant. So I brought the proverbs in too. That’s how it expanded from the single genre of lament into a variety of ancient genres.

Then I extracted actual primary-source texts (from temple walls, sarcophagi, papyri, or vellum written on calf skin) and used them directly to tell the story and the message, as well as to subvert them to point out the hypocrisy, which is very much within the traditions of these ancient genres. You see this with the biblical prophets: they’ll quote earlier scripture, sometimes as a reminder and other times subverting it.

I also paid attention, back to Salt’s book, to the variety of ways animals are exploited (fashion, entertainment, labor) and wanted to cover all of those. So I went deeper into research: how were bows and arrows made in ancient Egypt? There are the feathers on the arrows, and the development of the composite bow, which is much stronger and includes a ram’s horn. You see how, then and now, the exploitation of animals is fundamentally within the imperialist system. Pharaohs and people from adjacent cultures did a lot of cattle raiding, often capturing animals as well as humans (sometimes just women) and taking gold or other precious metals, with grazing lands a cause of much of the warfare. Sometimes they’d even take the gods themselves as a power move, to say, “we’ve got your deity.”

Looking at the sociological aspects of the ancient world, I saw this fundamentally intertwined link between the growth of empire, patriarchal societies, the accumulation of wealth in cattle and land and gold, and how religious and cultural institutions were used to promote, whitewash, and launder it…and how that’s all still being done today. I’m telling the story of Bronze Age goddesses and cultures, but many of these same deities are still being used to justify genocides, imperialism, and patriarchy. It might seem silly to write about a deity from 4,000 years ago, but many of them are still invoked today, in these regions and around the world, for similar ends.

Elise: People still today, even without these ancient deities, use religion to justify animal exploitation in many ways, so I think it’s incredibly relevant. I guess this ties in…you chose to use the indigenous names for Hathor and basically everyone else in the book as much as possible. I’m guessing that’s related to what you were just talking about.

Samuel: Yes. As I understood more, I learned that a lot of the names we commonly use come from the Graeco-Roman eras of occupation and imperialism. A good example is Hathor itself…that comes from the Graeco-Roman era, whereas her more indigenous name is Het-Heru, which means “house of Horus.” Knowing the indigenous names greatly enriches our understanding of the society and the meanings.

There’s a temple in present-day Sudan from Queen Tiye, called Sedeinga today (I’m not sure of that word’s origin) but if you go back to the sources, it’s named for Tiye. She represents herself as Hathor there, and her husband, the pharaoh, has another temple nearby at a place called Soleb, where he talks about conquering the people of present-day Sudan and the Levant. It’s actually the first place you see the term Yahweh written, around 1500 BCE.

I think it’s messed up to keep referring to these people by the names their conquerors gave them. Just as we might decolonize within our own societies and not name things after old dead white men who committed genocide, let’s understand the actual living place names within these communities. Applying that in the book gets difficult…for a Mesopotamian place, do I call it what the Egyptians called it, or what the Mesopotamians called it, which also changes over time? I tried to situate everything from the perspective of the frame narrator, a priestess of Hathor…what would she have known these places, people, or deities as?

Elise: Okay, we have two questions left. I want to talk about Het-Heru as a cow goddess…I love how ancient religions had animal deities; that’s always been fascinating to me. The dairy industry often tells us cows aren’t good mothers, to justify taking the milk, which is obviously a modern opinion, because ancient peoples often associated cows with motherhood, love, and femininity. We’ve lost a certain reverence for the interconnectedness of life in the modern age. In what ways would you like to see our society reconnect with those ancient beliefs, and in what ways do you think we can improve on them?

Samuel: The feeling I had when I saw that carving on the temple was imagining (and I don’t know if this is exactly how it went) that people looked around at the animals and asked which ones are great mothers. They saw the cow, the hippo, and others, but the cow especially, seeing and protecting her child, and thought, that’s a great symbol for motherhood. And yet (as on the cover of the book) I found another carving, on a sarcophagus, showing a mother cow crying a single tear while her male calf is tied to her foreleg and a man takes her milk. This is over 4,000 years old. There was an understanding back then, too; it’s not a contemporary-exclusive thing to see that this relationship has been corrupted.

In the present day we’re so far removed from the actual animals consumed or exploited that we don’t know what those relationships are like, so we believe what we hear. Sanctuaries play a great role in showing the impact of severing the bond between mother and child, and sometimes in providing safety for the mothers and children.

It’s not just the motherhood relationship that’s corrupted, but the fatherhood one as well, then and now. There’s a process called electro-ejaculation, where they extract the semen. There’s the disfigurement of “teaser bulls,” altered so they can get aroused but not actually inseminate, then used to mark when the females are in heat. So the fatherhood relationship has also been extremely corrupted.

On the other side, in these societies you see the bull as a symbol of the powerful conqueror (in deities such as El, Yahweh, and Baal, which all kind of morph together) as well as in Egyptian texts and symbolism. The king is the living Horus, a bird, but he’s also called “the bull of his mother,” meaning he impregnates his mother with himself. On a daily basis, the sun is born from Hathor or another cow deity, rises, and sets in the west…the dying process, in which the mother cow Hathor then resuscitates the sun, protects it through the night, and lets it rise again. We see pharaohs depicting themselves as strong bulls toppling walls and people.

It’s a stark exhibition of how a gender binary can be used to paint the female as only nurturing, kind, and gentle, and the male as only strong and conquering…when cows will also fight to defend their children, and there’s a hippo goddess, because hippos will mess you up if you go after their kids. But the narratives and symbols passed down say male equals dominance and female equals care, and I think we have to smash those too.

Elise: Yeah, absolutely. We’re out of time now, but thank you so much for doing this…it’s been such a great conversation.

Samuel: Thank you so much for everything you do. I love reading your interviews and reviews.

Elise: Oh, thank you.