Once upon a time, fables were popular both east and west, but now they are reserved only for children, whose books are teeming with them. As a literary genre, the fable features animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature, as well mythical creatures and even gods, all of whom are given human qualities in the narrative. In olden times, fables were used to pass on moral lessons, which were sometimes explicitly added at their end in the form of maxims summing up the lessons learned. But human qualities were not given to animals and all the other heroes of fables only to drive the moral point. Actually, they were believed to have such or similar qualities to begin with. This is what animism is all about, anyhow. Fables are thus witnesses of our collective past, which was shamanistic to boot. And all of nature was endowed with souls. As well as formidable intelligence. Looking back, one cannot but feel that fables were onto something not entirely wrongheaded, let alone childish. And James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is my witness.