The Species That History Calls — What God Designed Each Species For, and Why It Shows
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
An earlier post in this series established a pattern that, once you see it, you cannot unsee: the Leonite keeps showing up at history's great moments. David. Solomon. Julius Caesar. Augustus. Charlemagne. Peter the Great. The list is long and it is not a coincidence. When history has needed someone to stand at the absolute front of something enormous — to build an empire, to carry a civilization on his back, to be the person who says I will hold this and means it — it has, with remarkable consistency, looked at a Leonite and handed him the weight.
But here is what that pattern doesn't show on its own.
The Leonite is not the only species history calls. He is one of several — each of them showing up at different kinds of crucial moments, each of them answering a different kind of need. The full picture isn't a single species dominating history. It is every species playing the role it was designed to play.
That design is the subject of this post.
Not Coincidence — Vocation
The word vocation comes from the Latin for calling. In Christian theology, it describes the specific purpose for which a person was made — the unique role they are equipped to fill in God's plan for the world.
The argument here is that vocation extends beyond individuals to species. God did not make the Leonite, the Lupenite, the Ursinian, and the Vulpen interchangeable. He made each of them equipped for a specific kind of contribution to the world He intended — and history, read carefully, shows those contributions in action.
This is not determinism. A Leonite can refuse his vocation, can turn his propensity toward dominance instead of kingship, can take what God designed for authority and use it for destruction. History shows that too. The Fall disordered all the species propensities — the same force that bends the Leonite's authority toward tyranny, the Lupenite's loyalty toward tribalism, the Vulpen's prudence toward self-serving cunning. The vocation doesn't disappear in the Fall. It gets bent.
But the design is visible underneath, in the moments when it's working the way it was meant to.
The Leonite: Authority and the Building of Civilization
The Leonite vocation is the one most legible in history because it operates at the largest visible scale. Empires. Kingdoms. The civilizational structures that organize everything else.
David receives the kingship of Israel and is called a man after God's own heart — not because he is sinless, but because his authority, at its best, is always oriented toward something above himself. Solomon builds the Temple. Caesar creates the administrative structure that will govern the Western world for a millennium. Charlemagne organizes the ruins of Rome into something that will eventually become Europe. The pattern is not conquest for its own sake — it is the building of order where chaos existed, the establishment of structures that make civilization possible.
The Leonite propensity toward authority and dominance, when it is working as it was designed to work, produces exactly this: not the ruler who consumes his kingdom but the ruler who constitutes it. The Lion of Judah is the tribal symbol of the House of David for a reason. That reason is biological before it is metaphorical.
The Lupenite: Founding, Preserving, and the Bond That Holds
The Lupenite vocation operates at a different level — not the height of empire but its foundation and its binding.
Romulus and Remus are, according to the legend, raised by a wolf. That the legend reaches for a wolf at the founding moment of Rome is not an accident in a world where Lupenites are people. They are Lupenites, and the Rome they found is built not first on conquest but on brotherhood — the fierce, non-negotiable bond of two brothers who carry the same origin and the same mission. That Romulus ultimately kills Remus is the Fall at work in the founding story, the Lupenite's propensity toward protectiveness curdling into something possessive and violent. But the founding impulse itself — the creation of a people, a we bound by more than geography — is Lupenite through and through.
Centuries later, George Washington holds a starving, freezing army together at Valley Forge through nothing but loyalty — not his men's loyalty to the cause, which wavered, but his loyalty to his men, which did not. The pack does not abandon the pack. He could have gone home. He stayed. The Continental Army survived Valley Forge because its general was a Lupenite who could not conceive of leaving his people in the cold.
Abraham Lincoln's entire presidency is a Lupenite achievement. He does not merely win the Civil War. He refuses to let the nation separate into two peoples, because the Lupenite cannot accept the dissolution of the bond. And when the war ends, he extends that bond to the defeated side: malice toward none, charity for all. The pack doesn't take permanent enemies. It takes in the wounded.
What the Lupenite brings to history is not the height of authority but the ground under it — the binding that makes a civilization something its people will die to preserve rather than simply inhabit.
The Ursinian: The One Who Does Not Break
Winston Churchill's entire contribution to the Second World War can be summarized in a single sentence he gave to the graduating class at Harrow School in 1941: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in.
That is not a Leonite's speech. A Leonite commands. An Ursinian endures.
The Ursinian vocation, at its highest, is to be the thing that does not break when everything else is breaking. Churchill in 1940 — when France had fallen, when the United States had not yet entered the war, when Britain stood alone against an enemy that had rolled over every other nation in its path — did not command his way through that moment. He outlasted it. He was immovable in the way that a Brown Ursinian, above all other species, is immovable. Not because he had no fear, but because the Ursinian's response to overwhelming threat is not to flee and not to attack but to stand.
The Ursinian shows up in history at the moments when the species most needed is not the builder or the binder but the one who will not be moved. The mountain that everything else breaks against.
The Vulpen: Justice in the Margins
The historical Robin Hood — not the legend, which has accumulated centuries of embellishment, but the actual historical figure in the forests of medieval England — was a Vulpen.
That tells you everything about the Vulpen vocation.
When the official systems of a society have failed — when the law has been captured by those it was meant to constrain, when authority has become extraction rather than service — the species equipped to operate in that space is not the Leonite, whose vocation is to be the authority, but the Vulpen, whose vocation is to see what the authority has missed and act on it. The cunning that is a disorder when it serves the self becomes something close to justice when it serves the people the official systems abandoned.
The Vulpen doesn't appear at the moments when civilization is being built or preserved. The Vulpen appears at the moments when something is broken and needs someone willing to work in the margins to fix it — someone the system can't see clearly, someone who moves through the gaps, someone who understood the problem before anyone else admitted it existed.
If a Leonite Doesn't Fill the Space
There is a temptation, reading this, to conclude that the Leonite is the primary species and the others are supplements. That is not the right frame.
Each species fills the role it was designed to fill. When the moment calls for a Leonite and a Leonite answers, the design is working. When the moment calls for endurance and a Churchill arrives, the design is working. When a nation needs binding and Washington refuses to go home, the design is working. The different species are not in competition for a single role. They are filling different roles in the same overarching plan.
When a Leonite does not fill a space that needs filling, another species will step in and fill it in the way their own vocation equips them to. The work gets done. God designed an ensemble, not a hierarchy of importance.
The Incarnation
All of this builds toward a moment in history that makes the design fully explicit.
When God chose to enter His own creation — to take on the nature of His creatures and walk among them — He chose a species. That choice was not arbitrary. It was the fullest possible expression of every principle described above.
He came as a Leonite.
The Lion of Judah is not a metaphor in this world. It is a statement of biological fact about the species of the One born in Bethlehem, who grew up in Nazareth, who taught in Galilee, who died outside Jerusalem, and who rose. The tribe of Judah bore the lion as its symbol because the Lion was literally what that tribe produced — and from that tribe came the One who fulfilled everything the Leonite vocation had always been pointing toward.
Every Leonite king who carried his people, every Leonite saint who led by serving, every moment in history when Leonite authority functioned as it was designed to — all of it was a foreshadowing. The vocation was always pointing somewhere. It was pointing to the One who embodied it perfectly.
And in embodying it perfectly, He made it possible for every other species — Lupenites, Ursinians, Vulpens, all of them — to have their own disordered propensities brought back into their proper form through Him. The Incarnation is not just the fulfillment of the Leonite vocation. It is the event that makes the fulfillment of every species' vocation possible.
Why Antagonistic Worlds Fail at the Deepest Level
Most anthropomorphic fiction assumes that a world containing multiple species will be organized around species conflict. Different groups with different interests, competing for resources and status, generating the tension that drives the plot.
This assumption is not neutral. It is a specific claim about what the species are for — and the claim is that they are for themselves, competing against each other.
The design described above makes a different claim. The species were not made to compete. They were made to complement. Leonite authority needs Lupenite loyalty to have something worth building. Lupenite loyalty needs Ursinian endurance to have something worth holding through the dark. Ursinian endurance needs Vulpen prudence to know what is actually worth enduring for. The propensities interlock. They were designed to interlock.
Antagonism between species is not the natural state of this world. It is the Fall's distortion of the natural state. The history of the world, read through the lens of these vocations, is the story of that distortion being slowly, painfully, and not-yet-completely undone.
Christianity is the mechanism of that undoing — and that is what the companion piece to this post addresses.
What This Means for Your World
If you are building an anthropomorphic world, the question worth asking is not what do the different species want from each other but what did God — or whatever force ordered your world — design each species to contribute.
The answer to that question will tell you what your world's history looks like, who shows up at its crucial moments, and why. It will also tell you what the Fall — or the equivalent disordering force in your world — bent and broke, so that your characters have something real to work against and something real to work toward.
Species that were designed to complement each other, disordered by a Fall that bent their vocations inward, and slowly redeemed by whatever healing force your world contains — that is a world with genuine dramatic architecture. Not because the species are in conflict, but because they are in the process of learning, again, how to be what they were made to be.
— Eric Flegal
Want to go deeper into how these ideas shape the characters and the writing? Explore the full Anthropomorphic Writing Series for the complete picture — from the theological foundation to the species deep dives to the craft of putting it all on the page.
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
