The Egyptian deities often are sculpted with a human body and the face of an animal. It may be that this mixed creature is to remind us that humans are half-divinity and half-beast. Any intelligent creature that can reason and use language is a low-level deity, if they maverize much at all.
It is my assumption that what humans look like is what God and the angels look like--we are made in their image, not vice versa.
We are also part animal.
I also think of Beorn the shape-shifter, written of by Tolkien in The Hobbit. Many cultures shared the archetype of humans as half-angel, and half-beast, and the legends about shape-shifting humans in mythology is likely another manifestation of this realization about the nature of humans.
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