"a magic time or place or person that erases the boundary between humans and animals"

…from Wendy Doniger, quoted in The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee:

The belief that animals are like us in some essential way is the source of the enduring and widespread myth of a magic time or place or person that erases the boundary between humans and animals. The place is like the Looking-Glass forest where things have no names, where Alice could walk with her arms around the neck of a fawn. The list of people who live at peace among animals would include Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh and the many mythical children who are raised as cubs by a pack of animals, like Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan, like Pecos Bill (suckled by a puma) and Davy Crockett (raised among mountain lions). T.H. White, translater of a medieval bestiary, imagined the young King Arthur's education by Merlin the magician as taking place among ants and geese and owls and badgers. This myth is very different from the mythologies of bestiality, which imagine a very different sort of intimacy (though the two intersect uncomfortably i the image of "lying down with" animals, literally sleeping with animals).…The ideal state of humans is not one in which wild animals become tame (like Else the Lionness in Born Free, or the Long Ranger's horse, Silver). It is a state in which a human becomes one of the animals. Or rather, more precisely, a human becomes part of the society of the animals but remains a human…the adopted child in the myth must eventually return to the human world.