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was a land of sacred cats and jackals and hawks, whose mummies are among us to this day, but the reason of whose worship was a subject too sacred for the Father of History to discuss. Egyptian animal-worship seems to show, in a double line, traces of a savage ancestry extending into ages lying far behind even the remote antiquity of the Pyramids. Deities patronising special sacred animals, incarnate in their bodies, or represented in their figures, have nowhere better examples than the divine bull-dynasty of Apis, the sacred hawks caged and fed in the temple of Horus, Thoth and his cynocephalus and ibis, Hathor the cow and Sebek the crocodile. Moreover, the local character of many of the sacred creatures, worshipped in certain nomes yet killed and eaten with impunity elsewhere, fits remarkably with that character of tribe-fetishes and deified totems with which Mr. McLennan's argument is concerned. See the men of Oxyrynchos reverencing and sparing the fish oxyrynchos, and those of Latopolis likewise worshipping the latos. At Apollinopolis men hated crocodiles and never lost a chance of killing them, while the people of the Arsinoite nome dressed geese and fish for these sacred creatures, adorned them with necklaces and bracelets, and mummified them sumptuously when they died.1 In the modern world the most civilized people among whom animal-worship vigorously survives, lie within the range of Brahmanism, where the sacred animal, the deity incarnate in an animal or invested with or symbolized by its shape, may to this day be studied in clear example. The sacred cow is not merely to be spared, she is as a deity worshipped in annual ceremony, daily perambulated and bowed to by the pious Hindu, who offers her fresh grass and flowers; Hanuman the monkey-god has his temples and his idols, and in him Siva is incarnate, as Durga is in the jackal; the wise Ganesa wears the elephant's head;

1 Herod. ii.; Plutarch, De Iside & Osiride; Strabo, xvii. 1; Wilkinson, 'Ancient Eg.,' edited by Birch, vol. iii.; Bunsen, 2nd Edition, with notes by Birch, vol. i.

the divine king of birds, Garuda, is Vishnu's vehicle; the forms of fish, and boar, and tortoise, were assumed in those avatar-legends of Vishnu which are at the intellectual level of the Red Indian myths they so curiously resemble.1 The conceptions which underlie the Hindu creed of divine animals were not ill displayed by that Hindu who, being shown the pictures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John with their respective man, lion, ox, and eagle, explained these quite naturally and satisfactorily as the avatars or vehicles of the four evangelists.

In Animal-worship, some of the most remarkable cases of development and survival belong to a class from which striking instances have already been taken. Serpent-worship unfortunately fell years ago into the hands of speculative writers, who mixed it up with occult philosophies, Druidical mysteries, and that portentous nonsense called the Arkite Symbolism,' till now sober students hear the very name of Ophiolatry with a shiver. Yet it is in itself a rational and instructive subject of inquiry, especially notable for its width of range in mythology and religion. We may set out among the lower races, with such accounts as those of the Red Indian's reverence to the rattlesnake, as grandfather and king of snakes, as a divine protector able to give fair winds or cause tempests; 2 or of the worship of great snakes among the tribes of Peru before they received the religion of the Incas, as to whom an old author says, 'They adore the demon when he presents himself to them in the figure of some beast or serpent, and talks with them.'3 Thenceforth such examples of direct Ophiolatry may be traced on into classic and barbaric Europe; the great serpent which defended the citadel of Athens and enjoyed its monthly honey-cakes; the Roman genius loci appearing in the form of the snake (Nullus enim locus sine

1 Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 195, &c.

2 Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 231; Brinton, p. 108, &c.
3 Garcilaso de la Vega, 'Comentarios Reales,' i. 9.
4 Herodot. viii. 41.

genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur);1 the old Prussian serpent-worship and offering of food to the household snakes; 2 the golden viper adored by the Lombards, till Barbatus got it in his hands and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice. To this day, Europe has not forgotten in nursery tales or more serious belief the snake that comes with its golden crown and drinks milk out of the child's porringer; the house-snake, tame and kindly but seldom seen, that cares for the cows and the children and gives omens of a death in the family; the pair of household snakes which have a mystic connexion of life and death with the husband and housewife themselves.1 Serpent-worship, apparently of the directest sort, was prominent in the indigenous religions of Southern Asia. It now even appears to have maintained no mean place in early Indian Buddhism, for the sculptures of the Sanchi tope show scenes of adoration of the five-headed snakedeity in his temple, performed by a race of serpent-worshippers, figuratively represented with snakes growing from their shoulders, and whose raja himself has a five-headed snake arching hood-wise over his head. Here, moreover, the totem-theory comes into contact with ophiolatry. The Sanskrit name of the snake, 'nâga,' becomes also the accepted designation of its adorers, and thus mythological interpretation has to reduce to reasonable sense legends of serpent-races who turn out to be simply serpent-worshippers, tribes who have from the divine reptiles at once their generic name of Nâgas, and with it their imagined ancestral descent from serpents.5 In different ways, these Nâga tribes of South Asia are on the one hand analogues of the

1 Servius ad En. v. 95.

2 Hartknoch, 'Preussen,' part i. pp. 143, 162.

3 Grimm, D. M.' p. 648.

4 Grimm, 'D. M.'p. 650. Rochholz, 'Deutscher Glaube,' &c., vol. i. p. 146. Monnier, 'Traditions Populaires,' p. 644. Grohmann, 'Aberglauben aus Böhmen,' &c., p. 78. Ralston, 'Songs of Russian People,' p. 175.

5 Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship,' p. 55, &c., pl. xxiv. McLennan, 1.c. p. 563, &c.

Snake Indians of America, and on the other of the Ophiogenes or Serpent-race of the Troad, kindred of the vipers whose bite they could cure by touch, and descendants of an ancient hero transformed into a snake.1

Serpents hold a prominent place in the religions of the world, as the incarnations, shrines, or symbols of high deities. Such were the rattlesnake worshipped in the Natchez temple of the Sun, and the snake belonging in name and figure to the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl;2 the snake as worshipped still by the Slave Coast negro, not for itself but for its indwelling deity; the snake kept and fed with milk in the temple of the old Slavonic god Potrimpos ;* the serpent-symbol of the healing deity Asklepios, who abode in or manifested himself through the huge tame snakes kept in his temples 5 (it is doubtful whether this had any original connexion with the adoption of the snake, from its renewal by casting its old slough, as the accepted emblem of new life or immortality in later symbolism); and lastly, the Phoenician serpent with its tail in its mouth, symbol of the world and of the Heaven-god Taaut, in its original meaning perhaps a mythic world-snake like the Scandinavian Midgard-worm, but in the changed fancy of later ages adapted into an emblem of eternity. It scarcely seems proved that savage races, in all their mystic contemplations of the serpent, ever developed out of their own minds the idea, to us so familiar, of adopting it as a personification of evil. In ancient times, we may ascribe this character perhaps to the monster whose well-known form is to be seen on the mummy-cases, the Apophis-serpent of the Egyptian

1 Strabo, xiii. 1, 14.

2 J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrel.' pp. 62, 585.

3 J. B. Schlegel, 'Ewe-Sprache,' p. xiv.

4 Hanusch, Slaw. Myth.' p. 217.

5 Pausan. ii. 28; Ælian. xvi. 39. See Welcker, 'Griech. Götterl.' vol. ii.

p. 734.

6 Macrob. Saturnal. i. 9. Movers, 'Phönizier,' vol. i. p. 500.

7 Details such as in Schoolcraft, 'Ind. Tribes,' part i. pp. 38, 414, may be ascribed to Christian intercourse. See Brinton, p. 121.

Hades;1 and it unequivocally belongs to the destroying serpent of the Zarathustrians, Azhi Dahâka,2 a figure which bears so remarkable a relation to that of the Semitic serpent of Eden, which may possibly stand in historical connexion with it. A wondrous blending of the ancient rites of Ophiolatry with mystic conceptions of Gnosticism appears in the cultus which tradition (in truth or slander) declares the semiChristian sect of Ophites to have rendered to their tame snake, enticing it out of its chest to coil round the sacramental bread, and worshipping it as representing the great king from heaven who in the beginning gave to the man and woman the knowledge of the mysteries. Thus the extreme types of religious veneration, from the soberest matter-of-fact to the dreamiest mysticism, find their places in the worship of animals.1

Hitherto in the study of animistic doctrine, our attention has been turned especially to those minor spirits whose functions concern the closer and narrower detail of man's life and its surroundings. In passing thence to the consideration of divine beings whose functions have a wider scope, the transition may be well made through a special group. An acute remark of Auguste Comte's calls attention to an important process of theological thought, which we may here endeavour to bring as clearly as possible before our minds. In his 'Philosophie Positive,' he defines deities proper as differing by their general and abstract character from pure fetishes (i.e., animated objects), the humble fetish governing but a single object from which it is inseparable, while the gods administer a special order of phenomena at once in different bodies. When, he con

1 Lepsius, 'Todtenbuch,' and Birch's transl. in Bunsen's 'Egypt,' vol. v. 2 Spiegel, Avesta,' vol. i. p. 66, vol. iii. p. lix.

3 Epiphan. Adv. Hæres. xxxvii. Tertullian. De Præscript. contra Hæreticos, 47.

4 Further collections of evidence relating to Zoolatry in general may be found in Bastian, 'Das Thier in seiner mythologischen Bedeutung,' in Bastian and Hartmann's 'Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,' vol. i.; Meiners, 'Geschichte der Religionen,' vol. i.

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