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-wor ship 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. genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur);1 the old Prussian serpent-worship and offering of food to the household snakes; 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." 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 Æn. v. 95. 2 Hartknoch, 'Preussen,' part i. pp. 143, 162. 3 Grimm, D. M.' p. 648. Grimm, 'D. M. p. 650. Rochholz, Deutscher Glaube,' &c., vol. i. p. 146. Monnier, Traditions Populaires,' p. 644. Grohmann, Aberglauben aus Bohmen,' &c., p. 78. Ralston, 'Songs of Russian People,' p. 175. 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 5 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 (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 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; 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.4 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 (ie., 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. 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. tinues, the similar vegetation of the different oaks of a forest led to a theological generalization from their common phenomena, the abstract being thus produced was no longer the fetish of a single tree, but became the god of the forest; here, then, is the intellectual passage from fetishism to polytheism, reduced to the inevitable preponderance of specific over individual ideas. Now this observation of Comte's may be more immediately applied to a class of divine beings which may be accurately called species-deities. It is highly suggestive to study the crude attempts of barbaric theology to account for the uniformity observed in large classes of objects, by making this generalization from individual to specific ideas. To explain the existence of what we call a species, they would refer it to a common ancestral stock, or to an original archetype, or to a speciesdeity, or they combined these conceptions. For such speculations, classes of plants and animals offered perhaps an early and certainly an easy subject. The uniformity of each kind not only suggested a common parentage, but also the notion that creatures so wanting in individuality, with qualities so measured out as it were by line and rule, might not be independent arbitrary agents, but mere copies from a common model, or mere instruments used by controlling deities. Thus in Polynesia, as has been just mentioned, certain species of animals were considered as incarnations of certain deities, and among the Samoans it appears that the question as to the individuality of such creatures was actually asked and answered. If, for instance, a village god were accustomed to appear as an owl, and one of his votaries found a dead owl by the roadside, he would mourn over the sacred bird and bury it with much ceremony, but the god himself would not be thought to be dead, for he remains incarnate in all existing owls.2 According to Father Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a curious parallel to this notion. They 1 Comte, 'Philosophie Positive,' vol. v. p. 101. 2 Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 242. |