chapter vi

.); each was reverenced for that divine excellence or virtue which appeared to be manifestly resident in it. Thus the dog was worshipped for his watchfulness and faithfulness; the hawk for its darting flight through the upper air, like the flashing of the sunlight or of the sun-god himself; the cow as a great kind mother; the beetle for that wonderful procedure in the reproduction of his kind, in which he so strikingly brings life out of decay. (2) The beasts are not worshipped themselves; they are only the emblems of the deities with whom they are connected, and it is the deity who is worshipped, not the animal. This may be quite true of later practice, but is by no means a satisfactory explanation of its origin; for how was it arranged, and who was it that ordained at first, that the jackal should be the emblem of Anubis, the cat of Bast, the crocodile of Sebak, and so on? (3) Various mythological and quasi-historical accounts of the origin of the practice are given, such as that men long ago chose different animals for their standards in war, or that some early king, wishing to keep his subjects disunited, ordered that each nome should serve a different animal. It is also told as a story of early times that the gods when they walked on earth assumed the forms of various animals; thus the gods are still in the animals. The gods hid in the beasts in order to be near men and see how they did. But men found them out and worshipped them in the disguise they had assumed. (4) The gods cannot be present in the world and cannot be satisfactorily worshipped unless they have bodies to dwell in--that is involved in Egyptian psychology; and as the gods would be too much alike if they all occupied human bodies, they chose the bodies of different animals.

These theories of animal worship are evidently later inventions, to account for a state of matters the real origin of which was not known. Philosophical priests could not accommodate themselves to the animal worship of the temples without a doctrine to justify it to their minds. But those who resorted to such theories about animal worship could have nothing to do with calling the system into existence. We may be sure that a refined and cultivated people did not take up animal worship and cling to it, in spite of its repulsive features, with such tenacity as the Egyptians did, because of a speculative idea of the likeness of certain beasts to certain gods, or to express pantheistic views of the emanations of deity in animal forms. The system, in fact, cannot have sprung up after the Egyptians became civilised, and could not continue to exist among a civilised people, if it was not hallowed by an immemorial antiquity. Only as a mystery, a thing of which the origin was not known, could such a worship continue among such a people.

A new explanation of Egyptian animal worship has been put forward in recent times by the Anthropological school of students of religion,[3] and is rapidly gaining ground. The religious circumstances of Egypt as narrated by Juvenal and Diodorus have the strongest resemblance to the totemistic state of society described above (