Chapter XV · ANIMISM (continued). (continued 2)

The three motives of animal-worship which have been described, viz., direct worship of the animal for itself, indirect worship of it as a fetish acted through by a deity, and veneration for it as a totem or representative of a tribe-ancestor, no doubt account in no small measure for the phenomena of Zoolatry among the lower races, due allowance being also made for the effects of myth and symbolism, of which we may gain frequent glimpses. Notwithstanding the obscurity and complexity of the subject, a survey of Animal-worship as a whole may yet justify an ethnographic view of its place in the history of civilization. If we turn from its appearances among the less cultured races to notice the shapes in which it has held its place among peoples advanced to the stage of national organization and stereotyped religion, we shall find a reasonable cause for its new position in the theory of development and survival, whereby ideas at first belonging to savage theology have in part continued to spread and solidify in their original manner, while in part they have been changed to accommodate them to more advanced ideas, or have been defended from the attacks of reason by being set up as sacred mysteries. Ancient Egypt 238was 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.^[562] 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; 239the 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.^[563] 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;^[564] 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.’^[565] 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;^[566] the Roman genius loci appearing in the form of the snake (Nullus enim locus sine 240genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur);^[567] the old Prussian serpent-worship and offering of food to the household snakes;^[568] the golden viper adored by the Lombards, till Barbatus got it in his hands and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice.^[569] 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.^[570] 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 snake-deity 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.^[571] In different ways, these Nâga tribes of South Asia are on the one hand analogues of the 241Snake 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.^[572]

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;^[573] the snake as worshipped still by the Slave Coast negro, not for itself but for its indwelling deity;^[574] the snake kept and fed with milk in the temple of the old Slavonic god Potrimpos;^[575] the serpent-symbol of the healing deity Asklepios, who abode in or manifested himself through the huge tame snakes kept in his temples^[576] (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 Phœnician 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.^[577] 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.^[578] 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 242Hades;^[579] and it unequivocally belongs to the destroying serpent of the Zarathustrians, Azhi Dahâka,^[580] 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 semi-Christian 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.^[581] 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.^[582]

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 continues, 243the 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.^[583] 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 species-deity, 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.^[584] According to Father Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a curious parallel to this notion. They 244worshipped the ‘panes’ bird, which seems to have been an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood, and the body burned. Yet the natives maintained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacrificed each year, and more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages.^[585] Among the comparatively cultured Peruvians, Acosta describes another theory of celestial archetypes. Speaking of star-deities, he says that shepherds venerated a certain star called Sheep, another star called Tiger protected men from tigers, &c.: ‘And generally, of all the animals and birds there are on the earth, they believed that a like one lived in heaven, in whose charge were their procreation and increase, and thus they accounted of divers stars, such as that they call Chacana, and Topatorca, and Mamana, and Mizco, and Miquiquiray, and other such, so that in a manner it appears that they were drawing towards the dogma of the Platonic ideas.’^[586] The North American Indians also have speculated as to the common ancestors or deities of species. One missionary notes down their idea as he found it in 1634. ‘They say, moreover, that all the animals of each species have an elder brother, who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals, and this elder brother is marvellously great and powerful. The elder brother of the beavers, they told me, is perhaps as large as our cabin.’ Another early account is that each species of animals has its archetype in the land of souls; there exists, for example, a manitu or archetype of all oxen, which animates all oxen.^[587] Here, again, occurs a noteworthy correspondence with the ideas of a distant race. In Buyán, the island paradise of Russian myth, there 245are to be found the Snake older than all snakes, and the prophetic Raven, elder brother of all ravens, and the Bird, the largest and oldest of all birds, with iron beak and copper claws, and the Mother of Bees, eldest among bees.^[588] Morgan’s comparatively modern account of the Iroquois mentions their belief in a spirit of each species of trees and plants, as of oak, hemlock, maple, whortleberry, raspberry, spearmint, tobacco; most objects of nature being thus under the care of protecting spirits.^[589] The doctrine of such species-deities is perhaps nowhere more definitely stated than by Castrén in his ‘Finnish Mythology.’ In his description of the Siberian nature-worship, the lowest level is exemplified by the Samoyeds, whose direct worship of natural objects for themselves may perhaps indicate the original religious condition of the whole Turanian race. But the doctrine of the comparatively cultured heathen Finns was at a different stage. Here every object in nature has a ‘haltia,’ a guardian deity or genius, a being which was its creator and thenceforth became attached to it. These deities or genii are, however, not bound to each single transitory object, but are free personal beings which have movement, form, body, and soul. Their existence in no wise depends on the existence of the individual objects, for although no object in nature is without its guardian deity, this deity extends to the whole race or species. This ash-tree, this stone, this house, has indeed its particular ‘haltia,’ yet these same ‘haltiat’ concern themselves with other ash-trees, stones, and houses, of which the individuals may perish, but their presiding genii live on in the species.^[590] It seems as though some similar view ran through the doctrine of more civilized races, as in the well-known 246Egyptian and Greek examples where whole species of animals, plants, or things, stand as symbolic of, and as protected by, particular deities. The thought appears with most perfect clearness in the Rabbinical philosophy which apportions to each of the 2100 species, of plants for instance, a presiding angel in heaven, and assigns this as the motive of the Levitical prohibition of mixtures among animals and plants.^[591] The interesting likeness pointed out by Father Acosta between these crude theological conceptions and the civilized philosophical conceptions which have replaced them, was again brought into view in the last century by the President De Brosses, in comparing the Red Indians’ archetypes of species with the Platonic archetypal ideas.^[592] As for animals and plants, the desire of naturalists to ascend to primal unity to some extent finds satisfaction in a theory tracing each species to an origin in a single pair. And though this is out of the question with inanimate objects, our language seems in suggestive metaphor to lay hold on the same thought, when we say of a dozen similar swords, or garments, or chairs, that they have the same pattern (patronus, as it were father), whereby they were shaped from their matter (materia, or mother substance).

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