Volume II Part 10 (2/2)

writes M. Maspero, ”that during the second Theban empire the learned priests may have thought it well to attribute a symbolical sense to certain b.e.s.t.i.a.l deities. But whatever they may have wors.h.i.+pped in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, and not a hieroglyph, that the first wors.h.i.+ppers of the ibis adored.”***** M. Meyer is of the same opinion, and so are Professor Tiele and M. Perrot.******

* For a statement of the theory of ”h.o.m.onymous tendency,”

see Selected Essays, Max Muller, i. 299, 245. For a criticism of the system, see Mythology in Encyclop, Brit., or in La Mythologie, A. Lang, Paris, 1886.

** Hibbert Lectures, 1880, p. 111.

*** Wilkinson, iii. 325.

**** Op. cit., pp. 116, 117, 237.

***** Revue de V Histoire des Religions, vol. i.

****** Meyer, Oeschichte des Alterthums, p. 72; Tiele, Manuel, p. 45; Perrot and Chipiez, Egyptian Art, English transl., i. 54. Hist. Egypt. Rel., pp. 97, 103. Tiele finds the origin of this animal-wors.h.i.+p in ”animism,” and supposes that the original colonists or conquerors from Asia found it prevalent in and adopted it from an African population.

Professor Tiele does not appear, when he wrote this chapter, to have observed the world-wide diffusion of animal-wors.h.i.+p in totem ism, for he says, ”Nowhere else does the wors.h.i.+p of animals prevail so extensively as among African peoples”.

While the learned have advanced at various periods these conflicting theories of the origin of Egyptian animal-wors.h.i.+p, a novel view was introduced by Mr. M'Lennan. In his essays on _Plant and Animal Wors.h.i.+p_, he regarded Egyptian animal-wors.h.i.+p as only a consecrated and elaborate survival of totemism. Mr. Le Page Renouf has ridiculed the ”school-boy authorities on which Mr. M'Lennan relied”.* Nevertheless, Mr. M'Lennan's views are akin to those to which M. Maspero and MM. Perrot and Chipiez are attached, and they have also the support of Professor Sayce.

”These animal forms, in which a later myth saw the shapes a.s.sumed by the affrighted G.o.ds during the great war between Horus and Typhon, take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt was still totemism. They are survivals from a long-forgotten past, and prove that Egyptian civilisation was of slow and independent growth, the latest stage only of which is revealed to us by the monuments. Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and Pachis of Hermonthis are all links that bind together the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Egypt of the stone age. These were the sacred animals of the clans which first settled in these localities, and their identification with the deities of the official religion must have been a slow process, never fully carried out, in fact, in the minds of the lower cla.s.ses.”**

* Hibbert Lectures, pp. 6, 30.

** Herodotus, p. 344.

Thus it appears that, after all, even on philological showing, the religions and myths of a civilised people may be ill.u.s.trated by the religions and myths of savages. It is in the study of savage totemism that we too seek a partial explanation of the singular Egyptian practices that puzzled the Greeks and Romans, and the Egyptians themselves. To some extent the Egyptian religious facts were purely totemistic in the strict sense.

Some examples of the local practices and rites which justify this opinion may be offered. It has been shown that the totem of each totem-kindred among the lower races is sacred, and that there is a strict rule against eating, or even making other uses of, the sacred animal or plant.* At the same time, one totem-kindred has no scruple about slaying or eating the totem of any other kindred. Now similar rules prevailed in Egypt, and it is not easy for the school which regards the holy beasts as _emblems_, or as the results of misunderstood language, to explain why an emblem was adored in one village and persecuted and eaten in the next. But if these usages be survivals of totemism, the practice at once ceases to be isolated, and becomes part of a familiar, if somewhat obscure, body of customs found all over the world. ”The same animal which was revered and forbidden to be slaughtered for the altar or the table in one part of the country was sacrificed and eaten in another.”**

* This must be taken generally. See Spencer and Gillen in the _Natives of Central Australia_, where each kin helps the others to kill its own totem.

** Wilkinson, _Ancient Egyptians_, ii. 467.

Herodotus bears testimony to this habit in an important pa.s.sage. He remarks that the people of the Theban nome whose G.o.d, Ammon Ra, or Khnum, was ram-headed, abstain from sheep and sacrifice goats; but the people of Mendes, whose G.o.d was goat-headed, abstain from goats, sacrifice sheep, and hold all goats in reverence.*

These local rites, at least in Roman times, caused civil brawls, for the customs of one town naturally seemed blasphemous to neighbours with a different sacred animal. Thus when the people of Dog-town were feasting on the fish called oxyrrhyncus, the citizens of the town which revered the oxyrrhyncus began to eat dogs, to which there is no temptation.

Hence arose a riot.**

* Herodotus, ii. 42-46. The goat-headed Mendesian G.o.d Pan, as Herodotus calls him, is recognised by Dr. Birch as the goat-headed Ba-en-tattu. Wilkinson, ii. 512, note 2.

** De Is. et Os., 71, 72.

The most singular detail in Juvenal's famous account of the war between the towns of Ombi and Tentyra does not appear to be a mere invention.

They fought ”because each place loathes the G.o.ds of its neighbours”.

The turmoil began at a sacred feast, and the victors devoured one of the vanquished. Now if the religion were really totemistic, the wors.h.i.+ppers would be of the same blood as the animal they wors.h.i.+pped, and in eating an adorer of the crocodile, his enemies would be avenging the eating of their own sacred beast. When that beast was a crocodile, probably nothing but starvation or religious zeal could induce people to taste his unpalatable flesh. Yet ”in the city Apollinopolis it is the custom that every one must by all means eat a bit of crocodile; and on one day they catch and kill as many crocodiles as they can, and lay them out in front of the temple ”. The mythic reason was that Typhon, in his flight from Horus, took the shape of a crocodile. Yet he was adored at various places where it was dangerous to bathe on account of the numbers and audacity of the creatures. Mummies of crocodiles are found in various towns where the animal was revered.*

It were tedious to draw up a list of the local sacred beasts of Egypt;**

but it seems manifest that the explanation of their wors.h.i.+p as totems at once colligates it with a familiar set of phenomena. The symbolic explanations, on the other hand, are clearly fanciful, mere _jeux d'esprit_. For example, the sacred shrew-mouse was locally adored, was carried to Butis on its death, and its mummy buried with care, but the explanation that it ”received divine honours because it is blind, and darkness is more ancient than light,” by no means accounts for the mainly _local_ respect paid to the little beast.***

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