| II. The Worship of Stones, Hills, Trees, and Plants | Title page | IV. The Worship of Elements and Heavenly Phenomena |
[ p. 32 ]
Between man and beast there is, to a savage, only a linguistic difference; in other respects the beast is man’s “younger brother,” as the Hindu calls him, not as he also calls the gods the youn^r brothers of the demons, but because he recognizes in the animal a being akin to himself, having the same feelings, desires, and needs, but gifted with other speech and other occult powers, which, as in the case of some men, also gifted with superior intelligence, lead a common man to approach the beast with religious respect The first nature-fakir too is the savage, who publishes accounts of animal intelligence, of beasts consorting with men, of animals as progenitors, and creators, of sapient serpents, and of frog-maidens marrying humans. The soul of a man when he is alive and when he is dead is liable to pass into the body of an animal, and a god in the same way may inhabit a beast. Finally, a beast may be the ancestor of a clan of men or may, like a plant as in Australia, develop into many sjSueh in brief is the philosophy of animal-worship. Animals are worshipijed as great living powers and as ghosts, just as men are worshipped, while m addition ihere is something more mysterious in an animal, powers of strength and cunning to which men cannot attain. The very strong or savage beasts are universally revered for their prowess, the lion in Africa, the tiger in India, the eagle and bear in America, the bear in Yezo. For strength imd virility the bull was w’orshipped in Hreece and Egypt; for their wi.sdom the Amerind bent in reverence [ p. 33 ] before the beavers, who once were men, and all over the world those animals which have provided men with food have been worshipped as giers of life and sustenance, the cow in India, Africa, and Scandinavia, the buffalo in South India, the kangaroo in Australia, etc. Accident is also contributory to the worship of many individual animals. Cortez left a sick horse behind him and the beast was deified, offered meat-sacrifice, consequently starved to death, then received a cult and was worshipped as the “god of thunder.” A donkey imported to Africa was regarded by certain tribesmen, who had never seen such a beast, as a wise divinity, and consulted as an oracle. Horses were oracular to the early Germans and the Hindu Kunbhis offer them bloody sacrifice. In ancient times horses were themselves sacrificed in India as they are now by the Shamans, who hold that they carry up the soul. The cat and dog are worshipped in India, but for different reasons. The eat is the vehicle of a birth-demon, and the dog is the vehicle of a god, but the latter animal is revered also because it is connected with the spirits (which in turn are connected with the moon at which the dog bays), and because it is a house-protector, not only from thieves but from spirits. As connected with spirits it has become the Slavic guardian of the departing soul, for which reason in Tibet the bodies of the dead are given to dogs to eat. Further, as an animal “useful when alive and not very good to eat when dead” the dog was quite recently chosen as the “totem” of the Bengal Bauris.[1] The dog has in individual mstanees frequently [ p. 34 ] been deified in India. For example, in Bangalore there is the tomb and shrine of a Baja’s pet dog, which served him so well that after death the Baja established a cult for it, with priests paid to keep up the service in its honor. Ordinarily, however, the Hindu regards the dog as impure owing to its intercourse with spirits.[2] A good deal has been made of the Hindu epic story ot tne hero who refused to enter heaven without his dog, but this is a late feature (he has no dog tiB the moment of his ascent to heaven) and the dog is only an apparitional form of a god. Some of the Amerinds derived from a dog and a woman, but they sacrificed dogs, as their dearest possessions, to honor a guest.
A savage does not take sides in animal feuds. An African worships impartially the goat ar d its enemy, as the Amerind worshipped the good spiri and the evil spirit, the goat’s foe. because he deprecate its rage; the goat, because it gives him food and because also it shivers uncannily (so a shivering tree is worshipped).
Among birds, the goose was taboo to the Briton and worshipped by the Bomans; the dove was holy to Mexicans and Semites; the eagle was revered by some Arabs and Amerinds (sometimes as creator); the owl, holy to the Germans, was worshipped by Africans and Amerinds, who offered tobacco to it. The goose or swan received in India a double honor. It was the totem of extra-Indic tribes and by Hindu philosophers was taken as a type of soul and god. The philosophers did not take the totem of a wild Hansa clan as the emblem of the divine, as some ethnologists say, but invented it independently, not believing that the bird was an ancestor of theirs but that its lone and lofty fh^t typified an elevated spirit.
Of beast and bird form are the human-faced gods of [ p. 35 ] beastly shape and hnman-shaped gods of beastly face, centaurs, Assyrian lions, the pantheon of Egypt, Babylonian demons of similar character, the Holy Turtle and Grandfather Snake of the Amerinds, etc. Not sirens, for they are winged souls. In India, crows are real sirens, that is, reincorporated souls of men. Perhaps in classical antiquity they owed their quasi divinity as associates of Apollo in divination to the same belief, that they were reborn human souls. The great departed Fathers used to help Hindu warriors in this form, coming as birds to the battle-field and fanning their hot faces with cooling wings.
Among fishes, holy to the Syrians, the shark is most widely revered in the Pacific, obviously because it is most feared. Some savages derive from fish, as others cotne from frogs, turtles, crocodiles, snakes, and insects; but the resultant totemic worship is confined to the descendants and is independent of peculiar attributes in the ancestors. Some of the fish-stories connecting men and fishes may be totemic but this is not to be assumed offhand. The Hindu Noah called Father Manu was saved from the deluge by a fish and the modem totem-scholar says, “probably a fish-totem.” But the historian will point out that in the original story a grateful fish, not alluded to as ancestor but explained as a fish that had once been saved from death by Manu, in turn saved Manu from death. Then when Brahman had become a great god the story was fastened on him; he was the savior “in fish-form,” until Vishnu superseded Brahman, when in turn Vishnu became the god in fish-form. So the story remains to the glory of Vishnu till the totem-hnnter^refers it to a totem-god, though the Aryan Hindus Imd no totems and there is no hint in the original story that the [ p. 36 ] fish was connected with Manu in any way except by ties of gratitude. Other fish-stories have a quasi religious interest, Thus there is the Hindu fish that swallows a man or swallows a woman or swallows a man and his boat. One of these Hindu fishes swallows a merchant, who is found alive in his belly.[3] Nearly all the fish-totemism in India is connected with eels as totems, not of Aryans but of the Wild Tribes, but pretended totemism abounds. Thus there is a dehghtful tale about Khwaja Khizr, who is called “a sort of totem” of the Shiah Mohammedans. He was a Mohammedan saint who had charge of the water of immortality and so in Bengal he became a watergod and has recently been adopted as the “totem” of a sect, a good illustration of the loose way the unhistorical ethnologist cites evidence of totemism. In ancient days the Aryans had no divine fishes. At present certain fishes are holy because connected with divinities revered at the bathing-places where the fishes live beside the god, just as in Greece the sacred fishes got their sacredness from their sacred habitat, not because they were totems. The only really divine water-animal in India is the crocodile, which shows no trace of totemism and is now revered because he is connected with a god, originally because he was feared. As water repels evil spirits, so fishes, because of their water-nature, when painted on the wail, guard in India a^inst demons.
Serpents are among the earliest and most widely worshipped creaturesjNo one who has seen a boa constrictor, a cobra, a python, or a rattlesnake can question that such a being would be the object of devout regard on the part of any man who worshipped any animal. But any snake’s beauty, sinuous motion, mysterious habits, power of fascination, its association with tombs and trees, at the roots of which it is apt to live, its suggestive shape, are enough [ p. 37 ] to make it respected as a being having occult and obscene powers. Its abode and cunning give it a reputation for wisdom; its wisdom helps its reputation for evil; its hole makes it a guardian of treasure; and when it is honored with a temple, where treasure is stored, this reputation is increased. Because it lives about the altar and the house, where it gets food, and perhaps especially because it lives in tombs, it is regarded as the reembodied spirit of the dead, coming up out of the under-world for its meals. Aeneas regarded the serpent at the altar as the local genius of the place or the spirit of his father. The old Germans thought that snakes and mice, also coming out of the groimd, were peculiarly apt to be reincarnated spirits. The Pied Piper and the Bishop of Hatto had to deal ’vvith such spirits. The Hindu today gives his house-snake its daily meal of milk, believing it may be his ancestor in new form. The Lithuanians worshipped and sacrificed to the house-snakes as relatives and guardians. Mythologically, the lightning appears as the snake of the sky and dragon serpents oppose the gods of right and order in Babylon and India. The Scandinavian Midgard-snake was of similar nature, as were the Semitic snakes, which represented, like the Egyptian Apep, unfriendly powers of nature. The, sapient serpent of Eden, which had legs (the Hindu says that only a snake can see a snake’s legs), combines wisdom and enmity to man. The Hebrews worshipped serpents down to the days of HezeMah (2 Kings 18:4). A totemic origin may explain the Indian dragon-serpent Nagas, probably of Dravidian or Mongolian extraction. They have a friendly human nature. Chinese dragon-worship is a survival of serpent-worship. The ‘wisdom of the snake makes it the protecting genius of the physician in Greece and the preApollo oracle, as it is a prophetic genius elsewhere. The Africans worship snakes; the Amerinds, particularly [ p. 38 ] Mexicans, both worshipped the snake itself and exalted it into a deity. Tobacco was offered to the rattler, which (says Henry in his Travels) “really received it with pleasure”; the snake was called “grandfather” by the Amerinds, who besought it to take care of their families. The snake’s supposed power of healing, one side of its wisdom, led to its becoming emblematic of hfe and reproduction, more especially as it was connected with other phases of life in its association with trees as spirits of productivity and with the sun, an aspect prominent in’" Hindu sun-worship and Naga-cult. All this led to treeand-serpent worship, which, though overemphasized by early observers, is really connected with the sun-cult and phallic worship. Fergusson, in his work on this subject, imagines that Hindu snake-worship is Turanian and Buddhistic as opposed to Brahmanism and Shivaism, but there are no cogent reasons to support this view. Sun-worship and serpent-worship may have been united as early as ‘heholithic’ culture.[4]
There is an extravagance in India called “snake-love,” which has been given a mystic religious interpretation still more extravagant. But the matter is perfectly simple. A snake-charmer must endure the bite of a poisonous snake. He does not extract the poison but accustoms himself to it by taking larger doses from time to time till the bite ceases to affect him. He even learns to depend on his daily “dope” like an opium or hashish victim and his love for the poison explains “snake-love.” Among Mexicans and our northern Indians a religious observance seems to be connected with the “mound snake,” probably a parallel to the “furrow-snake” of Dravidian [ p. 39 ] villages, which are thus protected. The flying serpent was a form of storm or wind god among the Aztecs, obviously due to the shape of the storm. Myths connected with snakes are not illuminating as to the character of serpent-worshipt They are of great variety, some the result of quite modem interpretation, as when the beach-marks on the Adirondack coast made by trilobites are explained by the present inhabitants as tracks of the serpent of Eden.
Although insects as well as reptiles are worshipped, the attitude toward them is as of one but half believing in the power of the divinity. But ants in India are really worshipped and offerings are made to them to induce them to answer prayer and send blessings, such as children. Locusts, too, are taken seriously. A peasant will catch one and teU it to go in safety and inform its companions how well it has been treated, so that other locusts may spare his field, as he has spared their representative. The grasshopper has no mantic reputation in India as he had among the G-reeks. Insects and vermin derive at times a respect rather than worship from being imagined as reembodied souls of human beings. But in Buddhistic and Jain circles, what prevents a man from killing vermin is only his interpretation of the rule “do as you would be done by,” not the fear of killing his relatives. N/The worship of animals is embodied in totemism. Early records show that animals used as a food supply were regarded as sacred; the life-giver of a clan was the clan’s parent. The clan, after eating its parent, regularly reaches a point where it eats the life-giver only on special occasions, when the clan-tie is renewed by this physical communion, and finally the totem becomes so sacred that it is not eaten at all, the clan nourishing itself on other sustenance. In all these stages the totem-ardmal is only a revered brother or ancestor, not exactly a divinity. Anthropomorphism [ p. 40 ] (a figure on the totem-pole) and the feeling that the totem has the same needs and feelings as man, go far to intensify the belief in kinship between the growing “divinity” and mere man. -The totem differs from the fetish m being the object of a clan-cult, not the god of an individual. Decadent forms of totemism are where the term is applied to the relation existing between an individual and the hnagmed protective animal seen in a dream and accepted as a tutelary animal. Numerous other distortions of simple totemism pass under the samename and some scholars have even thought that totemism was once the aboriginal universal form of religion. But in fact totemism in its real form, where a human clan is akin to an animal-clan regarded as quasi divine, is far from universal. It belongs to a hunting stage of fife and, as taboo is most pronounced in an agricultural stage, it is not apt to prevail where taboo is most pronounced, as in Polynesia. Plants as food-givers have also been regarded as totems. Exogamy had originally no direct or necessary connection with totemism. Sacred crests are found without totemism and do not necessarily imply it, any more than do other observances implying respect for animals. The true totem as an object of special regard or worship is a being part human and part divine. Although the grotesque creatures thus represented are more beastly than godlike, yet the totem-beast has a peculiar reli^ous interest in timt it is a primitive attempt to embody the conception of a power somewhat more than man sphitually (powerfully), yet not alien to man, a rude prototype of the god-man; as Ms worshippers, through communion with him, were rmsed to MnsMp with the divine or superhuman.
Probably a direct reverence for the annual led in Egypt to the strange animal-god depicted as eat or Mppopotamns with human attributes and it may have been some [ p. 41 ] sort of totemic relationship with man which gave such an animal its human aspect. But it is also possible, as the cat and hippopotamus are not represented as ancestors of clans, that the human shape was no more than the embodiment of an attempt to make the animal human, much as tte oMr gods representing sky and storm in India and Germany were better realized under the aspect of giants and finally of quite anthropopathic beings. Indra in India and Zeus and Thor were superhuman, but they were quite htunan in their feelings and lives, exalted but subject to •anger, love, etc., and living a life of battle and feasting, having wives, .children, and retainers. A certain grotesqueness often indicates merely the human admirer’s wish to exhibit superhuman power. Thus the manybreasted Artemis and the many-armed Shiva are the result of trying to express superhmnan powers. The Louvre has a picture by Eubens in which the same idea of special fecundity is presented by a many-breasted femaie. These distorted tjrpes were early Greek but late Hindu forms, though in India the literary imagination, earlier than the plastic arts, had already invested the gods with nmny members, such as the sun-god with his thousand arms, drawn, so to speak, from nature.
There is also another kind of symbolism which is a real factor in religion. As in Arabia clouds are “camels,” so in India they are the “red cows” of dawn; the sun is a red horse, also an eagle, the “swift bird” of the sky, as the Zulus call the lightning, which in India is a snake; while in India and America wind is a bird or caused by a bird’s wings. The Mexican pantheon is one third a divine menagerie of animal forms, such as the winged snake. Eclipse to the ancient Germans was a wolf devouring sun and moon; in India, the original “seizer” (eclipse-demon) has today become the evil soul of a dead man whose chariot is drawn by eight steeds. The sun [ p. 42 ] had seven steeds, horses or deer; the fruitful god of increase in Germany and India had a car drawn by goats. In all these cases a fancied resemblance associates god and symbol. Speed and coursers, productivity and goats, zigzag lightning and snake-movement, wind and flapping of wings, these are mental parallels. Almost every god in India has an animal representative which typifies him more or less clearly. Even the death-god Yama’s steed, the buffalo, is explicable as a late (not early) association of the god of the South with the beast revered in the South as a quasi divinity. Thus, as there is a close imagined coimeetion between wisdom and water, as if wisdom were a purified knowledge, the emblem of the god of water and wisdom is a fish, both in Babylon and India. Is it then necessary to suppose that Ea and Varuna were originally fish-gods? If Varuna has a fish as his symbol, does not the scaly form of Ea point to the fact that the fish (by implication) is rather symbolic than a sign of the god’s original fish-nature? So the god of lotve in India was born of water, as in Greece, and for this reason has a fish-symbol, as some fish were sacred to Aphrodite. It is unlikely that both love-divinities were at first fishes. So when Brahman rides a swan it is unnecessary to imagine that Brahman was originally a bird-totem, or that, because Vishnu has a horse’s head, he was at first a horse, rather than that his horse-form reflects his sun-horse character; or that Shiva, who rides a bull, was originally a bull, and his consort, who rides a lion and tiger, was a beast. In Dahomey, the elephant is a god and a beast not to be eaten because he is so wise; in India, the god of cleverness in later times is given an elephant’s head, apparently because both the god and the elephant, originally worshipped for Mmself, are useful cMefly in clearing away difficulties. With the god of wisdom goes the rat as symbol and the rat in India plays the rdle of the clever [ p. 43 ] animal; lie is as naturally associated with personified divine cleverness as a red horse is with red fire and a fleet antelope with the wind-god. The wisdom of the rat as a worshipped animal may have associated him with a clever god in India, as in Greece he is associated with Apollo without implying a rat-totem or a rat-soul in either case. In the end the old object of worship becomes a mere symbol of the new god.
Some symbols are not at this late day quite clear. The demon-goddess of smallpox is associated with a donkey because (they say) she withdraws so slowly; but she may have ridden an ass because she comes so quickly (the ass typifies greater speed than the horse). The moon-god has ten horses, perhaps because there were originally ten months. Janus has two faces because he faces both ways, but in India the creator has four, because he sees on eveiy side and represents the four quarters; so four elephantgods represent space. In Africa likewise there is a hillgod with four faces representing “air” (space), to whom four times a year a baby is sacrificed, its flesh being buried in the earth, for the African god is earthly and hence is also represented as a snake (so our Indians had an earth-snake) and as such, a reproductive power, it appears with the legs of a goat. Yet at bottom it is only fourfaced space, air and earth as a whole, to which, as four winds, the Amerinds offered their first whiffs of tobacco.
Symbolism lies on the surface in a four-faced god; but just as obvious is the symbolism of many legs and arms to indicate more than usual power and in the same way the association of god and animal reverts to an obvious connection between them. It is not because an owl is a totem that to eat an owl’s eye imparts superhuman eyesight in India, but because the owl (an evil night-bird in Babylonia) sees in the dark. To the Amerinds that same owl, because it sees in the dark and is of preternatural [ p. 44 ] solemnity, was a bird of wisdom even “wiser than the beaver,” Parkman says. Why, then, when the owl is associ^ ated with Athene, mnst we believe that it is the original Athene? The owl was wise, hence divine, and as such associated with the wise goddess. Savage and barbarian, working out their conception of divinity, give what they can to indicate power and cleverness more than mortal. They succeed pretty well. Extra arms and feet; bullform and goat-form for virility; wings for flight; a thousand eyes for sight, etc. To represent gods as mere men would be profane, as mere animals would be meaningless. As divine animals (and there are many such) are represented as having human attributes, so divinities not of animal origin are represented as having that which indicates their powers.
There are, however, many doubtful cases. The goddess of love could have no more fitting symbol (as pure symbol) than a pair of turtle doves; but Syrian doves were worshipped in their own right and may therefore have been associated with her, as owls were probably worshipped before they represented Athene. Yet. in the light of comparative religious tendencies it is just possible that the owl itself was a mere symbol, as we find symbols among savages. Thus the African garden-god, Orisha Oko, representing fertility with a phallic emblem, has honey-bees as messengers, a crude but natural symbol, and Aroni, a one-legged forest-god, has a dog’s head, because he is half inclined to run after those who meet him and devour them, but (as in India) if one is brave one escapes. In the same environment, the Yoruba African country, the sea-goddess has a scaly form and long hair (mermaid style). The lowest savages thus express ideas symbolically. There was a time when symbolkm ran mad and much nonsense was said in defense thereof. Now the tide has turned and scholars hesitate to [ p. 45 ] see symbolism anywhere. Every symbol is the relic of a lost cult or god. But really there is such a thing as religious symbolism and we do not have to wait for the sick fancy of civilization to find it. The jackal that, hauirts a cemetery becomes a jackal-human god; the bull, worshipped for itself, becomes associated with a Zeus who was never a bull; but the “swift steed of the sun” was never anything but a symbol and the Lamb of God and sacred Fish do not represent animals but ideas.[5]
The lamb was the sacrificial animal, but as applied to Christ it merely symbolized him as the sacrifice. So the dove of peace became a mere symbol of peace and love, though originally a goddess of maternity. Some artistic attributes remain to us as a heritage of old belief. The horns of Moses represent magical power; the halo of the saint represents the cloud surrounding divinity (rather than the protective plate over Greek stathes), etc. The application of sjunbolism is as common outside of religion as within; a knife beneath the pillow is for brsivery; the white feather, for cowardice; honey, for sweet speech, etc. In religion, sjunbolism is a help and a hindrance. It provides a sign for an idea and is useful in recalling the idea. But when, instead of recalling, it replaces the idea, it becomes a menace. The witless Yogin who gazes forever at the sky, or holds the nrails against the palm till the hand is pierced, is only the empty-headed conseiver of noble symbols w^hose meaning he has lost.[6]
| II. The Worship of Stones, Hills, Trees, and Plants | Title page | IV. The Worship of Elements and Heavenly Phenomena |
Crooke, op. cit. II p. 222, explains the divinity of the dog on the paradoxical grounds advanced by Campbell, who thinks that dogs are worshipped because they kill men. For the dog as a psychopomp, compare the “bitch of heaven,” Samara (Hermes?) and, perhaps of cognate import, Kerberos, the dog of hell or of death, in Greece and India. This points to an early exposure of corpses, eaten by dogs. Hekate had originally a bitch’s head. See Paton, Spiritism and the Cult of the Dead in Antiquity, p. 123. ↩︎
Unclean animals are usually those possessed by or representing spiritual powers, more particularly ghosts, such as the unclean animals of Greek and Hebrew; in the latter case the implication is that the cult mimical to the Yahweh cult is represented by the animal. ↩︎
Crooke, op. cit, II, pp. 253 f. ↩︎
Serpent-worship is one of the elements ascribed by Elliot Smith to the first worship of the sun and the erection of megaliths, which elements, he thinks, were carried from Asia to America, along with the svastika, tattooing, couvade, and mummification. ↩︎
The fish-symbol has been explained by Pischel as a relic of Hindu fish- worship, which is highly improbable; it is more likely to have come from Egypt. The fish symbolizes immortality as a power overriding death (watery chaos). The connection with ichthys as representing Iesos Christos Theou (h)Uios Soter (son of God, Savior) was an ingenious utilization of the Greek word. ↩︎
A word here as to the symbol of the cross. It represents and historical incident only. The fact that the svastika was an ancient symbol of good luck and that it sometimes appeared in a cross is a mere accident. As a [ p. 46 ] symbol the svastika was known in Egypt, common in Buddhism, and found in the Far East and in America. It is apparently not known to early India; but it is earlier than the triskelion sign and the interpretation of its two forms as right and left (or male and female) symbols seems also to be late. Elliot Smith’s idea that it was peculiarly Egyptian (thence conveyed to South America) is opposed to the fact that the svastika is found in Germany, Scandinavia, and the Swiss Lake Dwellings, as well as in Great Britain and North America. Compare R. C. Temple in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, listed with other articles on the svastika in the exhaustive essay of Thomas Wilson in the United States National Museum Report, 1894. The Om, sacred syllable of India, has been interpreted as a svastika by Mr. H. N. Deb (1923), on the basis of the early form of the letter O. ↩︎