Gods and Totems
Our author refers to unnamed writers who call Indra or Ammon a totem (i. 200).
This is a foolish liberty with language. ‘Why should not all the gods of Egypt with their heads of bulls and apes and cats be survivals of totemisms?’ Why not, indeed? Professor Sayce remarks, ‘They were the sacred animals of the clans,’ survivals from an age ‘when the religion of Egypt was totemism.’ ‘In Egypt the gods themselves are totem-deities, i.e. personifications or individual representations of the sacred character and attributes which in the purely totem stage of religion were ascribed without distinction to all animals of the holy kind.’ So says Dr. Robertson Smith. He and Mr. Sayce are ‘scholars,’ not mere unscholarly anthropologists. [{76}]