The Greek Mouse-totem?
My theory connecting Apollo Smintheus and the place-names derived from mice with a possible prehistoric mouse-totem gave me, I confess, considerable satisfaction. But in Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough (ii. 129-132) is published a group of cases in which mice and other vermin are worshipped for prudential reasons—to get them to go away. In the Classical Review (vol. vi. 1892) Mr. Ward Fowler quotes Aristotle and Ælian on plagues of mice, like the recent invasion of voles on the Border sheep-farms. He adopts the theory that the sacred mice were adored by way of propitiating them. Thus Apollo may be connected with mice, not as a god who superseded a mouse-totem, but as an expeller of mice, like the worm-killing Heracles, and the Locust-Heracles, and the Locust-Apollo. [{81a}] The locust is still painted red, salaamed to, and set free in India, by way of propitiating his companions. [{81b}] Thus the Mouse-Apollo (Smintheus) would be merely a god noted for his usefulness in getting rid of mice, and any worship given to mice (feeding them, placing their images on altars, their stamp on coins, naming places after them, and so on) would be mere acts of propitiation.
There would be no mouse-totem in the background. I do not feel quite convinced—the mouse being a totem, and a sacred or tabooed animal, in India and Egypt. [{82a}] But I am content to remain in a balance of opinion. That the Mouse is the Night (Gubernatis), or the Lightning (Grohmann), I am disinclined to believe. Philologists are very apt to jump at contending meteorological explanations of mice and such small deer without real necessity, and an anthropologist is very apt to jump at an equally unnecessary and perhaps equally undemonstrated totem.