5. Animal-gods. The domestic animals.
It is easy to see how these domestic animals would overshadow all others in importance when the tribe had arrived at the pastoral or agricultural stage; thus in the former the camel, horse, goat or sheep, and in the latter pre-eminently the bull and cow, as the animals which afforded subsistence to the whole tribe, would become their greatest gods. It must be presumed that men forgot that their ancestors had tamed these animals, and looked on them as divine helpers who of their own free will had come to give mankind their aid in gaining a subsistence. Those who have observed the reverence paid to the cow and bull in India will have no difficulty in realising this point of view. Many other instances can be obtained. Thus in the Vedic religion of the Aryans the Ashvins, from ashva, a horse, were the divine horsemen of the dawn or of the sun. The principal sacrifice was that of the horse, considered, perhaps, as the representative of the sun or carrier of celestial fire. In a hymn the horse is said to be sprung from the gods. In Greece Phaethon was the charioteer of the horses of the sun. Mars, as the Roman god of war, may perhaps have been the deified horse, as suggested later. The chieftains of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England, Hengist and Horsa, were held to be descended from the god Odin, to whom horses were sacrificed; Hengist means a stallion and Horsa a horse, the word having survived in modern English. Other mythical kings in Bede’s chronicle have names derived from that of the horse (vicg.).[3] The camel does not seem to have become an anthropomorphic god, but the Arabs venerated it and refrained from killing it except as a sacrifice, when it was offered to the Morning-Star and partaken of sacramentally by the worshippers as will be seen subsequently. The ox as the tiller of the ground, with the cow as milk-giver and mother of the ox, are especially venerated by races in the early agricultural stage. Egyptian and Greek instances have already been given. In modern Egypt, as in India, bulls are let loose and held sacred. “Sometimes a peasant vows that he will sacrifice, for the sake of a saint, a calf which he possesses, as soon as it is full grown and fatted. It is let loose, by consent of all his neighbours, to pasture where it will, even in fields of young wheat; and at last, after it has been sacrificed, a public feast is made with its meat. Many a large bull is thus given away.”[4] Dionysus Zagreus was a young bull devoured by the Titans, whom Zeus raised again to a glorious life.[5] The Babylonians had a bull-god, Ninit.[6] Brazen images of bulls were placed in Babylonian temples. The Pārsis hold the bull sacred, and a child is made to drink a bull’s urine as a rite of purification. After a funeral the mourners free themselves from the impurity caused by contact with the dead in a similar manner.[7] The monotheistic religion of Persia, Mitraism, which was an outcome of the faith of Zoroaster, and being introduced by the Emperors Commodus and Julian into the Roman world contended for some time with Christianity, was apparently sun-worship, Mitra being the sun-god of the ancient Aryans and Iranians; M. Reinach says: “Mitra is born from a rock; he makes water flow from the rock by striking it with an arrow, makes an alliance with the sun, and enters into a struggle with a bull, whom he conquers and sacrifices. The sacrifice of the bull appears to indicate that the worship of Mitra in its most ancient form was that of a sacred bull, conjoined to or representing the sun, which was sacrificed as a god, and its flesh and blood eaten in a sacrificial meal. Mitra, the slayer of the bull, figures in a double rôle as one finds in all the religions which have passed from totemism to anthropomorphism.”[8] In Scandinavia the god Odin and his brothers were the grandsons of a divine cow, born from the melting ice in the region of snow and darkness.[9] In Rome a white bull was sacrificed to the Feriae Latinae, apparently the spirit of the Latin holy days, and distributed among all the towns of Latium.[10] Altars of the ancient Celts or Gauls have been found in France carved with the image of a bull.[11] In Palestine there is the familiar instance of the golden calf. In the open court of Solomon’s temple stood the brazen sea on twelve oxen, and figures of lions, oxen and cherubim covered the portable tanks.[12] The veneration of the bull survived into Christian England in the Middle Ages. “At St. Edmundsbury a white bull, which enjoyed full ease and plenty in the fields, and was never yoked to the plough nor employed in any service, was led in procession in the chief streets of the town to the principal gate of the monastery, attended by all the monks singing and a shouting crowd.[13] “Such remedies as cowdung and cow’s urine have been used on the continent of Europe by peasant physicians down to our times”;[14] and the belief in their efficacy must apparently have arisen from the sanctity attaching to the animal. In India Siva rides upon the bull Nandi, and when the Kunbis were too weak from famine to plough the fields, he had Nandi castrated and harnessed to the plough, thus teaching them to use oxen for ploughing; the image of Nandi is always carved in stone in front of Siva, and there seems little reason to doubt that in his beneficent aspect of Mahādeo the god was originally the deified bull. Bulls were let loose in his honour and allowed to graze where they would, and formerly a good Hindu would not even sell a bull, though this rule has fallen into abeyance. The sacred cow, Kāmdhenu, was the giver of all wealth in Hindu mythology, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is considered to have been the deified cow. Hindus are purified from grave offences by drinking the five products of the sacred cow, milk, curds, butter, dung and urine; and the floors of Hindu houses are daily plastered with cowdung to the same end.