Prof. Sayce [{112b}] holds that there was no such person as Sethos, but that the legend ‘is evidently Egyptian, not Greek, and the name of Sennacherib, as well as the fact of the Assyrian attack, is correct.’ The legend also, though Egyptian, is ‘an echo of the biblical account of the destruction of the Assyrian army,’ an account which omits the mice. ‘As to the mice, here,’ says Prof. Sayce, ‘we have to do again with the Greek dragomen (sic). The story of Sethos was attached to the statue of some deity which was supposed to hold a mouse in its hand.’ It must have been easy to verify this supposition; but Mr. Sayce adds, ‘mice were not sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as symbols, or found on the monuments.’ To this remark we may suggest some exceptions. Apparently this one mouse was found on the monuments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says mice do occur in the sculptures, but they were not sacred. Rats, however, were certainly sacred, and as little distinction is taken, in myth, between rats and mice as between rabbits and hares. The rat was sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like all totems) was not to be eaten. [{113a}] This association of the rat and the Sun cannot but remind us of Apollo and his mouse. According to Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did worship the shrew-mouse. The Athribitæ, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis, are the people to whom he attributes this cult, which he mentions (xvii. 813) among the other local animal-worships of Egypt. [{113b}] Several porcelain examples of the field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called Apollo by the Greeks) may be seen in the British Museum.
That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on the evidence of the Ritual, of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue ‘had a mouse on its hand.’ Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of mice gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation of mouse-worship. One of the Trojan ‘mouse-stories’ ran—That emigrants had set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle advised them to settle ‘wherever they were attacked by the children of the soil.’ At Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night by mice, which ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings. The colonists made up their mind that these mice were ‘the children of the soil,’ settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo. [{114a}] A myth of this sort may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or a Mouse tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have been settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion. [{114b}] Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse Apollo on the hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine. [{114c}]
Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god or of the mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse family names had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been, mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith: [{115a}] ‘Achbor, the mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and another mouse-name are among the Arabs. The same name occurs in Judah.’ Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult. In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of these practices (lxvi.): ‘They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord.’ This is like the Egyptian prohibition to eat ‘the abominable’ (that is, tabooed or forbidden) ‘Rat of Ra.’ If the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan, then the mouse was a totem, [{115b}] for the chosen people were forbidden to eat ‘the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.’ That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems, Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where ‘we find seventy of the elders of Israel—that is, the heads of houses—worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of all manner of unclean’ (tabooed) ‘creeping things, and quadrupeds, even all the idols of the House of Israel.’ Some have too hastily concluded that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring Philistines. After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in the house of Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They therefore, in accordance with a well-known savage magical practice, made five golden representations of the diseased part, and five golden mice, as ‘a trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,’ and so restored the Ark. [{116}] Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic countries, and the mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines had ever worshipped mice.
* * * * *
Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the sacred animal of Rudra. ‘The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,’ says the Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his ‘Apollo Smintheus.’ Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganeça, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented in art with his foot upon a mouse.
Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven in Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a totem, would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory than on that of De Gubernatis: ‘The Pagan sun-god crushes under his foot the Mouse of Night. When the cat’s away, the mice may play; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.’ [{117a}] This is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) cannot play: there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the mouse is the night, according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann’s opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was originally regarded by the Aryan race as the ‘flashing tooth of a beast,’ especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold, the lightning and the mouse are convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent; [{117b}] thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a heavenly cow—an idea recurring in the ‘Zend Avesta.’ But it does not follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a mouse’s teeth. The hypothesis is a jeu d’esprit, like the opposite hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred to the conjecture of a civilised observer. The facts of savage animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to or unappreciated by scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in Egyptian religion.
Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an isolated case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the mouse, he did no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several other animals whose images were associated with his own. The Greek religion was more refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In Egypt the animals were still adored, and the images of the gods had bestial heads. In Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic statues, had bestial heads; but beside the other deities the sculptor set the owl, eagle, wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever creature was the local favourite of the deity. [{118a}] Probably the deity had, in the majority of cases, superseded the animal and succeeded to his honours. But the conservative religious sentiment retained the beast within the courts and in the suit and service of the anthropomorphic god. [{118b}]
The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be observed in Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in his ‘Samoa’) each family has its own sacred animal, which it may not eat. If this law be transgressed, the malefactor is supernaturally punished in a variety of ways. But, while each family has thus its totem, four or five different families recognise, in owl, crab, lizard, and so on, incarnations of the same god, say of Tongo. If Tongo had a temple among these families, we can readily believe that images of the various beasts in which he was incarnate would be kept within the consecrated walls. Savage ideas like these, if they were ever entertained in Greece, would account for the holy animals of the different deities. But it is obvious that the phenomena which we have been studying may be otherwise explained. It may be said that the Sminthian Apollo was only revered as the enemy and opponent of mice. St. Gertrude (whose heart was eaten by mice) has the same rôle in France. [{119}] The worship of Apollo, and the badge of the mouse, would, on this principle, be diffused by colonies from some centre of the faith. The images of mice in Apollo’s temples would be nothing more than votive offerings. Thus, in the church of a Saxon town, the verger shows a silver mouse dedicated to Our Lady. ‘This is the greatest of our treasures,’ says the verger. ‘Our town was overrun with mice till the ladies of the city offered this mouse of silver. Instantly all the mice disappeared.’ ‘And are you such fools as to believe that the creatures went away because a silver mouse was dedicated?’ asked a Prussian officer. ‘No,’ replied the verger, rather neatly; ‘or long ago we should have offered a silver Prussian.’
STAR MYTHS.
Artemus Ward used to say that, while there were many things in the science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we ‘weigh the sun,’ and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the aid of spectrum analysis. ‘But what beats me about the stars,’ he observed plaintively, ‘is how we come to know their names.’ This question, or rather the somewhat similar question, ‘How did the constellations come by their very peculiar names?’ has puzzled Professor Pritchard and other astronomers more serious than Artemus Ward. Why is a group of stars called the Bear, or the Swan, or the Twins, or named after the Pleiades, the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas? [{121}] These are difficulties that meet even children when they examine a ‘celestial globe.’ There they find the figure of a bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between the stars of the constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn that Orion’s belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the heavens, the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal forms in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is true, everyone can behold in the heavens. Corona, for example, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved missile. The Milky Way, again, does resemble a path in the sky; our English ancestors called it Watling Street—the path of the Watlings, mythical giants—and Bushmen in Africa and Red Men in North America name it the ‘ashen path,’ or ‘the path of souls.’ The ashes of the path, of course, are supposed to be hot and glowing, not dead and black like the ash-paths of modern running-grounds. Other and more recent names for certain constellations are also intelligible. In Homer’s time the Greeks had two names for the Great Bear; they called it the Bear, or the Wain: and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the same constellation is popularly styled the Dipper, and every one may observe the likeness to a dipper or toddy-ladle.