* De Is. et Os., lxxii.
** Op. cit., xi.
*** Ibid., xliv.
**** Pietschmann, op. cit., p. 163, contends that the
animal-worship is older than these Egyptian modes of writing
the divine names, say of Amnion Ra or Hathor. Moreover, the
signs were used in writing the names because the gods were
conceived of in these animal shapes.
Mr. Le Page Renouf appears to hold that there was something respectably mythical in the worship of the inhabitants of zoological and botanical gardens, something holy apparent at least to the devout.* He quotes the opinion attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, that the beasts were symbols of deity, not deities, and this was the view of "a grave opponent". Mr. Le Page Renouf also mentions Porphyry's theory, that "under the semblance of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature".** It is evident, of course, that all of these theories may have been held by the learned in Egypt, especially after the Christian era, in the times of Apollonius and Porphyry; but that throws little light on the motives and beliefs of the pyramid-builders many thousands of years before, or of the contemporary peasants with their worship of cats and alligators. In short, the systems of symbolism were probably made after the facts, to account for practices whose origin was obscure. Yet another hypothesis is offered by Mr. Le Page Renouf, and in the case of Set and the hippopotamus is shared by M. Maspero. Tiele also remarks that some beasts were promoted to godhead comparatively late, because their names resembled names of gods.***
* Hibbert Lectures, pp. 6, 7.
** De Abst., iv. c. 9.
*** Theolog. Tidjsch., 12th year, p. 261.
The gods, in certain cases, received their animal characteristics by virtue of certain unconscious puns or mistakes in the double senses of words. Seb is the earth. Seb is also the Egyptian name for a certain species of goose, and, in accordance with the homonymous tendency of the mythological period of all nations, the god and the bird were identified.* Seb was called "the Great Cackler".** Again, the god Thoth was usually represented with the head of an ibis. A mummied ibis "in the human form is made to represent the god Thoth".*** This connection between Thoth and the ibis Mr. Le Page Renouf explains at some length as the result of an etymological confusion.**** Thus metaphorical language reacted upon thought, and, as in other religions, obtained the mastery.
While these are the views of a distinguished modern Egyptologist, another Egyptologist, not less distinguished, is of an entirely opposite opinion as to the question on the whole. "It is possible, nay, certain," writes M. Maspero, "that during the second Theban empire the learned priests may have thought it well to attribute a symbolical sense to certain bestial deities. But whatever they may have worshipped in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, and not a hieroglyph, that the first worshippers of the ibis adored."(v) M. Meyer is of the same opinion, and so are Professor Tiele and M. Perrot.(v)*
* For a statement of the theory of "homonymous tendency,"
see Selected Essays, Max Müller, i. 299, 245. For a
criticism of the system, see Mythology in Encyclop, Brit.,
or in La Mythologie, A. Lang, Paris, 1886.
** Hibbert Lectures, 1880, p. 111.
*** Wilkinson, iii. 325.
**** Op. cit., pp. 116, 117, 237.
(v) Revue de V Histoire des Religions, vol. i.
(v)* Meyer, Oeschichte des Alterthums, p. 72; Tiele,
Manuel, p. 45; Perrot and Chipiez, Egyptian Art, English
transl., i. 54. Hist. Egypt. Rel., pp. 97, 103. Tiele finds
the origin of this animal-worship in "animism," and supposes
that the original colonists or conquerors from Asia found it
prevalent in and adopted it from an African population.
Professor Tiele does not appear, when he wrote this chapter,
to have observed the world-wide diffusion of animal-worship
in totem ism, for he says, "Nowhere else does the worship
of animals prevail so extensively as among African peoples".
While the learned have advanced at various periods these conflicting theories of the origin of Egyptian animal-worship, a novel view was introduced by Mr. M'Lennan. In his essays on Plant and Animal Worship, he regarded Egyptian animal-worship as only a consecrated and elaborate survival of totemism. Mr. Le Page Renouf has ridiculed the "school-boy authorities on which Mr. M'Lennan relied".* Nevertheless, Mr. M'Lennan's views are akin to those to which M. Maspero and MM. Perrot and Chipiez are attached, and they have also the support of Professor Sayce.
"These animal forms, in which a later myth saw the shapes assumed by the affrighted gods during the great war between Horus and Typhon, take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt was still totemism. They are survivals from a long-forgotten past, and prove that Egyptian civilisation was of slow and independent growth, the latest stage only of which is revealed to us by the monuments. Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and Pachis of Hermonthis are all links that bind together the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Egypt of the stone age. These were the sacred animals of the clans which first settled in these localities, and their identification with the deities of the official religion must have been a slow process, never fully carried out, in fact, in the minds of the lower classes."**
* Hibbert Lectures, pp. 6, 30.
** Herodotus, p. 344.
Thus it appears that, after all, even on philological showing, the religions and myths of a civilised people may be illustrated by the religions and myths of savages. It is in the study of savage totemism that we too seek a partial explanation of the singular Egyptian practices that puzzled the Greeks and Romans, and the Egyptians themselves. To some extent the Egyptian religious facts were purely totemistic in the strict sense.