Myth, Ritual And Religion, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Andrew Lang

Some examples of the local practices and rites which justify this opinion may be offered. It has been shown that the totem of each totem-kindred among the lower races is sacred, and that there is a strict rule against eating, or even making other uses of, the sacred animal or plant.* At the same time, one totem-kindred has no scruple about slaying or eating the totem of any other kindred. Now similar rules prevailed in Egypt, and it is not easy for the school which regards the holy beasts as emblems, or as the results of misunderstood language, to explain why an emblem was adored in one village and persecuted and eaten in the next. But if these usages be survivals of totemism, the practice at once ceases to be isolated, and becomes part of a familiar, if somewhat obscure, body of customs found all over the world. "The same animal which was revered and forbidden to be slaughtered for the altar or the table in one part of the country was sacrificed and eaten in another."**

* This must be taken generally. See Spencer and Gillen in
the Natives of Central Australia, where each kin helps the
others to kill its own totem.
** Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, ii. 467.

Herodotus bears testimony to this habit in an important passage. He remarks that the people of the Theban nome whose god, Ammon Ra, or Khnum, was ram-headed, abstain from sheep and sacrifice goats; but the people of Mendes, whose god was goat-headed, abstain from goats, sacrifice sheep, and hold all goats in reverence.*

These local rites, at least in Roman times, caused civil brawls, for the customs of one town naturally seemed blasphemous to neighbours with a different sacred animal. Thus when the people of Dog-town were feasting on the fish called oxyrrhyncus, the citizens of the town which revered the oxyrrhyncus began to eat dogs, to which there is no temptation. Hence arose a riot.**

* Herodotus, ii. 42-46. The goat-headed Mendesian god Pan,
as Herodotus calls him, is recognised by Dr. Birch as the
goat-headed Ba-en-tattu. Wilkinson, ii. 512, note 2.
** De Is. et Os., 71, 72.

The most singular detail in Juvenal's famous account of the war between the towns of Ombi and Tentyra does not appear to be a mere invention. They fought "because each place loathes the gods of its neighbours". The turmoil began at a sacred feast, and the victors devoured one of the vanquished. Now if the religion were really totemistic, the worshippers would be of the same blood as the animal they worshipped, and in eating an adorer of the crocodile, his enemies would be avenging the eating of their own sacred beast. When that beast was a crocodile, probably nothing but starvation or religious zeal could induce people to taste his unpalatable flesh. Yet "in the city Apollinopolis it is the custom that every one must by all means eat a bit of crocodile; and on one day they catch and kill as many crocodiles as they can, and lay them out in front of the temple ". The mythic reason was that Typhon, in his flight from Horus, took the shape of a crocodile. Yet he was adored at various places where it was dangerous to bathe on account of the numbers and audacity of the creatures. Mummies of crocodiles are found in various towns where the animal was revered.*

It were tedious to draw up a list of the local sacred beasts of Egypt;** but it seems manifest that the explanation of their worship as totems at once colligates it with a familiar set of phenomena. The symbolic explanations, on the other hand, are clearly fanciful, mere jeux d'esprit. For example, the sacred shrew-mouse was locally adored, was carried to Butis on its death, and its mummy buried with care, but the explanation that it "received divine honours because it is blind, and darkness is more ancient than light," by no means accounts for the mainly local respect paid to the little beast.***

* Wilkinson, iii. 329. Compare AElian, x. 24, on the enmity
between worshippers of crocodiles and hawks (and Strabo,
xvii. 558). The hawk-worshippers averred that the hawk was a
symbol of fire; the crocodile people said that their beast
was an emblem of water; but why one city should be so
attached to water-worship and its neighbour to tire-worship
does not appear.
** A good deal of information will be found in Wilkinson's
third volume, but must be accepted with caution.
*** Wilkinson, iii. 33; Plutarch, Sympos., iv. quaest. 5;
Herodot, ii. 67.

If this explanation of the local worship of sacred beasts be admitted as plausible, the beast-headed gods, or many of them, may be accounted for in the same way. It is always in a town where a certain animal is locally revered that the human-shaped god wearing the head of the same animal finds the centre and chief holy place of his worship. The cat is great in Bubastis, and there is Bast, and also the cat-headed Sekhet* of Memphis. The sheep was great in Thebes, and there was the sacred city of the ram-headed Khnum or Ammon Ra.** If the crocodile was held in supreme regard at Ombos, there, too, was the sacred town of the crocodile-headed god, Sebak.

* Wilkinson, iii. 286. But the cat, though Bubastis was her
centre and metropolis, was sacred all over the land. Nor was
puss only in this proud position. Some animals were
universally worshipped.
** The inconsistencies of statement about this ram-headed
deity in Wilkinson are most confusing. Ammon is an adjective
= "hidden," and is connected with the ram-headed Khnum, and
with the hawk-headed Ra, the sun.