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.
6. Other animals.
Of the exaltation of minor animals into anthropomorphic gods and goddesses only a few instances need be given. As is shown by Sir J. G. Frazer, Demeter and Proserpine probably both represent the deified pig.[15] “The Greek drama has arisen from the celebrations of Dionysus. In the beginning the people sacrificed a goat totem-god, that is to say, Dionysus himself; they wept for his death and then celebrated his resurrection with transports of joy.”[16] And again M. Reinach states: “There are more than mere vestiges of totemism in ancient Greece. We may take first the attendant animals of the gods, the eagle of Zeus, the owl of Athena, the fawn of Artemis, the dolphin of Poseidon, the dove of Aphrodite and so on; the sacred animal can develop into the companion of the god, but also into his enemy or victim; thus Apollo Sauroctonos is, as the epithet shows, a killer of lizards; but in the beginning it was the lizard itself which was divine. We have seen that the boar before becoming the slayer of Adonis had been Adonis himself.”[17]
In early Rome “The wolf was the animal most venerated. Its association with Mars, as the sacrifice most pleasing to him, leaves no doubt as to the primitive nature of the god. It was a wolf which acted as guide to the Samnites in their search for a place to settle in, and these Samnites called themselves Hirpi or Hirpini, that is to say, wolves. Romulus and Remus, sons of the wolf Mars and the she-wolf Silvia (the forest-dweller), are suckled by a she-wolf.”[18] It seems possible that Mars as the deified wolf was at first an agricultural deity, the wolf being worshipped by the shepherd and farmer because he was their principal enemy, as the sāmbhar stag and the wild buffalo are similarly venerated by Indian cultivators. At a later period, in becoming the god of war, he may have represented the deified horse as well. Races of war-horses were held at his festivals on 14th March and 27th February, and a great race on the Ides of October when the winner was solemnly slain.[19] “In Egypt the baboon was regarded as the emblem of Tahuti, the god of wisdom; the serious expression and human ways of the large baboons are an obvious cause for their being regarded as the wisest of animals. Tahuti is represented as a baboon from the earliest dynasty down to late times; and four baboons were sacred in his temple at Heliopolis.”[20] “The hippopotamus was the goddess Ta-urt, ‘the great one,’ the patroness of pregnancy, who is never shown in any other form. Rarely this animal appears as the emblem of the god Set. The jackal haunted the cemeteries on the edge of the desert, and so came to be taken as the guardian of the dead and identified with Anubis, the god of departing souls. The vulture was the emblem of maternity as being supposed to care especially for her young. Hence she is identified with Mut, the mother-goddess of Thebes. The cobra serpent was sacred from the earliest times to the present day. It was never identified with any of the great deities, but three goddesses appear in serpent form.”[21]
7. Animals worshipped in India.
Finally, in India we have Hanumān, originally the deified ape, about whose identity there can be no doubt as he still retains his monkey’s tail in all sculpture. Bhairon, the watchman of Mahādeo’s temples, rides on a black dog, and was perhaps originally the watch-dog, or in his more terrible character of the devourer of human beings, the wolf. Ganesh or Ganpati has the head of an elephant and rides on a rat and appears to have derived his divine attributes from both these animals, as will be explained elsewhere;[22] Kartikeya, the god of war, rides on a peacock, and as the peacock is sacred, he may originally have been that bird, perhaps because its plumes were a favourite war emblem. Among his epithets are Sarabhu, born in the thicket, Dwādasakara and Dwādasāksha, twelve-handed and twelve-eyed. He was fostered by the maidens who make the Pleiades, and his epithet of twelve-eyed may be taken from the eyes in the peacock’s feathers.[23] But, like the Greek gods, the Hindu gods have now long become anthropomorphic, and only vestiges remain of their animal associations. Enough has been said to show that most of the pantheons are largely occupied by deified animals and birds.