Lecture V. Animal Worship. 99
And this symbolism, it will be noticed, accompanies the
introduction of symbolic writing. The figure of the bull which
denotes the Pharaoh, is as much a symbol as the fish which forms
part of his name. It is therefore fair to conclude that the hawk
which brings the captured enemy to the king is also a symbol.
The fetish has become symbolic; the hawk is no longer a god
in and for itself, but because it is the embodiment of the divine
Horus. [107]
It was but a step further to unite the symbol with the human
form. The process involved the disuse of inanimate objects; only
the living could be fitly joined together. Horus could be depicted
as a man with a hawk's head; it was less easy to combine the
symbol of Min with a man's limbs. Such anthropomorphising
followed necessarily from the deification of the Pharaoh. The race
which turned its human leader into a god was bound to represent
its gods under human form. In Egypt, however, the older element
in the population, with its religious ideas, was too strong to be
wholly disregarded by the ruling caste. The compromise, which
had transformed the fetish into a symbol, ended by retaining the
animal forms of the gods, but in subordination to the form of
man. Henceforth, for the State religion, Horus wore merely the
mask of a hawk.^72
That the official figures of the gods were thus a compromise
(^72) For late examples of the worship of animals like the cat, ram, swallow,
or goose, as animals and not as incarnations of an official god, see Maspero,
Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 395 sqq. The rarity
of them is due to their representing private and domestic cults not recognised
by the religion of the State.“The worship of the swallow, cat, and goose,
which had commenced as the pure and simple adoration of these creatures in
themselves, always remained so for the multitude. We must not forget that
Orientals regard beasts somewhat differently from ourselves. They ascribe
to them a language, a knowledge of the future, an extreme acuteness of the
senses which allows them to perceive objects and beings invisible to man. It
was not, indeed, all Egypt that worshipped in the beast the beast itself; but
a considerable part of it which belonged almost entirely to the same social
condition, and represented pretty much the same moral and intellectual ideas.”