Lecture V. Animal Worship. 101
a bird, if so he willed. Transmigration from one body to another,
indeed, never presented any difficulty to the Egyptian mind. It [109]
could be effected by the magician by means of his spells; and
there were stories, like the folk-tales of modern Europe, which
told how the life and individuality of a man could pass into the
bodies of animals, and even into seeds and trees. The belief is
common to most primitive peoples, and is doubtless due to the
dreams in which the sleeper imagines himself possessed of some
bodily form that is not his own.
We must then regard the animal worship of Egypt as the
survival of an early fetishism. But it is a survival which has
had to accommodate itself to the antagonistic conceptions of an
anthropomorphic faith. By the side of the deified king the deified
animal was allowed to remain, and man and beast were mixed
together in religious art. It was parallel to the juxtaposition of
pictorial ideographs and phonetically-spelt words in the writing
of a later day. And just as it was only the cultivated classes to
whom the written characters were symbols with a meaning other
than that which they bore to the eye, so too it was only these same
cultivated classes to whom the sacred animals were symbols and
embodiments of the deity, rather than the deity itself. The masses
continued to be fetish-worshippers like the earlier inhabitants of
the country from whom most of them drew their descent.
To this fact we must ascribe the extraordinary hold which the
worship of animals had upon the Egyptian people as a whole
up to the period of their conversion to Christianity. While the
walls of the temple were covered with pictures in which the gods
were represented in human or semi-human form, the inner shrine
which they served to surround and protect contained merely the
beast or bird in which the deity was believed to be incarnated
for the time. When the god revealed himself to his worshipper, [110]
it was as a hawk or a crocodile. The fact would be inexplicable
if the priests alone were privileged to see him, as has often
been maintained. Such, however, was not the case. Every