Lecture V. Animal Worship. 107
last days of Egyptian paganism the sun-god of Heliopolis was not
a bull, but a man; and though the mummified Apis watched over
the cemeteries of Memphis, the god of its great temple remained
a mummified man and not a mummified bull.
One of the legends elaborately concocted in the temples out of
old folk-tales and etymological puns explained the animal forms
of the gods as the result of the murder of Osiris by Typhon or
Set. The fear of sharing his fate made them hide themselves, it
was related, in the bodies of the beasts.^78 But the explanation
must belong to an age when the introduction of foreign ideas
had thrown discredit on the old worship of animals. In earlier
times no explanation was needed. The belief in the power
possessed by the soul of migrating from one body into another,
and the symbolism of which the hieroglyphic writing was at once [116]
the expression and the cause, formed an easy bridge by which
the fetishism of neolithic Egypt and the anthropomorphism of
historical Egypt could be joined together. Horus is a hawk and
the Pharaoh is a bull on the earliest monuments we possess, and
such visible symbols necessarily reacted on a people, one half
at least of whom already acknowledged the hawk and the bull
as their gods. The official recognition of Apis and Mnevis and
Mendes was the last step in the process of incorporating the
aboriginal superstitions and practices into the State religion, and
giving them official sanction. The parallelism with Bra%manism
in India is complete.
But we have still to ask why it was that the bull was worshipped
in one district of prehistoric Egypt, the hawk in another? Why
was it that a particular fetish was the protecting deity of a
particular sanctuary or nome? To this there can be but one
answer. A modified form of totemism must once have been
known in the valley of the Nile. The sacred animal must have
been the last representative of the totem of the tribe or clan. The
(^78) Plutarch,De Iside et Osiride, ed. Leemans, lxxii. p. 126.