108 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniaemblems borne on the flagstaffs of the prehistoric boats, like
the emblems on the standards of the several nomes, must have
been the animals or objects in which the clans saw the divine
powers which held them together, and from which, it may be,
they were derived. The subsequent history of animal worship in
Egypt is a continuous drifting away from this primitive totemism.
The inanimate objects first fall into the background; then, under
the influence of a higher form of religion, the animals become
symbols, and assume semi-human shapes, and finally one only
out of a species is selected to become the incarnation of a god.
But the god of whom he is the incarnation is a very different god
from the divinity that was believed to reside in the original fetish.
[117] It is a god in the Asiatic and not in the African sense, a god whose
nature is spiritual and free from the limitations of our earthly
existence, so that he can enter at any moment into whatsoever
form he desires. The old fetishes survived, indeed, but it was
as amulets and charms; and to these the multitude transferred its
faith as the State religion became more and more unintelligible
to it. The magic lock of hair and image of a serpent preserved
at Saft el-Henna, and said by the priests to have belonged to the
sun-god, had doubtless come down from the days of fetishism.
It has often been asserted that besides the bull or the ram or the
crocodile, there were other creatures of a composite or fabulous
character which were also accounted sacred by the Egyptians. It
is true that the sacred animal and symbol of Set seems to be of
this nature. His forked tail and ass-like ears make it difficult to
believe that any existing beast ever served for his portrait. But
the sphinx, in whom the men of the Eighteenth Dynasty saw
the image of Harmakhis, the rising sun, or the phœnix in whom
the sun-god of Heliopolis was incarnated, belongs to a different
category. They are not sacred animals in the sense in which Apis
and Mnevis were so.
The sphinx, like the symbol of Set, is one of those composite
creatures which meet us from time to time in Egyptian art. It