Animal deity

“ It was an easy step for the savage from the belief in his own descent from some animal to a belief in the sacredness and mystery of animals, naturally leading to the worship of them. The Indians of Peru, for example, regarded the dog as their most exalted deity. They set up the image of a dog in their temples. They were also in the habit of choosing a live dog as a representation of their deity. ”

“ The worship of animals, to those who have not felt the fascination of anthropology, appears merely unintelligible and absurd. Animals were worshipped because they were formidable or wonderful; because men fancied that they were incarnations of deity; because they might be tenanted by the souls of heroic forefathers;1199 and animal-worship, or a relic of animal-worship, which may perhaps, in some cases, have been a survival of totemism, has left vestiges in Celtic art. ”

“ I would only express my growing conviction that these two distinct modes of representing the divine personage to the worshipper are not necessarily prior and posterior, the one to the other, in the evolution of religion. They can easily, and frequently do, coexist. The vaguely conceived deity shifts his shape, and the same people may imagine him mainly as a glorified man of human volition and action, and yet think of him as temporarily incarnate in an animal, and embody his type for purposes of worship or religious art in animal forms. ”

“ Among our Indian worshipers of totems the sacred animal is eaten, body and blood, once a year, in a solemn sacrifice of itself unto itself in a mystical ceremony. These gross rites are thought to have an atoning efficacy, as they claim that the sacred animal shares the nature of their god, who in this manner dies for his people, while at the same time the life of the sacred beast passes into the lives of the communicants and unites them to their deity and each other in lasting bonds. ”

“ To consider an animal a god, the messenger, attendant, companion, or representative of that god; to offer it up as the most delectable sacrifice to that deity, and afterwards restrict the oblation to a part only of the animal, such as its horns, hoofs, excreta,—are all links in the same psycho-religious chain of reasoning.
Mrs. Fanny D. Bergen shrewdly observes, “There seems to be the best of reason for believing that, to seek the origin of the popular delusion concerning the curative properties of certain animal excreta, we must study the mythology of our long-ago Aryan ancestors.” ”

“ In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connection with the anthropomorphic gods which have been developed out of them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or plant. ”

“ But after an animal has been conceived as a god, or a god as an animal, it sometimes happens, as we have seen, that the god sloughs off his animal form, and becomes purely anthropomorphic; and that then the animal, which at first had been slain in the character of the god, comes to be the victim offered to the god, on the ground of its hostility to the deity ”

“ We know that the dead were often buried in the skins of sacrificial [Pg 220] animals, and so identified with the life-giving deities and given rebirth. We know also that in certain ceremonies the appropriate skins were worn by those who were impersonating particular gods or goddesses. The wearing of these skins of divine animals seems to have been prompted not so much by the idea of a reincarnation in animal form as by the desire for identification and communion with the particular deity which the animal represented. ”

“ Also, as in the ordinary transmigration of souls, a deity is considered able to enter into the body of an animal, as when he flies from place to place in the form of a sacred bird, or lives in the divine snake fed and worshipped among the negroes of the Slave coast. ”

“ Various temple officials impersonated the gods on certain occasions, and these were implored, invoked or praised as the living representative of the deity. But more frequently the animal sacred to the god was brought out and worshipped—not for himself, but for the deity he represented. ”

“ I have had to prove in mythology its most humble aspect, that is to say, the god enclosed in the animal; and inasmuch as amongst the various mythical animals which I have endeavoured to describe, several preserve the propitious character and resplendent form of the god, they are generally considered as the form which the deity assumes either to feed secretly upon the forbidden fruit or to fulfil a term of punishment for some former fault of his ”

“ Sometimes the incarnate deity, out of consideration perhaps for the weakness of the flesh, would limit his presence to a portion of an animal, it might be the left wing of a pigeon, or the tail of a dog, or the right leg of a pig. [74] The advantages of such a restriction to a worshipper are obvious. A man, for instance, to whom it would have been death to eat the right leg of a pig, might partake of a left leg of pork with safety and even with gusto. ”

“ Now it is important to note that these ritual records nowhere suggest that whole species of animals were worshipped, but that only certain individuals of that species, haunting certain places to which a sense of religious mystery attached, such as a cave or a lonely grove, or else found in or near some holy shrine, were thus marked out as divine. Also, we observe that in all the examples just quoted, the cult of the animal is linked to the cult of some personal god or goddess or hero: the snake, for instance, is the natural incarnation of the underworld divinity or hero. ”

“ The sacredness of animals, and the fact that they are regarded as embodying the souls of things and human beings, have led to a coalescence of their cults with other religious observances. They are abundantly employed in magical procedures and in sacrifices; they are often identified with spirits of vegetation, any locally revered animal being chosen for this purpose; they are brought into connection with astral objects and their forms are fancifully seen in sun, moon, and constellations; they play a great rôle in apotropaic and purificatory ceremonies ”

“ Two types of animal sacrament, the Egyptian and the Aino type. Corresponding to the two distinct types of animal worship, there are two distinct types of the custom of killing the animal god. On the one hand, when the revered animal is habitually spared, it is nevertheless killed—and sometimes eaten—on rare and solemn occasions. ”

“ Totems, in their developed form, are revered, but rarely if ever worshiped. The term 'animal-gods' may mean either living animals regarded as divine, or animals believed to be the forms assumed by gods; in the latter case they may be taken to be real gods of an inferior type. ”

“ In addition to these anthropomorphic deities we find animal life represented by the serpent, the dog, the jaguar, the macaw, deer, armadillo, turtle, monkey, quail, frog, scorpion, zopilote, pelican, blackbird, and what D. G. Brinton has called his "fish and oyster sign."
Again, many are reminiscent of domestic life, for example, of weaving, the spinning whorl, the flint knife (always denoting death or sacrifice and near the God of Death) , and lastly there are those having reference to sacrificial acts and the priests' devotion by the piercing of their tongues. ”

“ Many of the gods have more than one animal sacred to them or sacrificed to them in their worship, and very likely some of these animals, as in Indian mythology, were originally worshipped. When the ideas of early mankind once began to develop it would soon occur to them that human beings would be better impersonations for their gods than animals, yet the animals, once having been sacred, it would be very difficult to banish them altogether, hence they remained in the more developed myths as animals sacred to gods in human form. ”

“ On the other hand, animals are worshipped because they are habitually killed and eaten. In both types of worship the animal is revered on account of some benefit, positive or negative, which the savage hopes to receive from it. In the former worship the benefit comes either in the positive shape of protection, advice, and help which the animal affords the man, or in the negative shape of abstinence from injuries which it is in the power of the animal to inflict. In the latter worship the benefit takes the material form of the animal's flesh and skin. ”

“ Worshiping such an object as a god is idolatry. To these images and the objects of nature, as the sun, the moon, the stars, air, water, fire and other elements, divine honors were given by the most ancient nations. Nature-worship or the worship of the various objects in the world around us may be traced to the Phœnicians, who made gods of the sun, moon and stars. The origin of animal worship can be traced to the Egyptians, who made gods of oxen, birds, crocodiles, serpents and still lower forms of animal life. ”

“ It will become probable that the animal actually was mythically identified with the goddess at an extremely remote period, or, at all events, that the goddess succeeded to, and threw her protection over, an ancient worship of the animal. ”

“ When divinities in human form, when anthropomorphic sacra, take precedence of the animal god, traces of a fusion in image-magic are clearly visible. Whether by accident, or by reason of some traditional connexion, certain human gods came to be associated with certain species of animals. The sacrifice of such animals was regarded as particularly pleasing to such gods, and it is therefore arbitrary to assume that the sacrifice of animals was originally accepted as a substitute for a previous human sacrifice. ”

“ The question whether a totem ever develops into a god is a part of the general question whether a sacred animal ever becomes a god.926 The complications of early ideas and customs and 238the paucity of data for the formative period of early religion make an answer to these questions difficult. As far as regards the evolution of the totem into a true divine figure the evidence is not decisive. The identification of heroes or gods with animals, their transformations into animals, and their incarnations in animal forms may, indeed, suggest such an evolution. ”

“ The god can therefore exercise his divine power only on the condition of entering into the forms of those animals which are supposed to have the privilege of the qualities which the god is in need of in a special mythical occurrence. But in this animal form in which the god displays in a transcendent manner some particular quality, [Pg 429] he dims at the same time a great part of his divine splendour. ”

“ At this time, too, it is likely that the worship of animals arose, for almost every tribe of savages had a sacred animal which, except in rare instances, it was never allowed to kill and from which it often imagined itself descended.
After many ages, mankind began to till the ground, and to raise grain and vegetables, then plants and trees were more especially observed by them, and the mythical stories have, in consequence, more about plants and trees in them; and, as they had sacred animals, they had also sacred trees or plants, and worshipped them or imagined themselves descended from them. ”

“ While Egyptian myth, religion, and ritual is thus connected with the beliefs of the lower races, the animal-worship presents yet another point of contact. Not only were beasts locally adored, but gods were thought of and represented in the shape of various different beasts. How did the evolution work its way? what is the connection between a lofty spiritual conception, as of Ammon Ra, the lord of righteousness, and Osiris, judge of the dead, and bulls, rams, wolves, cranes, hawks, and so forth? ”

“ To account for the adoration of the animal on the hypothesis that it was the incarnation of a god, is the device which has been observed in Egyptian as in Samoan religion, and in that of aboriginal Indian tribes, whose animal gods become saints "when the Brahmans get a turn at them." ”

“ But we also know that the totemic animal is a sacred being. All the things that are classified in the clan of which it is the emblem have this same character, because in one sense, they are animals of the same species, just as the man is. They, too, are sacred, and the classifications which locate them in relation to the other things of the universe, by that very act give them a place in the religious world. ”

“ The devotion of the dog, the courage and physical power of the bear, the cleverness of the fox—all such natural powers might be assimilated by the worshiper; and since the animal was itself sacred, its body, taken into the human body, communicated a certain special capacity. ”

“ The belief that human beings can change themselves, or be changed, into animals carries with it the corollary that wounds received by a person when in the semblance of an animal will remain on the body after the return to human shape. This belief seems to be connected with the worship of animal-gods or sacred animals, the worshipper being changed into an animal by being invested with the skin of the creature, by the utterance of magical words, by the making of magical gestures, the wearing of a magical object, or the performance of magical ceremonies. ”