Animal worship

“ 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. ”

“ We may assume that man attributed a soul to the beasts of the field almost as soon as he claimed one for himself. It is therefore not surprising to find that many peoples on the lower planes of culture respect and even worship animals (see Totem; Animal Worship) ; though we need not attribute an animistic origin to all the developments, it is clear that the widespread respect paid to animals as the abode of dead ancestors, and much of the cult of dangerous animals, is traceable to this principle. ”

“ In the infancy of mankind almost every system of mythology included the worship or veneration of animals. In one land the deity was a bull, in another it was a serpent, in yet another it was a bird; and in lands like India and Egypt almost every known animal was either an incarnated deity or demon. The same reasons that caused the animal to be deified and worshiped would, in a short time, surround its worship with numberless myths and legends, that would be remembered long after the occasion that called them into existence had been forgotten. ”

“ When we consider how much we owe to the Dog, Man's faithful friend, to the noble Horse, the patient Ox, the Cow, the Sheep, and our other domestic animals, we cannot be too grateful to them; and if we cannot, like some ancient nations, actually worship them, we have perhaps fallen into the other extreme, underrate the sacredness of animal life, and treat them too much like mere machines. ”

“ The three motives of animal-worship which have been described, viz., direct worship of the animal for itself, indirect worship of it as a fetish acted through by a deity, and veneration for it as a totem or representative of a tribe-ancestor, no doubt account in no small measure for the phenomena of Zoolatry among the lower races, due allowance being also made for the effects of myth and symbolism, of which we may gain frequent glimpses. ”

“ But in truth they were in some sense symbols of the West and the East after all. The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day, at going out for a walk down the same road. The modern world is full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generally accompanied with human sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little of the real merits of animals ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, though this was the case with the educated and intellectual, the ignorant and uncultivated, who compose the great mass of a nation, did undoubtedly believe that both the living animal and the lifeless idol were themselves divine, and did worship them accordingly. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They did each man that which was right in his own eyes and worshipped the gods of the land. However, we perceive that as the centuries passed by the mark of a faithful Israelite was the performance of worship through animal sacrifice. Yet Christian worship has gone little further. While animal sacrifices were abolished for Christians following the founding of the Christian Church. ”

“ Instead of the absorption of man into God, it gives us transmigration through all bodily forms.169 It so completely incarnates God, as to make every type of animal existence divine; hence the worship of animals. ”

“ He permitted them to have a worship through animal sacrifice; but, mark this, He utterly changed the spirit of it, making the animals to represent the offering up of their good affections, for animal life represents the emotional life of man, and making the meal offerings from the vegetable kingdom to represent their good thoughts; for the vegetable kingdom, represents the intellectual life of man. In this way worship through sacrifices was made possible, possible to a savage people unable to appreciate true ethical ideals. ”

“ Next day, the father, and relations of the infant, return to see if the track or step of any animal appears in the ashes: not finding any, they leave the child there till some beast has approached the infant, and left behind him the marks of his feet: to this animal, whatsoever it be, they consecrate the creature newly born, as to its god, which he is bound to worship all his life, esteeming the said beast his patron and protector. They offer to their gods sacrifices of fire, wherein they burn a certain gum called by them copal, whose smoke smells very deliciously. ”

“ The worship of animals, while nearly universal as a whole, was local as to each sacred animal. An animal that was worshiped in one place was hunted down in another, all over the country. These animals were probably originally selected and made peculiar to distinguish the families and stocks of the people, like the totems of our Indians, and the corresponding customs among the Australians and some African races. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ For though we may be sure that the shape of an animal was that in which these gods were literally visible to their worshippers, yet it is impossible to tell whether some one living animal was chosen to be the earthly tenement of the deity, or whether he revealed himself in every individual of a species, or whether merely the cult-image was roughly hewn into the shape of an animal. ”

“ Thus, to abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to worship mice or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is not to worship sea-urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not to worship wolves: to throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice to some high divinity is not to worship flies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In hunting they have the service of a native dog which they have trained, and whose welfare they look after with sedulous attention. Though devoid of idols and external rites of worship, they manifest in many ways a sense of religion. ”

“ Of course, it is presupposed that the land-animals naturally partake of the benediction of man, so far as it can be due to them; the benediction, namely, of fertility and of increase. According to these indications and to the Biblical conception, man stands in still another and closer connection with the animal world than in that of mere supremacy over it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the address is made to any of the superior and beneficent deities for assistance, and the priest directs an offering of a horse, cow, dog, hog, or fowl, care must be taken that the animal to be sacrificed is entirely white. ”

“ There are several reasons why the Todas should not furnish any clear evidence of this frequent starting-point of religion. In the first place, they are people to whom one animal has become so predominantly sacred that it might be expected that any other relations with animals of a sacred character would have disappeared; the cult of animals in general would have been swamped in the cult of the buffalo. ”

“ The animal clings to its young with a natural affection, as great as that of a human mother for her child, but what animal ever thought of throwing its progeny into the Ganges, or into the fires of Moloch’s altar, for the saving of its soul, or to obtain the favour or avoid the wrath of God? ”

“ Philosophers at various times have attempted to account for this peculiar veneration of animals, which by many of the nations of antiquity was heightened into worship, and which, among some of the rude and barbarous tribes of Africa and the South-Sea Islands, still exists as almost their only recognition of a religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This animal is venerated in a religious sense, as holding in the rotation of the metempsychosis the rank immediately preceding the human form; and in a political sense as being the most useful and necessary of the whole animal creation, to a people forbidden to feed on any thing which has breathed the breath of life. ”

“ They should nourish us with the food of souls, ministering the Blood of Christ crucified which gives the life of grace; and they drag it from men's mouths, ministering eternal death, like wolves who feed not the flock, but devour them. And what shall the dogs do—the servants of God, who are placed in the world as guardians, that they may bark when they see the wolf come, to awaken the chief shepherd? ”

“ Above all things the minister of the Gospel and the church attendant should be kind and considerate toward all animal creation and should construe the Scriptures and preach to prove the sacredness of their Holy Bible. They should do God's will one earth as it is in Heaven, absolutely abstaining from the fleshpots of Egypt, thereby discouraging the blotting out of animal life, proving conclusively by their lives that their God is just and kind and merciful.
The man who opposes the spilling of life blood of Nature's creatures is on the higher plane of life. ”

“ The animals, domesticated or wild, like the horse or cow, the guardian dog, the bird of omen, naturally share the same life, and are approached with the same invocation. The sacred energy is also discerned in the ritual implements, in the stones for squeezing the soma-juice, and the sacrificial post to which animals were bound ”