Mythical animal

“ As has been shown (Chapters II and III) all the chief gods and goddesses had animal forms and composite monster forms before they became anthropomorphic deities. Ea had evidently a fish shape ere he was clad in the skin of a fish, as an Egyptian god was simply a bull before he was depicted in human shape wearing a bull's skin. The archaic Sumerian animal and composite monster gods of animistic and totemic origin survived after the anthropomorphic period as mythical figures, which were used for decorative or magical purposes and as symbols. ”

“ The old herbals and books of travels abound in curious examples of the quaint beliefs of our forefathers, while their treatises on natural history are a still richer storehouse. Many of the old tomes, again, on the science of heraldry give other curious notions respecting the different animals introduced. Some of these animals, as the dragon or the griffin, are undoubtedly of the most mythical nature, yet we find them described in the most perfect good faith, and without the slightest suspicion as to their real existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The association of animal forms with deities is a familiar thing in many ancient mythologies,—human figures had animal heads in Egypt, and bulls and lions had human heads in147 Assyria,—so one may guess at something of the kind in Peruvian mythology. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The deities are frequently recognizable by the heads of animals—of a lion, ram, cow, ape, jackal, crocodile, hawk, or ibis, as the case may be. The worship of nature, peculiar to Egypt, found a better expression in these symbols than in the monotonous representations of man, in marked contrast to the incorporation of Hellenic myths, where, in the monstrous conjunction of human and animal forms, the human head was rarely given up, it being more generally placed upon the body of an animal. ”

“ Nor is its curse yet come to an end; the deity or the hero must humble himself yet more, and assume in the zoological scale the most imperfect of organisms; the animal god will lose his speech in the form of a stupid fish; he will creep like a serpent or hop grotesquely like a filthy toad. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have seen that gods and magicians assume animal forms or force these upon others; and other stories point to the belief that domesticated animals came from the gods' land.
From these we turn to tales In which certain animals have a mythic aspect, perhaps connected with a cult of them. A divine bull or swine might readily be regarded as enormously large or strong, or possessed of magic power, or otherwise distinguished ”

“ All these alternative variations of a mythical representation become each in turn a legend by itself, as we shall see again more in detail, when the study of the different animals that take part in them shall furnish us with opportunities of doing so. ”

“ Wisdom, cunning, skill, and prowess are attributed to the real animals to a degree often greater than to man; and there are mythic animals as well as mythic men--monsters dwelling in the mountains and caves or hiding in the waters, who make themselves invisible as they pass over the land. Not only are there great monsters, beasts, and reptiles in their mythology, but there are wonderful insects and worms. All life is miraculous and is worshiped as divine. The heavenly bodies, the sun and moon and stars, are mythic animals, and all of the phenomena of nature are attributed to these zoic beings. ”

“ In the case of some of these tomb-haunting animals, the dog, jackal, and vulture, the feeling towards them as tomb-haunters seems to have given place to the belief that as the spirit lives in the tomb where the body is laid, so, if the body be eaten by an animal, the spirit lives in the animal, as in a living tomb.5
Other animals, again, are invested with particular qualities, fierceness and courage, strength or agility, and eating part of their flesh, or wearing a portion as an amulet, conveys to the possessor the qualities of the animal. ”

“ In his mythology he constructed beings endowed with superhuman qualities by fantastic combinations of the animal and the human form; and in his fables, from Æsop to B'rer Rabbit, he gave to his favorite animal the hero's part in his simple plots. He placed himself under the protection of some sacred animal as a totem, and held it as likely that the souls of an animal could be made to inhabit the bodies of a man, or that by some magic he could be transformed into their semblance. ”

“ ANIMALS IN CULTURE MYTHS
All the stories so far have reflected primitive man’s way of thinking and acting. Passing now to more developed phases of life, we are confronted in myths by such an array of animals—definite personifications of natural phenomena—that no possible ark would hold these cosmical monsters. ”

“ Peet refers to the fact that the "myths which fix upon scenes in nature are those which remind one of the animal divinities which were worshipped. The figure of the moose and the turtle and other animals have been recognised in certain strange and contorted figures in the rocks and mountains, and myths have been connected with them, the myth having evidently been made to account for the resemblances." ”

“ Here, on the other hand, we see what a heterogeneous multitude of mythical elements may combine to build up in course of time a single enormous superstition, and we see how curiously fact and fancy have co-operated in keeping the superstition from falling. In the first place the worship of dead ancestors with wolf totems originated the notion of the transformation of men into divine or superhuman wolves ”

“ When the day or the summer dies, the mythical serpent shows himself (in absolute contradiction to what we are taught by Natural History, one would almost say that when the serpent ceases to creep along the ground and to devour the animals of the earth, it goes to creep and to devour the animals of the sky) ; then the north winds begin to whistle,—and the serpent, particularly the mythical serpent, is a famous whistler. ”

“ Legendary animals, or spirits, are also represented in the elaborate masked pantomimes of the Indian tribes in North West America. The explanation given by the natives is that the ceremonial was instituted in ancient days when man had still the form of an animal; and before the great transformer had given him a distinctive shape. This ceremonial, performed by man-animals, is a dramatised form of myth, in which the actors attempt to reproduce certain trance-states by sympathetic mimicry. ”

“ WHILE we find numerous extraordinary beliefs clustering round the so-called natural history of various birds, such as the legend of the pelican nourishing its young with its own blood, or the eagle teaching its offspring to gaze on the brightness of the mid-day sun, it is curious to note how little of absolute myth-creation has been developed in the direction of strange forms of bird life. ”

“ To the second class belong the shorter animal myths, which have lost whatever sacred character they may once have had, and are told now merely as humorous explanations of certain animal peculiarities. ”

“ Starting from this base, it may be observed that the liturgical interpreters of the animal world distinguished beasts from animals, including under the former head wild and untamable creatures, and under the second gentle and timid creatures and domestic animals. ”

“ She mixes whatever nature has engendered in its most fearful caprices, foam from the jaws of a mad dog, the entrails of the lynx, the backbone of the hyena, and the marrow of a stag that had dieted on serpents, the sinews of the remora, and the eyes of a dragon, the eggs of the eagle, the flying serpent of Arabia, the viper that guards the pearl in the Red Sea, the slough of the hooded snake, and the ashes that remain when the phœnix has been consumed. ”

“ We may almost fancy that we can see them in their dark and subterranean retreats, crouching round their hearths, and skilfully and patiently chipping out their flint instruments and shaping their reindeer-horn tools, in the midst of all the pestilential emanations arising from the various animal remains which their carelessness has allowed to remain in their dwellings. Skins of wild beasts are stripped of their hair, and, by the aid of flint needles, are converted into garments. ”

“ He recognizes it equally in the snake that glides from under the stones of the tumulus, in the beast or bird that crosses his path after the offering of prayer to his deified ancestor, in the shadowy form that eludes his prying gaze amid the dense shades of the primeval forest, and in the vague human shape that stands beside him in his dreams, and whispers into his ear uncertain warnings or dim promises for the future. ”

“ Afterwards men came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold the lightning and the mouse are convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the result of the action of animals. ”

“ There is scarcely any familiar animal, bird, reptile or insect, which is not used in some metaphorical sense in the imagery which pervades the whole of the Scriptures. For example, the various carnivorous animals, such as the lion, wolf, and bear, are used as emblems of destruction in various ways; while the carnivorous birds, such as the eagle and hawk, and the destructive insects, such as the locust and the caterpillar, are all similarly employed in strengthening and illustrating the words of Holy Writ. ”

“ The mythological stories about animals are rather difficult to treat, because they are so much mixed up with the topic of totemism. Here we only examine myths which account by means of a legend for certain peculiarities in the habits, cries, or colours and shapes of animals. ”

“ The primeval animals—the actors in the animal myths and the predecessors of the existing species—are believed to have been much larger, stronger, and cleverer than their successors of the present day. In these myths we find the Indian explanation of certain peculiarities of form, color, or habit, and the various animals are always consistently represented as acting in accordance with their well-known characteristics. ”

“ It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, and Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as we are by the mythical adventures of their gods. But is there any known stage of the human intellect in which similar adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and all else that puzzles us in the civilised mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? ”