would be more highly respected if no statues whatever were erected to them, and if theology was treated in a different manner, with a little more wisdom and mystery … The mind forms to itself a something which it delineates better than what any art can do; but in the present instance you have taken from the gods the very power of appearing beautiful either to the eye or to the understanding."[1]
I do not quote this conversation as in any way deserving to be considered authentic, but only as evidence that the Egyptian worship of animals was considered even by grave opponents as symbolical, and not as pure fetishism. Celsus is quoted by Origen as distinctly denying the worship by the Egyptians of brute creatures of a day (ζώων ἐφημερίων). And some Christian Fathers even admit that the symbolical worship of animals denotes a higher stage of culture than the worship of inanimate images, stocks and stones, or of deities whose actions are inconsistent with the most elementary notions of morality. Porphyry[2] explains the animal worship from a Pantheistic point of view. All living creatures in their degree partake of the Divine essence, and "under the semblances of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature."
