hypothesis may be hazarded that this rite was one of the many ways in which the sacred animal has been propitiated in his death by many peoples. It is a kind of legal fiction to persuade him that, like the bear in the Finnish Kalewala and in the Red Indian and Australian legend, "he does not die." His skin is still capering about on other shoulders.[1]
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? Osiris especially had quite a collection of bestial heads, and appeared in divers bestial forms.[2] The bull Hapi "was a fair and beautiful image of the soul
- ↑ For examples of propitiation of slain animals by this and other arts, see Prim. Cult., i. 467, 469. When the Koriaks slay a bear or wolf, they dress one of their people in his skin, and dance round him, chanting excuses. We must not forget, while offering this hypothesis of the origin of beast-headed gods, that representations of this kind in art may only be a fanciful kind of shorthand. Every one knows the beasts which, in Christian art, accompany the four Evangelists. These do not, of course, signify that St. John was of the eagle totem kin, and St. Mark of the stock of the lion. They are the beasts of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, regarded as types of the four Gospel writers. Moreover, in mediæval art, the Evangelists are occasionally represented with the heads of their beasts— John with an eagle's head, Mark with a lion's, Luke with that of an ox. See Bulletin, Com. Hist. Archeol., iv. 1852. For this note I am indebted to M. H. Gaidoz.
- ↑ Cf. Wilkinson, iii. 86–87.
