briefest comment. De Brosses, very
unluckily, confused zoolatry with other superstitions under the head
of Fetichism. This was unscientific; but is it scientific of Mr. Max
Mueller to discuss animal-worship without any reference to totemism?
The worship of sacred animals is found, in every part of the globe, to
be part of the sanction of the most stringent and important of all
laws, the laws of marriage. It is an historical truth that the society
of Ashantees, Choctaws, Australians, is actually constructed by the
operation of laws which are under the sanction of various sacred
plants and animals.[200] There is scarcely a race so barbarous that
these laws are not traceable at work in its society, nor a people
(especially an ancient people) so cultivated that its laws and
religion are not full of strange facts most easily explained as relics
of totemism. Now note that actual living totemism is always combined
with the rudest ideas of marriage, with almost repulsive ideas about
the family. Presumably, this rudeness is earlier than culture, and
therefore this form of animal-worship is one of the earliest religions
that we know. The almost limitless distribution of the phenomena,
their regular development, their gradual disappearance, all point to
the fact that they are all very early and everywhere produced by
similar causes.

Of all these facts, Mr. Max Mueller only mentions one--that many races
have called themselves Snakes, and he thinks they might naturally
adopt the snake for ancestor, and finally for god. He quotes the
remark of Diodorus that 'the snake may either have been made a god
because he was figured on the banners, or may have been figured on the
banners because he was a god'; to which De Brosses, with his usual
sense, rejoins: 'We represent saints on our banners because we revere
them; we do not revere them because we represent them on our banners.'

In a discussion about origins, and about the corruption of religion,
it would have been well to account for institutions and beliefs almost
universally distributed. We know, what De Brosses did not, that
zoolatry is inextricably blent with laws and customs which surely must
be early, if not primitive, because they make the working faith of
societies in which male descent and the modern family are not yet
established. Any one who wishes to show that this sort of society is a
late corruption, not an early stage in evolution towards better
things, has a difficult