nce to the
mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally spring
up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god or of the
mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as the relics
of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse family names
had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been, mice totems and
mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved
by Prof. Robertson Smith: {115a} 'Achbor, the mouse, is an Edomite name,
apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and another mouse-name are among
the Arabs. The same name occurs in Judah.' Where totemism exists, the
members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or
only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions. The totem of a hostile stock
may be eaten by way of insult. In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to
refer to one or other of these practices (lxvi.): 'They that sanctify
themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the
midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the _mouse_, shall
be consumed together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian
prohibition to eat 'the abominable' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) 'Rat
of Ra.' If the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of
each clan, then the mouse was a totem, {115b} for the chosen people were
forbidden to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his
kind.' That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally
totems, Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where
'we find seventy of the elders of Israel--that is, the heads of
houses--worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of
all manner of unclean' (tabooed) 'creeping things, and quadrupeds, _even
all the idols of the House of Israel_.' Some have too hastily concluded
that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring Philistines.
After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in the house of
Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They therefore, in
accordance with a well-known savage magical practice, made five golden
representations of the diseased part, and five golden mice, as 'a
trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,' and so restored the Ark. {116}
Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic countries, and the
mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines had ever worshipped
mice.

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