d and cultivated people did
not take up animal worship and cling to it, in spite of its repulsive
features, with such tenacity as the Egyptians did, because of a
speculative idea of the likeness of certain beasts to certain gods,
or to express pantheistic views of the emanations of deity in animal
forms. The system, in fact, cannot have sprung up after the Egyptians
became civilised, and could not continue to exist among a civilised
people, if it was not hallowed by an immemorial antiquity. Only as a
mystery, a thing of which the origin was not known, could such a
worship continue among such a people.

A new explanation of Egyptian animal worship has been put forward in
recent times by the Anthropological school of students of
religion,[3] and is rapidly gaining ground. The religious
circumstances of Egypt as narrated by Juvenal and Diodorus have the
strongest resemblance to the totemistic state of society described
above (chapter iv.). Here, as in Peru before the Incas, or among the
North American Indians of to-day, we have a number of communities
each with its special sacred animal, which it does not eat, but
reverences and defends. Other traces of totemistic arrangements may
be suspected here and there in Egyptian observances, but even did the
analogy extend no further than to the facts just mentioned, there
would be a case for considering whether the nomes were not first
peopled by a set of totemistic clans, who, even after they were
united in one people, preserved their early separate traditions. The
sacred animals of the nomes would then be "the totems of the clans
which first settled in these localities." Later developments of
religion never displaced these venerable emblems, if this be so, of
tribal life.[4]

[Footnote 3: See A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, Second
Edition. Frazer's _Totemism_. Most of the modern Egyptologists
incline to the theory that animal worship, though not the only, was
one of the chief sources of Egyptian religion. Pietschmann first took
up this ground.]

[Footnote 4: Compare the worship of animals in Babylonia, chapter
vii.]

II. THE GREAT GODS

A very different set of gods are those made known to us by the
monuments and books. It is the principal problem of this religion to
explain how, along with the sacred animal, the cat or ibis or
crocodile, there was worshipped in the Egyptian temple the celestial
being, the god of heaven or of the sun, whose nature is light, who i