ove) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals
and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of
the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people
whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear,
and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there
would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of
emotions--emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and
so forth--an image of a divine Bear in whom they lived and moved and had
their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or
a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same
way spring tip the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred
kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its
presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these
objects were and had been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly
and seasonal Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo
(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the totem-animal
or priest or magician-chief gradually invested him with Awe and
Divinity.

According to this theory the god--the full-grown god in human shape,
dwelling apart and beyond the earth--did not come first, but was a late
and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of
the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is much
supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early
cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The
Egyptian religion was full of such divinities--the jackal-headed
Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of
darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in
Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide
and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that,
following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or
medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the
skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask--this
partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of
the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic
virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the
crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered, wears the aegis, or goat-skin--said
to be the hid