anation of animal worship is
the opinion of Bunsen. The human soul and animal soul, according to this
view, are essentially the same,--therefore the animal was considered as
sacred as man. Still, we do not _worship_ man. Animal worship, then, must
have had a still deeper root in the sense of awe before the mystery of
organized life.

Sec. 5. Sources of Egyptian Theology. Age of the Empire and Affinities of the
Race.

But whence came this tendency in the human mind? Did it inhere in the
race, or was it the growth of external circumstances? Something, perhaps,
may be granted to each of these causes. The narrow belt of fertile land in
Egypt, fed by the overflowing Nile, quickened by the tropical sun, teeming
with inexhaustible powers of life, continually called the mind anew to the
active, creative powers of nature. And yet it may be suspected that the
law of movement by means of antagonism and reaction may have had its
influence also here. The opinion is now almost universal, that the impulse
of Egyptian civilization proceeded from Asia. This is the conclusion of
Bunsen at the end of his first volume. "The cradle of the mythology and
language of Egypt," says he, "is Asia. This result is arrived at by the
various ethnological proofs of language which finds Sanskrit words and
forms in Egypt, and of comparative anatomy, which shows the oldest
Egyptian skulls to have belonged to Caucasian races." If, then, Egyptian
civilization proceeded from Central Asia, Egyptian mythology and religion
probably came as a quite natural reaction from the extreme spiritualism of
the Hindoos. The question which remains is, whether they arrived at their
nature-worship directly or indirectly; whether, beginning with Fetichism,
they ascended to their higher conceptions of the immortal gods; or,
beginning with spiritual existence, they traced it downward into its
material manifestations; whether, in short, their system was one of
evolution or emanation. For every ancient theogony, cosmogony, or ontogony
is of one kind or the other. According to the systems of India and of
Platonism, the generation of beings is by the method of emanation.
Creation is a falling away, or an emanation from the absolute. But the
systems of Greek and Scandinavian mythology are of the opposite sort. In
these, spirit is evolved from matter; matter up to spirit works. They
begin with the lowest form of being,--night, chaos, a mundane egg,--and
evolve the higher gods