3. Muham was done by stealth, and efforts were made to impose severe penalties on anybody guilty of the crime of being accessory to the death of the sacred kine, while it is said that the emissaries of the butchers were sent to the markets disguised as Brahmans or religious mendicants, and pretended that they wished to buy cattle in order to preserve their lives as a meritorious act. But such attempts at restriction have generally proved fruitless, and the trade is now openly practised and acquiesced in by public opinion. In spite of many complaints of the shortage of plough cattle caused by the large numbers of animals slaughtered, the results of this traffic are probably almost wholly advantageous; for the villages no longer contain a horde of worn-out and decrepit animals to deprive the valuable plough and milch cattle of a share of the too scanty pasturage. Kasais themselves are generally prosperous. When killing an animal the butcher lays it on the ground madan rite with its feet to the west and head stretched towards the north and then cuts its throat saying: of zibah or halal. In the name of God; This method of killing an animal is known as zibah. The Muhammadan belief that an animal is not fit for food unless its throat has been cut so that the blood flows on to the ground is thus explained in Professor Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites1: "In heathen Canaan all the animals belonged to the god of the country; but it was lawful to kill them if payment was made to the god by pouring out their life or blood on the ground." The Arabs are of the same Semitic stock, and this may be partly the underlying idea of their rite of zibah. It seems doubtful, however, whether the explanation suffices to explain its continuance for so long a period among the Muhammadans who have long ceased to reverence any earth-deity, and in a foreign country where the soil cannot be sacred to them; and a short summary of Dr. Robertson Smith's luminous explanation of the underlying principle of animal sacrifice in early times seems requisite to its full understanding. 1 (London, A. & C. Black.) II ANIMISM 349 Primitive man did not recognise any difference of in- 4. Animtelligence and self-consciousness between himself and the ism. lower animals and even plants, but believed them all to be possessed of consciousness and volition as he was. He knew of no natural laws of the constitution of matter and the action of forces, and therefore thought that all natural phenomena, the sun, moon and stars, the wind and rain, were similarly appearances, manifestations or acts of volition of beings conscious like himself. This is what is meant by animism. Among several races the community was divided into totem-clans, and each clan held sacred some animal or bird, which was considered as a kinsman. All the members of the clan were kin to each other through the tie formed by their eating their totem animal, which in the hunting stage was probably their chief means of subsistence, and from which they consequently thought that they derived their common life. In process of time the animals which were domesticated, such as the horse, the sheep, the cow and the camel, acquired a special sanctity, and became, in fact, the principal deities of the community, such as the calf-god Apis, the cow-goddess Isis-Hathor, and the ramgod Amen in Egypt, Hera, probably a cow-goddess, and Dionysus, who may be the deified bull or goat (or a combination of them) in Greece, and so on. domestic It is easy to see how these domestic animals would 5. Animalovershadow all others in importance when the tribe had gods. The arrived at the pastoral or agricultural stage; thus in the animals. former the camel, horse, goat or sheep, and in the latter pre-eminently the bull and cow, as the animals which afforded subsistence to the whole tribe, would become their 1 This definition of totemism is more or less in accord with that held by the late Professor Robertson Smith, but is not generally accepted. The exhaustive collection of totemic beliefs and customs contained in Sir J. G. Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy affords, however, substantial evidence in favour of it among tribes still in the hunting stage in Australia, North America and Africa. The Indian form of totemism is, in the writer's opinion, a later one, arising when the totem animal has ceased to be the main source of life, and when the clan come to think that they are greatest gods. It must be presumed that men forgot that their ancestors had tamed these animals, and looked on them as divine helpers who of their own free will had come to give mankind their aid in gaining a subsistence. Those who have observed the reverence paid to the cow and bull in India will have no difficulty in realising this point of view. Many other instances can be obtained. Thus in the Vedic religion of the Aryans the Ashvins, from ashva, a horse, were the divine horsemen of the dawn or of the sun. The principal sacrifice was that of the horse, considered, perhaps, as the representative of the sun or carrier of celestial fire. In a hymn the horse is said to be sprung from the gods. In Greece Phaethon was the charioteer of the horses of the sun. Mars, as the Roman god of war, may perhaps have been the deified horse, as suggested later. The chieftains of the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England, Hengist and Horsa, were held to be descended from the god Odin, to whom horses were sacrificed; Hengist means a stallion and Horsa a horse, the word having survived in modern English. Other mythical kings in Bede's chronicle have names derived from that of the horse (vicg.). The camel does not seem to have become an anthropomorphic god, but the Arabs venerated it and refrained from killing it except as a sacrifice, when it was offered to the MorningStar and partaken of sacramentally by the worshippers as will be seen subsequently. The ox as the tiller of the ground, with the cow as milk-giver and mother of the ox, are especially venerated by races in the early agricultural stage. Egyptian and Greek instances have already been given. In modern Egypt, as in India, bulls are let loose and held sacred. "Sometimes a peasant vows that he will sacrifice, for the sake of a saint, a calf which he possesses, as soon as it is full grown and fatted. It is let loose, by consent of all his neighbours, to pasture where it will, even in fields of young wheat; and at last, after it has been sacrificed, a public feast is made with its meat. Many a large bull is thus given away." Dionysus Zagreus was a young bull devoured by the Titans, whom Zeus raised again 1 Orpheus (Heinemann), p. 197. to a glorious life.1 The Babylonians had a bull-god, Ninit.2 Brazen images of bulls were placed in Babylonian temples. The Parsis hold the bull sacred, and a child is made to drink a bull's urine as a rite of purification. After a funeral the mourners free themselves from the impurity caused by contact with the dead in a similar manner. The monotheistic religion of Persia, Mitraism, which was an outcome of the faith of Zoroaster, and being introduced by the Emperors Commodus and Julian into the Roman world contended for some time with Christianity, was apparently sun-worship, Mitra being the sun-god of the ancient Aryans and Iranians; M. Reinach says: "Mitra is born from a rock; he makes water flow from the rock by striking it with an arrow, makes an alliance with the sun, and enters into a struggle with a bull, whom he conquers and sacrifices. The sacrifice of the bull appears to indicate that the worship of Mitra in its most ancient form was that of a sacred bull, conjoined to or representing the sun, which was sacrificed as a god, and its flesh and blood eaten in a sacrificial meal. Mitra, the slayer of the bull, figures in a double rôle as one finds in all the religions which have passed from totemism to anthropomorphism." In Scandinavia the god Odin and his brothers were the grandsons of a divine cow, born from the melting ice in the region of snow and darkness.5 In Rome a white bull was sacrificed to the Feriae Latinae, apparently the spirit of the Latin holy days, and distributed among all the towns of Latium. Altars of the ancient Celts or Gauls have been found in France carved with the image of a bull.' In Palestine there is the familiar instance of the golden calf. In the open court of Solomon's temple stood the brazen sea on twelve oxen, and figures of lions, oxen and cherubim covered the portable tanks. The veneration of the bull survived into Christian England in the Middle Ages. "At St. Edmundsbury a white bull, which enjoyed full ease and plenty in the fields, and was never yoked to the plough nor employed in any service, was 6. Other animals. led in procession in the chief streets of the town to the principal gate of the monastery, attended by all the monks singing and a shouting crowd.1 "Such remedies as cowdung and cow's urine have been used on the continent of Europe by peasant physicians down to our times"; 2 and the belief in their efficacy must apparently have arisen from the sanctity attaching to the animal. In India Siva rides upon the bull Nandi, and when the Kunbis were too weak from famine to plough the fields, he had Nandi castrated and harnessed to the plough, thus teaching them to use oxen for ploughing; the image of Nandi is always carved in stone in front of Siva, and there seems little reason to doubt that in his beneficent aspect of Mahādeo the god was originally the deified bull. Bulls were let loose in his honour and allowed to graze where they would, and formerly a good Hindu would not even sell a bull, though this rule has fallen into abeyance. The sacred cow, Kamdhenu, was the giver of all wealth in Hindu mythology, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is considered to have been the deified COW. Hindus are purified from grave offences by drinking the five products of the sacred cow, milk, curds, butter, dung and urine; and the floors of Hindu houses are daily plastered with cowdung to the same end. 3 Of the exaltation of minor animals into anthropomorphic gods and goddesses only a few instances need be given. As is shown by Sir J. G. Frazer, Demeter and Proserpine probably both represent the deified pig. "The Greek drama has arisen from the celebrations of Dionysus. In the beginning the people sacrificed a goat totem-god, that is to say, Dionysus himself; they wept for his death and then celebrated his resurrection with transports of joy." And again M. Reinach states: "There are more than mere vestiges of totemism in ancient Greece. We may take first the attendant animals of the gods, the eagle of Zeus, the owl of Athena, the fawn of Artemis, the dolphin of Poseidon, the dove of Aphrodite and so on; the sacred animal can develop into the companion of the god, but also into his enemy or 3 Golden Bough, ii. pp. 299-301. See article on Kumhār. 1 Gomme, Folk-lore as a Historical Science, p. 161. 2 Haug's Essays on the Parsis, p. 286. 4 Orpheus, p. 139. |