Animals. WORSHIP OF, according to most students of comparative religion, is a stage in the religious evolution, characteristic of the less cultured races, which has sometimes held its place in the higher stages of civilisation. It originates in Animism (q.v.), or spirit-worship, which is a universal phenomenon of humanity. The savage recognises in the animal, power or courage beyond his own, as well as a soul similar to his own, which continues to exist after death, and is still powerful for good or evil. Naturally, he tries to conciliate the power for evil indwelling in the animal, and thus reaches the stage of full or direct worship, in which he recognises the animal as the incarnation of a divine soul. Or he may recognise it as a fetich acted through by a deity, and in his worship he is thus reverencing only the representative or symbol of some unseen deity, who for some reason assumes the form of the animal as his symbol.
But a wider and deeper motive for such worship is his veneration for the animal as a totem or representative of a tribe-ancestor or protector. Among primitive peoples, all animals are supposed to be endowed with souls, which in many cases have formerly animated human beings. Hence a likeness is often recognised between an animal and some deceased friend, and the animal is addressed as the person would have been, and honoured with a kind of worship. The case of an ancestral soul, worshipped as incarnate in an animal body, thus forms a link between manes-worship and beast-worship; and we find this connection otherwise in the veneration of a particular species of animal by a particular family, clan, or tribe. Many tribes call themselves by the name of some animal, and even derive their pedigree from it. Its cries become the omens of the tribe, and here we may find a key to an explanation of the divination and augury of more civilised nations. This curious and widespread belief in a descent from animals in connection with a belief in transmigration into other forms, goes far to explain such phenomena as lycanthropy (see WERE-WOLF) and the unions between animals and human beings so common in folk-lore, and has doubtless originated in totemism (see TOTEM). The division of a tribe into the families of the bear, crane, turtle, &c. indicates a time when families claiming descent from ancestors holding those names have banded themselves together for the common interest; and that an ancestor should be called the bear, or turtle, or crane, indicates a time still further back, when the name was given him for some reason. Many ethnologists, notably Herbert Spencer, suppose these names to have been originally personal epithets, designating qualities or characteristics of the individual (thus, a slow man would be called a turtle, a very long-legged man a crane), which became family surnames, and eventually gave rise to myths of the families being actually descended from the animals in question as ancestors; while popular mystification between the great ancestor and the creature whose name he held and handed down to his race, led to veneration for the creature itself, and thence to full animal-worship. The name was originally a mere nickname, but in process of time the meaning of the metaphor was lost, and the belief originated and was transmitted to posterity that the animal was the actual progenitor. Though such nicknaming as this has occurred, totemism must have had a much broader and deeper foundation. The mere fear of ancestral ghosts is too narrow a basis on which to build, as Mr Spencer does, the whole structure of myth and religion, and does not allow sufficient play for the creative force of man's imagination as applied to the wondrous universe around him. Perhaps the worship of personal deities, seen in its greatest development in the North American native races, will lead us to a more satisfactory explanation of the origin of totemism as the basis of animal-worship. The manitou of the Indian is almost always an animal, and is chosen by each individual at his coming of age, being pointed out to him in a dream, produced by the greatest religious act of his life—his first fast. This animal then becomes an object of worship, and its skin is carried about the person as a fetich, and its likeness painted on the body or sculptured on the weapons. Thus tattooing and primitive heraldry may be explained as forms of worship, and here also we see the reason for the superstitious fear the savage entertains of killing or eating his manitou, or patron-animal. The manitou develops into the totem, or sacred animal, of the gens or family which descends from that person, and worship is paid to all representatives of its species. Equally strong evidence is obtained from the ancient nations. Some facts are preserved in the signs of the zodiac, the majority of which are animals, or compounds of human and animal forms. There is nothing in the grouping of the stars to suggest animal forms, and the probability is, that in ancient as in modern times, stars, when named, were given names of distinction that commanded respect, if not veneration; therefore that the animals whose names were transferred to the stars were, on earth, highly, if not religiously venerated. This is borne out by the legends of the transference to the heavens of particular animals. The frequency, also, of animal-names, and of representations of the same animals upon coins, points to the same conclusion. In the old Egyptian animal-worship, also, the theory of tribe-fetiches and deified totems is borne out. We find deities patronising special sacred animals, incarnate in their bodies or represented in their figures; while many of the sacred creatures are worshipped in one locality, yet killed and eaten with impunity elsewhere.
In the modern world, the most civilised people among whom animal-worship vigorously survives lie within the range of Brahmanism. Here, says Tylor, the sacred cow is not merely to be spared; she is, as a deity, worshipped and bowed to daily by the pious Hindu, who offers her fresh grass and flowers. Siva is incarnate in Hanuman, the monkey-god, as Durga is in the jackal; the wise Ganesa wears the elephant's head; the divine king of birds, Garuda, is Vishnu's vehicle; and the forms of fish, and boar, and tortoise are assumed in the avatar-legends of Vishnu, which are at the intellectual level of those Red Indian myths which they so curiously resemble. Perhaps no worship has prevailed more widely than that of the serpent. It had its place in Egypt and among the Hebrews; in Greece and Rome; among the Celts and Scandinavians in Europe; in Persia and India; in China and Tibet; in Mexico and Peru; in Africa, where it still flourishes as the state religion in Dahomey; in Java and Ceylon; among the Fijians, and elsewhere in Oceania. And even within the limits of Christianity, we find the sect of the Ophites, who continued or renewed snake-worship, blended curiously with purer rites. It is evident, however, that although some animals may have received a preference, yet all had a share in the superstitious reverence of primitive peoples; and this broad universality of their worship militates against any other theory of its origin except that based on a belief in the free transmigration of souls from men to animals, and from animals to men, inherited from an early totem stage of society.
See Fergusson's Tree and Serpent Worship (1868); McLennan in the Fortnightly Review for 1869 and 1870; Herbert Spencer in the Fortnightly for 1870; chap. xv. of Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871); Gubernatis' Zoological Mythology (1874), for its facts; Robertson Smith in the Journal of Philology (1880); chap. vi. of Dorman's Origin of Primitive Superstitions (Philadelphia, 1881); two chapters in Lang's Custom and Myth (1884); and Lang's Myth, Ritual, and Religion (2 vols. 1887).