Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/162

Rh 150 MYTHOLOGY arrived at the stage in which great centralized monarchies appear. The Mexican and Peruvian civilizations were far ahead of Maori culture, in so far as they possessed the elements of a much more settled and highly-organized society. Their religion had its fine lucid intervals, but their mythology and ritual were little better than savage ideas, elaborately worked up by the imagination of a cruel and superstitious priesthood. In cruelty the Aztecs sur passed perhaps all peoples of the Old World, except certain Semitic stocks, and their gods, of course, surpassed almost all other gods in bloodthirstiness. But in grotesque and savage points of faith the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Vedic Indians ran even the Aztecs pretty close. Bernal Diaz, the old &quot; conquistador,&quot; has described the hideous aspect of the idols which Cortes destroyed, &quot; idols in the shape of hideous dragons as big as calves,&quot; idols half in the form of men, half of dogs, and serpents which were worshipped as divine. The old contemporary missionary Sahagun has left one of the earliest detailed accounts of the natures and myths of these gods, but, though Sahagun took great pains in collecting facts, his speculations must be accepted with caution. He was convinced (like Caxton in his Destruction of Troy, and like St Augustine) that the heathen gods were only dead men worshipped. Ancestor- worship is a great force in early religion, and the qualities of dead chiefs and sorcerers are freely attributed to gods, but it does not follow that each god was once a real man, as Sahagun supposes. Euemerism cannot be judiciously carried so far as this. Of Huitzilopochtli, the famed god, Sahagun says that he was a necromancer, loved &quot;shape- shifting,&quot; like Odin, metamorphosed himself into animal forms, was miraculously conceived, and, among animals, is confused with the humming-bird, whose feathers adorned his statues. 1 This humming-bird god should be compared with the Roman Picus (Servius, 189). That the humming bird (Nuitziton), which was the god s old shape, should become merely his attendant (like the owl of Pallas, the mouse of Apollo, the goose of Priapus, the cuckoo of Hera), when the god received anthropomorphic form, is an example of a process common in all mythologies. Plutarch observes that the Greeks, though accustomed to the con ceptions of the animal attendants of their own gods, were amazed when they found animals worshipped as gods by the Egyptians. Miiller 2 mentions the view that the humming bird, as the most beautiful flying thing, is a proper symbol of the heaven, and so of the heaven-god, Huitzilopochtli. This vein of symbolism is so easy to work that it must be regarded with distrust. Perhaps it is safer to attribute theriomorphic shapes of gods, not to symbolism (Zeus was a cuckoo), but to survivals from that quality of early thought which draws no line between man and god and beast and bird and fish. If spiders may be great gods, why not the more attractive humming-birds ? Like many other gods, Huitzilopochtli slew his foes at his birth, and hence received names analogous to ACI/AO? and &amp;lt;o/3os. Mr Tylor (Primitive Culture, ii. 307) calls Huitzilopochtli an &quot;inextricable compound parthenogenetic god.&quot; His sacrament, when paste idols of him were eaten by the com municants, was at the winter solstice, whence it may, per haps, be inferred that Huitzilopochtli was not only a war- god but a nature-god, in both respects anthropomorphic, and in both bearing traces of the time when he was but a humming-bird, as Yehl was a raven (Miiller, op. cit.,p. 595). As a humming-bird, Huitzilopochtli led the Aztecs to a new home, as a wolf led the Hirpini, and as a woodpecker led the Sabines. Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec deity, is as much a sparrow (or similar small bird) as Huitzilopochtli is a humming-bird. Acosta says he retained the sparrow s head 1 See also Bancroft, iii. 288-290, and Acosta, pp. 352-361. 2 Gescliicftie der Amerikanischcn Urreligioncn, p. 592. in his statue. For the composite character of Quetzalcoatl as a &quot; culture-hero &quot; (a more polished version of Qat), as a &quot; nature-god,&quot; and as a theriomorphic god see Miiller (op. cit., pp. 583-584). Miiller frankly recognizes that not only are animals symbols of deity and its attributes, not only are they companions and messengers of deity (as in the period of anthropomorphic religion), but they have been divine beings in and for themselves during the earlier stages of thought. The Mexican &quot; departmental &quot; gods answer to those of other polytheisms ; there is an Aztec Ceres, an Aztec Lucina, an Aztec Vulcan, an Aztec Flora, an Aztec Venus. The creative myths and sun myths are crude and very early in character. Egyptian Myths. On a much larger and more magnifi cent scale, and on a much more permanent basis, the society of ancient Egypt some what resembled that of ancient Mexico. The divine myths of the two nations had points in common, but there are few topics more obscure than Egyptian mytho logy. Writers are apt to speak of Egyptian religion as if it were a single phenomenon of which all the aspects could be observed at a given time. In point of fact Egyptian religion (conservative though it was) lasted through perhaps five thousand years, was subject to innumerable influences, historical, ethnological, philosophical, and was variously represented by various schools of priests. We cannot take the Platonic speculations of lamblichus about the nature and manifestations of Egyptian godhead as evidence for the belief of the peoples who first worshipped the Egyptian gods an innumerable series of ages before lamblichus and Plutarch. Nor can the esoteric and pantheistic theories of priests (according to which the various beast-gods were symbolic manifestations of the divine essence) be received as an historical account of the origin of the local animal- worships. It has already been shown that the lowest and least intellectual races indulge in local animal- worship, each stock having its parent bird, beast, fish, or even plant, or inanimate object. It has also been shown that these back ward peoples recognize a non-natural race of men or animals, or both, as the first fathers, heroes, and, in a sense, gods. Such ideas are consonant with, and may be traced to the confused and nebulous condition of, savage thought. Pre cisely the same ideas are found at various periods among the ancient Egyptians. If we are to regard the Egyptian myths about the gods in animal shape, and about the non- natural superhuman heroes, and their wars and loves, as esoteric allegories devised by civilized priests, perhaps we should also explain Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, the Mantis god, the Spider creator, the Coyote and Raven gods as priestly inventions, put forth in a civilized age, and retained by Australians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Papuans, who preserve no other vestiges of high civilization. Or we may take the opposite view, and regard the story of Osiris and his war with Seth (who shut him up in a box and mutilated him) as a dualistic myth, originally on the level of the battle between Gaunab and Tsui-Goab, or between Tagar and Suqe. We may regard the local beast- and plant -gods of Egypt as survivals of totems and totem-gods like those of Australia, India, America, Africa, Siberia, and other countries. In this article the latter view is adopted. The beast-gods and dualistic and creative myths of savages are looked on as the natural product of the savage reason and fancy. The same beast-gods and myths in civilized Egypt are looked on as survivals from the rude and early condition of thought to which such conceptions are natural. In the most ancient Egyptian records the gods are not pictorially represented, and we have not obtained from these records any descriptions of adoration and sacrifice. There is a prayer to the Sky on the coffin of the king of Dynasty IV., known as Mycerinus to the Greeks. The