Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/119

Rh that it "received divine honours because it is blind, and darkness is more ancient than light," by no means accounts for the mainly local respect paid to the little beast.

If this explanation of the local worship of sacred beasts be admitted as plausible, the beast-headed gods, or many of them, may be accounted for in the same way. It is always in a town where a certain animal is locally revered that the human-shaped god wearing the head of the same animal finds the centre and chief holy place of his worship. The cat is great in Bubastis, and there is Bast, and also the cat-headed Sekhet of Memphis. The sheep was great in Thebes, and there was the sacred city of the ram-headed Khnum, or Ammon Ra. If the crocodile was held in supreme regard at Ombos, there, too, was the sacred town of the crocodile-headed god, Sebak.

While Greek writers like Porphyry, and Plutarch, and Jamblichus repeat the various and inconsistent Egyptian allegorical accounts of the origin of those beast-headed gods, the facts of their worship and chosen residence show that the gods are only semi-anthropomorphic refinements on the animals. It has been said that these representations are later in time, and it is probable that they are later in evolution, than the