Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/77

30 beasts, like the medicine-bags of the North-American Indians, are reckoned as divinities, and so become objects of adoration. But in this case the visible object is idealized; not worshipped as the brute thing it really is, but as the type and symbol of God. Nature is an Apparition of the Deity, God in a mask. Brute matter was never an object of adoration. Thus the Egyptians who worshipped the Crocodile, did not worship it as a Crocodile, but as a symbol of God, “an appropriate one,” says Plutarch, “for it alone, of all animals, has no tongue, and God needs none to speak his power and glory.” Similar causes, it may be, led to the worship of other animals. Thus the Hawk was a type of divine foresight; the Bull of strength; the Serpent of mystery. The Savage did not worship the Buffalo, but the Manitou of all Buffaloes, the universal cause of each particular effect. Still more, there is something mysterious about the animals. Their instinctive knowledge of coming storms, and other events; the wondrous foresight of the Beaver, the Bee; the sagacity of the Dog; the obscurity attending all their emotions, helped, no doubt, to procure them a place among powers greater than human. It is the Unknown which men worship in common things; at this stage, man, whose emotions are understood, is never an object of adoration.

Fetichism is the infancy of Religion. Here the religious