The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s3.28

v1.c11.s3.28

An instance of generalization on insufficient grounds is afforded by S. Reinach's¹ theory of totemism: he insists that the traces of the reverence paid to animals is always to be accounted for in one simple way: at one time the animal was the god: men revered animals by an excess of philanthropy, by a hypertrophy of the same instinct which made human society a possibility: but at stated intervals the animal god was devoured in order to renew the tie of blood between the clan and the animal, which was then replaced by another specimen of the species, the god being the species, not the mere individual. To this feeling of man for the animal he attributes the domestication of wild animals and the greatest possible help to the progress of civilization. In later times, as the process of religious development proceeded, the animal gods faded away and appeared as animals in the train of anthropomorphic deities, or enemies of these deities. There is some obscurity in the conception of the mode of the introduction of anthropomorphism, which in Greece¹ at least Reinach seems to regard as a new element introduced from without the original religion, but the real objection to the theory is that it ignores many other possibilities explaining reverence paid to animals. The hunter who pays a semblance of reverence to the animal which he has killed does so often to avoid the anger of the spirit of the dead beast, and the revenge of the relatives of the slain, and no sacramental relation is involved. Again there is an essential distinction to be drawn between theriomorphism and actual worship of animals for themselves. The early religious imagination, it is clear, was not capable of the distinctions between human and animal which we draw so sharply: the innumerable legends of the transmutation of men into animals and *vice versa* show a certain instability of view, and a god like Indra or like Dionysos may be conceived as bull shaped, as well as in human or mixed form. Closely allied with this thought is the conception that the god may take actual embodiment in the form of the animal, more especially when the animal is led up to be offered to him in sacrifice: the classical example of the Bouphonia,² the flight of the priest, and the condemnation of the weapon with which the fatal blow is given to the ox can thus best be explained. For the time being, and in a certain sense, the victim may be said to become a fetish, and like a fetish it is an object filled with the holy power, but not abidingly, and, what is more important, not in and for itself sacred. There is at least as little difficulty in understanding this aspect of religious belief as in accepting the theory that totemism is a universal stage of religious faith.