Myth, Ritual And Religion, Vol. 2 (of 2)Lang, Andrew
Religion
Myth, Ritual And Religion, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Lang, Andrew
Myth; Mythology; Religion; Rites and ceremonies
In his Romische Mythologie, i. 336, 337, Preller makes no use of these
materials for comparison, though the conduct and character of the other
beast of war, the wolf, as guide and protector of the Hirpi (wolves),
and worshipped by them with wolf-dances, is an obvious survival of
totemism. The Picini have their animal leader, Picus, the woodpecker,
the Hirpi have their animal leader, the wolf, just as the humming-bird
was the leader of the Aztecs.
In these Latin legends, as in the legends of Huit-zilopochtli, the
basis, as J. G. Müller sees, is the bird--the humming-bird in one case,
the woodpecker in the other. The bird is then euhemerised or brought
into anthropomorphic form. It is fabled that he was originally a man
(like Picus before Circe enchanted him to a bird's shape), or, in
Mexico, a man named Huitziton, who during the Aztec migrations heard and
pursued a little bird that cried "Tinni," that is, "Follow, follow".*
Now we are all familiar with classical legends of races that were guided
by a bird or beast to their ultimate seats. Müller mentions Battus and
the raven, the Chalcidians and the dove, the Cretans and the dolphin,
which was Apollo, Cadmus and the cow; the Hirpi, or wolves, who followed
the wolf. In the same way the Picini followed the woodpecker, _Picus_,
from whom they derived their name, and carried a woodpecker on their
banners. Thus we may connect both the Sabine war-gods and the bird of
the Mexican war-gods with the many guiding and protecting animals which
occur in fable. Now a guiding and protecting animal is almost a synonym
for a totem. That the Sabine woodpecker had been a totem may be pretty
certainly established on the evidence of Plutarch. The people called by
his name (Picini) declined, like totemists everywhere, to eat their holy
bird, in this case the woodpecker.**
* Bancroft, iii. 69, note, quoting Torquemada.
** Quoest. Rom., xxi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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