Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningCarpenter, Edward
Religion
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
Carpenter, Edward
Christianity and other religions; Mythology; Paganism; Religion
According to this theory the god--the full-grown god in human shape,
dwelling apart and beyond the earth--did not come first, but was a late
and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of
the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is much
supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early
cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The
Egyptian religion was full of such divinities--the jackal-headed
Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of
darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in
Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide
and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that,
following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or
medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the
skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask--this
partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of
the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic
virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the
crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered, wears the aegis, or goat-skin--said
to be the hide of the goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy;
there are a number of legends which connected the Arcadian Artemis with
the worship of the bear, Apollo with the wolf, and so forth. And, most
curious as showing similarity of rites between the Old and New Worlds,
there are found plenty of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in
religious processions among the native tribes of both North and South
America. In the Atlas of Spix and Martius (who travelled together in
the Amazonian forests about 1820) there is an understanding and
characteristic picture of the men (and some women) of the tribe of the
Tecunas moving in procession through the woods mostly naked, except for
wearing animal heads and masks--the masks representing Cranes of various
kinds, Ducks, the Opossum, the Jaguar, the Parrot, etc., probably
symbolic of their respective clans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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