Be this as it may, it is at any rate clear that totemism itself was a very ancient and widespread institution in early Egypt. Totems are defined by Mr. Frazer as “a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation.” “Observation of existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere,” says Sir Martin Conway, “shows us that one or more representatives of the totem are often fed or even kept alive in captivity by the tribe.” Mr. Frazer tells us that “amongst the Nar-rinyeri in South Australia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up their mouths, and keep them as pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was carefully kept and fed. Amongst the Kalong in Java, whose totem is a red dog, each family as a rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on no account allow to be struck or ill-used by any one.” In the same way, no doubt, certain Egyptian clans kept sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks, jackals, cobras, lizards, ibises, asps, and beetles. Mummies of most of these sacred animals, and little images of others, are common in the neighbourhood of certain places where they were specially worshipped. Whether the animal-headed gods represent a later stage of the same totem-worship, or whether they stand merely for real ancestor-gods belonging to a particular totem-clan, and therefore represented by its totem, is not a question easily settled. But at any rate it is clear that many gods are the equivalents of such totem-animals, as is the case with the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the cow-headed Athor, the ram-headed Knum, the cat-headed Pasht, the lion-headed Sekhet, the ibis-headed {176}Thoth, and the kestrel-headed Khons. These gods appear on the earlier monuments as beasts alone, not as human forms with bestial heads. Till the Twelfth Dynasty, when a totem-god is mentioned (which is not often), “he is represented,” says Mr. Flinders Petrie, “by his animal.” Anubis, for example, at this stage, is merely a jackal; and as M. Maspero puts it, “Whatever may have been the object of worship in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, not a hieroglyph, that the earliest ibis-worshippers adored.” There were other totems, however, which were less fruitful in deities, but which entered largely in artistic forms into the later religious symbolism. Such were especially the asp and the sacred scarabæus, which almost rival the sun-disk in the large part they play in the developed religious art-language of the great temple-building dynasties. I may add that among the other symbols of this curious emblematical picture-writing are the Tau or _crux ansata_, by origin apparently a combined _linga_ and _yoni_; the lotus, the sceptre, the leek, and the crescent.