periods--the age before, and the age which followed the accession of
the Incas, and their establishment of sun-worship as the creed of the
State. In the earlier period, the pre-Inca period, he tells us 'an
Indian was not accounted honourable unless he was descended from a
fountain, river, or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild
animal, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call
_cuntur_ (condor), or some other bird of prey.'[108] To these
worshipful creatures 'men offered what they usually saw them eat' (i.
53). But men were not content to adore large and dangerous animals.
'There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did
not worship as a god,' including 'lizards, toads, and frogs.' In the
midst of these superstitions the Incas appeared. Just as the tribes
claimed descent from animals, great or small, so the Incas drew
_their_ pedigree from the sun, which they adored like the _gens_ of
the Aurelii in Rome.[109] Thus every Indian had his _pacarissa_, or,
as the North American Indians say, _totem_,[110] a natural object
from which he claimed descent, and which, in a certain degree, he
worshipped. Though sun-worship became the established religion,
worship of the animal _pacarissas_ was still tolerated. The
sun-temples also contained _huacas_, or images, of the beasts which
the Indians had venerated.[111] In the great temple of Pachacamac,
the most spiritual and abstract god of Peruvian faith, 'they
worshipped a she-fox and an emerald. The devil also appeared to them,
and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce.'[112] This toleration
of an older and cruder, in subordination to a purer, faith is a very
common feature in religious evolution. In Catholic countries, to this
day, we may watch, in Holy Week, the Adonis feast described by
Theocritus,[113] and the procession and entombment of the old god of
spring.
'The Incas had the good policy to collect all the tribal animal gods
into their temples in and round Cuzco, in which the two leading gods
were the Master of Life, and the Sun.' Did a process of this sort ever
occur in Greek religion, and were older animal gods ever collected
into the temples of such deities as Apollo?
* * * * *
While a great deal of scattered evidence about many animals
consecrated to Greek gods points in this direction, it will be enough,
for the present, to examine the case of the Sacred Mice. Among races
which are still in the totemistic stage, which still claim descent
from animals and from other objects, a peculiar marriage law generally
exists, or can be shown to have existed. No man may marry a woman who
is descended from the same ancestral animal, and who bears the same
totem-name, and carries the same badge or family crest, as himself. A
man descended from the Crane, and whose family name is Crane, cannot
marry a woman whose family name is Crane. He must marry a woman of the
Wolf, or Turtle, or Swan, or other name, and her children keep her
family title, not his. Thus, if a Crane man marries a Swan woman, the
children are Swans, and none of them may marry a Swan; they must marry
Turtles, Wolves, or what not, and _their_ children, again, are
Turtles, or Wolves. Thus there is necessarily an eternal come and go
of all the animal names known in a district. As civilisation advances
these rules grow obsolete. People take their names from the father, as
among ourselves. Finally the dwellers in a given district, having
become united into a local tribe, are apt to drop the various animal
titles and to adopt, as the name of the whole tribe, the name of the
chief, or of the predominating family. Let us imagine a district of
some twenty miles in which there are Crane, Wolf, Turtle, and Swan
families. Long residence together, and common interests, have welded
them into a local tribe. The chief is of the Wolf family, and the
tribe, sinking family differences and family names, calls itself 'the
Wolves.' Such tribes were probably, in the beginning, the inhabitants
of the various Egyptian towns which severally worshipped the wolf, or
the sheep, or the crocodile, and abstained religiously (except on
certain sacrificial occasions) from the flesh of the animal that gave
them its name.[114]
* * * * *
It has taken us long to reach the Sacred Mice of Greek religion, but
we are now in a position to approach their august divinity. We have
seen that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribal
_pacarissas_ in Peru, and that the _huacas_, or images, of the sacred
animals were admitted under the roof of the temple of the Sun. Now it
is recognised that the temples of the Sminthian Apollo contained
images of sacred mice among other animals, and our argument is that
here, perhaps, we have another example of the Peruvian religious
evolution. Just as, in Peru, the tribes adored 'vile and filthy'
animals, just as the solar worship of the Incas subordinated these,
just as the _huacas_ of the beasts remained in the temples of the
Peruvian Sun; so, we believe, the tribes along the Mediterranean
coasts had, at some very remote prehistoric period, their animal
_pacarissas_; these were subordinated to the religion (to some extent
solar) of Apollo; and the _huacas_, or animal idols, survived in
Apollo's temples.
* * * * *
If this theory be correct, we shall probably find the mouse, for
example, revered as a sacred animal in many places. This would
necessarily follow, if the marriage customs which we have described
ever prevailed on Greek soil, and scattered the mouse-name far and
wide.[115] Traces of the Mouse families, and of adoration, if
adoration there was of the mouse, would linger on in the following
shapes: (1) Places would be named from mice, and mice would be
actually held sacred in themselves. (2) The mouse-name would be given
locally to the god who superseded the mouse. (3) The figure of the
mouse would be associated with the god, and used as a badge, or a kind
of crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has been a
venerated animal. (4) Finally, myths would be told to account for the
sacredness of a creature so undignified.
Let us take these considerations in their order:--
(1) If there were local mice tribes, deriving their name from the
worshipful mouse, certain towns settled by these tribes would retain a
reverence for mice.
In Chrysa, a town of the Troad, according to Heraclides Ponticus, mice
were held sacred, the local name for mouse being ~sminthos~. Many
places bore this mouse-name, according to Strabo.[116] This is
precisely what would have occurred had the Mouse totem, and the Mouse
stock, been widely distributed.[117] The Scholiast[118] mentions
Sminthus as a place in the Troad. Strabo speaks of two places deriving
their name from Sminthus, or mouse, near the Sminthian temple, and
others near Larissa. In Rhodes and Lindus, the mouse place-name
recurs, 'and in many other districts' (~Kai allothi de pollachothi~).
Strabo (x. 486) names Caressus, and Poeessa, in Ceos, among the other
places which has Sminthian temples, and, presumably, were once centres
of tribes named after the mouse.
Here, then, are a number of localities in which the Mouse Apollo was
adored, and where the old mouse-name lingered. That the mice were
actually held sacred in their proper persons we learn from AElian. 'The
dwellers in Hamaxitus of the Troad worship mice,' says AElian. 'In the
temple of Apollo Smintheus, mice are nourished, and food is offered to
them at the public expense, and white mice dwell beneath the
altar.'[119] In the same way we found that the Peruvians fed their
sacred beasts on what they usually saw them eat.
(2) The second point in our argument has already been sufficiently
demonstrated. The mouse-name 'Smintheus' was given to Apollo in all
the places mentioned by Strabo, 'and many others.'
(3) The figure of the mouse will be associated with the god, and used
as a badge, or crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has
been a venerated animal.
The passage already quoted from AElian informs us that there stood 'an
effigy of the mouse beside the tripod of Apollo.' In Chrysa,
according to Strabo (xiii. 604), the statue of Apollo Smintheus had a
mouse beneath his foot. The mouse on the tripod of Apollo is
represented on a bas-relief illustrating the plague, and the offerings
of the Greeks to Apollo Smintheus, as described in the first book of
the _Iliad_.[120]
* * * * *
The mouse is not an uncommon local badge or crest in Greece. The
animals whose figures are stamped on coins, like the Athenian owl, are
the most ancient marks of cities. It is plausible conjecture that,
just as the Iroquois when they signed treaties with the Europeans used
their totems--bear, wolf, and turtle--as seals,[121] so the animals on
archaic Greek city coins represented crests or badges which, at some
far more remote period, had been totems.
The Argives, according to Pollux,[122] stamped the mouse on their
coins.[123] As there was a temple of Apollo Smintheus in Tenedos, we
naturally hear of a mouse on the coins of the island.[124] Golzio has
published one of these mouse coins. The people of Metapontum stamped
their money with a mouse gnawing an ear of corn. The people of Cumae
employed a mouse dormant. Paoli fancied that certain mice on Roman
medals might be connected with the family of _Mus_, but this is rather
guesswork.[125]
We have now shown traces, at least, of various ways in which an early
tribal religion of the mouse--the mouse _pacarissa_, as the Peruvians
said--may have been perpetuated. When we consider that the superseding
of the mouse by Apollo must have occurred, if it did occur, long
before Homer, we may rather wonder that the mouse left his mark on
Greek religion so long. We have seen mice revered, a god with a
mouse-name, the mouse-name recurring in many places, the _huaca_, or
idol of the mouse, preserved in the temples of the god, and the
mouse-badge used in several widely severed localities. It remains (4)
to examine the myths about mice. These, in our opinion, were probably
told to account for the presence of the _huaca_ of the mouse in
temples, and for the occurrence of the animal in religion, and his
connection with Apollo.
A singular mouse-myth, narrated by Herodotus, is worth examining for
reasons which will appear later, though the events are said to have
happened on Egyptian soil.[126] According to Herodotus, one Sethos, a
priest of Hephaestus (Ptah), was king of Egypt. He had disgraced the
military class, and he found himself without an army when Sennacherib
invaded his country. Sethos fell asleep in the temple, and the god,
appearing to him in a vision, told him that divine succour would come
to the Egyptians.[127] In the night before the battle, field-mice
gnawed the quivers and shield-handles of the foe, who fled on finding
themselves thus disarmed. 'And now,' says Herodotus, 'there standeth a
stone image of this king in the temple of Hephaestus, and in the hand
of the image a mouse, and there is this inscription, "Let whoso
looketh on me be pious."'
Prof. Sayce[128] holds that there was no such person as Sethos, but
that the legend 'is evidently Egyptian, not Greek, and the name of
Sennacherib, as well as the fact of the Assyrian attack, is correct.'
The legend also, though Egyptian, is 'an echo of the biblical account
of the destruction of the Assyrian army,' an account which omits the
mice. 'As to the mice, here,' says Prof. Sayce, 'we have to do again
with the Greek dragomen (_sic_). The story of Sethos was attached to
the statue of some deity which was supposed to hold a mouse in its
hand.' It must have been easy to verify this supposition; but Mr.
Sayce adds, 'mice were not sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as
symbols, or found on the monuments.' To this remark we may suggest
some exceptions. Apparently this one mouse _was_ found on the
monuments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says mice do occur in the sculptures,
but they were not sacred. Rats, however, were certainly sacred, and as
little distinction is taken, in myth, between rats and mice as between
rabbits and hares. The rat was sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like
all totems) was not to be eaten.[129] This association of the rat and
the Sun cannot but remind us of Apollo and his mouse. According to
Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did worship the shrew-mouse. The
Athribitae, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis, are the people to whom he
attributes this cult, whom he mentions (xvii. 831) among the other
local animal-worships of Egypt.[130] Several porcelain examples of the
field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called Apollo by the Greeks) may
be seen in the British Museum.
That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on
the evidence of the Ritual of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian
art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue
'had a mouse on its hand.' Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of
the mice gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation
of mouse-worship. One of the Trojan 'mouse-stories' ran--that
emigrants had set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle
advised them to settle 'wherever they were attacked by the children of
the soil.' At Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night
by mice, which ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings.
The colonists made up their mind that these mice were 'the children of
the soil,' settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo.[131] A myth of
this sort may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or
a Mouse tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have
been settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion.[132]
Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse
Apollo on the hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice,
like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said
to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine.[133]
Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the
mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally
spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god
or of the mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as
the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse
family names had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been,
mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the
Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith:[134] 'Achbor, the
mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and
another mouse-name are among the Arabs. The same name occurs in
Judah.' Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not
eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial
occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult.
In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of
these practices (lxvi.): 'They that sanctify themselves, and purify
themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's
flesh, and the abomination, and the _mouse_, shall be consumed
together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian prohibition to
eat 'the abominable' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) 'Rat of Ra.' If
the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan,
then the mouse was a totem,[135] for the chosen people were forbidden
to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.'
That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems,
Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where 'we
find seventy of the elders of Israel--that is, the heads of
houses--worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of
all manner of unclean' (tabooed) 'creeping things, and quadrupeds,
_even all the idols of the House of Israel_.' Some have too hastily
concluded that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring
Philistines. After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in
the house of Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They
therefore, in accordance with a well-known savage magical practice,
made five golden representations of the diseased part, and five golden
mice, as 'a trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,' and so restored
the Ark.[136] Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic
countries, and the mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines
had ever worshipped mice.
* * * * *
Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic,
and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the
sacred animal of Rudra. 'The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,' says the
Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his _Apollo Smintheus_.
Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics
of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of
Ganeca, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented in art with his
foot upon a mouse.
Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he
really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his
prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven
in Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at
home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own
Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a
totem, would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites
of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our
theory than on that of De Gubernatis: 'The Pagan Sun-god crushes
under his foot the Mouse of Night. When the cat's away, the mice may
play; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.'[137] This
is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when
the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) _cannot_ play:
there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the
Scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical
phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the
mouse is the night according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's
opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was
originally regarded by the Aryan race as the 'flashing tooth of a
beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the
beast with his teeth, and, behold the lightning and the mouse are
convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages
regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the
result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent;[138]
thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in
Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a
heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the _Zend Avesta_. But it does not
follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all
the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a
serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on
earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite
unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a
mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a _jeu d'esprit_, like the opposite
hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other
current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship
of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly
neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred
to the conjecture of a civilised observer. The facts of savage
animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to
or unappreciated by Scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who
recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in
Egyptian religion.
Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an
isolated case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the
mouse, he did no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several
other animals whose images were associated with his own. The Greek
religion was more refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In
Egypt the animals were still adored, and the images of the gods had
bestial heads. In Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic
statues, had bestial heads; but besides the other deities the sculptor
set the owl, eagle, wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever
creature was the local favourite of the deity.[139] Probably the deity
had, in the majority of cases, superseded the animal and succeeded to
his honours. But the conservative religious sentiment retained the
beast within the courts and in the suit and service of the
anthropomorphic god.[140]
The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be
observed in Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in his _Samoa_) each
family has its own sacred animal, which it may not eat. If this law be
transgressed, the malefactor is supernaturally punished in a variety
of ways. But, while each family has thus its totem, four or five
different families recognise, in owl, crab, lizard, and so on,
incarnations of the same god, say of Tongo. If Tongo had a temple
among these families, we can readily believe that images of the
various beasts in which he was incarnate would be kept within the
consecrated walls. Savage ideas like these, if they were ever
entertained in Greece, would account for the holy animals of the
different deities. But it is obvious that the phenomena which we have
been studying may be otherwise explained. It may be said that the
Sminthian Apollo was only revered as the enemy and opponent of mice.
St. Gertrude (whose heart was eaten by mice) has the same _role_ in
France.[141] The worship of Apollo, and the badge of the mouse, would,
on this principle, be diffused by colonies from some centre of the
faith. The images of mice in Apollo's temples would be nothing more
than votive offerings. Thus, in the church of a Saxon town, the verger
shows a silver mouse dedicated to Our Lady. 'This is the greatest of
our treasures,' says the verger. 'Our town was overrun with mice till
the ladies of the city offered this mouse of silver. Instantly all the
mice disappeared.' 'And are you such fools as to believe that the
creatures went away because a silver mouse was dedicated?' asked a
Prussian officer. 'No,' replied the verger, rather neatly; 'or long
ago we should have offered a silver Prussian.'
FOOTNOTES:
[108] _Comm. Real._, i. 75.
[109] See _Early History of the Family_, _infra_.
[110] The names _Totem_ and _Totemism_ have been in use at least since
1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Mueller
(_Academy_, Jan., 1884) says the word should be, not _Totem_, but
_Ote_ or _Otem_. Mr. Tylor's inquiries among the Red Men support this.
Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the word _Totamism_
in 1792; but Lafitau (1724) had already explained some classical myths
as survivals of Totemism.
[111] Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.
[112] Cieza de Leon, p. 183.
[113] _Idyll_ xv.
[114] Sayce, _Herodotos_, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson's
_Ancient Egyptians_ (1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch, _De Is. et
Os._, 71, 72; Athenaeus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.
[115] The Mouse, according to Dalton, is still a totem among the
Oraons of Bengal. A man of the Mouse 'motherhood,' as the totem
kindred is locally styled, may not eat mice (esteemed a delicacy), nor
marry a girl who is a Mouse.
[116] xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.
[117] There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete
(De Witte, _Revue Numismatique_, N.S. iii. 3-11).
[118] _Iliad_, i. 39.
[119] AElian, _H. A._, xii. 5.
[120] The bas-relief is published in Paoli's _Della Religi ne de'
Gentili_, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, ad Cal. Oper. _de
Colum. Trajan._, p. 315. Paoli's book was written after the discovery
in Neapolitan territory of a small bronze image, hieratic in
character, representing a man with a mouse on his hand. Paoli's
engraving of this work of art, unluckily, does not enable us to
determine its date or _provenance_. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.
[121] Colden, _History of the Five Nations_, p. 15 (1727).
[122] _Onomast._, ix. segm. 84.
[123] De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In the _Revue
Numismatique_, N.S. iii., De Witte publishes coins of Alexandria, the
more ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad. The Sminthian Apollo is
represented with his bow, and the mouse on his hand. Other coins show
the god with the mouse at his foot, or show us the lyre of Apollo
supported by mice. A bronze coin in the British Museum gives Apollo
with the mouse beside his foot.
[124] _Spanheim_, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. 1, p. 312.
[125] _Della Rel._, p. 174.
[126] Herodotus, ii. 141.
[127] Liebrecht (_Zur Volkskunde_, p. 13, quoting _Journal Asiatique_,
1st series, 3, 307) finds the same myth in Chinese annals. It is not a
god, however, but the king of the rats who appears to the distressed
monarch in his dream. Rats then gnaw the bowstrings of his enemies.
The invaders were Turks, the rescued prince a king of Khotan. The king
raised a temple, and offered sacrifice--to the rats? The same story of
rats gnawing bowstrings recurs, of all places, in the _Migration
Legend of the Greeks_ (Brinton, Philadelphia. 1884).
[128] _Herodotos_, p. 204.
[129] Wilkinson, iii. 249, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: 'Thou devourest
the abominable rat of Ra, or the Sun.'
[130] Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the
throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used as substitutes for
scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all
represented in Mr. Loftie's collection. See his _Essay of Scarabs_, p.
27. It may be admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the
religion of the Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.
[Illustration: {Two examples of scarab substitutes}]
[131] Strabo, xiii. 604.
[132] Eustathius on _Iliad_, i. 39.
[133] _A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of
Mice_, 1670.
[134] _Journal of Philol._, xvii. p. 96.
[135] Leviticus xi. 29.
[136] Samuel i. 5, 6.