(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 [Greek]. Many places
bore this mouse-name, according to Strabo. {108b} This is precisely what
would have occurred had the Mouse totem, and the Mouse stock, been widely
distributed. {108c} The Scholiast {109a} 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' ([Greek]). Strabo (x. 486) names Caressus, and Poeessa, in
Ceos, among the other places which had 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.'
{109b} 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.' {110a}
* * * * *
The mouse is a not 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 a plausible conjecture that, just as the
Iroquois when they signed treaties with the Europeans used their
totems--bear, wolf, and turtle--as seals, {110b} 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, {110c} stamped the mouse on their
coins. {110d} As there was a temple of Apollo Smintheus in Tenedos, we
naturally hear of a mouse on the coins of the island. {111a} 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. {111b}
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. {111c} 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. {112a} 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 {112b} 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.
{113a} 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, which he mentions (xvii.
813) among the other local animal-worships of Egypt. {113b} 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 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. {114a} 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. {114b} 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. {114c}
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: {115a} '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, {115b} 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. {116}
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.' {117a} 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; {117b}
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 beside the other deities the sculptor set the owl, eagle,
wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever creature was the local
favourite of the deity. {118a} 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. {118b}
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.
{119} 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.'