Our author refers to unnamed writers who call Indra or Ammon a totem (i.
200).
This is a foolish liberty with language. 'Why should not all the gods of
Egypt with their heads of bulls and apes and cats be survivals of
totemisms?' Why not, indeed? Professor Sayce remarks, 'They were the
sacred animals of the clans,' survivals from an age 'when the religion of
Egypt was totemism.' 'In Egypt the gods themselves are totem-deities,
i.e. personifications or individual representations of the sacred
character and attributes which in the purely totem stage of religion were
ascribed without distinction to all animals of the holy kind.' So says
Dr. Robertson Smith. He and Mr. Sayce are 'scholars,' not mere
unscholarly anthropologists. {76}