Animal Worship

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Animal worship — sometimes called zoolatry or theriolatry — is the veneration of animals, or of gods conceived in animal form, as bearers or images of the sacred. The term covers a wide spread of practices that share only an outline: the directing of cult toward a living creature, a species, or a deity whose body is partly or wholly that of a beast. What unites them is less a doctrine than a posture — the conviction that divine power presses into the world through forms that are not human, and that a falcon, a bull, or an elephant-headed god can be a place where the holy is met. The phrase itself, though, came mostly from the outside. It has named, far more often, a thing the namer found beneath him than a thing anyone claimed for himself.

The falcon-headed Horus at the Temple of Horus, Edfu — a theriomorphic deity in which the swiftness of the falcon images the soaring kingship of the god. — Ijanderson977, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Egypt: the richest case, and the most misread

Egypt furnishes the most familiar examples, and the most misunderstood. Its gods were routinely shown with animal heads — the ibis or baboon of Thoth, the falcon of Horus, the jackal of Anubis, the lioness face of Sekhmet, the ram of Khnum, the cow horns of the goddess Isis — and certain living animals were kept and honored as the earthly seat of a god: the Apis bull at Memphis, sacred crocodiles of the Faiyum, the cats of Bastet, vast cemeteries of mummified ibises and hawks. To the casual eye this looks like worship of beasts. To the priests who tended it, it was something exactly drawn, and the distinction is carried in the Egyptian vocabulary itself.

An animal so honored was a ba of the god — a manifestation, an outward power, a form in which an otherwise hidden being made itself present. The same word described the mobile, active aspect of a person that survived death; applied to the sacred bull or the temple ibis, it marked the creature as a vehicle of presence rather than its origin. The animal did the work a cult statue did: a seat the god could enter and act through, then leave. Egyptian religion did not suppose that a god looked like a falcon or a jackal; it supposed that the falcon’s swiftness or the jackal’s haunting of the cemetery edge made each a fitting body for a particular power — the soaring kingship of Horus, the guardianship of the dead under Anubis — and so the iconography reads as a grammar of attributes, not a portrait. A single power could wear several animal forms and several human ones, and the texts move between them without strain. This is the many-and-one structure that the Egyptologist Erik Hornung set at the center of his account of Egyptian theology: a divine field at once unmistakably plural and, in its workings, one. For the two great living bulls the language was finer still. The Apis at Memphis and the Mnevis at Heliopolis were each called the whm — the herald, the intermediary — of a god, the Apis of Ptah and creation’s craftsman, the Mnevis of the sun. The Apis was not Ptah. It was Ptah’s herald, the one who carried the god’s voice into the visible world; its movements, the chamber it entered, the food it took or refused, were read as the god speaking through it. Recognized by its markings and installed at Memphis, the living Apis was a single chosen animal, its successor sought out when it died — never a species adored, but one creature at a time made the mouthpiece of a power.

Alexander the Great visiting the Apis bull at Memphis, where the living, specially marked bull served as the herald of Ptah. — André Castaigne (1898–1899), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

That death is where the Egyptian logic shows its full shape. A dead Apis did not simply end; it became Osiris-Apis, Osorapis, the bull joined to Osiris, lord of the dead, and was embalmed at Memphis and carried in procession along the desert causeway to the catacombs of Saqqara, where the buried bulls lay in granite sarcophagi weighing tens of tons — the Serapeum that Auguste Mariette opened in 1850. From this fused Osiris-Apis the Ptolemies, ruling Egypt after Alexander, raised a deity meant for Greek and Egyptian alike: Serapis, enthroned and human-bodied, a god of the Hellenistic world grown from the corpse of a sacred bull. The line from beast to god to imperial deity runs through the embalmer’s table.

The scale of the animal cults grew enormous in the Late Period and under the Ptolemies, but its center of gravity shifted. Alongside the single chosen Apis stood the votive necropolises, where pilgrims dedicated mummified animals by the million as offerings to a god — a creature wrapped and interred so that it might carry the donor’s petition into the divine world. The ibis sacred to Thoth was buried this way in staggering numbers: roughly four million at Tuna el-Gebel near Hermopolis, and at the Sacred Animal Necropolis of Saqqara perhaps ten thousand a year, reaching well over a million birds, with the practice cresting between about 450 and 250 BCE. Falcons, cats, baboons, and dogs filled their own catacombs. These were not the god embodied but gifts to the god, an economy of intercession in animal form — a distinct register of the same conviction, that the creature could stand between the worshipper and the power it was sacred to.

The ibis of Thoth, the bird buried by the million in the votive necropolises at Tuna el-Gebel and Saqqara (Louvre, E 17380). — Zakarie Faibis, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

Greek and Roman observers, lacking the ba-and-whm distinction, reported the Egyptians as people who worshipped beasts outright. Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BCE, set down in the second book of his Histories that every animal in Egypt was reckoned sacred and given appointed keepers, that killing one deliberately brought death and killing it by accident a fine, and that for the ibis and the hawk the penalty was death however it was done; he recorded households shaving their eyebrows when the family cat died, and the dead cats carried to Bubastis to be embalmed. He was an attentive witness, and much of what he saw is confirmed in the ground. But the framing he handed forward — Egyptians as the people who bow to animals — flattened the priestly theology into a curiosity. Later writers sharpened it into ridicule: the satirist Juvenal mocked the Egyptians for adoring cats and crocodiles and leeks, and Christian apologists folded the same charge into the wider attack on idolatry, the worship of the made and the merely living in place of the maker. The accusation outran the practice and became, for centuries, the thing most Western readers knew about Egyptian religion.

Bull, mount, and emblem beyond Egypt

The phenomenon is far older and wider than Egypt. Theriomorphic deities and sacred beasts appear across the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. In Mesopotamia the bull is a standing image of divine strength — the human-headed winged bulls, the lamassu, guarding palace gates; the storm-god’s bull; the “bull of heaven” of the Gilgamesh epic — and in Bronze Age Crete the bull recurs in the horns of consecration and the leaping rites of the Minoan palaces. The bull recurs because it is the natural emblem of generative force and royal might; the serpent because it coils at the threshold of chaos and renewal; the eagle and the lion because they crown their own orders of sky and earth. Across countless local cults a particular animal stood close to a particular power, neither quite the god nor quite separate from it, in the ambiguous middle ground that the Egyptian terms had tried to fix — and which observers from one tradition routinely collapsed when they looked at another.

A human-headed winged bull, or lamassu, from Dur-Sharrukin (c. 721–705 BCE) — the bull as an image of divine strength guarding the palace gate. — Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In India the relation is drawn through the figure of the vahana, the mount: each great god rides or is attended by an animal that is at once a vehicle, an emblem, and a sharer in the god’s nature. Shiva’s bull Nandi kneels before every Shaiva temple, a guardian and devotee who is honored in his own right without being mistaken for the god he carries. Vishnu rides Garuda, the sun-bright eagle-king and enemy of serpents. Ganesha wears the head of an elephant, his whole body a theriomorphic form rather than a mount, and is among the most widely beloved of the gods of Hinduism. Hanuman, the monkey, is god, hero, and exemplary devotee together. The reverence here is not confined to images. The cow is held in a regard of its own — Gau Mata, the mother-cow, associated with the cowherd Krishna and with the nourishing aspect of the divine, and protected under the discipline of ahimsa, non-harming, that tightened from the later Vedic period onward and was carried furthest by the Jain and Buddhist renouncers. To call this animal worship is again to import an outsider’s word: the cow is honored as a bearer and image of life’s sanctity, an instance of the divine immanence that much Hindu thought finds throughout the living world — closer to a pantheism of pervading presence than to the cult of a beast. The relation between honoring the animal and honoring the power it carries is drawn finely, and differently in different schools.

Nandi, the bull who kneels before Shaiva temples — guardian and devotee, honored in his own right without being mistaken for the god he carries (Bull Temple, Bangalore). — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

“Animal worship” as an accusation

It is worth marking how much of the historical record of animal worship was written by its opponents. The label has more often been an accusation than a self-description: a way for one tradition to place another lower down, nearer the brute. The polemicists read the practices so named as crude literalism — worship of the beast itself — and where the practitioners drew a careful line between the creature and its source, the charge erased it. This is distinct from, though often tangled with, the parallel polemic over images, idolatry proper; and it is distinct again from fetishism, the category European observers coined for the attribution of power to a material object, which carried its own freight of condescension. Each of the three was shaped as much by the accuser as by anything in the practice accused.

The deepest of these tidy schemes was totemism. The Scottish jurist John Ferguson McLennan coined the term in 1869, in a series of articles on “The Worship of Animals and Plants” in the Fortnightly Review, and argued that the whole human race had passed through a stage in which clans took an animal or plant as ancestor and emblem, the original from which the gods themselves descended. James George Frazer gathered the evidence into his Totemism (1887) and the four volumes of Totemism and Exogamy (1910); Émile Durkheim made Australian totemism the elementary form of all religious life. For half a century the theory organized the field. Then Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962), wrote what amounted to its obituary: totemism as a single institution did not exist. It was an illusion assembled by scholars out of unlike things, he argued, much as nineteenth-century medicine had assembled “hysteria” out of unrelated symptoms; the genuine phenomenon underneath was classification — the use of differences among animal species to think the differences among human groups, a logic of the mind rather than a survival of beast-ancestry. Most of the grand single explanations have since been set aside as too tidy for evidence that is local, varied, and resistant to one account. With them should go the older register that ranked the traditions so named as primitive — a register that told more about its authors than about the cow, the falcon, or the bull.

The texts and the scholarship

The documentary core of the Egyptian material is the funerary and religious corpus assembled by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egyptology, much of it long in the public domain even as its translations have been superseded. E. A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Magic (1899) and his edition of the Book of the Dead, the Papyrus of Ani, remain the most accessible English gateway to the theology of ba and divine manifestation, though modern philology — Faulkner, Allen, Erik Hornung — has replaced his renderings; Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (English translation 1982; German Der Eine und die Vielen, 1971) is the standard treatment of how Egyptian theology held a single divine power and its many animal-bodied forms together. For the outsider’s witness, the second book of Herodotus is itself the primary text, read now against the archaeology of the animal necropolises — where genetic study of the mummified sacred ibis has begun to show whether the millions of birds were farmed or trapped, and so how the votive cult actually fed itself. The history of the totemism category is best followed from the source: McLennan’s argument is summarized in the Britannica account of The Worship of Animals and Plants and his life in the Dictionary of National Biography, while Lévi-Strauss’s dismantling of it is laid out in the standard reference treatment. Together they trace an idea from its confident birth to its careful undoing.

What the priestly traditions held, where it can be recovered, drew the same distinction Egypt drew. The Apis was the herald, not the craftsman-god; Nandi kneels before Shiva and is not Shiva; the cow bears the sanctity of life without being its author. The divine was understood as not confined to human shape, and the animal was the form it could be met in — the vessel through which a hidden power put on a visible body, walked the temple precinct, and let itself be recognized. To name that idolatry is to refuse the one distinction its keepers most insisted on: that the falcon on the standard and the bull in its stall were where the god appeared, and never where the god began.

→ In the library: Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899) · Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913)

→ Related: Immanence · Indra · Kali · Mesopotamia · Thoth · Horus · Isis · Osiris · Serapis · Heliopolis · Shiva · Vishnu · Ganesha · Hanuman · Hinduism · Herodotus · Idolatry · Fetishism · Pantheism · Tree Worship