Animal Worship

← Encyclopedia

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.

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 — 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. What the priests understood by this is a careful question. The Egyptian texts do not say the animal was the god, but that the divine power could dwell in or be manifest through it; the creature was a vessel, not the source. Greek and Roman observers, lacking that distinction, reported the Egyptians as people who worshipped beasts outright, and the charge became a fixture of ancient ridicule and later Christian polemic alike.

The phenomenon is far older and wider than Egypt. Theriomorphic deities appear across the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, in the bull-iconography of Mesopotamia and Crete, and in countless local cults where a particular animal stood close to a particular power. In India, animals attend the gods as their mounts and emblems — Shiva’s bull Nandi, Vishnu’s eagle Garuda, the elephant form of Ganesha — and the cow holds a reverence of its own; here too the relation between honoring the animal and honoring the divine it carries is drawn finely, and differently in different schools. Comparative scholarship of the nineteenth century reached for grand single explanations — totemism above all, the descent of the gods from clan-animals — and most of those schemes have since been set aside as too tidy for evidence that is local, varied, and resistant to one account.

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. The priestly understanding, where it can be recovered, drew the same distinction Egypt drew: the divine was held to be not confined to human shape, and the animal was its vessel, not the source.

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

→ Related: Immanence · Indra · Kali · Mesopotamia