T S BIRDS IN LEGEND 



of the ancient Egyptians. This ibis, and other incarnated 

 animals, originally mere symbols of lofty ideas, came to 

 be reverenced as real divinities in the places where their 

 cult flourished (although they might enjoy no such dis- 

 tinction elsewhere), were given divine honors when they 

 died, and were, in short, real gods to their devotees ; that is 

 to say, the sophisticated Egyptians of the later dynasties 

 had elevated into the logical semblance of divinity this 

 and that animal-fetish of their uncultured ancestors. 



Another singular case of a bird rising to the eminence 

 of tutelary deity is that of the ruddy sheldrake (Casarca 

 rutila) or Brahminy duck in Thibet. From it is derived 

 the title of the established church of the lamas (practi- 

 cally the government of that Buddhistic country) ; and 

 their abbotts wear robes of the sheldrake colors. In 

 Burmah the Brahminy duck is sacred to Buddhists as a 

 symbol of devotion and fidelity, and it was figured on 

 Asoka's pillars in this emblematic character. This shel- 

 drake is usually found in pairs, and when one is shot 

 the other will often hover near until it, too, falls a vic- 

 tim to its conjugal love. 16 



A stage in this process of deification is given by Tylor 

 in describing the veneration of a certain bird in Poly- 

 nesia, as a Tahitian priest explained it to Dr. Ellis, the 

 celebrated missionary-student of the South Seas. The 

 priest said that his god was not always in the idol repre- 

 senting it. "A god," he declared, "often came to and 

 passed from an image in the body of a bird, and spiritual 

 influence could be transmitted from an idol by imparting 

 it by contact to certain valued kinds of feathers. " This 

 bit of doctrine helps us to understand what Colonel St. 

 Johnston has to tell in his recent thoughtful book 48 on the 

 ethnology of Polynesia, of the special use of the feathers 



