TOT EMI 8M IN THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 397 



Greece, where each god has a small menagerie of sacred animals ; 

 and it seems probable that these animals were originally the 

 totems of the different stocks subsumed into the worship of the 

 anthropomorphic deity." 



In Egypt, when animal-worship became associated with 

 anthropomorphic conceptions, the figures of the gods after the 

 twelfth dynasty exhibit a gradual transition by being repre- 

 sented in a mixed figure of an animal's head upon a human form. 



Apis, the sacred bull, was worshiped from the earliest period, 

 but does not appear on the monuments until the fourth dynasty. 

 Apis was supposed to have been born from a virgin cow rendered 

 pregnant by a moonbeam, or a flash of lightning. We find in the 

 theology of an African tribe the story of one of their gods being 

 born in a similar mysterious way from a cow ; and we see a sur- 

 vival of this savage thought in regard to Indra recorded in the 

 Rig- Veda: "His mother: a cow, bore Indra, an unlicked calf." 

 The mother of Apis shares on the monuments the honors of the 

 bull, and is represented, under the attributes of Isis Hathor, as a 

 goddess with a cow's head. The hieroglyphics represent Osiris 

 adorned with horns, or with the head of a bull, and unite the two 

 names, Apis-Osiris. According to Greek tradition, Apis was the 

 incarnation of Osiris.* 



Careful study proves to us that "the peculiar mark of the 

 wilder American tribe legends is the bestial character of the divine 

 beings, which is also illustrated in Australia and Africa, while 

 the bestial clothing, feathers or fur, drops but slowly off Indra, 

 Zeus, Dionysus, the Egyptian Osiris, and the Scandinavian Odin." 



In following the slow advance in culture from animal-worship 

 to the highest monotheistic conception, we are forced to admit 

 that " all religions are one and the same religion, in various stages 

 of evolution, taking on different colors from local soils and cli- 

 mates, and thus developing many varieties." In the earliest 

 phases of religious development we find the idea of two beings, 

 one good and the other evil, who are supposed to be engaged in 

 constant warfare. This widely spread dualistic myth seems to 

 have originated in the primitive mind through an attempt to ex- 

 plain the origin of evil in the world. Men ask in Australia, as in 

 Persia, " Why do things go wrong ? " and are answered by the 

 myth — still surviving in modern theology — of the evil one who has 

 thwarted the Creator of all things. Among the Thlinkuts, on our 

 Western continent, the great opponent of their totem deity — the 

 Raven — is the wicked Wolf, the ancestor of the wolf race of men. 

 In certain Australian tribes their creative totem — the Eagle 

 Hawk — is always at war with the evil crow. 



* Article Apis, by Dr. Samuel Birch. Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edition. 



