i88i] ANIMAL WORSHIP AND ANIMAL TRIBES 463 



took their respective names. There is nothing surprising 

 in the conception that the worshippers are sons of their 

 god. We find the same thing in the Old Testament. 

 The Moabites are called sons and daughters of Kemosh in 

 the old lay, Num. xxi. 29, and even Malachi calls a 

 heathen woman the daughter of a strange god (ii. n). 

 In the later stages of thought this was no doubt a meta 

 phor. But in its origin, as we see it in these tribal names, 

 the idea must have been that the people were of the stock 

 of their god. When a man called himself Shamsi, &quot;solar,&quot; 

 he meant that he really was of the stock of the sun. The 

 existence of such a way of speaking, and even of cases 

 in which a man is directly named Sun, Moon, Venus, 

 Canopus, or the like (Osiander, p. 466), points to another 

 and presumably an earlier habit of religious thought than 

 that which gave rise to the names Abd esh-Shams, Abd 

 Nuhm, &quot; servant of the Sun,&quot; &quot; of Nuhm,&quot; and the like. 

 Thus it would seem that even in the worship of the 

 heavenly beings a way of thinking analogous to totemism 

 preceded the distant and awful veneration of a remote 

 and inaccessible heavenly splendour which Baudissin and 

 others take as the type of Semitic religion. 



The analogies now brought forward make it tolerably 

 certain that the animal names of stocks have a religious 

 significance. I shall now produce an instance in which 

 the ideas god, animal, ancestor, are all brought into 

 connection. The great tribe or group of tribes which bore 

 the name of Qaysites or Beni Qays trace their genealogy 

 to Qays Aylan son of Modar. Now Qays is a god 

 (Osiander, p. 500), but what is Aylan ? According 

 to Abulfeda (Hist. Ante-Islam., ed. Fleischer, p. 194, n), 

 &quot;it is said that Qays was son of Aylan son of Modar. 

 Others say that Aylan was his horse, others that he was his 

 dog. Others again say that Aylan was the brother of 

 Ilyas (and therefore son of Modar), and that his name 

 (^1 as distinct from surname) was En-nas bin Modar, 

 and that Qays was his son.&quot; Here plainly we have 



