i88i] ANIMAL WORSHIP AND ANIMAL TRIBES 465 



of the Arabs after Mohammed are little better. The 

 followers of Islam were anxious to forget all but the mere 

 surface facts of the old religion. Even of the great gods 

 who had important temples of their own, and were 

 worshipped by wide districts, we hardly know anything 

 beyond a few names. Yet in the temple of Mecca alone 

 the great Pantheon of the heathen Arabs there stood 

 no fewer than 360 idols, and every head of a house had 

 his own family gods (Pococke, Spec. ed. White, p. 112). 

 About these minor gods we are absolutely without 

 information. Yet it is among these and not among the 

 great gods which had more than a mere tribal character 

 that we could expect to find confirmation of our present 

 argument. It will have been observed that the animal 

 names in our list generally belong to sub-tribes. That 

 this is precisely what is to be expected on theoretical 

 considerations will be shown presently. But of the 

 deities corresponding to such divisions there is no record. 

 We cannot therefore expect to hear of animal gods except 

 in the cases where they have gained a circle of worshippers 

 wider than their own stock, and have therefore laid aside 

 the totem character. And in such a case a god is not 

 unlikely to lose his proper animal form and become a 

 man-god retaining, perhaps, some animal symbol or 

 connection as in the case of Qays Aylan. In the last 

 period of Arab heathenism most of the great gods seem 

 actually to have assumed human form, and even those 

 which retained an animal shape, like the lion Yaghuth, 

 and the horse Ya uq, were no longer the property of a 

 single stock. They had acquired a larger importance 

 and wars were waged for the possession of their images 

 (Sprenger, p. 285). This is not inconsistent with totem 

 origin, but at such a stage of development we can no 

 longer expect to find direct evidence of the more primitive 

 totem worship. Yet of the few animal figures that are on 

 our records almost all actually appear as stock names. 

 Yaghuth corresponds to the Asad ; the eagle-god Nasr to 



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