to offer
divine worship to the tiger.[464] Such worship appears to be paid to the
snake by the Naga tribes and the Gonds of India, and by the Hopi of
North America.[465]

+258+. In these and similar cases it is sometimes difficult to say
whether the animal is worshiped in its own person merely, or as the
embodiment or representative of a god or of ancestors. The usages in
question are almost entirety confined to low tribes, and disappear with
the advance of civilization; wild animals are banished from society and
cease to be sacred, and the recollection of their early character
survives only in their mythological attachment to deities proper. For a
different reason domesticated animals lose their sacredness--they become
merely servants of men. The Egyptian cult of the bull is the
best-attested instance of actual worship of a domestic animal, and
parallels to this it is hard to find; the Todas, for example, for whom
the buffalo is the central sacred object, do not now pay worship to the
animal--they may have done so in former times.

+259+. The sacredness of animals, and the fact that they are regarded
as embodying the souls of things and human beings, have led to a
coalescence of their cults with other religious observances. They are
abundantly employed in magical procedures and in sacrifices; they are
often identified with spirits of vegetation, any locally revered animal
being chosen for this purpose; they are brought into connection with
astral objects and their forms are fancifully seen in sun, moon, and
constellations; they play a great role in apotropaic and purificatory
ceremonies; and they appear in myths of all sorts,[466] especially in
the histories of gods.

+260+. But, though they are in many cases regarded as tutelary beings,
it is doubtful whether they ever develop into anthropomorphic
deities.[467] The creation of such deities followed a different
line[468] and dispensed with the lower quasi-divine forms. Such manlike
attributes as beasts were supposed to have were taken up into the
distincter and nobler conceptions of tribal gods to whom beasts were
more and more subordinated. The latter were allegorized and
spiritualized, and came to serve merely as material for poetry.

+261+. Yet beast worship, such as it was and is, has played an important
part in religious development. It has furnished a point of
crystallization for early ideas, and has supplied interesting objects in
which man's demand for su