, very unluckily,
confused zoolatry with other superstitions under the head of Fetichism.
This was unscientific; but is it scientific of Mr. Max Muller to discuss
animal-worship without any reference to totemism? The worship of sacred
animals is found, in every part of the globe, to be part of the sanction
of the most stringent and important of all laws, the laws of marriage. It
is an historical truth that the society of Ashantees, Choctaws,
Australians, is actually constructed by the operation of laws which are
under the sanction of various sacred plants and animals. {226} There is
scarcely a race so barbarous that these laws are not traceable at work in
its society, nor a people (especially an ancient people) so cultivated
that its laws and religion are not full of strange facts most easily
explained as relics of totemism. Now note that actual living totemism is
always combined with the rudest ideas of marriage, with almost repulsive
ideas about the family. Presumably, this rudeness is earlier than
culture, and therefore this form of animal-worship is one of the earliest
religions that we know. The almost limitless distribution of the
phenomena, their regular development, their gradual disappearance, all
point to the fact that they are all very early and everywhere produced by
similar causes.

Of all these facts, Mr. Max Muller only mentions one--that many races
have called themselves Snakes, and he thinks they might naturally adopt
the snake for ancestor, and finally for god. He quotes the remark of
Diodorus that 'the snake may either have been made a god because he was
figured on the banners, or may have been figured on the banners because
he was a god'; to which De Brosses, with his usual sense, rejoins--'we
represent saints on our banners because we revere them; we do not revere
them because we represent them on our banners.'

In a discussion about origins, and about the corruption of religion, it
would have been well to account for institutions and beliefs almost
universally distributed. We know, what De Brosses did not, that zoolatry
is inextricably blent with laws and customs which surely must be early,
if not primitive, because they make the working faith of societies in
which male descent and the modern family are not yet established. Anyone
who wishes to show that this sort of society is a late corruption, not an
early stage in evolution towards better things, has a difficult task
before him, which