ANIMALS, WORSHIP OF. The practice of worshiping animals, as well as certain plants and stones, prevailed among many of the nations of antiquity, and is still common among barbarous tribes. That animals should be held sacred and receive worship, need excite no surprise when we bear in mind the origin of polytheistic worship generally. They are manifestations of power; mysterious, too, because actuated by impulses differ ing from those of man ; and often, by their greater acuteness of sense and more unerring instincts, seeming to possess supernatural knowledge. Besides this general ground, vari ous animals have been associated with the gods as emblems and in other ways. But a more important source of the superstitious regard bestowed on animals, is the belief that gods, and spirits in general, often take the form of animals, either temporarily or as a permanent abode. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls is not confined to India. Kindred notions, though not perhaps reduced to system and formally enunciated, are all but universal; they seem as indigenous in the heart of Africa as on the banks of the Ganges. It was as a manifestation of the soul of Osiris—originally, like all the other Egyptian deities, a sun-god—that the sacred bull Apis was worshiped in ancient Egypt.
When the Spaniards first visited the coasts of South America, they found a ludicrous kind of animal-worship practiced by the natives on the coast of Cumana (Venezuela). " They held the toad to be, as they said, ' the lord of the waters,' and therefore they were very compassionate with it, and dreaded by any accident to kill a toad; though, as has been found the case with other idolaters, they were ready, in times of difficulty, to com pel a favorable hearing from their pretended deities, for they were known to keep these toads with care under an earthen vessel, and to whip them with little switches when there was a scarcity of provisions and a want of rain. Another superstition worthy of note was that when they hunted down any game, before killinn it they were wont to open its mouth and introduce some drops of maize-wine, in order that its soul, which they judged to be the same as that of men, might give notice to the rest of its species of the good entertalunient which it had met with, and thus lead them to think that if they came too, they would participate in this kindly treatment."—Hetps.