[p.1]

THE NATURAL GENESIS

SECTION 1

NATURAL GENESIS OF THE KAMITE TYPOLOGY

In an epistle to the Egyptian Anebo, assigned to Porphyry, the learned Greek writer asks, 'What is the meaning of those mystic narrations which say that a certain divinity is unfolded into light from mire; that he is seated above a lotus, that he sails in a ship, and that he changes his form every hour according to the signs of the zodiac? If these things are asserted symbolically, being symbols of the powers of this divinity, I request an interpretation of these symbols.'[1]

According to Proclus, in his Commentary on the Enneads of Plotinus[2], Iamblichus wrote his work on the Mysteries as a reply to the pertinent questioning of Porphyry[3]. But Iamblichus, like so many who have followed him, began with things where he first met with them, on the surface, in their latest phase. He represented the Egyptians as worshippers of the one god, uncreated, unique, omnipotent, and universal. He starts with this as their starting-point, and affirms that all the other gods of the pantheon are nothing more than the various attributes and powers of the supreme personified. In short, he makes monotheism the foundation instead of the summit of the Egyptian religion. This view has been maintained by several Egyptologists.

Champollion-Figeac says, 'A few words will suffice to give a true and complete idea of the Egyptian religion. It was purely monotheistic and manifested itself externally by a symbolical Polytheism.'[4] According to De Rouge[5], one idea pervades the total cult—that of a single primordial god. M. Maspero is likewise of opinion that all the forms [p.2] and names of the innumerable gods were for the worshipper only so many terms and forms of the one God[6]. M. Chabas declares that all the gods and goddesses are but different aspects or attributes of the one sole God who existed before everything[7].

M. Pierret asserts that the ignorant were held in abject fetishism by the despotism of the priests, but the initiated recognized one sole and hidden God[8].

Mariette, in reply to Iamblichus, has denied this interpretation point blank, and in toto. He says, 'Neither in these temples nor in those which were previously known to us does the "one God" of Iamblichus appear. We find everywhere deities who are immortal and uncreated; but nowhere do we find the one and invisible God without name and without form, who presides from on high over the Egyptian pantheon. No indication to that effect is given by the Temple of Denderah, the most hidden inscriptions of which have now been thoroughly examined.'[9]

Dr. Samuel Birch, our great English Egyptologist, in conversation with the present writer, agreed with Mariette. Renouf asks 'Was there really, as is frequently asserted an esoteric doctrine known to the scribes and priests alone, as distinct from popular belief?' His answer is, 'No evidence has yet been produced in favour of this hypothesis.'[10]

Nor was there a one god known to Iamblichus. He quotes two by name, as Ichton and Ήμήφ[11]. Bunsen says no notice of the latter name appears elsewhere[12]. But it is evidently intended for Iu-em-hept, the Greek Imothes, whose mother's name was Iusaas, she who was great with the Coming One; and his father is Atum. The one god in this case was the solar trinity of Heliopolis, the Hebrew On.

There never was a subject which demanded the evolutionary mode of manipulation more than this of the origin of Egyptian mythology and the expansion of religious ideas in the valley of the Nile. Nothing but the application of the evolutionary method can rescue us from the traditions we have inherited as survivals of the primitive system of mythical interpretation. It takes the latter half of all one's lifetime to unlearn the falsehood that was instilled into us during the earlier half. Generation after generation we learn, unlearn, and relearn the same lying legendary lore. Henceforth our studies must begin from the evolutionist standpoint in order that they may not have to be gone over again.

In vain the non-evolutionist, who is likewise a metaphysician, would deal with the problem of the religious origins. None but the evolutionist can go back far enough. None but the evolutionist [p.3] can commence early enough. None but the evolutionist is entirely freed from the falsehood of the 'Fall' and the hallowed beginning at the wrong end of things, called the 'Creation.' Only the evolutionist can present the facts in their natural sequence and the true order of their development. The non-evolutionist can begin at any time, and anywhere, except at the right place. But neither in Egypt nor out of it did mythology commence with the causative interpretation of phenomena assumed by the non-evolutionist. Reverence for an unseen power apprehended as mind and conscious cause was preceded by a recognition of powers and potencies in nature exterior and superior to men, which were estimated by the force of their physical manifestations; and the fear and dread of these were operative long ages before the existence of that reverence which can be called religious—that which Shakespeare designates the 'Angel of the World.' Primos in orbe deos fecit timor[13].

An unfathomable fall awaits the non-evolutionist misinterpreters of mythology in their descent from the view of a primeval and divine revelation made to man in the beginning, to the actual facts of the origins of religion. A 'primitive intuition of God,' and a God who 'had in the beginning revealed Himself as the same to the ancestors of the whole human race,'[14] can have no existence for the evolutionist.

The 'primitive revelation,' so-called, had but little in it answering to the notion of the supernatural. It was solely just what the early men could make out in the domain of the simplest matters-of-fact. Theirs is the profundity of simplicity, not of subtlety. Their depth, like that of the Egyptian soil, is the result of constant accumulation of silt between us and the solid rock. Moreover, an Egyptologist may know the monuments from first to last, and yet be unable to give any satisfactory account of the rise and development of the Egyptian religion, because its roots are hidden in an unknown past. All that would be of supreme interest and primordial value to the evolutionist is out of view and untested by the comparative process. Egypt comes into sight upon a summit of attainment. The non-evolutionist is still infected with the notion of a primeval monotheism and a lapse into polytheism and idolatry, whereas mythology arose out of typology, and religion was developed from the mythology, not the mythology from religion; but to begin with a conception of the one hidden god is to make religion precede mythology. A religion had been established in the time of the earliest monuments, but the mythology no more begins at that point than the Nile springs in Egypt. M. Pierret, for instance, is right as to the ideographic types being figures for use rather than fetishes for worship, but utterly wrong as to their origin in a manifold expression of monotheistic thought. [p.4] It is easy, of course, to take the later texts and then read the monuments backwards. It is easy to assume that all the divine types are modes of manifestation for the one God; but the idea of the one God belongs to religion; this was preceded by mythology, and these types were extant before either. We require to know what they signified in their pre-monumental phase, and what was their origin. We cannot tell who or which the gods are until we have ascertained what they represented or typified—in short, what was their natural genesis.

Egyptologists who talk of the one primordial God as the father of souls, never seem to recognize the fact that the individualized fatherhood was comparatively late as a human institution, and that the father could not be recognized in heaven before he had been discovered on earth. There is no fatherhood in the first pleroma of the gods, who are a family of seven, born of the genetrix of gods and men. Those of the seven that can be traced, such as Sut, Kebekh, Kak, Kafi (Shu), and Horus, had no father. Hence, when we do get back to a one God on any local line of Egyptian mythology, it is the mother alone, and not the father, we find to be the first. No matter which cult we question, the genetrix of the gods precedes the primordial God, whether as Ta-urt, the Mother of the Revolutions, who presides in the birthplace at the centre; or Neith, who came 'from herself,' and who boasted significantly at Sais that her peplum had never been lifted by the male generator; or Mut, Ank, or Hathor. The mother is everywhere first and foremost, as she was in nature where the bringer-forth was observed and typified long before the human mind could enter into the realm of creative cause, or the fatherhood had been established. Hence the female was continued with the male in the image of the one God, and there is no one God that is not a biune being, a twin form of the 'double primitive essence,' like Ptah; in fact, a 'Male­Mother,' which is the meaning of 'Ka-Mutf,' a title of Khem because the mother-mould of the producer was primordial.

When at last attained, the 'one God' of Egypt is as much a result of evolution and survival of the fittest type, as in the case of any other species, ranging through the four series of elemental, stellar, lunar, and solar deities. The unity is final, not initial, and when the one has been aggregated from the many, which is the sole followable process of attaining unity, the last result is a dual deity who brings forth from and with the womb. Manifested 'existences are in his hand; unmanifested existences are in his womb (kat).'[15] This is the language of various other texts that might be cited.

If there be a one and only god, according to the language of certain inscriptions, a father of beginnings endowed with all the attributes of the sole god, it is Amen-Ra, the hidden sun. But his creation is comparatively late—the solar regime being last of all—he [p.5] was later than Ptah, Atum, Horus, Seb, Shu, Osiris, and Sut, and his birth was as a timekeeper. In the inscription from the temple of El-Karjeh it is said that he was 'self-produced,' and that in 'making his body,' and 'giving birth to it,' 'he has not come out of a womb—he has come out of cycles.'[16]

Like Taht, the moon-god, and Seb, the star-god, he too was a birth of time. This is the 'only one,' as the sun-god, of whom the Osirian says, 'Let me cross and manage to see the Only One, the sun going round, as the giver of peace.'[17]

The language of monotheism reaches its climax in the hymns and addresses to Amen-Ra, the one god, one in all his works and ways. Yet he was a god with a beginning, and his piety to his parents is on record. He paid an annual visit to the Valley of the Dead, and poured out a libation to his father and mother on the altar of propitiation. The one god is simply the culminating point of all the immeasurable past of polytheism.

The world of sense was not a world of symbol to the primitive or primeval man. He did not begin as a Platonist. He was not the realizer of abstractions, a personifier of ideas, a perceiver of the Infinite. In our groping after the beginnings we shall find the roots of religious doctrines and dogmas with the common earth, or dirt even, still clinging to them, and showing the ground in which they grew.

Metaphysical explanations have been the curse of mythology from the time of the Platonists up to the present. All interpretation is finally futile that is not founded on the primary physical phenomena. Fortunately, this basis of the earliest thought is more or less extant in the types that have been left us to interpret as best we may; and on this concrete foundation we have to build. Nor is there any origin of religion worth discussing apart from these foundations of mythology which are verifiable in the phenomena of nature.

Instead of a monotheistic instinct, or a primeval revelation of the one god, mythology exhibits a series of types as the representatives of certain natural forces from which the earliest gods were evolved, and finally compounded into a one deity, who assumed their attributes as his manifestations, and thus became the supreme being and god over all. It will be demonstrated that Egyptian mythology began with the typifying of seven elements or seven elemental forces, such as fire and water, earth and air, born of the typhonian genetrix, as the Abyss. These were the eight in Am-Smen, the place of preparation, who were born of space or chaos before the formation of the world, or the establishment of order and time. Their types were continued in the secondary phase—that of time—as intelligencers to men.

The primordial, or supreme deity in Egypt, then, was not a god one, or one god of the beginning, but the one who had been com- [p.6] pounded and elevated to the supremacy as solar type of the godhead and representative of a pleroma. Neither Ra, Atum, Amen, nor Ptah was one of the eight original gods. The processes will be shown by which the latest deities were compounded or developed from characters previously extant, who were gods of the earliest time, as these were of the latest.

Ra, as a total god, comprises the seven spirits, or souls that preceded his creation, as the seven spirits of the Bear[18]. So the one god of the Avesta, Ahura-Mazda, is made up of the seven spirits, or Amshaspands, who preceded his supremacy. One title of the sun-god Ra is 'Teb-Temt,' and temt means totalled, from tem, the total, as in the English team. His total, as Teb-temt, consists of seventy-five characters. These seventy-five manifestations of Ra—which correspond to the seventy-five zones of suffering in the Hades, whence came the cries of those who were in greatest need of knowing a name to call upon—are repeated in number in the Ormazd-Yasht of the Avesta, where the divinity gives to Zarathushtra his seventy-five names. The Parsees say the number should be seventy-two, correlating them probably with the seventy two decans, but the seventy five correlate with the original Egyptian unknown to them[19].

The primordial god, as Ptah, was not divided into four couples as M. Pierret argues[20], but the four couples, or the eight great gods previously extant, were represented by Ptah; they were resolved into his attributes, or manifestations, when Ptah as a solar god had been created. Everywhere, inevitably, the non-evolutionist reverses the process of development.

Canon Rawlinson has lately reaffirmed the statement that there was an esoteric and exoteric system of teaching, by which the Egyptian priests, with whom the 'primary doctrine of the esoteric religion undoubtedly was the real essential unity of the divine nature,' taught the people at large 'a polytheism of a multitudinous, and in many respects, of a gross character.'[21] This is the portrait of the Egyptian priest commonly presented by modern monotheists, who surreptitiously interpolate the ancient texts.

Here, however, the seventeenth chapter of the Ritual, which is designated the gospel or faith of the Egyptians, and is the kernel of their religious creed, contains a complete refutation and reversal.

It happens that in this chapter we have the text mixed up with the glosses, which were intended to be kept oral; the two corresponding to the written and oral law of the Hebrews. Thus, for once the exoteric and esoteric teaching appear together. A text or saying is announced followed by the 'Petar ref su,' = 'let him (the esoterist) explain it;' and in many instances he does explain the text. The result is that the announcement contains all the monotheistic matter, the [p.7] supposed esoteric doctrine, whereas the glosses which secreted the hidden oral wisdom relate to the materialistic beginnings, and tend to identify the abstract god once more with the origins in phenomena, the spiritual god being explained physically—mark, not in the exoteric but in the esoteric teaching.

The theosophy is continually rendered in terms of physical phenomena. The deceased speaks in the person of various gods. He says, for example, 'I am Tum, the only being in the firmament.' Now Tum is the 'one god,' the father of souls. But the abstract idea is in the text, and the commentary, gloss, or esoteric teaching keeps the mind anchored fast to the natural genesis in physical phenomena. The god of the exoteric teaching is all through the actual sun of the esoteric.

The 'sun in his rising,' the 'sun in his disk,' the 'great god' in the pool is the 'sun himself.' The 'father' is 'the sun.' The one who 'orders his name to rule the gods' as Horus, the 'son of Osiris,' is explained to be 'the sun himself.'

These explanations, which usually remained unwritten, show that the cause of concealment in later times was the simple physical nature of the beginnings out of which the more abstract ideas had been gradually evolved.

There is undoubtedly a dislike in the later stage of ideas to having them expressed in those terms of phenomena which serve to recall the physical origins, and a great desire to keep their primitive nature clothed and out of sight, requiring all the unshrinking honesty of modern science—'whose soul is explanation'—to counteract such diffidence. Yet it was necessary for the learned to retain a knowledge of the beginnings. This it was that led to the hidden wisdom, the gnosis, the Kabbalah, the inner mysteries. The knowledge was concealed because of its primitiveness, and not on account of its profundity.

According to the statement of the Bishop of Cæsarea[22], the learned Egyptian Chaeremon acknowledged no intellectual principles in the earliest mythology of Egypt[23]. This shows that he knew the matter to the root, and the nature of the eight Elementaries whose origin was entirely physical.

It is certain, then, that Egyptian polytheism was not monotheism intentionally disguised with various masks for one face, and equally sure that the image of the one god and supreme being was evolved from many preceding gods, and that the process of this evolution can be followed and fixed.

Cicero asks, 'Do you not see how from the productions of nature and the useful inventions of men have arisen fictitious and imaginary deities, which have been the foundation of false opinions, pernicious errors, and miserable superstitions?'[24]

And he affirms rightly that the sacred and august Eleusina, into [p.8] whose mysteries the most distant nations were initiated, and the solemnities in Samothrace and in Lemnos, secretly resorted to by night, if they were properly explained and reduced to reasonable principles, would rather explicate the nature of tidings than discover the knowledge of the gods[25].

A few hints may be found in Plutarch's ever-precious fragment Of Isis and Osiris[26]; also in the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo[27], which have been considerably undervalued by certain Egyptologists. But the mysteries remained unpublished. The Greeks could not master the system of Egyptian mythology, and the hieroglyphics were to them the dead letter of a dead language.

What Herodotus knew of the mysteries he kept religiously concealed. What Plato had learned made him jealous of the allegories to which he did not possess the clue; but he would have banished the poems of Homer from his republic[28], because the young would be unable to distinguish between what was allegorical and what was actual; exactly on the same ground that many sound thinkers today would banish the Bible from our schools for children.

Outside of their own mysteries the Greeks stood altogether outside of the subject. They, as their writers allege, had inherited their mythology, and the names of the divinities, without knowing their origin or meaning. They supplied their own free versions to stories of which they never possessed the key. Whenever they met with anything they did not understand, they turned it the more effectively to their own account. All that came to hand was matter for metaphysics, poetry, statue, and picture. They sought to delight and charm the world with these old elements of instruction, and with happy audacity supplied the place of the lost nature of mystic meaning with the abounding grace and beauty of their art. Nothing, however, could be more fatal than to try to read the thoughts of the remoter past through their eyes, or to accept the embellishments of these beautifiers for interpretations of the ancient typology; and the reproduction of the primitive myths from the Aryan stage of language in Greece is on a par with the modern manufacture of ancient Masters carried on in Rome.

In his Commentary on the Politicus of Plato, Proclus, speaking of the symbolism of the ancients, and their sacerdotal system, says truly that from this mythology Plato himself derived or established many of his peculiar dogmas[29].

The utterly misleading way in which Egyptian physics were converted by Plato and his followers into Greek metaphysics, makes Platonism only another name for imposture. Time, says Plato finely, is the moving image of eternity[30]. But the foundation of the image is planetary, or stellar motion, and on this basis of visible things he sought to establish all that was invisible, and build up the human [p.9] soul backwards, according to the celestial geometry of the Egyptians[31]. Philo complains that the Greeks had brought a mist upon learning which made it impossible to discover the truth[32]. The same charge may be substantialized on other grounds against his own countrymen.

In India the myths have been vaporised. Their poets are at play with the shadows of ancient things, and the mere fringe of phenomena.

It is not that the mythical characters in the Vedas have not yet been evolved into a definite form. It is not the indefiniteness of beginning that we find there, but of dissolution. The definite representation was earlier, and in the Vedas the shapes are in process of dislimning and being evaporated into doctrinal abstractions; the concrete facts of early earth are passing off into the fading phantoms of cloudland.

The decadence of mythology is to be found in the Greek poetising, Hebrew euhemerising, and Vedic vagueness. What the myths have to tell us depends on their having preserved the earliest shape; they have reached their decay when made to speak falsely through the interfusion of later thought. They preceded our civilisation, arc not a birth of it, nor a descent from it; and their value is in proportion to the marks of their origin which have not yet been worn off them.

It is with mythology as with language. In vain we look for the lost likeness of language simply in the structure of a thousand languages. The genius of language has been at work for countless years to diversify and divaricate in structure. We must seek the primitive unity in the original matter of human thought, and in the earliest modes of expression; and the further we go back the nearer we shall find ourselves approaching to the origin in unity, for the bole of the tree is extant as well as the branches above and the roots below.

It is solely in the symbolic stage of expression that we can expect to recover the lost unity. This is preserved in the gesture-signs, ideographic types, the origin of numbers and the myths, the imagery scattered over the world that still remains unread by us; and in the religious rites and ceremonies, popular customs, and other practical forms of typology which have been wandering dispersedly about the earth. Any single shape of registered tradition is no absolute guarantee for fidelity to the lost original. It is, as it were, only an individual memory. We have to appeal to the memory of the whole human race, by gathering up the scattered fragments and various versions of the general tradition. Many incoherent witnesses may testify to one truth when we are in possession of the clue. Their disconnected evidence is all the more express when they are too unconscious to connive.

We shall find the human race has kept its own buried records of the prehistoric preliterary ages almost as faithfully as the earth its [p.10] geological register. So far from the process having corrupted or dissipated the ideas entrusted to its keeping (as Gibbon[33] alleges), these have been preserved because they were branded and bitten into the memory more permanently than they could have been stamped in metal or engraved in stone.

The most perfect, that is the most primitive, forms of the myths and symbols out of Africa are those which for thousands of years have been kept by living memory alone. Having to trust to the memory in the absence of written records the oral method of communication was held all the more sacred, as we find it in the ancient priesthoods, whose ritual and gnosis depended on the living memory for their truth, purity, and sanctity. It was the mode of communication from 'mouth to ear,' continued in all the mysteries, including Masonry—that monotheism in polytheism!

In Sanskrit, the tradition which has been borne in mind from the beginning, delivered by mouth and learned by ear, to live in memory alone, is 'Smriti.' S'ruti, a form of the same word, signifies hearing. Sem, in Egyptian, also denotes hearing; rut means repeated; and on this hearing of the oral wisdom has been based a theory of the Vedas having been communicated by audible revelation! But the revelation was simply made from mouth to ear.

So ancient was this mode of making sure of the treasures of knowledge, so deeply were these engrafted in the mind, so painfully scored in the flesh by the marks and symbols of tattoo, as if one should bury his jewels in his own body for a safe; so permanently was the record inscribed that it still lives and underlies all literature or artificial registers in the world. It reaches down to the origins of human thought, however far from those we may be who dwell on the surface today, where we keep our own written records of the past. This matter, preserved by the universal memory, belongs to the symbolic stage of expression, and can only be understood by reverting to the symbol. The symbol is the true Tower of Babel and point of dispersion in language. The symbolic extends beyond the written or the spoken language of any people now extant.

With the Chinese, for example, their symbols can be read in various parts of the empire by words and sounds so entirely different that the speakers who interpret the typology cannot understand each other when they talk.

The symbols underlie two other languages, and at that depth the scattered readers meet once more.

So is it with the typology of tattoo. The African Oworos and the Basas do not speak one language, but they have, the same tattoo-mark, and that is the link of a connection earlier than their language as spoken at the present time[34].

The Khoi-Khoi, or Hottentots, form one branch of a widespread [p.11] race which has been divided into ever so many tribes. These differ totally in language, but they preserve a primeval relationship in the use of certain peculiar sounds, of which the clicks constitute the essential part[35].

Among the Tembus, Pondos, Zulus, Ashantis, Fantis, and various other African tribes there are many people of the same family title. These are unable to trace any relationship with each other, but wherever they are they find themselves in possession of ceremonial customs which are quite peculiar to those who bear that name. Thus the particular customs observed at the birth of a child are exactly the same in different parts of the country among those who have the same family title, although they have never heard of each other's existence, whilst their neighbours of the same clan, but of different family names, have altogether dissimilar customs[36]. Here the name and the typical custom lead down to that unity of origin which is lost sight of on the surface. This equally applies to such typical customs and names on a far larger scale than that of the Kaffir tribes. Also it shows how the name, the mark, and the custom have persisted together from time immemorial.

So is it on the American continent. Not the remotest affinity can be detected by grammarians between the languages of the Pawnees and the neighbouring Mandans[37], but when it comes to a type like that of the four quarters and the cross, together with the customs and superstitions associated with the type, then the earlier connection becomes apparent and the possession is found to be in common.

James describes the Kiawa-Kaskaia Indians as nations united 'under the influence of the Bear-tooth,' yet they were totally ignorant of each other's spoken language, and when two individuals of different nations wished to converse they did so freely by the language of gesture-signs[38]. That was the earlier and simpler medium of communication reverted to when the spoken language was dispersed. The primal unity was shown by the totemic 'Bear-tooth' and by gesture-signs. Here, then, we get down to a record of the past that lies beyond spoken language, the living memory of man, or of the tribe, the local race, or the human race itself. This record is the language of symbolism, a skeleton of all other forms of human speech, whose bones are like the fossil remains that exist as proofs of an original unity between the lands that are now severed, just as the bones of the mammoth in Britain and France show that the two lands, though divided now, were originally one.

As Emerson has it, 'a good symbol is a missionary to convince thousands.'[39] When Europe was first converted to Christianity, it was by making use of the same symbols that were hallowed in the pagan [p.12] cult; the rooted types being indefinitely more potent than any later sense engrafted on them.

Whether for good or ill the symbol has proved all-powerful. The hold of symbolism is in its way as strong in civilised society as in the savage world. Crestolatry is as nearly a form of devotion as Christolatry, totemism, or fetishism, except that a Briton who had the fish, stag, or vine in his coat-of-arms, would not nowadays think of totally abstaining from fish, venison, or wine in consequence; as would the Bechuana of Southern Africa or the Kol of Nagpore; although the time was, in these islands, when he would have done so, as may be seen by the non-eating of the pig, hare, and eel in the past.

The king, as sacred ruler, acquired the vesture of his divinity and the halo of awful light because he was made to personate or reflect the deity on earth, and thus became vicariously divine. Kingship, in this phase, was not founded on the human character, however supremely able, however exalted in the forms of chieftainship, but on the typical and representative character. Hence the 'divinity that doth hedge a king,' which did not emanate from him but was conferred upon him; he wore it from without, as a lay figure invested with the drapery of deity.

The ank (Eg.) or the Inca (Peru.) represented the living and ever-living one, who was therefore not a human being, and on this ground was based the fiction of the king being the undying one. So the king never dies. This was not directly derived from the natural genesis, but is in accordance with the typology formulated in Egypt and extant wherever the title of Inca, ying, or king is found.

Hence the king becomes the life and the master of life to his people, as in Siam, in a very literal later fashion, where the typical character is superstitiously interpreted. The king in Egypt was the living image of the solar god. He was the divine child, the repa, god-begotten, who grew up into the god in person on earth. And just as the king was glorified as the sun, so were the earlier rulers glorified under more primitive types of power. In Madagascar the monarch, like the pharaoh of Egypt, was the potent bull. The king of Ashanti is glorified as the snake and the lion; the Zulu king as the tiger, lion or mountain. In Guatemala the king was the tiger of the wood, the laughing jaguar, the mighty boa, the oppressing eagle. The Norse king Gorm was the great worm (or Crom) the dragon-king. The chief in a Kaffir folktale is a snake with five heads. By the earliest titles the bearers were assimilated to the most terrible types of power and the most primitive forms of force, and, therefore, to the elementary gods, which preceded the sun, moon, and star gods of the cycles of time.

When the symbol has lost its significance, the man or woman still remains to receive the homage of ignorance and the sacrifices that [p.13] once were offered intelligently to the visible and living image of the god, as it was in Egypt. or to the demon in Africa beyond. So potent is the influence of symbols over the mind that the world's welfare cannot afford to have their indefinable appeal perverted by cunning or ignorance.

Symbols still dominate the minds of men and usurp the place of realities. A symbol may cause humanity proudly to rise in stature or grovel pronely in the dust. Who has not felt the flutter of the flag in one's pulses and been stirred with rapture to horripilation at sight of some war-worn, shot-riddled remnant, stained with the blood of its bearers, which had braved and beckoned forward the battle on some desperate clay, that made all safe once more for the dear land of our love? Whether used for good or evil the symbol, that outward and visible shape of the idea, is supreme. Most helpful of servants, most tyrannous of masters. Expression still attains the summit in a symbol. It belongs to the universal language, the masonry of nature, the mode of the immortals.

In the case of the flag the link between the fact and its sign is not lost, but precisely where it is lost and we have no clue to the natural verity signified, the origin is there claimed to be supernatural, and credited with the power of conferring a divine sanction on all sorts of devilry. The same influence will prevent the Hindu, if starving, from tasting a bit of cow, or killing the monkey that is devastating villages.

The ancient symbolism was a mode of expression which has bequeathed a mould of thought that imprisons the minds of myriads as effectually as the toad shut up by the rock into which it was born.

The human mind has long suffered an eclipse and been darkened and dwarfed in the shadow of ideas, the real meaning of which has been lost to the moderns. Myths and allegories whose significance was once unfolded to initiates in the mysteries have been adopted in ignorance and reissued as real truths directly and divinely vouchsafed to mankind for the first and only time! The earlier religions had their myths interpreted. We have ours misinterpreted. And a great deal of what has been imposed on us as God's own true and sole revelation to man is a mass of inverted myth, under the shadow of which we have been cowering as timorously as birds in the stubble when an artificial kite in the shape of a hawk is hovering overhead. The parables of the primeval thinkers have been elevated to the sphere, so to say, as the 'hawk' or 'serpent,' the 'bull' or the 'crab' that gave names to certain groups of stars, and we are in precisely the same relationship to those parables and allegories as we should be to astronomical facts if we thought the serpent and bull, the crab and hawk were real animal and bird instead of constellations with symbolical names. The simple realities of the earliest time were [p.14] expressed by signs and symbols and these have been taken and applied to later thoughts and converted by theologists into problems and metaphysical mysteries which they have no basis for and can only wrangle over en l'air, unable to touch solid earth with one foot when they want to expel opponents with the other.

The Greek and still more modern misinterpretations of ancient typology have made it the most terrible tyranny in the mental domain.

Much of our folklore and most of our popular beliefs are fossilized symbolism. The fables and allegories that fed the minds of the initiated, when interpreted, became the facts of the ignorant when the oral teaching of the mysteries was superseded by letters and direct reading, because the hidden wisdom had never been published. Misinterpreted mythology has so profoundly infected religion, poetry, art, and criticism, that it has created a cult of the unreal. Unreality is glorified, called the ideal, and considered to be poetry, a mocking image of beauty, that blinds its followers, until they cannot recognise the natural reality.

In the great conflict of the age between the doctrine of evolution and the dogmas of mythology, between the marvellous and the impossible, our art and poetry are continually found on the side of the mytholators. The myths still furnish lay-figures for the painter and poet, and lives are spent in the vain endeavour to make them live by those and for those who have never known what they signified at first. Youth yet falls in love with them, and has the desire to reproduce; Humanity is recast in the present according to a lion­browed, ape-toed Greek type of the past (described later on), and the humanly heroic is superseded by the counterfeit divine. The prostitute of primitive intercourse, the great harlot of mythology, is continued as a supreme personage in poetry, whether as Helen of Troy or Gwenivere of Britain, or Iseult of Brittany, the Welsh Essyllt, one of the 'three unchaste maidens' of British mythology. It is on the assumption that these lay-figures of poetry, art, or religion, were human once that an interest is taken in them now. But the assumption is false, and falsehood, however attractive, is always fraudulent.

These divinities of the bygone time may serve to beguile the children of today as dolls for dandling, but they are outgrown by all who have attained the stature and status of real men and women. Shakespeare, we are told, has no heroes. Happily to a large extent he drew from nature instead of the models of mythology.

The Jews are caught and confined in a complete network of symbolism, so closely woven round them that they are cramped and catalepsed into rigidity from long keeping of the same postures, and the interstices are almost too narrow for breath to pass through. So is it with the Mohammedan and Parsee ritual of rigid rule and ceremonial routine; a religion of form in which the trivial is stereo- [p.15] typed for all time because of its mystical, that is emblematical, character.

The world of thought is thronged with false births and malformations which were entirely bred of perverted typology. The theological doctrines of evil, the depravity of matter, the fallen nature of the flesh have no other basis and had no other beginning.

Religion itself is sick and daily dying in the process of unloving and sloughing off that which has been imposed upon it by a misinterpretation of symbolism.

It is not the ancient legends that lie; the creators of these did not deal falsely with us. The falsehood is solely the result of ignorantly mistaking mythology for 'revelation' and historic truth.

They did not teach geology in the ancient mysteries. The Christian world assumed that they did, and therefore it was found in opposition to scientific geology.

They did not teach the historic fall of man in the myths. Theologists have assumed that they did, and consequently were found to be utterly opposed to the ascent of man unveiled by the doctrine of evolution. The earliest limits of the human mind have been re-imposed upon it as the latest, in the name of religion, until it looks at last as if all that faith accepted is arrayed against and at enmity with everything that science affirms to be true.

As the later people of many lands no longer recognise the Celt stones for things of human workmanship, but consider them to have fallen ready-made from heaven, so has it been with the simplest ideas of the primitive or archaic men which have been unrecognised because outgrown. These were picked up and preserved as divine. They are believed to have come direct from heaven and are treasured as such in that repository which is in reality the European museum of the Kamite mythology.

Nor were the symbolists insane as they appear to Max Muller.

There is nothing of insanity, nothing irrational in the origins of mythology, when the subject is considered in the light of evolution. The irrationality arises from and remains with the non-evolutionist view. It may be affirmed here, for it will be proved hereafter, that the ancient wisdom is not made up of guesses at truth, but is composed of truths which were carefully ascertained and verified; that the chief character of the myths in their primitive phases is a most perfect congruity and that they have the simplicity of nature itself.

The only work of value left to be written on mythology or typology is one that will account for the facts upon which the myths and religions are founded by relating them once more to the phenomena in which they originated, so that we may know how and where we stand in regard to a beginning. That is now attempted. This work aims at getting to the root and discovering [p.16] the genesis of those ideas that have caused more profound perplexity to the human mind in modern times, without benefit to the individual or the race, than all the problems solved by science, with its glorious gains and rich results for universal humanity.

The idea of De Brosses that 'these fetishes are anything which people like to select for adoration, a tree, a mountain, the ocean, a piece of wool, the tail of a lion, a pebble, a shell, fish, plant, flower, cow goat, elephant, or anything else,'[40] is entirely erroneous, as regards the origins. We might as well expect to select our words by the promiscuous heaping together of any of the letters at random. What he calls fetishes are types which were almost as much the result of natural. selection as are any other things in nature, so little conscious choice had man in the matter, so slow was the process of adoption, so great the economy of means on the part of nature. But once evolved they were preserved as faithfully as any other types. De Brosses had no glimpse of the origin of symbolism which he called fetishism.

Men did not 'set to' to select and adopt their symbols, they made use of things to express their thoughts, and those things became symbols in what grew to be a system of homonymism which was created by the human consciousness so gradually under the guidance of natural law, that individual authorship was unknown.

Mr. Spencer has rightly denied that 'conscious symbolization' is at the foundation of certain ceremonial customs and rites of what he terms 'ceremonial government.'[41] He has argued that there is just as little basis for the belief that primitive men deliberately adopted symbols as that they deliberately made rules of social contract. Symbolism was not a conscious creation of the human mind; man had no choice in the matter. He did not begin by thinging his thoughts in intentional enigmas of expression.

Necessity, the mother of invention, was the creator of types and symbols. The type is but a first pattern which becomes the model figure because it was first. Tepi (Eg.) the type, signifies the first. The earliest signs that were made and adopted for current usage were continued as the primary types which had to serve for several later applications.

We have to remember that doing was earlier than saying, and the dumb drama was acted first. When all allowance has been made for the influence of heredity, the deaf-mute who imitates faces and peculiar features and gestures to represent the likeness of certain persons is an extant specimen of the primitive and preverbal mimic. Naturally picture-making by gesture signs preceded the art of picture-writing or drawing of figures on the ground, on bones, stones and the bark of trees. Also the earliest figure-drawing was by imitation of objects as they appear, and not as they are conceived by thought. Things were portrayed before thoughts by those who were thingers [p.17] rather than thinkers. The men who first employed signs had not attained the art which supplies an ideal representation of natural facts; they directly represented their meaning in visible forms. The signs enter a second phase as the representatives of ideas when they become ideographic and metaphorical.

The figure of an eye directly represents sight and seeing, but the eye as reflector of the image becomes a symbol. The eye of Horus is his mother as mirror and reproducer of the babe-image. The uta eye signifies health, welfare, safety, and salvation, because when placed with the mummy in the tomb it denoted reproduction for another life. The Macusi Indians of Guiana say that when the body decays in death the 'Man in the eyes will not die,' the image reflected by the eye being emblematic of the shadow or soul. The Nootkas of Nootka Sound were found, by Lord, to be in possession of a precious medicine; a solid piece of copper hammered flat, and of an oval or eye-shape, the chief device on which was an eye represented in many sizes. This medicine was most carefully preserved and shown only on extraordinary occasions[42]. This was identical with the symbolic eye of health, welfare, and salvation in Egypt.

The Hottentots to this day will take the root of a shrub called kharab, cut it up and pound it on stones. When one is hungry he takes a pinch of the dust and goes to the house of his neighbour where instead of asking for food, he throws the powder on the fire and expects food to be given to him[43]. The charm is known as the food-provider. Here the action is elaborately symbolical. In the earliest stage of sign-language it would have sufficed to point to the mouth and the food. Again the tip of the crocodile's tail is the hieroglyphic sign for black, not because it was black, for it is but slate-coloured when darkest, and is often of a reddish brown. The type therefore in this case does not depend directly on the complexion. According to Horapollo the tail of the crocodile signifies darkness because the animal inflicts death on any other animal which it may have caught by first striking it with its tail (?) and rendering it incapable of motion[44]. That is one idea. The crocodile likewise denoted sunset. Its two eyes typified the sunrise, its tail the sunset or darkness. All day long the animal lay on land and when the night came down it disappeared in the waters. The tip of its tail was the end of it, and the black signified was night; the colouring matter, so to say, was mental and this sign became its ideograph. The crocodile, his mark! that had been made on their minds by actual contact, and the wrestling for supremacy during ages of watching of this intelligent one of the deep, or the deep one, not unmixed with a sense of relief at the nightly-vanishing tip of its tail.

[p.18] A distinct statement of the symbolic nature of the sacred fish may be quoted from the Ritual[45]. One of the forty two sins was the catching of 'the fish which typify.' These then were sacred because symbolical.

The meaning of many curious customs and rites cannot be directly ascertained, for the memory is lost, and the ritual of the cult was unwritten. Nor can it be directly derived from nature, which has outgrown that infantile age of humanity, however lucky the guesses we may make. True, the evolutionist is able to affirm that such customs as we now call symbolical are not accounted for until we can trace them to their natural genesis. Here is the imperative need of the typological phase of these things to interpret that which was once the natural; the directly representative, which is still reflected for us by the older races of the world in the primitive customs, religious rites, superstitious beliefs, folklore, and fetishes also in the mirror of mythology. Between us and the natural genesis of ancient customs, rites, ceremonies and religious beliefs, lie the culture represented by Egypt, America, Babylonia, and China, and the decadence and obliviousness of the dying races; and at least we need to know what Egypt has yet to say on these earliest simplicities which have become the later mysteries; she who is the contemporary of time, or rather its creator; the chronologer, the revealer, the interpreter of antiquity; the sole living memory of the dark, oblivious land (the very consciousness of Kam), the speaker for the dumb, unfathomable past, who gave, in graven granite, permanence to the primitive signs of thought, and types of expression; whose stamp or mint-mark may be found generally on this current coinage of the whole world. Without some such clue as Egypt offers, any direct or literal rendering of that which has become symbolic, is likely to be erroneous. The decaying races can but seldom tell what is the intention underlying the type. They have their symbols without the means or desire to interpret them for us. They have their thoughts, for which they do not find expression; their feelings, that may not be transfigured into thought; but for us they are dumb in the awful shadow of the past that hangs over them, and they cannot explain the meaning of its mystery; they have no interpreter between themselves and us for the language of symbols, and until these are understood we shall never understand them. We English mix with 250,000,000 of natives in India, and can rule over them, but cannot comprehend them. Yet those natives who read the present work will penetrate its significance far more profoundly than the writer's own countrymen, whose knowledge is too late a creation, and whose minds live too extensively on the surface of the present for them to get en rapport with their remoter ideas, and establish any real camaraderie of relationship with the peoples of the far-off past.

[p.19] Egypt can help us to enter the primordial domain of human thought. Egypt or Kam is the parent of all primitive typology, and she alone can adequately explain it, as she was the great conscious recorder of that which had been unconsciously created for the commonest use in the inner African birthplace.

What is here termed typology had its origin in gesture-language, where a few signs supplemented by a few sounds served all purposes for expressing sensations, feelings, and ideas. Gesture-language was (so to say) developed and made permanent in typology. The origin of both may be traced to the fact that men visualised thought in pictures, which they portrayed to the eye, and reflected things in their mental mirror long before they could speak in words, just as the deaf-mutes tell us they thought before mastering the alphabet of gesture-signs. The origins of mythology, symbolism, and numbers have all to be sought in the stage of gesture-language, which was the first mode of figuring an image. For instance, a pin made crooked to throw into the 'wishing-well' is a prayer made permanent. It is a survival of gesture-language; a kind of drawing made by the dumb for the invisible powers to see. The sign can be interpreted by the hieroglyphic uten, a twisted bit of metal, signifying an offering, a libation, the appeal of sacrifice, therefore a type of prayer. Such sign-language is yet extant, and is illustrated at a distance by the Chinaman who failing to convey his meaning by words will draw the ideographic character on the palm of his hand, or with his fan in the air, saying, 'I mean that!'

Stanley tells us how the Waganda frequently have recourse to drawing figures on the ground to illustrate imperfect oral description, and that they show surprising cleverness in the truthfulness of their rough-and-ready delineations[46]. The skill of the bushmen, Kaffirs and some negroes in the drawing and modelling of figures is a result of the primordial gesture-language transferred from the air to solid earth.

Leibnitz has said that the writing of the Chinese might seem to have been invented by a deaf person, its formation was so near to that of gesture-signs addressed to the eye[47]. The oldest Chinese characters, two hundred in number, are called Siang-Hing, that is images or ideographic representations. A considerable number of Chinese ideographs are identical with the Egyptian.

The most ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are those which convey their meaning by direct representation or imitation. In a later phase these were still continued as ideographic determinatives, so that notwithstanding the development of the hieroglyphics the links are complete from the gesture-signs down to the alphabet.

Man invoking, praying, adoring, rejoicing, dancing, striking, building, sculpturing, tilling the ground, fighting, reposing, ruling, carrying, walking, old man and young child, are represented directly [p.20] in the act of making the appropriate gesture-signs or visible speech which all men can read at sight. Things belonging to sight are indicated by an eye. An arm outstretched is the sign of offering, and making a present. The ear is an emblem of listening, hearing, judging; the nose, of breathing, smelling, and the delight of life or existence. A pair of legs going denotes the transitive verb and the legs in transitu were first.

A comparison of certain Egyptian signs with those of the North American Indians tends to the conclusion that they had a common origin[48]. The Egyptians engraved such hieroglyphics in granite and the Indians still figure them in the air. But the typology is at times identical and the two continue to meet in one and the same meaning.

With the Indians one sign serves to convey several meanings according to a prototypal idea. The index finger lifted above the face signifies over, heaven, great spirit, and day, or today. So in the hieroglyphics her, the sign of heaven, denotes above, over, superior, a spirit, and the same word means day. Thus, one form of the sign is the face (her), above, and the Indian sign is made above the face.

In making the signs for day, morning, noon, tomorrow, or yesterday, the subject must face the south with his back to the north, and right hand to the west. This attitude shows the Sabean and pre-solar standpoint in which the south was the face and front and the north the hinder part, whereas in the solar reckoning the east was the front and the west was the back.

In Egyptian imagery the south is the front, the north the hinder part. The male emblem as the bahu denotes the front, and is the figure of 'before.' The female is the image of behind and the hinder-part, probably in relation to primitive usage, when woman was as the animal. This typology is illustrated by the Bongos, who bury the male facing the north, or frontwise, and the female facing the south or hinderwise, according to the Kamite reckoning.

It is probable that the Indian sign of before is an equivalent for the Egyptian ideograph. 'The left hand representing an imaginary line, the action of the right makes it the front, or before;' the forefinger is pointed outward, and the hand thrust forward forcibly and rapidly. These gestures tend to identify the original meaning with the Egyptian masculine sign. When the Indians, according to Dunbar's list of gesture-signs[49], denote the man by closing the hand and with the extended forefinger drawing a line down over the stomach from the upper to the lower part of the body, they are indicating the male as the front one, just as the bahu hieroglyphic of the male signifies [p.21] 'before.' Behind is portrayed by making the gesture for before, and then swinging the hand backwards from the thigh, with a motion quickened as the hand goes back[50]. Behind (khepsh the north, or khept the rump) is represented in the hieroglyphics by the hinder thigh.

The typology of the left as the lower hand, the feminine half, corresponding to the hinder-part and the nethermost of two, runs through all the Indian signs. The lower, hinder-part, and the left hand are feminine in the quarters north and west. The Indian sign for the female (squaw) is made by passing the flat extended hands with fingers joined down the sides of the head as far as the shoulders to denote long hair. Then the left hand is held transversely before the body, pointing to the right. The right hand, index downwards, is then passed beneath the left hand along the abdomen, and the sign is made which signifies 'of woman born.'[51]

'Below,' as with the Egyptians, is identical with the left hand; the indicatory movements being made with the left, or lower, hand, palm downwards, and the eyes kept looking down; Also to rub the back of the left hand with the fingers of the right, is a sign of black, the lower, night side, the English Car-hand, for the left hand, and Car-land for lowland.

This identifies the left hand, the Car-hand, with the kas or karh (Eg.) of the lower, the night side, the dark. In gathering the selagot herb, Pliny[52] says, the Druids plucked it with the right hand wrapped in a tunic, the left being uncovered, as though they were stealing it. This is the pictograph of stealing according to the Indian sign-gestures. In these, the left hand and night, or the dark side, being identical as the under hand.

The action of stealing is portrayed by holding the left forearm a little in front of, and across the body for cover and concealment, then the seizure is suddenly made with the right hand, which feels furtively, grasps, and withdraws; the act being performed under the security of darkness or night, typified by the left hand[53]. Stealing is yet described as 'underhand work.'

The left hand plays the same part in the mimograph of fruitless. It is brought forward; the left index punches the right palm, and is then swept backwards and downwards by the left side. This sign of negation and deficiency is employed by the Hottentots, who describe a stingy chief as being gei-âre, or greatly left-handed; âre, with the click, being identical with the English car for the left hand; the Egyptian kar for underneath.

Some antique statues have been lately found by M. de Sarzil in the mounds of Tello, belonging to an art and civilisation which preceded those of Babylonia and Assyria. They have all one attitude, the arms being crossed on the breast with the left hand clasping the right[54].

[p.22] This is a gesture-sign to be read at sight. The left hand being the lower and inferior, this is the attitude of humility, or an act of worship. Whether the object be human or divine must be determined by the surroundings, but the gesture-sign belongs to gesture-language, and tells its story according to one system wherever found.

The significance of giving the 'right hand of fellowship,' and in making a covenant, or of being seated on the right hand still depends on the origin in gesture-language, the right being the superior hand. The symbolism of the left hand is also applied by the Indians to the representation of death, in which it is held flat over the face with the back outwards, when the right hand similarly held is passed below the other, gently touching it[55]. This sign likewise denotes the passage under; death itself being described as 'going under.' In the representation of 'dying,' the left hand is held as in the sign for dead and the right is passed under it with a slow, gentle, interrupted movement.

The signs for death point to drowning as the typical end and mode of 'going under.' One illustration is by reversal of the hand, which reads 'upset,' 'keeled over.' Water is the most primary and permanent of types, one of the Two Truths of Egypt; the natural opposite or antithesis of breath. The Egyptian ideograph of negation, no, not, without, deprived of, is a wave of water; and the Indian representations of death include a downward movement of the hand outstretched with the palm upward. The hand is lowered gradually with a wave-like motion. In another sign the palm of the hand is placed at a short distance from the side of the head, and then withdrawn gently in an oblique downward direction, at the same time the upper part of the body bends, leans, and the sinking motion is thus imitated twice over. The word 'ke-neeboo' is pronounced slowly. Colonel Mallery points out that in Ojibwa the word nibo means he dies, he sleeps, the original significance being he leans, from anibeia, it is leaning[56]; but the leaning, keeling over, and sinking, all indicate death by water, and in the chief Indian languages, nibo, for 'he dies' is the type-name for water, as:

Death by drowning was a form of sinking and going under that was obvious to the earliest perception, and this negation of life by means of water is figured in the hieroglyphic sign of negation.

It has been said that there is no negative in nature* but the men [p.23] who made water the sign for no, en, or nun had observed that it was the negation of breath, and the hieroglyphics show the type of negation in running water. Also the word skhet (Eg.) which means to slay, signifies to capsize. Khem (Eg.) is a form of no, not, and the word likewise means dead.

* Negation. 'Now we come upon a feature which is inconsiderable in its bulk ... but yet one which covers with its influence half the realm of language. This is the apparatus of negation ... Where in the outer world is there such a thing as a negative? Where is the natural phenomenon that would suggest to the human mind the idea of negation? There is no negative in nature.'[57]

With this waving and sinking of the hand to indicate death we may connect, and possibly interpret, the Indian signs of no, the emphatic negative. One of these is made by moving the hand in front of the face; another by oscillating the index finger before the face from right to left. This latter sign, made by the Pah-Utes, is said by Canon de Jorio to be in use also among the Neapolitans, and in many parts of Southern Europe[58]. Oscillation shows negation whether made with the head or the hand. This sign is extant among the Japanese.

The shake of the head is another mode of negation corresponding to the wave and the waving motion. Also the natives near Torres Straits have a gesture of negation in which they hold up the right hand and shake it by turning it half round and back again two or three times[59], which corresponds to our shake of the head as a sign of 'no.' The essential feature is the waving or wave which imitates the wave of water that constitutes the hieroglyphic no, emphatic negation, none (nun).

A Chinese character signifying law is composed of 'water' and 'to go,' why is unknown; but, as water denotes the negative, the two signs read 'no go,' or 'thou shalt not,' which was the earliest formula of law.

Darwin, on The Expression of the Emotions[60], remarks that 'the waving of the hand front right to left, which is used as a negative by some savages, may have been invented in imitation of shaking the head; but whether the opposite movement of waving the hand in a straight line from the face which is used in affirmation has arisen through antithesis or in some quite distinct manner, is doubtful.' The left hand in the Kamite typology is the negative, feminine, nether, underhand; the emphatic negative being expressed by both hands held low down, whilst the straight is the right and thus the right hand waved in a straight line has the value of yes.

Straight is synonymous with true or right and true, that is with mâ, which also means 'come,' 'you may,' and is therefore an affirmative. So the Dakota signs of yes and truth are identical. Possibly this sign of mâ or mâi, for 'come,' 'you may,' can be read at root by 'maaui' (Eg.) which signifies 'in the power of.' More fully 'You may come, I am in your power, truly, or empty-handed; see the palm of my hand.' [p.24] In the Egyptian ideograph of the verb to pray and beseech the palms of the two hands are presented outward, showing that the hands are empty.

In a similar manner the sound of 'cooey,' which the Australian settlers have adopted from the natives, affords its intimation. In the Yarra dialect the word kooo-ey signifies 'alone,' or 'I am alone;' and this intelligence is first uttered by the messenger from one tribe to another whilst he is yet a mile from their place of encampment.

In the Apache, Comanche, Kaiowa and Wichita sign, the palm of the right hand is afterwards thrown against the horizontal palm of the left hand, showing in another way that both hands are empty, although only one was lifted in invitation.

This reading may be illustrated by the Yoruban saying, 'The palm of the hand does not lie,' or it never deceives one. The same fundamental meaning survives in the phrase of clear or 'clean-handed.'

The Egyptian ideograph of peaceful and gentle actions is the arm with the hand fallen thus À. Whereas the determinative of forcible actions is the clenched hand uplifted.

The Indian intimation of no, not, negation, is conveyed by the hand being waved in refusing to accept the idea or statement presented. This action is in keeping with the hieroglyphic sign for no, not, negation, with the two hands waved apart and extended palm-downwards ¹. In the Dakota sign[61] the hand is held flat and pointing upwards before the right side of the chest, then thrown outward and pressed down. Also there is a strong coincidence between the negative particle 'ma,' given by Landa[62], and the Egyptian emphatic negative.

According to Fornander, the same gesture sign for 'no' prevails throughout Polynesia. He says, 'Ask a person if he had such or such a thing, and, two to one, instead of saying "No," he will turn his hand or hands palm-downwards, in sign of a negative answer.'[63]

This figure of negation, of forbidding and prohibiting represented by the hieroglyphic ¹, is yet made by our railway signalmen for staying the train and preventing it from starting. It is still the 'no' of gesture speech.

The explanation as given by Captain Burton of the Indian signs for truth and lie[64], is sufficient to affiliate the gestures to the 'Two Truths' of Egypt, which are manifold in their application as two aspects or phases of the one idea, such as yes or no, before and behind, good and bad, right and wrong, the dual justice or twofold truth. Captain Burton says the forefinger extended straight from the mouth is the sign for telling truth, as 'one word,' whereas two fingers denote the 'double-tongue,' or a lie[65]. Truth is that which comes straight from the heart or mouth. Speaking the truth is straight speech[66]. Among [p.25] the Khoi-Khoi, law means that which is straight, right, true, in a straight line, in exact agreement with Maat, for the law as inflexible rule. Also the gentleman's or great man's word is the true word (amab)[67].

Although comparatively superseded by the cubit measure, yet the finger is at times found to be an Egyptian determinative of mā, the true, truth, or goddess of truth. Mā signifies to stretch out (protendere), to hold out straight before one, just as the Indians extend the finger. This stretching out straight is the sign of right rule, the finger being an early form of the rule measure, or the straight, right, and true. All the meanings meet in the Zend erezu for rule, straight, right, true, and the name of the finger.

The extended finger was the rule-sign of truth, of mā, which has two phases, positive and negative, or true and untrue, the untrue being indicated by the second finger as the dual mā. If we read mâti as makti, that is double-tongue. Here it may be remarked that one sign of mā is the hand outstretched in offering the sign of stretched-out, but not of hand, and that the Mexicans portrayed a hand—ma (itl)—to signify the sound of ma, and not the word hand.

The Egyptian ankh, to pair, couple, clasp together, duplicate, naturally includes marriage, and, as we still say, the marriage-tie. The ankh-knot is made in gesture-speech by forming the loop with the tips of the thumb and forefinger. When Goat's-Nose[68] makes this sign by softly coupling the nails of the two members together, Pantagruel says the sign denotes marriage. This is the modern Neapolitan sign for 'love,' and was a sign of marriage and of Venus in Italy from remotest times.

This sign of coupling, unity and marriage is made by Vishnu with his right handi, in the act of embracing Lakshmi with his left[69]. When the ankh tie was formed, that served the purpose, but the gesture made with the thumb and forefinger was first.

The knot or tie (ankh) is a hieroglyphic sign of life and living. Ankh also means to clasp, and the Indian sign of life and alive is made with a particular mode of making the clasp with the thumb and middle (root) finger of the right hand[70].

In the sign for death (Comanche) the gesture-maker might be undoing the ankh-sign of life as the instructions are: 'Bring the left hand to the left breast, hand half clinched, then bring the right hand to the left with the thumb and forefinger in such a position as if you were going to take a bit of string from the forefinger of the left hand, and pull the right hand as if you were stretching out a string.'[71] This reads 'Soul going to happy hunting grounds;' and as before said looks [p.26] like the loosening of the ankh-knot of life. Moreover, the untying in the sign of death is the right natural antithesis to the tie or clasp (ankh) as the symbol of life.

The death-sign described by Holt is made by placing the 'left forefinger and thumb against the heart, act as if taking a hair from the thumb and forefinger of the left hand with the thumb and forefinger of the right and slowly casting it front you, only letting the left hand remain at the heart and let the index finger of the right hand point outward toward the horizon.'[72] Here also we have the sign of the knot or cord which formed the ankh-symbol of life, and the pantomime of loosing it; that loosing of the silver לבח (Eg. kabu the cord) described by the Hebrew writer[73], which also probably applies to the noose-symbol of life.

The mode of describing the meaning destroyed, all gone, no more, is by an action of the palms. These are rubbed together, signifying rubbed out. The hands are held horizontally and the palms are rubbed together two or three times circularly; the right hand is then carried off from the left in a short horizontal curve. They are rubbed out. This is an express signification of 'ter' (Eg.) for killing, running through, transfixing, obliterating, literally to wipe and rub out.

One mimograph of the personal pronoun I, myself is made by striking the breast repeatedly with the clenched hand, and it is noticeable that ank (Eg.) the personal pronoun, the I, I the king, also means to clench or clasp the hand. Others touch the top of the nose with the index finger, or lay it along the ridge with the top resting between the eyes. So in Egypt.

'He pronounced an oath by the sovereign Lord (the pharaoh) striking his nose and his ears with both hands upon a rod.'[74]

In some languages the man, the I, and the nose have one name.

The personal pronoun I is—

 In Egyptian nra is the man, nra the neb of the vulture. In Tsheremis her is the nose. In Latin hare is a nose; also the nostrils of a hawk. Here the three types of man, the personal pronoun, and the nose meet under one word, and are in keeping with the Indian sign of 'I'.

The Arapahos make a gesture sign, which denotes their name, by taking the nose between the thumb and forefinger[75]. And as in other Indian gesture signs the nose is the ideograph of the personal pronoun I, and as the nose is an equivalent for ankh (Eg.) I, I am, [p.27] the king, these according to the typology are claiming a supremacy among men. If interpreted by the nar or nose of the vulture they would be the sure hunters, the far-sighted, the victorious.

The Todas of the Neilgherry Hills have a mode of salutation, supposed to be one of respect, in which they raise the open right hand to the brow and rest the thumb on the nose. The hieroglyphic nose when human signifies pleasure and delight; glad to smell you as it were.

The nose as the ank or personal pronoun I is equivalent to the Eskimo innuk, a type-name for man. In one of the dialects (Kuskutshewak) nikh is the name for the nose, which is kinaga in Kadiak. Innuwok in Eskimo is life and to live. In the Maya we have inic, winic, winak; in Javanese wong. The Iroquois onnhe, to live, is a modified form of the same archetypal word, and probably the wang or spirit of inner Africa is the unku (Eg.) a spirit; the spirit was primarily the breath, hence the connection with the nose as an organ of breathing, and a type of the I, the ank, who in Egypt had become the king, the living one.

The nasal sound nug of the Cherokee language is the inner African nge, the most common form of the personal pronoun 'I,' in Africa, or the rest of the world. This represents the nose, and the personal pronoun 'I,' the ankh itself in the domain of sounds.

The mouth, eye, nose, and ear are all forms of the ankh-type of life and living; the being, the one who is, the I am, the I see, or I hear, I breathe, I smell out, I perceive, with the particular organ for ideographic determinator. Hence the mouth, eye, nose, and ear became natural hieroglyphics of the I in person, sufficient to distinguish four different ideas or persons, and to furnish four totemic signs. The Chinese have five officials of the human body, the mouth, nose, ear, eye, and eyebrow. The strong eyebrow is a preserver of a modified ankhu or emblem of life; the natural being primary.

The teeth are touched by the Indians to indicate the meaning of white, and in Egyptian the tooth is 'hu' which is also the name long life; and in the Egyptian hieroglyphics the anhu, eyebrow, is for white as hut. Black is signified by touching the hair, and in Egyptian black and hair are synonymous; they have one name as kam. Another sign for black is made by pointing to the sun and executing the sign for no; no sun or sun-setting being equal to black. So the Chinese ideograph of the setting sun which is similar to the Akkadian and like it has the value of 'mi,' i.e., sunset, night, black, is one with the Egyptian am or mmi for the west, the place of sunset. The mode of indicating a period, applied to the end of a lifetime, as in the 'Address of Kin Chē-ĕss,'[76] is by the gesture-sign of 'cut off.' Ever, always, or eternal is 'never cut off.' This ideograph belongs to the oldest representation of time in heaven. In the [p.28] planisphere of Denderahi the goddess of the seven stars and mother of time is portrayed holding a knife, the kat (Eg.), English cutter, in her hand. That is the sign of time cut off, separated, distinguished. One revolution of the Bear was one year cut off; the annual quota cut off, quotannis. A long time is expressed by placing the thumbs and forefingers as if a thread were held between the thumb and forefinger of each hand; the hands first touching each other, are then slowly drawn apart as if stretching a piece of gum elastic. Colonel Mallery compares this act with the Greek τείνω, to stretch[77]. In Egyptian ten, denotes time, measure, to stretch and to reckon. Ten is to extend, lengthen out; tens is a stretcher. Ten is to complete, fill up, determine, and the variant tem (our time) has the same meaning. A tent is a length of time, a fortnight; temt is a total.

The Egyptian gesture-sign for ter to interrogate, ask, inquire, question, English tell me, is made with both hands scooped upwards exactly as the one hand is employed in making the common Indian sign for 'tell me.'[78] This gesture is used by the natives of Australia and is common with all orators as a mode of inquiry. Another link may be established between teru for time, and teru to draw. The sign-gesture for drawing was first, but teru (Eg.) to draw had become pictorial, applied to colour and painting. Teru, to draw, is also a measure of land, or of time, the gesture is a measure of time, indicated by the drawing out.

Horapollo observes, 'When we would denote the loins or constitution of a man we depict the backbone, for some hold that the seed proceeds from thence.'[79]

Mr. Long says: 'If an Indian wishes to tell you that an individual present is his offspring, he points to the person, and then with the finger still extended, passes it forward from his loins in a line curving downward, then slightly upward.'[80] Captain Burton tells us, 'A son or daughter is expressed by making with the hand a movement denoting issue from the loins.' Offspring, read literally, is 'out of the loins.'[81]

The signs for male and female, boy and girl, are made by direct imitation, the forefinger taking the place of the Egyptian ideograph. To depict the female the two outstretched thumbs and forefingers are joined, and placed in position to form the ovoid figure represented by the hieroglyphic ru ¨. The sign for the female is also made with an almond-shaped opening between the thumb and forefinger, with the tip of the one resting on the tip of the other.

One sign for woman is also European. The left fore and second fingers are extended and separated with the other fingers closed. The thumb is then placed against the palm in such a manner that [p.29] the top is visible in the crotch thus figured. This represents a likeness to the form et staturigo veneris in the pudendum muliebre[82].

It is common among the English peasantry, and constitutes a most deadly sign of insult with the Latin races, who give the fico, or fig, in a similar manner. The insult lies in the gesture indicating the female, and reads, 'You are effeminate,' 'Behold your sign.' So our English boys who shoot (at marbles) with the thumb tucked in are chaffingly said to play 'cunny-thumbed.'[83]

A form of this feminine mimeograph is given by Colonel Mallery under the heading of 'Challenge, Florentine Sign.' 'A fist clinched with the thumb thrust out under the forefinger.' The thumb thrust out is a sign of mockery and contempt with various African races. One of the Oji proverbs says, 'If you go to the sabbat (or 'customs') making the sign with the thumb (i.e., thrusting out the thumb) you will be answered with blows.' One mimeograph for woman is made by imitating the action of combing the long hair[84]. This sign has the same value as the comb found on the tomb of the Lars, in the Akkadian pictographs, or on the Scottish stones along with the mirror, both being feminine, both symbols of reproduction by the pubescent female. The comb is a female sign in the hieroglyphics, and is equivalent to the sign of combing. Another of the ideographs for woman is to point to or express the mammæ[85]. This is the same as the sign of the two breasts in hieroglyphics, the determinative of menâ, the wet-nurse, and menâ, to suckle. Menâ (menkat) had become a goddess in Egypt, and her vases had taken the place of the mammæ, but the living type is still retained in the Indian sign. The primary natural signs remain for use where vases, breast-shaped or womb-shaped, are no longer manufactured. The vase of menâ was both mammæ-shaped and womb-shaped, and in the gesture-sign for the female, as rendered by Matthews, 'the arms were flexed and the hands held fist-like at either side in the position of the female mammary glands, then swept semi-circularly downwards.'[86] The sign reads, one with prominent mammæ who can bring forth young, and who thus represented the blessings of the Hebrew shadai. The vase of mena was also imitated by making the cup-shape over each breast[87].

The Egyptians indicated pregnancy in the female by a swelling abdomen, and the hieroglyphy is the same, although only drawn in gesture-sign for the moment, when the Indians express the same fact pantomimically by passing the two hands slightly arched from the pubis in a curve upward and in toward the pit of the stomach, and thus depict the rotund shape of the abdomen[88].

For birth, delivery, to produce the child, the Egyptians represent the woman in the act of emaning the child, whose head and arms [p.30] are visible (]). The Indians enact the process of parturition, and imitate the pubic arch and the curve of carus with the two hands, which is followed by the head of the child during birth. This sign is used generically[89]. With additions it means mother, father, grandparent. The Egyptian sign reads pâ-pâ, for the human species; pâ, the race, men; pâpâ, to produce and be delivered. To denote the babe, or nursling, the back of the right hand is laid crosswise in the palm of the left, on the left side of the breast, and the movement up and down is then made as though holding and dandling an infant[90]. So in the hieroglyphics, renn, to dandle, and renn, the nursling, are identical; and the babe is shown in the arms of the nurse, who is dandling it up and down, and who is named the dandler, as Rennut.

The child, or suckling, is portrayed by the thumb and fingers being brought to the mouth, or by the finger placed in the mouth. This is the Egyptian hieroglyphic for the child. The primary idea was probably in reference to the suckling child. Still the infant and infans are inseparably connected, and the Greeks were not so wrong as some Egyptologists have supposed in making the child Har-pi-kart, the god of silence, or the silent god. The child and silence have the same name in Egyptian[91]. Khart, the child, also means silence. It is always perilous to limit an ideograph to one meaning. The chief sign for astonishment, surprise, and wonder is made by placing the right hand before the mouth, which is supposed to be open. This gesture is generic in the hieroglyphics, where it is used for expressing various emotions; it likewise signifies to speak, whisper, meditate, and to kiss, as in Job's description of idolatry or adulation conveyed by kissing the hand. It also has the meaning of thinking and meditating, and would therefore apply to being lost in astonishment, or speechless. It serves as the determinative of 'dumb,' 'mouthless.' Hiding the mouth, with many Asiatic races, is equivalent to being mouthless, i.e., dumb. The negroes on the West Coast of Africa clap their hands to their mouths when surprised, saying, at the same time, 'My mouth cleaves to me,'[92] that is, I am speechless, dumb with amazement. In spite of all assumptions to the contrary, this gesture is a sign of the child as the speechless one, the dumb Horus, or silent khart, who was the opposite of the True Voice. The sign has really to be read by childhood being the type of speechlessness. The gesture says, 'I am voiceless, a child again, a ninny who has nothing to say.' The Australians, the North American Indians, and the Africans all make this gesture-sign of wonder. Darwin remarks that it has been observed among so many races of men it must have some natural origin[93]. We may add, that there must also have been consensus. The mimeograph [p.31] for silence and the child, are both expressed by the one word khart (Eg.).

Mrs. Barber says the Kaffirs and Fingoes express astonishment by a serious look and by placing the right hand upon the mouth, uttering the word 'mawo'[94] which is the Xhosa exclamation for wonderful! prodigious! The word also signifies 'alas.' The fuller form of the expression in grief is 'mame-mawo,' or 'Alas! my mother!' In this the mother is added to the type of the child. So in Egyptian the mam, mum or mu is the mother, and malui denotes wonder, to be full of astonishment, like the vulgar English 'O moy!' The word 'adore' really means 'with hand to mouth.'

For the sign of companion, as the husband, or to accompany, the forefinger of each hand is extended pointing straight to the front and joined, all other fingers of both hands being closed, the hands held horizontal, with the backs upwards, signifying 'inseparable, united, equal.'[95] A similar sign is made by the native Australians when they offer the woman to a visitor as a rite of hospitality, the fingers of both hands being closely interlocked. In the hieroglyphics teka, to join, adhere, mix, and multiply with the sign of the cross X is equivalent to the two or the ten digits, or to the two hands being interlaced to signify conjunction. To denote a basket, or wickerwork, the separated fingers of both hands are interlaced in front of the body[96]. So tekar (Eg.), the digit, is the type of teka, to join, cross, cleave, twist, intertwine, as do the fingers, or the withies in making baskets.

The sign of counting, and of enumeration in general, is made by stretching out the ten digits. Also many, much, quantity, multiplicity, are expressed by stretching out the fingers and clutching at the air several times. This action, says Kohl[97], is often confounded with that for counting. The native Australians likewise denote many, multitude, large numbers, by holding up the hand, spreading out the fingers, and shutting and opening them rapidly.

Now the first and most universal reckoning was digital, and the name of the digits and the number ten of many languages is tek, or tekh (Eg.). Tekh is a title of the reckoner, who was both tekhi, the goddess, and Taht. Tekar is the Egyptian digit, a finger. The sign of tek is the cross X, the Roman figure of ten, or decem, and this is the hieroglyphic symbol of multiplication.

One sign of all is made by moving both hands horizontally, palm downwards, in a large circle, two feet in front of the face[98]. The Egyptian all, as neb and temt, is a total and a circle of two halves.

Among the signs for day, one is described by Titchkemátski, the Cheyenne Indian, as ending with the palms of the hands being [p.32] outspread upward, to indicate the opening out of day[99]. Wied also describes this gesture as consisting in both hands being placed apart, some distance from the breast, with the palms upward[100]. This sign for day, or this morning, is an Egyptian gesture. It is made with lifted hands, and the palms outspread upwards, signifying 'all open,' 'everything is open,' the reverse of the sign for night, or 'everything is closed.' This is the hieroglyphic for tuau, or Seb, which has the meaning of opening day, morning, morrow, and also to worship. So certainly is the sense of 'opening out' conveyed by the words Seb and Tuau, for the dawn of day, that they also denote the gateway of the light; the gate or gate-opener being a star. One sign of the night is made by the two hands crossed horizontally[101]. The cross is a well-known Indian sign of night and darkness. This is connected with the crossing of the sun by night, who is represented as the black god.

It was the custom in Egypt to reckon the year by the inundation. The month of Mesore is named from the new birth of the waters. In like manner one of the Indian signs for rain or snow is the ideographic sign for a year[102]. The year as a rain marks the same mode of computation as that of the Unyamwesi and the Hottentots, who reckon time by the rainy seasons, as the Egyptians did by the inundations.

The hand and language have one name in Egyptian, as 'tut.' Also the tongue and hand are the two Egyptian hieroglyphics of speech. The sign-language of the Indians is known as Hand-Conversation. Burton says the open hand is extended from the mouth[103]. Various other gestures of hand and mouth likewise denote speech.

The Egyptian sign of kâ, to beckon, call, and say, with the uplifted hands, agrees with the Oto sign for an interview—'Approach, I will open myself to you, I will speak to you.' One Egyptian determinative for tet, speech, address, to tell, shows both hands held up and waving level with the mouth[104]. Both hands are used for 'conversation' in the Ankara and Hidatsa gesture-signs. An Egyptian tradition, recorded in Plutarch, tells us that until the god Taht taught men speech they used mere cries like other animals[105]; and it is true that Taht, the lunar logos, is later than the god Shu, or Kafi, and the typhonian genetrix Kefa. The kaf ape was a type of 'hand-conversation' and gesture-language. The ape is the hand of the gods, has the name of the hand, is the hand personified, and its name, kaf is the earlier form of kâ, for calling and saying; thus the hand is an earlier sign of speech in Egyptian mythology than the mouth or tongue as Taht, the lunar logos.

In the scenes of the Hades appear four monkeys, each holding an enormous hand[106]. Moreover, the descent of the hand-type can be [p.33] traced in language from the kaf monkey, to the human hand of Taht. One name of the oldest genetrix, the kaf-nosed hippopotamus, is Tept. Tept is the tongue, and she was depicted with her tongue lolling out as a symbol of utterance. Tept modifies into tet, for the tongue, the human hand, and the later equivalent for kaf, the hand, to take, to utter language. Typology and mythology agree in this beginning with the kaf which is solely African, and neither Asiatic, European, nor American. Tep in Egyptian means to taste, breathe, inhale. It is also the name for the tongue and palate. This is a common type-name for the tongue or mouth, the organ of taste, as—

Tofo, in Polynesian, and tovolea, Fijian, mean taste; tubbu, Fiji, is to be sweet to the taste, and dovu is the sugar-cane. Teb (Eg.) is the fig, the fruit that is sweet to the taste. In Santa Barbara salt is tipi; and in San Luis Obispo it is tepu. A variant of the word tef (Eg.), tyffen, Cornish, is to spit; also tuf, in Persian.

The Indian sign for taste is to touch the tip of the tongue[107]. In the Shienne gesture-sign for 'sweet,' the tip of the forefinger is pressed on the tip of the tongue[108]. The same sign is used for 'sour.' The Dakota sign for sour includes spitting. Now the tongue (tep) was touched in tasting, and gave its answer in saliva before there was a word tep to express the sensation, or to name the organ or the act.

Colonel Mallery says:—

'A lesson was learned by the writer as to the abbreviation of signs and the possibility of discovering the original meaning of those most obscure from the attempts of a Shienne to convey the idea of "old man."[109] He held his right hand forward bent at elbow, with fingers and thumb closed sidewise. This not conveying any sense, he found a long stick, bent his back, and supported his frame in a tottering step by the stick held as was before only imagined. There, at once, was decrepit Age dependent on a Staff.'[110]

The bent old man leaning on a long staff is likewise the Egyptian sign of age, elders, the old man (5).

In this description we see a mode of reducing the earliest direct ideograph to a secondary representation, or kind of hieroglyphic shorthand corresponding to the reduction of the Egyptian ideographic signs in the demotic phase on the way to their becoming letter signs. The mimic finding the symbolic and secondary phase ineffectual had recourse to direct representation, as we do when we revert to the primary gesture-language. In like manner the deaf mutes will contract and reduce the natural, or spontaneous gesture, into an artificial sign that loses all obvious likeness to the [p.34] natural one, but is understood by them, and serves the purpose of expression[111].

Gesture-language was, and still is, continued in religious rites and ceremonies. In holding up the holy water the Parsee ritual prescribes that at certain words it is to be lifted level with the heart of the officiating priest, and at others it is to be held level with the arm of the priest, so that the warriors fighting for their country may be fuller of breath, and the husbandmen stronger of arm in tillage and cultivation of the world[112].

The principle is the same if the action is not so primitive as that of the Hottentots, who, when out on the war-path, will take the heart of a crow and calcine it to dust. This is then rammed into a gun and fired off with powder. As the heart is blown into air it is held that the enemy will lose heart and fly off like timid crows[113]. Both had their origin in the acting drama and the signs that preceded spoken language. Our popular beliefs still talk to us or make their dumb show of meaning in gesture-speech. The noose of the hangman or the suicide is not only held to be healing on account of its having taken life it loses its efficacy if allowed to fall to the ground, and the touch of the dead hand must be applied whilst the body is still hanging. Why? Because the symbol of suspending or of being suspended was taken to suspend the disease.

These primates of human expression have now to be traced on another line of thought. In the early dawn of the human consciousness man would observe that the animals, birds, reptiles, and insects excelled him in various kinds of contrivance, modes of getting a living, and power over the elements. The fish could breathe in the water which was fatal to him. The frog could engender and suspend on the flood a floating foothold of life, a base of being that began in the water and ended on the land. The hippopotamus could dive and disappear for an hour together. In attack or retreat many of the animals were superior to himself. The dog made a better hunter and watchman; the cat could see and pounce on her prey in the dark the bee, bird, and beaver beat him in building; the spider in spanning empty space, with the woven means of crossing it. The serpent managed the art of locomotion without visible members, and renewed its garment periodically by changing its skin. The monkey, with his four hands, excelled man, who had lost two of his in the process of metamorphosis and descent from the fourfold foothold in the tree to the twofold standing on the earth. Animate or inanimate things were adopted of necessity for use as a means of representing his primitive thought, and these things in the later phase became sacred objects, and thus Africa and the world were filled with fetish images which are only another kind of hieroglyphics not yet interpreted; a [p.35] rendering of which was brought on, almost intact, by the Egyptians. Tradition, customs, and language in many lands, still preserve the ancient types, where their meaning is no longer understood. But the notion that the primitive man fell straightway to worshipping these types is wholly erroneous. Greek writers, like Porphyry, mystified themselves with thinking that the Egyptian respect paid to animals arose from their belief in the transmigration of souls[114]. This was their guess at the hieroglyphics they could not translate, and the symbolism they did not comprehend. Our remotest ancestors were not so simple as to regard the brutes as gods, or the birds as angels, or the reptiles as devils. Such a reading postulates gods, angels, and devils, which were not then extant. They observed the keen instincts, the ingenious works and ways of the creatures as something remarkable and imitable, so far as was possible, without suspecting the presence of divinities or demons in animal disguise.

The Bushmen venerate or pay homage to a kind of caterpillar, to which, or in presence of which, they pray for success in hunting after game[115]. The caterpillar is the stealthy crawler. In Egyptian, hefa, to crawl, is the name of the caterpillar and viper, or snake. It would supply a type of that crawling stealthily along the ground which was a necessity with the early man in pursuit of his prey. And the so-called praying to the image would be equivalent to saying, may we slide along as silently and successfully as the caterpillar, only as they expressed themselves by means of things, this was their sole way of saying it.

The mantis, a perfect type of the most deadly deception, is also highly honoured by the Bushmen and Hottentots. The noiseless movement of the caterpillar, or snake, and the deceiving appearance of the mantis, were enviable and admirable to the primitive huntsman. They are living ideographs, which were afterwards portrayed in Egypt as hieroglyphic determinatives of ideas[116].

The enormous fecundity of the frog was the cause of the tadpole being adopted as the ideograph of a million, and also designated the lord of life. The time was when people in England, who wished for offspring, would swallow frogs to ensure children. The frog was eaten not for any virtue which it could communicate, but because it was an ideograph of fecundity. So the Malays of Singapore eat the flesh of the tiger, and pay highly for it, not that they like it, but they say that the man who eats tiger 'acquires the sagacity, as well as the courage, of that animal.'[117]

Captain Burton remarked that in the heraldry of the Abeokutans, which is tattooed into their own flesh, the lizard was an especial favourite[118]. This on the monuments is an ideograph of multiplying, [p.36] to be numerous, and, like the frog, was a type of fertility and reproduction, whether applied to this life or the next, or both. So in the Hervey Islands the custom of tattoo was said to be derived from their most fecund fish, whose name (tini) signifies innumerable, and whose striped pattern they copied.

When the nature of symbolism is understood, such phrases as 'zoolatry' and 'worship of animals' will be superseded. Animals were the living hieroglyphics, among the first figures of speech, and means of thinging thoughts; pictures painted by nature to illustrate the primary language. A bull-man, a cow-mother, a serpent-woman, are modes of expression; ideographs adopted for use, having no necessary relation to animal or reptile worship.

Cicero makes the apposite remark, that the Egyptians held no beasts to be sacred, except on account of some benefit which they had received from them. The barbarians, he says, paid divine honours to the beasts because of the advantages they derived from them, whereas the Roman gods not only conferred no benefit, but were idle and did nothing whatever to get their living[119]—as we say.

The ichneumon will destroy the cobra-di-capello, and consequently was greatly honoured as a serpent-killer. Pigs, as is well known, are determined enemies of snakes. So soon as a pig sees a snake he rushes at it, and the snake immediately makes off at sight of a pig. Pigs have been employed in America to clear out districts that were infested with rattlesnakes. Even the hedgehog in England will attack and devour the viper. The sow was a type of Rerit, the goddess of the Great Bear. The numerous mammæ were one cause of the personification, but the picture of the mother devouring snakes—man's fatal and most subtle enemies—in defence of her young, would arrest early attention. In recognising his friends and defenders the early man would not overlook the hedgehog and pig. Accordingly we find the hedgehog was sacred to Pasht or Buto, the Great Mother. In the Pahlavi Vendidad[120] the hedgehog is termed 'the slayer of the thousands of the evil spirit,' and in the Shayast La-Shayast it is said the high priest taught 'that it is when the hedgehog voids urine into an ant's nest that a thousand ants will die.' The ant being considered a noxious creature because it carried off grain[121].

The ibis received great honour from its destroying all deadly and venomous reptiles, so that any person who killed one was punished with instant death. The Thessalians protected the stork for the same reasons[122]. Darwin mentions the 'secretary hawk' as having had his whole frame modified for the purpose of killing snakes with impunity[123]. This bird is named the gxangxosi in Xhosa Kaffir. It lives on snakes and other reptiles, and is protected by law from being killed[124]. [p.37] Major Serpa Pinto in the account of his crossing Africa, tells us of an intelligent creature. He says no sooner does the traveller penetrate into one of the extensive forests of South-Central Africa, than the indicator* makes its appearance, bopping from bough to bough, in close proximity to the adventurer, and endeavouring by its monotonous note to attract his attention. This end having been attained, it rises heavily upon the wing, and perches a little distance off, watching to see if it is followed. If no attention be paid, it again returns, hopping and chirping as before, evidently inviting the stranger to follow in its wake, and when the wayfarer yields, it guides him through the intricacies of the forest, almost unerringly, to a bees' nest[125]. Whether the action arises from the bird's desire to communicate the secret or to make a cat's-paw of the newcomer, it is very arresting if true, and worthy of the land which we look upon as the nursery of the human mind.

* The Kaffirs tell the same story of the ngende, or honey-bird[126].

These birds were honoured for work done. Besides which the ibis, that represented Taht, who amongst other things was the god of medicine, taught men the use of the enema, or clyster, by administering it to herself, as Plutarch relates, she being observed to be after this manner washed and purged by herself. So that those of the priests who were the strictest observers of their sacred rites, when they used water for lustration, would fetch it from some place, where the ibis had been drinking, for she will neither taste any infectious, nor come near any unwholesome water[127]. Horapollo says when the Egyptians symbolise a man that conceals his own defects they depict an ape making water, for when he does so he conceals his urine[128]. The cat, another curiosity of cleanliness, would also present a worthy example as a concealer of its own defects. That such animals were among the teachers of the primitive and prehistoric men, is witnessed by the way in which their portraits have been preserved in the picture-gallery of the hieroglyphics.

The Chinese are still in the habit of using the eye of the cat for a timepiece. No matter whether the day is cloudy or dull, they will run to the nearest cat, pull open her eyes, if closed, and at once determine the time by the contraction of the iris and size of the pupil[129].

Horapollo writes: 'The Egyptians say that the male cat changes the shape of the pupils of his eyes according to the course of the sun. In the morning, at the rising of the god, they are dilated, in the middle of the day they become round, and about sunset appear less brilliant; whence the statue of the god in the city of the sun is in the form of a cat.'[130] In the Ritual[131], one of the transformations of [p.38] the solar god is into a cat. As such he 'makes the likeness of Seb,' or Time, which shows the timepiece as the cat.

When the dog turns round before lying down to rest, he is said, in the Isle of Wight, to be 'making his doke.' He has no need to do so now, as his wild ancestors had when they made their nightly bed in the long grass and liked to have it well beaten down, with a clear and ample space around for the purpose of watching; but he still continues the habit on bare boards, with no enemy to apprehend. The doke is a furrow, a hollow, a division, a small brook. It answers to the Egyptian tek, a boundary frontier, dyke, cutting. It supplied the name of the district or nome as tek, variant tesh, when the nomads who came down into Egypt had made their dokes and dykes. Doke and dog are synonymous for a boundary, fence, defence; that which encloses and guards, as the dog-irons fence the fire. In the celestial divisions the first nome, or doke, was given to the dog, who had taught the primitive man a lesson in making his doke; and the dog as Canis Major or Canis Minor continues to make his doke, and to be the doke, tekh, or dog in heaven for ever.*

* The dog. Tekh, or takh is a name of Taht, one of whose types is the dog. The name is applied to the tongue of the Balance which was represented by the cynocephalus as well as by the vase. The dog is the tongue or voice of the gods. But tekai (Eg.) means the adherer; a most appropriate name for the dog or doggie!

The Egyptians had no 'tide-predicting machines,' but, according to Plutarch, the beetle khepra and the crocodile 'were the natural prognosticators of the height of the coming inundation, he affirms that in whatsoever place in the country the female crocodile lays her eggs, that may with certainty be regarded as the utmost limit to which the rise of the river Nile will reach for the year. For, 'not being able to lay their eggs in the water, and being afraid to lay them far from it, they have so exact a knowledge of futurity, that, although they enjoy the benefit of the approaching stream at their laying and hatching, they still preserve their eggs dry and untouched by the water. They lay sixty eggs in all, and are just that number of days in hatching them, and the longest-lived of them live as many years; that being the first measure (no. 60) made use of by those who are employed in the celestial reckonings.'[132] The crocodile was also honoured as a purifier of the holy water of the Nile.

Yarrell, in his book on British birds, tells the story of a swan on the river at Bishop's Stortford which was sitting on four or five eggs. One day, previous to a very heavy downpour of rain, she was observed to be most diligently adding to her nest, which she raised some two and a half feet higher. That night the rain fell and the flood rose, but her nest had lifted the eggs just beyon