elders of Israel—­that is, the heads of houses—­worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of all manner of unclean’ (tabooed) ’creeping things, and quadrupeds, even all the idols of the House of Israel.’  Some have too hastily concluded that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring Philistines.  After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in the house of Dagon, the people were smitten with disease.  They therefore, in accordance with a well-known savage magical practice, made five golden representations of the diseased part, and five golden mice, as ’a trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,’ and so restored the Ark. {116} Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic countries, and the mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines had ever worshipped mice.

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Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the sacred animal of Rudra.  ‘The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,’ says the Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his ‘Apollo Smintheus.’  Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo.  In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganeca, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented in art with his foot upon a mouse.

Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion.  If he really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven in Hellenism.  Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own Apollo-worship.  In that case the mouse, while still originally a totem, would not be an Aryan totem.  But probably the myths and rites of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory than on that of De Gubernatis:  ’The Pagan sun-god crushes under his foot the Mouse of Night.  When the cat’s away, the mice may play; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.’ {117a} This is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic.  Obviously, when the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) cannot play:  there is no light to produce a shadow.  As usually chances, the scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse.  While the mouse is the night, according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann’s opinion the mouse is the lightning.  He argues that the lightning was originally regarded by the Aryan race as the ‘flashing tooth of a beast,’ especially of a mouse.  Afterwards men came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold, the lightning and the mouse are convertible mythical terms!  Now it is perfectly true that savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the result of the action of animals.  The rainbow is a serpent; {117b} thunder is caused by