I offer a list of other animals closely connected with Apollo, giving him a beast’s name (wolf, ram, dolphin), and associated with him in myth and art.  In M. R. R. I apply similar arguments in the case of Artemis and the Bear, of Dionysus and the Bull, Demeter and the Pig, and so forth.  Moreover, I account for the myths of descent of Greek human families from gods disguised as dogs, ants, serpents, bulls, and swans, on the hypothesis that kindreds who originally, in totemistic fashion, traced to beasts sans phrase, later explained their own myth to themselves by saying that the paternal beast was only a god in disguise and en bonne fortune.

This hypothesis at least ‘colligates the facts,’ and brings them into intelligible relationship with widely-diffused savage institutions and myths.

The Greek Mouse-totem?

My theory connecting Apollo Smintheus and the place-names derived from mice with a possible prehistoric mouse-totem gave me, I confess, considerable satisfaction.  But in Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough (ii. 129- 132) is published a group of cases in which mice and other vermin are worshipped for prudential reasons—­to get them to go away.  In the Classical Review (vol. vi. 1892) Mr. Ward Fowler quotes Aristotle and AElian on plagues of mice, like the recent invasion of voles on the Border sheep-farms.  He adopts the theory that the sacred mice were adored by way of propitiating them.  Thus Apollo may be connected with mice, not as a god who superseded a mouse-totem, but as an expeller of mice, like the worm-killing Heracles, and the Locust-Heracles, and the Locust-Apollo. {81a} The locust is still painted red, salaamed to, and set free in India, by way of propitiating his companions. {81b} Thus the Mouse-Apollo (Smintheus) would be merely a god noted for his usefulness in getting rid of mice, and any worship given to mice (feeding them, placing their images on altars, their stamp on coins, naming places after them, and so on) would be mere acts of propitiation.

There would be no mouse-totem in the background.  I do not feel quite convinced—­the mouse being a totem, and a sacred or tabooed animal, in India and Egypt. {82a} But I am content to remain in a balance of opinion.  That the Mouse is the Night (Gubernatis), or the Lightning (Grohmann), I am disinclined to believe.  Philologists are very apt to jump at contending meteorological explanations of mice and such small deer without real necessity, and an anthropologist is very apt to jump at an equally unnecessary and perhaps equally undemonstrated totem.

Philological Theory