Terminology Tuesday: Theriolatry
Theriolatry
Worship of animals. some beliefs in the animal-incarnations of the divinity, were certainly in vogue. A few of the more ancient cult-titles would be sufficient evidence, apart from the later records. One of the most significant and oldest is Λύκειος, an epithet of Apollo marking his association with wolves. We find also that in many legends, and even occasionally in ritual, the wolf appears as his sacred animal. These facts point back to a period when Apollo was still the hunter-god of the wild wood, and was regarded as occasionally incarnate in the beast of the wild. We have also a few indications of direct reverence being paid to the wolf, apart from its connexion with any god. Another salient example either of theriolatry or of theriomorphic god-cult is snake-worship, proved to have existed in the earliest epoch of the Delphic religion, and in vogue, according to later records, in Epirus and Macedonia. The snake may have been reverenced in its own right, or as the incarnation of some personal divinity or hero, as we find it later attached to the chthonian deities, to the Earth-Mother, Zeus Κτήσιος and Μειλίχιος, Asklepios, and to the buried hero or heroine, such as Erechtheus, Kychreus. We have also reasons for assuming a very early cult of a bear-Artemis in Attica3 and Arcadia; and many other examples of similar phenomena will be found in a treatise on the subject by De Visser. Later Arcadia was full of the products and of the tradition of this early mode of religious imagination; besides the horse-headed Demeter at Phigaleia, we hear of the worship at the same place of a goddess called Eurynome, represented as half-woman, half-fish; and bronze figures belonging to the Roman period have been found at Lykosoura in Arcadia, apparently representations of divinities partly theriomorphic.2
Farnell, L. R. (1908–1926). GREECE, GREEK RELIGION. In J. Hastings, J. A. Selbie, & L. H. Gray (Eds.), Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Vol. 6, pp. 399–400). Edinburgh; New York: T. & T. Clark; Charles Scribner’s Sons.
