RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Mourning- Customs Movement, Laymen's
the Old Testament, it is rendered nearly certain by the usage of the Talmud and that in cognate languages.
While the mention in Scripture is rare, in two cases the circumstances are of unusual interest. The passage in Leviticus is of less importance, as it simply registers the mouse among the animals over which a food taboo extends. The chapter in I Samuel deals with the plague on the Philistines (q.v.) attending the presence among them of the ark, and a significant part of the history is existence among the propitiatory offerings of golden mice (rats?) which the sufferers evidently associated with the pestilence. The connection of the rat with the bubonic plague so recently discovered illumines this narrative (see Diseases and the Healing Art, § 4). Indirectly confirmatory of this is the disaster referred to in II Kings ix. 35, by which the great army of Sennacherib was almost wholly destroyed on the borders of Egypt. The Egyptian account introduces the mouse, though in a different way (see Assyria, VI., 3, 12), and the real cause of the catastrophe to the Assyrians may well have been the bubonic plague.
The passage in Isa. Ixvi. 17 is even more striking, referring as it does to the eating of the mouse in connection with the eating of the swine " and the abomination." The explanation here is doubtless to be found in the mystic sacrificial eating of a totem animal (see Comparative Religion, VI., 1, d. § 1). The evidence that the mouse was once a totem animal is quite convincing. This animal was in the Troad held sacred to Apollo, was fed in his temple, and images of it were also kept there (Aelian, Historia, xii. 5), sometimes appearing beside the deity's tripod and sometimes beneath his feet. In the region the name for the mouse was sminthos, and one of the epithets of Apollo was Smintheus (e.g., Iliad, i. 39), the phrase " Sminthean Apollo " was equivalent to " Apollo of the mouse " (cf. Strabo, Geographica, xiii. 604), and Sminthiac feasts were celebrated at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and in Crete. In the Troad a number of places were named from the mouse, in Ceos and Tenedos there were Sminthean temples, and the animal appears on coins and heraldic designs (Strabo, x. 486). The connection of the deity with the animal is explained in a twofold manner quite in accordance with the method accompanying the vestiges of totemistic practises — Apollo was the protector and also the destroyer of the mouse. Both explanations may have a historical basis. The immunity offered a totem animal sometimes results in the animal becoming a pest; the removal of the nuisance by any means is then ascribed to the god who formerly protected it and his relation to it is reversed in the myth. It is known also that in Egypt the rat was a totem animal sacred to Ra (J. G. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs, new ed., London, 1883), while the inhabitants of Crocodilopolis worshiped the shrewmouse, which was sacred to Horus, and examples of porcelain models of the animal are extant. In India the mouse was sacred to Rudra and to Ganesha, and the image of the latter often has a mouse under its foot. If Isa. Ixvi. be as late as the moderate critics place it (in the Greek period), it was com-
posed in a time when religious syncretism was entering Palestine in force, and with the evidences of mouse worship about— in the Mediterranean basin, in Egypt, and in Crete— the reference is best explained as a totemistic observance adopted by renegade Jews and denounced by the prophet. A like reference is probably to be seen in Ezek. viii. 10.
Geo. W. Gilmore. Bibliography: Besides the commentaries on the passages consult: Smith, Semites, 2d ed., p. 293; A. Lang, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120, London, 1885; idem, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, p. 201, ib. 1887; idem. Modern Mythology, pp. 80-82, ib. 1897; J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 129-132, London, 1890. Material illustrative but not closely pertinent may be found in J. Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, i. 523, Edinburgh and New York, 1908.