There are also other traces of Egyptian idolatry. The Ganges in India was accounted sacred as the Nile in Egypt, the sun in both countries, in India a cow, reminding one of Apis. But the worship of cats and dogs, of leeks and onions, is not found in India. There idolatry took a somewhat different direction. Symbols of their gods were not sought for among the brutes, or in their kitchen gardens. They multiplied their gods, but as a rule, all were in the shape of men and women, sometimes with a monstrous and unnatural addition or change when a particular attribute or quality was to be made prominent; as when the head of an elephant was given to a human body to express prudence and sagacity, also four arms to show power. As an expression of an abstract idea, it is that of an untutored and perhaps childish mind; but from an aesthetic point the Hindu idol is disgusting and repulsive.
The ancient form of Hinduism differs from its present,—which is known under the name of Brahmanism. But a mere glance at the course of idolatry after its authoritative establishment and organization in Egypt does not require more that the notice of the transition from the pantheistic aspect of the ancient Hindu mythology to the fundamental idea of one god, as Brahm, with polytheistic associations. There is another idolatrous system, that of Buddha. This is said to be less gross and barbarous than Brahmanism. While Brahm is a myth, Buddha may have been a real personage who, disgusted with the cruelties practiced by the Brahmans, formed a sect of his own. But the Buddhists were driven out of India and settled principally in Ceylon. Some went to China, others to Tartary, and possibly even to Scandinavia. The Brahmans on the contrary would not go beyond the limits of India, their sacred region. In their emigration the Buddhists carried images of Buddha into these countries whither they went, and worshipped him as supreme, but mixed with his worship some of the Brahminical or Egyptian mythology. Thus the stream of that system of idolatry which had its beginning in Egypt has flowed thence over the greater part of the East, and a modification of it sweeping back overflowed all Europe. And this must have happened between the years B.C. 1635 and B.C. 542, for at the later date the Buddhists had been driven out of India.
Among the Greeks and Romans the fabulous deities were not living animals, as are found with the Egyptians, nor images of unnatural shapes and forms as in India, though not quite free from the latter (as Pan with the feet of a goat), but by some of them certain animals, if not deified, were considered sacred to a particular deity, (as the peacock to Juno). With these masters of the world idolatry seems divested of its bestial form, and unaccompanied with the more bloody rites observed in the North. By them idolatry was made attractive, clothed in forms of beauty and voluptuousness. Yet Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury are but different names for the Scandinavian Thor, Irea and Woden, and may be traced to the Egyptian Osiris and Isis.
But if there be room for question as to the practical identity of the idols of one country with those of another, one thing is certain that the same superstition, the same cruelty lurks in all, that the particular character of the development of idolatry is in great measure due to the habits and education of the people of each country, and that, whatever the development, man is proved in all to be stupid, vile, and lost.