Modern writers have found it as difficult to explain the animal worship of ancient Egypt as the philosophers and theologians of Greece and Rome. Creuzer declared that it was the result of a poverty of imagination, and that the beasts were worshipped because they embodied certain natural phenomena. Lenormant argued, on the other hand, that it was due to a high spiritual conception of religion, which prevented the Egyptians from adoring lifeless rocks and stones like the other nations of antiquity. Of late the tendency has been to see in it a sort of totemism which prevailed among the aboriginal population of the country, and was tolerated by the higher religion of the Pharaonic immigrants. In this case it would represent the religion of the prehistoric race or races, and its admittance into the official religion would be paralleled by the history of Brahmanism, which has similarly tolerated the cults and superstitions of the aboriginal tribes of India. Indeed, it is possible to discover an analogous procedure in the history of Christianity itself. The lower beliefs and forms of worship can be explained away wherever needful with the help of symbolism and allegory, while the mass of the people are left in the undisturbed enjoyment of the religious ideas and rites of their forefathers.
Recent discoveries, however, have cast a new light on the matter. The early monuments of Egyptian history, found in the neolithic graves and among the remains of the first dynasties, have shown that the animal worship of Egypt was only part of a larger system. Slate plaques, on which are represented the actions of Pharaohs who preceded Menes or were his immediate successors, prove that the prevailing system of religion must have been one closely akin to African fetishism. The gods appear frequently, but they always appear under the form of what in later times were regarded as their symbols. Sometimes the symbol is an animal or bird, but sometimes also it is a lifeless object. The human forms, to which we are accustomed in later Egyptian art, are absent;(67) there is nothing to tell us that the religion of the time was in any way distinguished from the fetishism of Dahomey or the Congo.