But once a year at the
festival of Ammon they killed a ram, skinned it, and clothed the
image of the god in the skin. Then they mourned over the ram and
buried it in a sacred tomb. The custom was explained by a story that
Zeus had once exhibited himself to Hercules clad in the fleece and
wearing the head of a ram. Of course the ram in this case was simply
the beast-god of Thebes, as the wolf was the beast-god of Lycopolis,
and the goat was the beast-god of Mendes. In other words, the ram
was Ammon himself. On the monuments, it is true, Ammon appears in
semi-human form with the body of a man and the head of a ram. But
this only shows that he was in the usual chrysalis state through
which beast-gods regularly pass before they emerge as full-blown
anthropomorphic gods. The ram, therefore, was killed, not as a
sacrifice to Ammon, but as the god himself, whose identity with the
beast is plainly shown by the custom of clothing his image in the
skin of the slain ram. The reason for thus killing the ram-god
annually may have been that which I have assigned for the general
custom of killing a god and for the special Californian custom of
killing the divine buzzard.
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