RELIGION.
We have hitherto been occupied in tracing the growth of inventions which
had for their end the supply of material wants, or the ordering of
conditions which should enable men to live peaceably together in
communities, and defend the products of their labour from the attacks of
rival tribes and warlike neighbours. A very little research into the
relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human thought
before us, and we discover, whether by following the revelations of
language or by examining into the traces left in ancient sites, abundant
proof to show that the material wants of life did not alone occupy the
thoughts of our remote ancestors any more than our own, and that even
while the struggle for life was fiercest, conjectures about the unseen
world and the life beyond the grave, and aspirations towards the
invisible source of life and light they felt to be around them, occupied
a large space in their minds. God did not leave them without witness at
any time, but caused the ‘invisible things to be shown by those that do
appear.’ And even in the darkest ages and among the least-favoured races
there were always to be found some minds that vibrated, however feebly,
to the suggestions of this teaching, and shaped out for themselves and
their tribe some conception of a Divine Ruler and His government of the
world from those works of His hands of which their senses told them.
Before commerce, or writing, or law had advanced beyond their earliest
beginnings, religious rites and funeral rites had no doubt been
established in every tribe, and men’s thoughts about God and His
relationship to His creatures had found some verbal expression, some
sort of creed in which they could be handed down from father to son and
form a new tie to bind men together. The task of tracing back these
rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly harder than that
of tracing material inventions, or laws between man and man, to their
first germs, for we are here trenching on some of the deepest questions
which the human mind is capable of contemplating--nothing less, indeed,
than the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself with the
souls of His creatures. We must therefore tread cautiously, be content
to leave a great deal uncertain, and, making up our minds only on such
points as appear to be decided by revelation, accept on others the
results of present researches as still imperfect, and liable to be
modified as further light on the difficult problems in consideration is
obtained.
[Sidenote: Explanation of mythology through the study of language.]
The study of language has perhaps done more than anything else to clear
away the puzzles which mythologies formerly presented to students. It
has helped in two ways: first, by tracing the names of objects of
worship to their root-forms, and thus showing their meaning and
revealing the thought which lay at the root of the worship; secondly, by
proving the identity between the gods of different nations, whose names,
apparently different, have been resolved into the same root-word, or to
a root of the same meaning, when the alchemy of philological research
was applied to them.
The discovery of a closer relationship than had been formerly suspected
between the mythologies of various nations is a very important one, as
it enables us to trace the growth of the stories told of gods and
heroes, from the mature form in which we first become acquainted with
them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians,
to the primitive shape in which the same creeds were held by the more
metaphysical and less imaginative Eastern peoples among whom they
originally sprang up. In some respects this task of tracing back the
poetical myths of Greek and Northern poets to the simpler, if grander,
beliefs of the ancient Egyptians or Chaldæans or Hindus is not unlike
our search in a perfected language for its earliest roots. We lose
shapeliness and beauty as we come back, but we find the form that
explains the birth of the thought, and lets us see how it grew in the
minds of men. One chief result arrived at by this comparison of creeds,
and by unravelling the meaning of the names of ancient gods and heroes,
is the discovery that a worship of different aspects and forces of
nature lies at the bottom of nearly all mythologies, and that the cause
of the resemblance between the stories told of the gods and heroes (a
resemblance which strikes us as soon as we read two or three of them
together) is that they are in reality only slightly different ways of
describing natural appearances according to the effect produced on
different minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the year.
Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, we soon become
expert in hunting the parable through all the protean shapes in which it
is presented to us. The heroes of the old stories we have long loved
begin to lose their individuality and character for us. And instead of
thinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles, and Thor as
separate idealizations of heroic or godlike character; of Ariadne, and
Idun, and Isis as heroines of pathetic histories, our thoughts as we
read are busied in tracing all that is said about them to the aspects of
the sun in his march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of a
bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and the tenderly
glowing and fading colours of the western sky into which he sinks when
his course is run.
Our first feeling on receiving this simple explanation of the old
stories of mythology is rather one of disappointment than of
satisfaction; we feel that we are losing a great deal--not the interest
of the stories only, but all those glimpses of deep moral meanings, of
yearnings after Divine teachers and rulers, of acknowledgment of the
possibility of communion between God and man, which we had hitherto
found in them, and which we are sure that the original makers of them
could not have been without. It seems to rob the old religions of the
essence of religion--spirituality--and reduce them to mere observations
of natural phenomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any
instincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of language,
with which we were about to quarrel as having robbed us, comes in to
restore to the old beliefs those very elements of mystery, awe, and
yearning towards the invisible, which we were fearing to see vanish
away. As is usually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the
explanation which seemed at first to impoverish really enhances the
beauty and worth of the subject brought into clearer light. It teaches
us to see something more in what we have been used to call mere
nature-worship than appears at first sight.
When we were considering the beginnings of language, we learned that
all root-words were expressions of sensations received from outward
things, every name or word being a description of some bodily feeling, a
gathering-up of impressions on the senses made by the universe outside
us. With this stock of words--pictorial words, we may call them--it is
easy to see that when people in early times wanted to express a mental
feeling, they were driven to use the word which expressed the sensation
in their bodies most nearly corresponding to it. We do something of the
same kind now when we talk of _warm_ love, _chill_ fear, _hungry_
avarice, and _dark_ revenge--mixing up words for sensations of the body
to heighten the expression of emotions of the mind. In using these
expressions we are conscious of speaking allegorically, and we have,
over and above our allegorical phrases, words set aside especially for
describing mental actions, so that we can talk of the sensations of our
bodies and of our minds without any danger of confounding them together.
But in early times, before words had acquired these varied and enlarged
meanings, when men had only one word by which to express the glow of the
body when the sun shone and the glow of the mind when a friend was near,
the difficulty of speaking, or even thinking, of mental and bodily
emotions apart from each other must have been very great. Only gradually
could the two things have become disentangled from one another, and
during all the time while this change was going on an allegorical way of
speaking of mental emotions and of the source of mental emotions must
have prevailed. It is not difficult to see that while love and warmth,
fear and cold, had only one word to express them, the sun, the source of
warmth, and God, the source of love, were spoken of in much the same
terms, and worshipped in songs that expressed the same adoration and
gratitude. It follows, therefore, that while we acknowledge the large
proportion in which the nature element comes into all mythologies, we
need not look upon the worshippers of nature as worshippers of visible
things only. They felt, without being able to express, the Divine cause
which lay behind the objects whose grandeur and beauty appealed to their
wonder, and they loved and worshipped the Unseen while naming the seen
only. As time passed on and language developed, losing much of its
original significance, there was, especially among the Greeks and
Romans, a gradual divergence between the popular beliefs about the gods
and the spirit of true worship which originally lay behind them. People
no longer felt the influence of nature in the double method in which it
had come to them in the childhood of the race, and they began to
distinguish clearly between their bodies and their minds, between the
things that lay without and the emotions stirred within. Then the old
nature-beliefs became degraded to foolish and gross superstitions, and
yearning souls sought God in a more spiritual way.
The mythologies of the different Aryan nations are those which concern
us most nearly, entering as they do into the very composition of our
language, and colouring not only our literature and poetry, but our
cradle-songs and the tales told in our nurseries. We shall find it
interesting to compare together the various forms of the stories told by
nations of the Aryan stock, and to trace them back to their earliest
shape.
[Sidenote: Egyptian religion.]
But before entering on this task, it may be well to turn our attention
for a little while to a still earlier mythology, where the mingling of
metaphysical conceptions with the worship of natural phenomena is
perhaps more clearly shown than in any other, and which may therefore
serve as a guide to help us in grasping this connection in the more
highly coloured, picturesque stories we shall be hereafter attempting
to unravel. This earliest and least ornamented mythology is that of the
ancient Egyptians, a people who were always disposed to retain primitive
forms unchanged, even when, as in the case of their hieroglyphics, they
had to use the primitive forms to express thoughts which these forms
could not naturally convey. That they followed this course with their
religious ceremonies and in their manner of representing their gods, is
perhaps fortunate for us, as it enables us to trace with greater ease
the particular aspect of nature, and the mental sensation or moral
lesson identified with it, which each one of their gods and goddesses
embodied. We have the rude primitive form embodying an aspect or force
of nature, instead of a beautiful confusing story, merely for the most
part titles, addresses, and prayers, whose purport more or less reveals
the spiritual meaning which that aspect of nature conveyed to the
worshipper.
The chief objects of nature-worship must obviously be the same, or
nearly the same, in every part of the world, so that even among
different races, living far apart, and having no connection with each
other, a certain similarity in the stories told about gods and heroes,
and in the names and titles given to them, is observable. The sun, the
moon, the heavens and stars, the sea, the river, sunshine and darkness,
night and day, summer and winter,--these objects and changes must always
make the staple, the back-bone so to speak, round which all mythological
stories founded on nature-worship are grouped. But climate and scenery,
especially any striking peculiarity in the natural features of a
country, have a strong influence in modifying the impressions made by
these objects on the imaginations of the dwellers in the land, and so
giving a special form or colour to the national creed, bringing perhaps
some Divine attribute or some more haunting impression of the condition
of the soul after death, into a prominence unknown elsewhere. The
religion of the ancient Egyptians was distinguished from that of other
nations by several such characteristics, and in endeavouring to
understand them we must first recall what there is distinctive in the
climate and scenery of Egypt to our minds.
[Sidenote: Influence of nature in Egyptian religion.]
The land of Egypt is, let us remember, a wedge-shaped valley, broad at
its northern extremity and gradually narrowing between two ranges of
cliffs till it becomes through a great part of its length a mere strip
of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. Its sky overhead is
always blue, and from morning till evening intensely bright, flecked
only occasionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that the
sun’s course, from the first upshooting of his keen arrowy rays over the
low eastern hills to his last solemn sinking in a pomp of glorious
colour behind the white cliffs in the west, can be traced unimpeded day
after day through the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which
receive the sun’s first and last greeting stretches a boundless
waste--the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had ever traversed,
which led no one knew where, from whose dread, devouring space the sun
escaped triumphant each morning, and back into which it returned when
the valley was left to darkness and night.
The neighbourhood of the desert, and the striking contrast between its
lifeless wastes and the richly cultivated plains between the hills, had,
as we can see, a great effect on the imaginations of the first
inhabitants of the land of Egypt, and gave to many of their thoughts
about death and the world beyond the grave an intensity unknown to the
dwellers among less monotonous scenery. The contrast was a perpetual
parable to them, or rather perhaps a perpetual _memento mori_. The
valley between the cliffs presented a vivid picture of active and
intense life, every inch of fruitful ground teeming with the results of
labour--budding corn, clustering vines, groups of palm-trees, busy
sowers and reapers and builders; resounding, too, everywhere with brisk
sounds of toil or pleasure. The clink of anvil and hammer, the creaking
of water-wheels, the bleating and lowing of flocks and herds, the tramp
of the oxen treading out the corn, the songs of women, and the laughter
of children playing by the river. On the other side of the cliffs, what
a change! There reigned an unbroken solitude and an intense silence,
such as is only found in the desert, because it comes from the utter
absence of all life, animal or vegetable: no rustle of leaf or bough, no
hum of an insect or whirr of a wing, breaks the charmed stillness even
for a minute. There is silence, broad, unbroken sunshine, bare cliffs,
rivers of golden sand--nothing else. Amenti, the ancient Egyptians
called the western desert into which, as it seemed to them, the sun went
down to sleep after his day’s work was done; Amenti, the vast, the
grand, the unknown; and it was there they built their most splendid
places of worship, there that they carried their dead for burial,
feeling that it spoke to them of rest, of unchangeableness, of eternity.
Another striking and peculiar feature of Egyptian scenery was the
beautiful river--the one only river--on which the prosperity, the very
existence, of the country depended. It, too, had a perpetual story to
tell, a parable to unfold, as it flowed and swelled and contracted in
its beneficent yearly course. They saw that all growth and life depended
on its action; where its waters reached, there followed fruitfulness and
beauty, and a thousand teeming forms of animal, vegetable, and insect
life; where its furthest wave stayed, there the reign of nothingness and
death began again. The Nile, therefore, became to the ancient Egyptians
the token and emblem of a life-giving principle in nature, of that
perpetual renewal, that passing from one form of existence into another,
which has ever had so much hopeful significance for all thinking minds.
Its blue colour when it reflected the sky was the most sacred of their
emblems, and was devoted to funeral decorations and to the adornments of
the dead, because it spoke to them of the victory of life over death, of
the permanence of the life-principle amid the evanescent and vanishing
forms under which it appeared. Of these two distinctive features of
nature in Egypt, the unexplored western desert and the unending river,
we must, then, think as exercising a modifying or intensifying effect on
the impressions produced on the minds of ancient Egyptians by those
aspects of nature which they had in common with other Eastern peoples.
Let us think what these are. First and most conspicuous we must put the
sun, in all his changing aspects, rising in gentle radiance over the
eastern hills, majestically climbing the cloudless sky, sending down
fierce perpendicular rays through all the hot noon, withdrawing his
overwhelming heat towards evening as he sloped to his rest, and painting
the western sky with colour and glory, on which the eyes of men could
rest without being dazzled, vanishing from sight at last behind the
white rocks in the west. And then the moon--white, cold, changeable,
ruling the night and measuring time. Besides these, the planets and
countless hosts of stars; the green earth constantly pouring forth food
for man from its bosom; the glowing blue sky at noon and the purple
midnight heaven; the moving wind; the darkness that seemed to eat up and
swallow the day.
[Sidenote: Sun-gods.]
[Sidenote: Amun.]
Now let us see how the ancient Egyptians personified these into gods,
and what were the corresponding moral or spiritual ideas of which each
nature-power spake to their souls. We shall find the mythology easier to
remember and understand if we group the personifications round the
natural objects whose aspects inspired them, instead of enumerating them
in their proper order as first, second, and third class divinities. So
for the present we will class them as Sun-gods, Sky-gods, Wind-gods,
etc.; and we will begin with the sun, which among ancient Egyptians
occupied the _first_ place, given, as we shall see, to the sky among our
Aryan ancestors. The sun, indeed, not only occupies the most conspicuous
position in Egyptian mythology, but is presented to us in so many
characters and under so many aspects that he may be said to be the chief
inspiration, the central object of worship, nothing else, indeed, coming
near to his grandeur and his mystery. It is to be remarked, however--and
this is a distinctive feature in the Egyptian system of worship--that
the _mystery_ of the sun’s disappearance during the night and his
reappearance every morning is the point in the parable of the sun’s
course to which the Egyptians attached the deepest significance, and to
the personification of which they gave the most dignified place in their
hierarchy of gods. Atum, or Amun, ‘the concealed one,’ was the name and
title given to the sun after he had sunk, as they believed, into the
under-world; and by this name they worshipped the concealed Creator of
all things, the ‘Dweller in Eternity,’ who was before all, and into
whose bosom all things, gods and men, would, they thought, return in the
lapse of ages. The figure under which they represented this their oldest
and most venerable deity was that of a man, sometimes human-headed and
sometimes with the man’s face concealed under the head and horns of a
ram--the word ‘ram’ meaning ‘concealment’ in the Egyptian language. The
figure was coloured blue, the sacred colour of the Source of life. Two
derivations are given for the name Amun. It means that which brings to
light; but it also expresses the simple invitation ‘Come,’ and in this
sense it appears to be connected with a sentence in the ritual, where
Atum is represented as dwelling alone in the under-world in the ages
before creation, and on ‘a day’ speaking the word ‘Come,’ when
immediately Osiris and Horus (light and the physical sun) appeared
before him in the under-world.
[Sidenote: Osiris.]
The aspect of the sun as it approached its mysterious setting exercised,
perhaps, a still greater power over the thoughts of the Egyptians, and
was personified by them in a deity, who, if not the most venerable, was
the best loved of all their gods. Osiris was the name given from the
earliest times to the kind declining sun, who appeared to men to veil
his glory, and sheathe his dazzling beams in a lovely, many-coloured
radiance, which soothed and gladdened the weary eyes and hearts of men,
and enabled them to gaze fearlessly and lovingly on the dread orb from
which during the day they had been obliged to turn their eyes. This was
the god who loved men and dwelt among them, and for man’s sake permitted
himself to be for a time quenched and defeated by the darkness--it was
thus that the ancient people read the parable of the sun’s evening
beauty and of his disappearance beneath the shades of night, amplifying
it, as the needs of the human heart were more distinctly recognized,
into a real foreshadowing of that glorious truth towards which the whole
human race was yearning--_the_ truth of which these shows of nature
were, indeed, speaking continually to all who could understand. The
return of Osiris every evening into the under-world invested him also,
for the ancient Egyptians, with the character of guardian and judge of
souls who were supposed to accompany him on his mysterious journey, or
at all events to be received and welcomed by him in Amenti (the realm of
souls) when they arrived there. Osiris therefore filled a place both
among the gods of the living and those of the dead. He was the link
which connected the lives of the upper and the under worlds together,
and made them one--the Lover and Dweller among men while yet in the
body, and also the Judge and Ruler of the spirit-realm to which they
were all bound. Two distinct personifications showed him in these
characters. As the Dweller among men and the Sharer of the commonness
and materiality of their earth-life, he was worshipped under the form of
a bull--the Apis, in which shape his pure soul was believed constantly
to haunt the earth, passing from one bull to that of another on the
death of the animal, but never abandoning the land of his choice, or
depriving his faithful worshippers of his visible presence among them.
In his character of Judge of the dead, Osiris was represented as a
mummied figure, of the sacred blue colour, carrying in one hand the rod
of dominion, and in the other the emblem of life, and wearing on his
head the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. In the judgment scenes
he is seated on a throne at the end of the solemn hall of trial to which
the soul has been arraigned, and in the centre of which stands the
fateful balance where, in the presence of the evil accusing spirit and
of the friendly funeral gods and genii who stand around, the heart of
the man is weighed against a symbol of Divine Truth.
Next in interest to the setting sun is the personification under which
the Egyptians worshipped the strong young sun, the victorious conqueror
of the night, who each
[Sidenote: Horus.]
[Sidenote: Ra.]
morning appeared to rise triumphant from the blank realm of darkness in
which the rays of yesterday’s sun had been quenched. They figured him as
the eldest son of Osiris, Horus, the vigorous bright youth who loved his
father, and avenged him, piercing with his spear-like ray the monster
who had swallowed him up. Horus is represented as sailing up the eastern
sky from the under-world in a boat, and slaying the serpent Night with a
spear as he advances. The ultimate victory of life over death, of truth
and goodness over falsehood and wrong, were the moral lessons which this
parable of the sun’s rising read to the ancient Egyptians. The midday
sun, ruling the heavens in unclouded glory, symbolized to them majesty
and kingly authority, and was worshipped as a great and powerful god
under the name of Ra, who was often identified with Amun and worshipped
as Amun-Ra. This was especially the case at Thebes.
[Sidenote: Ptah.]
Though these four appearances may well seem to exhaust all the aspects
under which the sun can be considered, there are still several other
attributes belonging to him which the ancient Egyptians noticed and
personified into other sun-gods. These we will enumerate more briefly.
Ptah, a god of the first order, worshipped with great magnificence at
Memphis, personified the life-giving power of the sun’s beams, and in
this character was sometimes mixed up with Osiris, and in the ritual is
spoken of also as the creative principle, the ‘word’ or ‘power’ by which
the essential deity revealed itself in the visible works of creation.
Another deity, Mandoo, appears to personify the fierce power of the
sun’s rays at midday in summer, and was looked upon as the god of
vengeance and destruction, a leader in war, answering in some measure,
though not entirely, to the war-gods of other mythologies.
[Sidenote: Sekhet-Pasht.]
There were also Gom, Moui, and Kons, who are spoken of always as the
_sons_ of the sun-god, those who reveal him or carry his messages to
mankind, and in them the _rays_, as distinguished from the _disk_ of the
sun, are apparently personified. The rays of the sun had also a feminine
personification in Sekhet or Sekhet-Pasht, the goddess with the
lioness’s head. To her several different and almost opposite qualities
were attributed: as, indeed, an observer of the burning and enlightening
rays of an Eastern sun might be doubtful whether to speak oftenest of
the baleful fever-heat with which they infect the blood, or of their
vivifying effects upon the germs of animal and vegetable life. Thus the
lioness-goddess was at once feared and loved; dreaded at one moment as
the instigator of fierce passions and unruly desires, invoked at another
as the giver of joy, the source of all tender and elevating emotions.
Her name, Pasht, means ‘the lioness,’ and was perhaps suggested by the
fierceness of the sun’s rays, answering to the lion’s fierce strength or
the angry light of his eyes. She was also called the ‘Lady of the Cave,’
suggesting something of mystery and concealment. Her chief worship was
at Bubastis; but, judging from the frequency of her representations,
must have been common throughout Egypt.
[Sidenote: Thoth.]
We will now take the second great light of the heavens, the moon, and
consider the forms under which it was personified by the Egyptians.
Rising and setting like the sun, and disappearing for regular periods,
the moon was represented by a god, who, like the god of the setting sun,
occupied a conspicuous position among the powers of the under-world, and
was closely connected with thoughts of the existence of the soul after
death, and the judgment pronounced on deeds done in the body. Thoth,
‘the Word,’ the ‘Lord of Divine Words,’ was the title given to this
deity; but though always making one in the great assemblage in the
judgment-hall, his office towards the dead does not approach that of
Osiris in dignity. He is not the judge, he is the recorder who stands
before the balance with the dread account in his hand, while the
trembling soul awaits the final sentence. His character is that of a
just recorder, a speaker of true words; he wears the ostrich feather,
the token of exact rigid evenness and impartiality, and yet he is
represented as having _uneven_ arms, as if to hint that the cold white
light of justice, untempered by the warmth of love, cannot thoroughly
apprehend what it seems to take exact account of, leaving, after all,
one side unembraced, unenlightened, as the moonlight casts dense shadows
around the spots where its beams fall. The silent, watching, peering
moon! Who has not at times felt an inkling of the parable which the
ancient Egyptians told of her cold eye and her unwarming rays which
enlighten chilly, and point out while they distort?
In spite of his uneven arms, however, Thoth (the dark moon and the light
moon) was a great god, bearing sway in both worlds in accordance with
his double character of the revealed and the hidden orb. On earth he is
the great teacher, the inventor of letters, of arithmetic, and
chronology; the ‘Lord of Words,’ the ‘Lover of Truth,’ the ‘Great and
Great.’ Thoth was sometimes represented under the form of an ape; but
most frequently with a human figure ibis-headed; the ibis, on account of
his mingled black and white feathers, symbolizing the dark and the
illumined side of the moon. Occasionally, however, he is drawn with a
man’s face, and bearing the crescent moon on his head, surmounted by an
ostrich feather; in his hand he holds his tablets and his recording
pencil.
[Sidenote: Maut and Neit.]
The sky-divinities were all feminine among the Egyptians; representing
the feminine principle of receptivity, the sky being regarded by them
mainly as the abode, the home, of the sun and moon gods. The greatest of
the sky-deities was Maut, or Mut, the mother, who represents the deep
violet night sky, tenderly brooding over the hot exhausted earth when
the day was over, and wooing all living things to rest, by stretching
cool, protecting arms above and around them. The beginning of all
things, abysmal calm, but above all, motherhood, were the metaphysical
conceptions which the ancient Egyptians connected with the aspect of the
brooding heavens at midnight, and which they worshipped as the oldest
primeval goddess, Maut. The night sky, however, suggested another
thought, and gave rise to yet another personification. Night does not
bring only repose; animals and children sleep, but men wake and think;
and, the strife of day being hushed, have leisure to look into their own
minds, and listen to the still small voice that speaks within. Night was
thus the parent of thought, the mother of wisdom, and a personification
of the night sky was worshipped as the goddess of wisdom. She was named
Neit, a word signifying ‘I came from myself,’ and she has some
attributes in common with the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athene, whose
warlike character she shared. Nu, another sky-goddess, who personifies
the sunlit blue midday sky, may also on other accounts claim kinship
with the patroness of Athens. She is the life-giver--the joy-inspirer.
Clothed in the sacred colour which the life-giving river reflects, the
midday sky was supposed to partake of the river’s vivifying qualities,
and its goddess Nu is very frequently pictured as seated in the midst of
the tree of life, giving of its fruits to faithful souls who have
completed their time of purification and travel in the under-world, and
are waiting for admission to the Land of Aoura, the last stage of
preparation before they are received into the immediate presence of the
great gods.
[Sidenote: Saté and Hathor.]
Two other aspects of the sky were considered worthy of personification
and worship. The morning sky, or perhaps the eastern half of the morning
sky, which awaited the sun’s earliest beams, and which was called Saté,
and honoured as the goddess of vigilance and endeavour, and the
beautiful western sky at even, more lovely in Egypt than anywhere else,
to the exaltation of which the Egyptians applied their prettiest titles
and symbols. Hathor, the ‘Queen of Love,’ was the name they gave to
their personification of the evening sky, speaking of her at once as the
loving and loyal wife of the sun, who received the weary traveller, the
battered conqueror, to rest on her bosom after his work was done, and
the gentle household lady whose influence called men to their homes when
labour was finished, and collected scattered families to enjoy the
loveliest spectacle of the day, the sunset, in company. Hathor is
represented as a figure with horns, bearing the sun’s disk between them,
or sometimes carrying a little house or shrine upon her head.
[Sidenote: Kneph.]
The sky, however, with the ancient Egyptians, did not include the _air_;
that again was personified in a masculine form, and regarded as a very
great god, some of whose attributes appear to trench on those of Osiris,
and Ptah; Kneph was the name given to the god who embodied the air, the
living breath or spirit; and he was one of the divinities to whom a
share in the work of creation was attributed. He is represented in a
boat, moving over the face of the waters, and breathing life into the
newly created world. He was no doubt connected in the minds of pious
Egyptians with thoughts of that breath of God by whose inspiration man
became a living soul; but in his nature-aspect he perhaps especially
personified the wind blowing over the Nile valley after the inundation,
and seeming to bring back life to the world by drying up the water under
which the new vegetation was hidden.
[Sidenote: Isis.]
The soil of the country thus breathed upon, which responded to the rays
of Osiris and the breath of Kneph by pouring forth a continual supply of
food for men, was naturally enough personified into a deity who claimed
a large share of devotion, and was worshipped under many titles. Isis,
the sister-wife of Osiris, was the name given to her, and so much was
said of Isis, and so many stories told of her, that it appears at times
as if, under that single name, the attributes of all the other goddesses
were gathered up. Isis, was a personification, not of the receptive
earth only, but of the feminine principle in nature wherever perceived,
whether in the tender west that received the sun, or in the brooding
midnight sky that invited to repose, or in the cherishing soil that drew
in the sun’s warmth, and the breath of the wind, only to give them forth
again changed into flowers and fruit and corn. Isis of ‘the ten thousand
names’ the Greeks called her; and if we consider her as the embodiment
of all that can be said of the feminine principle, we shall not be
surprised at her many names, or at the difficulty of comprehending her
nature. She was, above all else, however, the wife of Osiris and the
mother of Horus, which certainly points to her being, or at all events
to her having been originally, a sky-goddess; but then again she is
spoken of as dressed in robes of many hues, which points to the changing
and parti-coloured earth. Some of her attributes
[Sidenote: Nephthys.]
seem to connect her with the dark moon, especially the fact that her
most important offices are towards the dead in the under-world, whose
government she is spoken of as sharing with her husband Osiris. In
pictures of the funeral procession she is drawn as standing at the head
of the mummied body during its passage over the river that bounds the
under-world, and in that position she represents the beginning; her
younger sister, Nephthys, the end, stands at the foot of the still
sleeping soul; the two goddesses thus summing up, with divinity at each
end, the little span of mortal life. In the judgment-hall, Isis stands
behind the throne of Osiris, drooping great protecting wings over him
and it. This quality of protecting, of cherishing and defending, appears
to be the spiritual conception worshipped under the form of the
many-named goddess. Isis is constantly spoken of as the protector of her
brother Osiris, and is drawn on the tomb with long drooping wings. She
is also frequently represented as nursing Horus, the son who avenged his
father, and in that character she wears the cow’s head, the cow being
sacred to Isis, as was the bull to Osiris.
But when we have made this summary there is one thing which should also
be borne in mind with regard to the religion of Egypt. Ancient Egypt,
which appears at first sight such a single and united empire, was in
reality (and in this respect it was something like the Chinese empire)
deeply infected with a sort of feudalism, in virtue of which the
different divisions (nomes) of the country did in reality constitute
something like different states. And each state tried to preserve its
sense of independence by having some special divinity or group of
divinities which it held in peculiar honour. So that the Egyptian
pantheon itself is infected by this republican spirit. Almost each
single god is supreme somewhere; elsewhere he may be almost overlooked.
[Sidenote: Animal-gods.]
The origin of the strangely intimate connection between these Egyptian
gods, and certain animals held to be sacred to them, and in some cases
to be incarnations of them, is a very difficult question to determine.
Two explanations are given by different writers. One is that the
animal-worship was a remnant of the religion of an inferior race who
inhabited Egypt in times far back, and who were conquered but not
exterminated by immigrants from Asia, who brought a higher civilization
and a more spiritual religion with them, which, however, did not
actually supersede the old, but incorporated some of its baser elements
into itself. Other writers look upon the animal-worship as but another
form of the unending parable from nature, which, as we have seen,
pervades the whole Egyptian mythology. The animals, according to this
view, being not less than the nature-gods worshipped as revelations of a
divine order, manifesting itself through the many appearances of the
outside world; their obedient following of the laws imposed on their
natures through instinct making them better witnesses to the Divine Will
than self-willed, disobedient man was found to be.
This is one of the problems which must be left to be determined by
further researches into unwritten history, or perhaps by a fuller
understanding of Egyptian symbols. That a great deal of symbolical
teaching was wrapped up in the Egyptians’ worship of animals may be
gathered by the lesson which they drew from the natural history of the
sacred beetle, whose habit of burying in the sand of the desert a ball
of clay, full of eggs, which in due course of time changed into
chrysalises and then into winged beetles, furnished them with their
favourite emblem of the resurrection of the body and the continued life
of the soul through the apparent death-sleep--an emblem which was
wanting to no temple, and without which no body was ever buried.
Thinking of this, we must allow that their eyes were not shut to the
teaching of the ‘visible things’ which in the ages of darkness yet spoke
a message from God.
We have now gone over the most important of the Egyptian gods,
connecting them with the natural appearances which seem to have inspired
them, so as to give the clue to a comparison with the nature-gods of the
Aryans, of which we shall speak in the next chapter. There were, of
course, other objects of worship, not so easily classed, among which we
ought to mention Hapi, the personification of the river Nile; Sothis,
the dog-star, connected with Isis; and two more of the funeral
gods--Anubis, who in his nature-aspect may be possibly another
personification of air and wind, and who is always spoken of as the
friend and guardian of pure souls, and represented at the death-bed
sometimes in the shape of a human-headed bird as helping the new-born
soul to escape from the body; and Thmei, the goddess of Truth and
Justice, who introduces the soul into the hall of judgment. The evil
powers recognized among the ancient Egyptians were principally
embodiments of darkness and of the waste of the desert, and do not
appear to have had any distinct conception of moral evil associated with
them. They are, however, spoken of in the book of the dead as enemies of
the soul, who endeavour to delude it and lead it out of its way on its
journey across the desert to the abode of the gods. Amenti was no doubt
the desert, but not only the sunlit desert the Egyptians could overlook
from their western hills--it included the unknown world beyond and
underneath, to which they supposed the sun to go when he sank below the
horizon, and where, following in his track, the shades trooped when
they had left their bodies. The story of the trials and combats of the
soul on its journey through Amenti to the judgment-hall, and its
reception by the gods, is written in the most ancient and sacred of
Egyptian books, the Ritual, or Book of the Dead, which has been
translated into French by M. de Rougé, and later by M. Pierret, and into
English by Dr. Birch. The English translation is to be found in the
Appendix to the fifth volume of Bunsen’s _Egypt’s Place in History_.
[Sidenote: Chaldæan religion.]
The mythologies of the other uninspired Semitic nations resemble the
Egyptian in the main element of being personifications of the powers of
nature. The Chaldæans directed their worship chiefly towards the
heavenly bodies as did the ancient Egyptians, but not exclusively. Their
principal deities were arranged in triads of greater and less dignity;
nearly all the members of these were personifications of the heavens or
the heavenly bodies. The first triad comprised Ana, the heavens or the
hidden sun, Father of the gods, Lord of Darkness, Ruler of a far-off
city, Lord of Spirits. By these titles, suggestive of some of the
attributes and offices towards the dead, attributed by the Egyptians to
Atum and Osiris, was the first member of their first order of gods
addressed by the Chaldæans. Next in order came Bil, also a sun-god: the
Ruler, the Lord, the Source of kingly power, and the patron and image of
the earthly king. His name has the same signification as Baal, and he
personifies the same aspect of nature, the sun ruling in the heavens,
whose worship was so widely diffused among all the people with whom the
Israelites came in contact. The third member of the first triad was Hoa
or Ea, who personified apparently the earth: Lord of the abyss, Lord of
the great deep, the intelligent Guide, the intelligent Fish, the Lord of
the Understanding, are some of his titles, and appear to reveal a
conception somewhat answering to that of Thoth. His symbol was a
serpent, and he was represented with a fish’s head, which connects him
with the Philistine’s god Dagon. The second triad comprised Sin, or
Urki, a moon-god, worshipped at Ur, Abraham’s city--his second name
Urki, means ‘the watcher,’ and has the same root as the Hebrew name for
‘angel’--San, the disk of the sun; and Vul, the air. Beneath these
deities in dignity, or rather perhaps in distance, came the five
planets, each representing some attribute or aspect of the deity, or
rather being itself a portion of deity endowed with a special
characteristic, and regarded as likely to be propitious to men from
being less perfect and less remote than the greater gods. These
planetary gods were called--Nebo (Mercury), the lover of light; Ishtar
(Venus), the mother of the gods; Nergal (Mars), the great hero; Bel
Merodach (Jupiter), the ruler, the judge; Nin (Saturn), the god of
strength. To these gods the chief worship of the Assyrians was paid, and
it was their majesty and strength, typifying that of the earthly king,
which Assyrian architects personified in the winged, man-headed bulls
and lions with examples of which we are familiar. The gods of the
Canaanite nations, Moloch, Baal, Chemosh, Baal-Zebub, and Thammuz, were
all of them personifications of the sun or of the sun’s rays, considered
under one aspect or another; the cruel gods, to whom human sacrifices
were offered, representing the strong, fierce summer sun, and the gentle
Thammuz being typical of the softer light of morning and of early
spring, which is killed by the fierce heat of midday and midsummer, and
mourned for by the earth till his return in the evening and in autumn.
Ashtoreth, the horned queen, symbolized by trees and worshipped in
groves, is the moon and also the evening star; but, like Isis, she seems
to gather up in herself the worship of the feminine principle in nature.
The Canaanites represented their gods in the temples by symbols instead
of by sculptured figures. An upright stone, either an aerolite or a
precious stone (as in the case of the great emerald kept in the shrine
of the Temple of Baal-Melcarth at Tyre), symbolized the sun and the
masculine element in nature; while the feminine element was figured
under the semblance of a grove of trees, the Ashara, sometimes
apparently a grove outside the temple, and sometimes a mimic grove kept
within.
There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another and perhaps a
more ancient and more metaphysical conception of God worshipped by all
the Semitic peoples of Asia. His name, Il or El, appears to have been
for Chaldæans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes of
the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, the generic
name for God; and his worship was limited to a distant awful
recognition, unprofaned by the rites and sacrifices wherein the
nature-gods were approached. Il became a concealed, distant deity, too
far off for worship, and too great to be touched by the concerns of men,
among those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew to be
concealers instead of revealers of the Divine; while to the chosen
people the name acquired ever new significance, as the voice of
inspiration unfolded the attributes of the Eternal Father to His
children.
This sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites is, it must be
owned, very barren in incident and character. It presents, indeed, no
more than a shadowy hierarchy of gods and heroes, through whose thin
personalities the shapes of natural objects loom with obtrusive
clearness. They may serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way
through the mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also be
remembered that we have not touched upon the later more ornamented
stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that of the death and
dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy Typhon, and the recovery of his
body, and his return to life through the instrumentality of Isis and
Horus.