PART I. THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT.

Lecture I. Introduction.

It was with a considerable amount of diffidence that I accepted the

invitation to deliver a course of lectures before this University, in

accordance with the terms of Lord Gifford’s bequest. Not only is the

subject of them a wide and comprehensive one; it is one, moreover, which

is full of difficulties. The materials upon which the lectures must be

based are almost entirely monumental: they consist of sculptures and

paintings, of objects buried with the dead or found among the ruins of

temples, and, above all, of texts written in languages and characters

which only a century ago were absolutely unknown. How fragmentary and

mutilated such materials must be, I need hardly point out. The Egyptian or

Babylonian texts we possess at present are but a tithe of those which once

existed, or even of those which will yet be discovered. Indeed, so far as

the Babylonian texts are concerned, a considerable proportion of those

which have already been stored in the museums of Europe and America are

still undeciphered, and the work of thoroughly examining them will be the

labour of years. And of those which have been copied and translated, the

imperfections are great. Not infrequently a text is broken just where it

seemed about to throw light on some problem of religion or history, or

where a few more words were needed in order to explain the sense. Or

again, only a single document may have survived to us out of a long

series, like a single chapter out of a book, leading us to form a wholly

wrong idea of the author’s meaning and the object of the work he had

written or compiled. We all know how dangerous it is to explain a passage

apart from its context, and to what erroneous conclusions such a practice

is likely to lead.

And yet it is with such broken and precarious materials that the student

of the religions of the past has to work. Classical antiquity can give us

but little help. In the literary age of Greece and Rome the ancient

religions of Babylonia and Egypt had passed into their dotage, and the

conceptions on which they were founded had been transformed or forgotten.

What was left of them was little more than an empty and unintelligible

husk, or even a mere caricature. The gods, in whose name the kings of

Assyria had gone forth to conquer, and in whose honour Nebuchadrezzar had

reared the temples and palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into the

patrons of a system of magic; the priests, who had once made and unmade

the lords of the East, had become “Chaldæan” fortune-tellers, and the

religion and science of Babylonia were remembered only for their

connection with astrology. The old tradition had survived in Egypt with

less apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of religious

belief and teaching was more apparent than real, external rather than

internal; and though the Ptolemies and early Roman emperors rebuilt the

temples on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the

dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names they

could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing

up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit

and life had fled.

Both in Egypt and in Babylonia, therefore, we are thrown back upon the

monumental texts which the excavator has recovered from the soil, and the

decipherer has pieced together with infinite labour and patience. At every

step we are brought face to face with the imperfections of the record, and

made aware how much we have to read into the story, how scanty is the

evidence, how disconnected are the facts. The conclusions we form must to

a large extent be theoretical and provisional, liable to be revised and

modified with the acquisition of fresh material or a more skilful

combination of what is already known. We are compelled to interpret the

past in the light of the present, to judge the men of old by the men of

to-day, and to explain their beliefs in accordance with what seem to us

the common and natural opinions of civilised humanity.

I need not point out how precarious all such attempts must necessarily be.

There is nothing harder than to determine the real character of the

religion of a people, even when the religion is still living. We may

describe its outward characteristics, though even these are not

unfrequently a matter of dispute; but the religious ideas themselves,

which constitute its essence, are far more difficult to grasp and define.

Indeed, it is not always easy for the individual himself to state with

philosophical or scientific precision the religious beliefs which he may

hold. Difficult as it is to know what another man believes, it is

sometimes quite as difficult to know exactly what one believes one’s self.

Our religious ideas and beliefs are a heritage which has come to us from

the past, but which has also been influenced and modified by the

experiences we have undergone, by the education we have received, and,

above all, by the knowledge and tendencies of our age. We seldom attempt

to reduce them into a harmonious whole, to reconcile their

inconsistencies, or to fit them into a consistent system. Beliefs which go

back, it may be, to the ages of barbarism, exist with but little change by

the side of others which are derived from the latest revelations of

physical science; and our conceptions of a spiritual world are not

unfrequently an ill-assorted mixture of survivals from a time when the

universe was but a small tract of the earth’s surface, with an

extinguisher-like firmament above it, and of the ideas which astronomy has

given us of illimitable space, with its millions of worlds.

If it is difficult to understand and describe with accuracy the religions

which are living in our midst, how much more difficult must it be to

understand and describe the religions that have gone before them, even

when the materials for doing so are at hand! We are constantly told that

the past history of the particular forms of religion which we profess, has

been misunderstood and misconceived; that it is only now, for example,

that the true history of early Christianity is being discovered and

written, or that the motives and principles underlying the Reformation are

being rightly understood. The earlier phases in the history of a religion

soon become unintelligible to a later generation. If we would understand

them, we must have not only the materials in which the record of them has

been, as it were, embodied, but also the seeing eye and the sympathetic

mind which will enable us to throw ourselves back into the past, to see

the world as our forefathers saw it, and to share for a time in their

beliefs. Then and then only shall we be able to realise what the religion

of former generations actually meant, what was its inner essence as well

as its outer form.

When, instead of examining and describing a past phase in the history of a

still existing form of faith, we are called upon to examine and describe a

form of faith which has wholly passed away, our task becomes infinitely

greater. We have no longer the principle of continuity and development to

help us; it is a new plant that we have to study, not the same plant in an

earlier period of its growth. The fundamental ideas which form, as it

were, its environment, are strange to us; the polytheism of Babylonia, or

the animal-worship of Egypt, transports us to a world of ideas which

stands wholly apart from that wherein we move. It is difficult for us to

put ourselves in the place of those who saw no underlying unity in the

universe, no single principle to which it could all be referred, or who

believed that the dumb animals were incarnations of the divine. And yet,

until we can do so, the religions of the two great cultured nations of the

ancient world, the pioneers of the civilisation we enjoy to-day, will be

for us a hopeless puzzle, a labyrinth without a clue.

Before that clue can be found, we must divest ourselves of our

_modernism_. We must go back in thought and sympathy to the old Orient,

and forget, so far as is possible, the intervening ages of history and

development, and the mental and moral differences between the East and the

West. I say so far as is possible, for the possibility is relative only.

No man can shake off the influences of the age and country of which he is

the child; we cannot undo our training and education, or root out the

inherited instincts with which we were born. We cannot put back the hand

of time, nor can the Ethiopian change his skin. All we can do is to

suppress our own prejudices, to rid ourselves of baseless assumptions and

prepossessions, and to interpret such evidence as we have honestly and

literally. Above all, we must possess that power of sympathy, that

historical imagination, as it is sometimes called, which will enable us to

realise the past, and to enter, in some degree, into its feelings and

experiences.

The first fact which the historian of religion has to bear in mind is,

that religion and morality are not necessarily connected together. The

recent history of religion in Western Europe, it is true, has made it

increasingly difficult for us to understand this fact, especially in days

when systems of morality have been put forward as religions in themselves.

But between religion and morality there is not necessarily any close tie.

Religion has to do with a power outside ourselves, morality with our

conduct one to another. The civilised nations of the world have doubtless

usually regarded the power that governs the universe as a moral power, and

have consequently placed morality under the sanction of religion. But the

power may also be conceived of as non-moral, or even as immoral; the blind

law of destiny, to which, according to Greek belief, the gods themselves

were subject, was necessarily non-moral; while certain Gnostic sects

accounted for the existence of evil by the theory that the creator-god was

imperfect, and therefore evil in his nature. Indeed, the cruelties

perpetrated by what we term nature have seemed to many so contrary to the

very elements of moral law, as to presuppose that the power which permits

and orders them is essentially immoral. Zoroastrianism divided the world

between a god of good and a god of evil, and held that, under the present

dispensation at all events, the god of evil was, on the whole, the

stronger power.

It is strength rather than goodness that primitive man admires, worships,

and fears. In the struggle for existence, at any rate in its earlier

stages, physical strength plays the most important part. The old

instinctive pride of strength which enabled our first ancestors to battle

successfully against the forces of nature and the beasts of the forest,

still survives in the child and the boy. The baby still delights to pull

off the wings and legs of the fly that has fallen into its power; and the

hero of the playground is the strongest athlete, and not the best scholar

or the most virtuous of schoolboys. A sudden outbreak of political fury

like that which characterised the French Revolution shows how thin is the

varnish of conventional morality which covers the passions of civilised

man, and Christian Europe still makes the battlefield its court of final

appeal. Like the lower animals, man is still governed by the law which

dooms the weaker to extinction or decay, and gives the palm of victory to

the strong. In spite of all that moralists may say and preach, power and

not morality still governs the world.

We need not wonder, therefore, that in the earliest forms of religion we

find little or no traces of the moral element. What we term morality was,

in fact, a slow growth. It was the necessary result of life in a

community. As long as men lived apart one from the other, there was little

opportunity for its display or evolution. But with the rise of a community

came also the development of a moral law. In its practical details,

doubtless, that law differed in many respects from the moral law which we

profess to obey to-day. It was only by slow degrees that the sacredness of

the marriage tie or of family life, as we understand it, came to be

recognised. Among certain tribes of Esquimaux there is still promiscuous

intercourse between the two sexes; and wherever Mohammedanism extends,

polygamy, with its attendant degradation of the woman, is permitted. On

the other hand, there are still tribes and races in which polyandry is

practised, and the child has consequently no father whom it can rightfully

call its own. Until the recent conversion of the Fijians to Christianity,

it was considered a filial duty for the sons to kill and devour their

parents when they had become too old for work; and in the royal family of

Egypt, as among the Ptolemies who entered on its heritage, the brother was

compelled by law and custom to marry his sister. Family morality, in fact,

if I may use such an expression, has been slower in its development than

communal morality: it was in the community and in the social relations of

men to one another that the ethical sense was first developed, and it was

from the community that the newly-won code of morals was transferred to

the family. Man recognised that he was a moral agent in his dealings with

the community to which he belonged, long before he recognised it as an

individual.

Religion, however, has an inverse history. It starts from the individual,

it is extended to the community. The individual must have a sense of a

power outside himself, whom he is called upon to worship or propitiate,

before he can rise to the idea of tribal gods. The fetish can be adored,

the ancestor addressed in prayer, before the family has become the tribe,

or promiscuous intercourse has passed into polygamy.

The association of morality and religion, therefore, is not only not a

necessity, but it is of comparatively late origin in the history of

mankind. Indeed, the union of the two is by no means complete even yet.

Orthodox Christianity still maintains that correctness of belief is at

least as important as correctness of behaviour, and it is not so long ago

that men were punished and done to death, not for immoral conduct, but for

refusing to accept some dogma of the Church. In the eyes of the Creator,

the correct statement of abstruse metaphysical questions was supposed to

be of more importance than the fulfilment of the moral law.

The first step in the work of bringing religion and morality together was

to place morality under the sanction of religion. The rules of conduct

which the experiences of social life had rendered necessary or

advantageous were enforced by an appeal to the terrors of religious

belief. Practices which sinned against the code of social morality were

put under the ban of the gods and their ministers, and those who ventured

to adopt them were doomed to destruction in this world and the next. The

_tapu_, which was originally confined to reserving certain places and

objects for the use of the divine powers, was invoked for the protection

of ethical laws, or to punish violations of them, and the curse of heaven

was called down not only upon the enemy of the tribe, but upon the enemy

of the moral code of the tribe as well.

Religion thus became tribal as well as personal; the religious instinct in

the individual clothed itself with the forms of social life, and the

religious conceptions which had gathered round the life of the family were

modified and transferred to the life of the community. It was no longer

only a feeling of fear or reverence on the part of the individual which

made him bow down before the terrors of the supernatural and obey its

behests; to this were now added all the ties and associations connected

with the life of a tribe. The ethical element was joined to the religious,

and what has been termed the religious instinct or consciousness in the

individual man attached itself to the rules and laws of ethical conduct.

But the attachment was, in the first instance, more or less accidental;

long ages had to pass before the place of the two elements, the ethical

and religious, was reversed, and the religious sanction of the ethical

code was exchanged for an ethical sanction of religion. It needed

centuries of training before a Christian poet could declare: “He can’t be

wrong whose life is in the right.”

There is yet another danger against which we must guard when dealing with

the religions of the past; it is that of confusing the thoughts and

utterances of individuals with the common religious beliefs of the

communities in which they lived. We are for the most part dependent on

literary materials for our knowledge of the faiths of the ancient world,

and consequently the danger of which I speak is one to which the historian

of religion is particularly exposed. But it must be remembered that a

literary writer is, by the very fact of his literary activity, different

from the majority of his contemporaries, and that this difference in the

ages before the invention of printing was greater than it is to-day. He

was not only an educated man; he was also a man of exceptional culture. He

was a man whose thoughts and sayings were considered worthy of being

remembered, who could think for himself, and whose thoughts were listened

to by others. His abilities or genius raised him above the ordinary level;

his ideas, accordingly, could not be the ideas of the multitude about him,

nor could he, from the nature of the case, express them in the same way.

The poets or theologians of Egypt and Babylonia were necessarily original

thinkers, and we cannot, therefore, expect to find in their writings

merely a reflection of the beliefs or superstitions of those among whom

they lived.

To reconstruct the religion of Egypt from the literary works of which a

few fragments have come down to us, would be like reconstructing the

religion of this country in the last century from a few tattered pages of

Hume or Burns, of Dugald Stewart or Sir Walter Scott. The attempts to show

that ancient Egyptian religion was a sublime monotheism, or an enlightened

pantheism which disguised itself in allegories and metaphors, have their

origin in a confusion between the aspirations of individual thinkers and

the actual religion of their time. There are indeed literary monuments

rescued from the wreck of ancient Egyptian culture which embody the

highest and most spiritual conceptions of the Godhead, and use the

language of the purest monotheism. But such monuments represent the

beliefs and ideas of the cultured few rather than of the Egyptians as a

whole, or even of the majority of the educated classes. They set before us

the highest point to which the individual Egyptian could attain in his

spiritual conceptions—not the religion of the day as it was generally

believed and practised. To regard them as representing the popular faith

of Egypt, would be as misleading as to suppose that Socrates or Plato were

faithful exponents of Athenian religion.

That this view of the literary monuments of ancient Egypt is correct, can

be shown from two concrete instances. On the one side, there is the

curious attempt made by Amon-hotep IV., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, to

revolutionise Egyptian religion, and to replace the old religion of the

State by a sort of monotheistic pantheism. The hymns addressed to the

solar disk—the visible symbol of the new God—breathe an exalted

spirituality, and remind us of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures. “O God,”

we read in one of them. “O God, who in truth art the living one, who

standest before our eyes; thou created that which was not, thou formest it

all”; “We also have come into being through the word of thy mouth.”

But all such language was inspired by a cult which was not Egyptian, and

which the Egyptians themselves regarded as an insult to their national

deity, and a declaration of war against the priesthood of Thebes. Hardly

was its royal patron consigned to his tomb when the national hatred burst

forth against those who still adhered to the new faith; the temple and

city of the solar disk were levelled with the ground, and the body of the

heretic Pharaoh himself was torn in pieces. Had the religious productions

of the court of Amon-hotep IV. alone survived to us, we should have formed

out of them a wholly false picture of the religion of ancient Egypt, and

ascribed to it doctrines which were held only by a few individuals at only

one short period of its history,—doctrines, moreover, which were detested

and bitterly resented by the orthodox adherents of the old creeds.

My other example is taken from a class of literature which exists wherever

there is a cultured society and an ancient civilisation. It is the

literature of scepticism, of those minds who cannot accept the popular

notions of divinity, who are critically contemptuous of time-honoured

traditions, and who find it impossible to reconcile the teaching of the

popular cult with the daily experiences of life. It is not so much that

they deny or oppose the doctrines of the official creed, as that they

ignore them. Their scepticism is that of Epicurus rather than of the

French encyclopædists. Let the multitude believe in its gods and its

priests, so long as they themselves are not forced to do the same.

Egypt had its literary sceptics like Greece or Rome. Listen, for instance,

to the so-called Song of the Harper, written as long ago as the age of the

Eleventh Dynasty, somewhere about 2500 B.C. This is how a part of it runs

in Canon Rawnsley’s metrical translation, which faithfully preserves the

spirit and sense of the original—(1)

“What is fortune? say the wise.

Vanished are the hearths and homes;

What he does or thinks, who dies,

None to tell us comes

Eat and drink in peace to-day,

When you go your goods remain;

He who fares the last long way,

Comes not back again.”

The Song of the Harper is not the only fragment of the sceptical

literature of Egypt which we possess. At a far later date, a treatise was

written in which, under the thinly-veiled form of a fable the dogmas of

the national faith were controverted and overthrown. It takes the form of

a dialogue between an Ethiopian cat—the representative of all that was

orthodox and respectable in Egyptian society—and a jackal, who is made the

mouthpiece of heretical unbelief.(2) But it is clear that the sympathies

of the author are with the sceptic rather than with the believer; and it

is the cat and not the jackal who is worsted in argument. In this first

controversy between authority and reason, authority thus comes off second

best, and just as Epicurus has a predecessor in the author of the Song of

the Harper, so Voltaire has a predecessor in the author of the dialogue.

Here, again, it is obvious that if only these two specimens of Egyptian

theological literature had been preserved, we should have carried away

with us a very erroneous idea of ancient Egyptian belief—or unbelief. Who

could have imagined that the Egyptians were a people who had elaborated a

minutely-detailed description of the world beyond the grave, and who

believed more intensely perhaps than any other people has done either

before or since in a future life? Who could have supposed that their

religion inculcated a belief not only in the immortality of the soul or

spirit, but in the resurrection of the body as well; and that they painted

the fields of the blessed to which they looked forward after death as a

happier and a sunnier Egypt, a land of light and gladness, of feasting and

joy? We cannot judge what Egyptian religion was like merely from the

writings of some of its literary men, or build upon them elaborate

theories as to what priest and layman believed. In dealing with the

fragments of Egyptian literature, we must ever bear in mind that they

represent, not the ideas of the mass of the people, but the conceptions of

the cultured few.

But there is still another error into which we may fall. It is that of

attaching too literal a meaning to the language of theology. The error is

the natural result of the reaction from the older methods of

interpretation, which found allegories in the simplest of texts, and

mystical significations in the plainest words. The application of the

scientific method to the records of the past brought with it a recognition

that an ancient writer meant what he said quite as much as a writer of

to-day, and that to read into his language the arbitrary ideas of a modern

hierophant might be an attractive pastime, but not a serious occupation.

Before we can hope to understand the literature of the past, we must try

to discover what is its literal and natural meaning, unbiassed by

prejudices or prepossessions, or even by the authority of great names.

Theologians have been too fond of availing themselves of the ambiguities

of language, and of seeing in a text more than its author either knew or

dreamt of. Unless we have express testimony to the contrary, it is no more

permissible to find parables and metaphorical expressions in an old

Egyptian book than it is in the productions of the modern press.

But, on the other hand, it is possible to press this literalism too far.

Language, it has been said, is a storehouse of faded metaphors; and if

this is true of language in general, it is still more true of theological

language. We can understand the spiritual and the abstract only through

the help of the material; the words by which we denote them must be drawn,

in the first instance, from the world of the senses. Just as in the world

of sense itself the picture that we see or the music that we hear comes to

us through the nerves of sight and hearing, so all that we know or believe

of the moral and spiritual world is conveyed to us through sensuous and

material channels. Thought is impossible without the brain through which

it can act, and we cannot convey to others or even to ourselves our

conceptions of right and wrong, of beauty and goodness, without having

recourse to analogies from the world of phenomena, to metaphor and

imagery, to parable and allegory. What is “conception” itself but a

“grasping with both hands,” or “parable” but a “throwing by the side of”?

If we would deal with the spiritual and moral, we _must_ have recourse to

metaphorical forms of speech. A religion is necessarily built up on a

foundation of metaphor.

To interpret such metaphors in their purely natural sense would therefore

land us in gross error. Unfortunately, modern students of the religious

history of the past have not always been careful to avoid doing so. Misled

by the fact that language often enshrines old beliefs and customs which

have otherwise passed out of memory, they have forgotten that a metaphor

is not necessarily a survival, or a survival a metaphor. In the

hieroglyphic texts discovered in the Pyramids of the sixth Egyptian

dynasty, Sahu or Orion, the huntsman of the skies, is said to eat the

great gods in the morning, the lesser gods at noon and the smaller ones at

night, roasting their flesh in the vast ovens of the heavens; and it has

been hastily concluded that this points to a time when the ancestors of

the historical Egyptians actually did eat human flesh. It would be just as

reasonable to conclude from the language of the Eucharistic Office that

the members of the Christian Church were once addicted to cannibalism.

Eating and drinking are very obvious metaphors, and there are even

languages in which the word “to eat” has acquired the meaning “to

exist”.(3) I remember hearing of a tribe who believed that we worshipped a

lamb because of the literal translation into their language of the phrase,

“O Lamb of God.” Theology is full of instances in which the language it

uses has been metaphorical from the outset, and the endeavour to interpret

it with bald literality, and to see in it the fossilised ideas and

practices of the past, would end in nothing but failure. Christianity is

not the only religion which has consciously employed parable for

inculcating the truths it professes to teach. Buddhism has done the same,

and the “Parables of Buddhagosha” have had a wider influence than all the

other volumes of the Buddhist Canon.

Survivals there undoubtedly are in theological language as in all other

forms of language, and one of the hardest tasks of the student of ancient

religion is to determine where they really exist. Is the symbolism

embodied in a word or an expression of primary or secondary origin? Was it

from the very beginning a symbol and metaphor intended to be but the

sensuous channel through which some perception of divine truth could be

conveyed to us, or does it reflect the manners and thought of an earlier

age of society, which has acquired a symbolical significance with the

lapse of centuries? When the primitive Aryan gave the Being whom he

worshipped the name of Dyaus, from a root which signified “to be bright,”

did he actually see in the bright firmament the divinity he adored, or was

the title a metaphorical one expressive only of the fact that the power

outside himself was bright and shining like the sun? The Babylonians

pictured their gods in the image of man: did Babylonian religion

accordingly begin with the worship of deified ancestors, or were the human

figures mere symbols and images denoting that the highest conception man

could form of his creator was that of a being like himself? The answer to

these questions, which it has been of late years the fashion to seek in

modern savagery, is inconclusive. It has first to be proved that modern

savagery is not due to degeneration rather than to arrested development,

and that the forefathers of the civilised nations of the ancient world

were ever on the same level as the savage of to-day. In fact the savage of

to-day is not, and cannot be, a representative of primitive man. If the

ordinary doctrine of development is right, primitive man would have known

nothing of those essentials of human life and progress of which no savage

community has hitherto been found to be destitute. He would have known

nothing of the art of producing fire, nothing of language, without which

human society would be impossible. On the other hand, if the civilised

races of mankind possessed from the outset the germs of culture and the

power to develop it, they can in no way be compared with the savages of

the modern world, who have lived, generation after generation, stationary

and unprogressive, like the beasts that perish, even though at times they

may have been in contact with a higher civilisation. To explain the

religious beliefs and usages of the Greeks and Romans from the religious

ideas and customs of Australians or Hottentots, is in most cases but

labour in vain, and to seek the origin of Semitic religion in the habits

and superstitions of low-caste Bedâwin, is like looking to the gipsies for

an explanation of European Christianity. Such a procedure is the abuse,

not the use, of the anthropological method. Folk-lore gives us a key to

the mind of the child, and of the childlike portion of society; it sheds

no light on the beginnings either of religion or of civilisation, and to

make it do so is to mistake a will-o’-the-wisp for a beacon-light. It is

once more to find “survivals” where they exist only in the mind of the

inquirer. So long as civilised society has lasted, it has contained the

ignorant as well as the learned, the fool as well as the wise man, and we

are no more justified in arguing from the ignorance of the past than we

should be in arguing from the ignorance of the present. So far as

folk-tales genuinely reflect the mind of the unlearned and childlike only,

they are of little help to the student of the religions of the ancient

civilised world.

We must, then, beware of discovering allegory and symbol where they do not

exist; we must equally beware of overlooking them where they are actually

to be found. And we must remember that, although the metaphors and

symbolism of the earlier civilisations are not likely to be those which

seem natural to the modern European, this is no reason why we should deny

the existence of them. In fact, without them religious language and

beliefs are impossible; it is only through the world of the senses that a

way lies to a knowledge of the world beyond. The conditions into which we

were born necessitate our expressing and realising our mental, moral, and

religious conceptions through sensuous imagery and similitude. Only we

must never forget that the imagery is not the same for different races or

generations of mankind.

Before concluding, I must say a few words in explanation of the title I

have given to the course of lectures I have the honour of delivering

before you. It is not my intention to give a systematic description or

analysis of the ancient religions of Egypt and Babylonia. That would

hardly be in keeping with the terms of Lord Gifford’s bequest, nor would

the details be interesting, except to a small company of specialists.

Indeed, in the case of the ancient religion of Babylonia, the details are

still so imperfect and disputed, that a discussion of them is fitted

rather for the pages of a learned Society’s journal than for a course of

lectures. What the lecturer has to do is to take the facts that have been

already ascertained, to see to what conclusions they point, and to review

the theories which they countenance or condemn. The names and number of

the gods and goddesses worshipped by the Egyptians and Babylonians is of

little moment to the scientific student of religion: what he wants to know

is the conception of the deity which underlay these manifold forms, and

the relation in which man was believed to stand to the divine powers

around him. What was it that the civilised Babylonian or Egyptian meant by

the term “god”? What was the idea or belief that lay behind the polytheism

of the popular cult, and in what respects is it marked off from the ideas

and beliefs that rule the religions of our modern world? The old Egyptian,

indeed, might not have understood what we mean by “polytheism” and

“monotheism,” but would he not have already recognised the two tendencies

of thought which have found expression among us in these words? Was St.

Paul right when he declared that the old civilised nations had sought

after the God of Christianity, “if haply they might feel after Him and

find Him,” or is there an impassable gulf between the religious

conceptions of paganism and those of Christian Europe? Such are some of

the questions to whose solution I trust that the facts I have to bring

before you may contribute, in however humble a degree.

Lecture II. Egyptian Religion.

It is through its temples and tombs that ancient Egypt is mainly known to

us. It is true that the warm and rainless climate of Upper Egypt has

preserved many of the objects of daily life accidentally buried in the

ruins of its cities, and that even fragments of fragile papyrus have come

from the mounds that mark the sites of its villages and towns; but these

do not constitute even a tithe of the monuments upon which our present

knowledge of ancient Egyptian life and history has been built. It is from

the tombs and temples that we have learned almost all we now know about

the Egypt of the past. The tombs were filled with offerings to the dead

and illustrations of the daily life of the living, while their walls were

adorned with representations of the scenes at which their possessor had

been present, with the history of his life, or with invocations to the

gods. The temples were storehouses of religious lore, which was sculptured

or painted on their walls and ceilings. In fact, we owe most of our

knowledge of ancient Egypt to the gods and to the dead; and it is natural,

therefore, that the larger part of it should be concerned with religion

and the life to come.

We are thus in an exceptionally good position for ascertaining, at all

events in outline, the religious ideas of the old Egyptians, and even for

tracing their history through long periods of time. The civilisation of

Egypt goes back to a remote past, and recent discoveries have carried us

almost to its beginnings. The veil which so long covered the origin of

Egyptian culture is at last being drawn aside, and some of the most

puzzling inconsistencies in the religion, which formed so integral a part

of that culture, are being explained. We have learnt that the religion of

the Egypt which is best known to us was highly composite, the product of

different races and different streams of culture and thought; and the task

of uniting them all into a homogeneous whole was never fully completed. To

the last, Egyptian religion remained a combination of ill-assorted

survivals rather than a system, a confederation of separate cults rather

than a definite theology. Like the State, whatever unity it possessed was

given to it by the Pharaoh, who was not only a son and representative of

the sun-god, but the visible manifestation of the sun-god himself. Its

unity was thus a purely personal one: without the Pharaoh the Egyptian

State and Egyptian religion would alike have been dissolved into their

original atoms.

The Pharaonic Egyptians—the Egyptians, that is to say, who embanked the

Nile, who transformed the marsh and the desert into cultivated fields, who

built the temples and tombs, and left behind them the monuments we

associate with Egyptian culture—seem to have come from Asia; and it is

probable that their first home was in Babylonia. The race (or races) they

found in the valley of the Nile were already possessed of a certain

measure of civilisation. They were in an advanced stage of neolithic

culture; their flint tools are among the finest that have ever been made;

and they were skilled in the manufacture of vases of the hardest stone.

But they were pastoral rather than agricultural, and they lived in the

desert rather than on the river-bank. They proved no match for the

newcomers, with their weapons of copper; and, little by little, the

invading race succeeded in making itself master of the valley of the Nile,

though tradition remembered the fierce battles which were needed before

the “smiths” who followed Horus could subjugate the older population in

their progress from south to north.

How far the invaders themselves formed a single race is still uncertain.

Some scholars believe that, besides the Asiatics who entered Egypt from

the south, crossing the Red Sea and so marching through the eastern desert

to the Nile, there were other Asiatics who came overland from Mesopotamia,

and made their way into the Delta across the isthmus of Suez. Of this

overland invasion, however, I can myself see no evidence; so far as our

materials at present allow us to go, the Egyptians of history were

composed, at most, of three elements, the Asiatic invaders from the south,

and two older races, which we may term aboriginal. One of them Professor

Petrie is probably right in maintaining to be Libyan.(4)

We thus have at least three different types of religious belief and

practice at the basis of Egyptian religion, corresponding with the three

races which together made up the Egyptian people. Two of the types would

be African; the third would be Asiatic, perhaps Babylonian. From the very

outset, therefore, we must be prepared to find divergences of religious

conception as well as divergences in rites and ceremonies. And such

divergences can be actually pointed out.(5)

The practice of embalming, for instance, is one which we have been

accustomed to think peculiarly characteristic of ancient Egypt. It is

referred to in the Book of Genesis, and described by classical writers.

There are many people whose acquaintance with the old Egyptians is

confined to the fact that when they died their bodies were made into

mummies. It is from the wrappings of the mummy that most of the small

amulets and scarabs have come which fill so large a space in collections

of Egyptian antiquities, as well as many of the papyri which have given us

an insight into the literature of the past. We have been taught to believe

that from times immemorial the Egyptians mummified their dead, and that

the practice was connected with an equally immemorial faith in the

resurrection of the dead; and yet recent excavations have made it clear

that such a belief is erroneous. Mummification was never universal in

Egypt, and there was a time when it was not practised at all. It was

unknown to the prehistoric populations whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found

on their arrival in the country; and among the Pharaonic Egyptians

themselves it seems to have spread only slowly. Few traces of it have been

met with before the age of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, if, indeed, any

have been met with at all.

But, as we shall see hereafter, the practice of mummification was closely

bound up with a belief in the resurrection of the dead. The absence of it

accordingly implies that this belief was either non-existent, or, at all

events, did not as yet occupy a prominent place in the Egyptian creed.

Like embalming, it must have been introduced by the Pharaonic Egyptians;

it was not until the older races of the country had been absorbed by their

conquerors that mummification became general, along with the religious

ideas that were connected with it. Before the age of the Eighteenth

Dynasty it seems to have been practically confined to the court and the

official priesthood.

On the other hand, one at least of the prehistoric races appears to have

practised secondary burial. The skeletons discovered in its graves have

been mutilated in an extraordinary manner. The skull, the legs, the arms,

the feet, and the hands have been found dissevered from the trunk; even

the backbone itself is sometimes broken into separate portions; and there

are cases in which the whole skeleton is a mere heap of dismembered bones.

But, in spite of this dismemberment, the greatest care has been taken to

preserve the separate fragments, which are often placed side by side. An

explanation of the dismemberment has been sought in cannibalism, but

cannibals do not take the trouble to collect the bones of their victims

and bury them with all the marks of respect; moreover, the bones have not

been gnawed except in one or two examples, where wild beasts rather than

man must have been at work. It seems evident, therefore, that the race

whose dismembered remains have thus been found in so many of the

prehistoric cemeteries of Egypt, allowed the bodies of the dead to remain

unburied until the flesh had been stripped from their bones by the birds

and beasts of prey, and that it was only when this had been done that the

sun-bleached bones were consigned to the tomb. Similar practices still

prevail in certain parts of the world; apart from the Parsi “towers of

silence,” it is still the custom in New Guinea to leave the corpse among

the branches of a tree until the flesh is entirely destroyed.(6)

Between mummification and secondary burial no reconciliation is possible.

The conceptions upon which the two practices rest are contradictory one to

the other. In the one case every effort is made to keep the body intact

and to preserve the flesh from decay; in the other case the body is cast

forth to the beasts of the desert and the fowls of the air, and its very

skeleton allowed to be broken up. A people who practised secondary burial

can hardly have believed in a future existence of the body itself. Their

belief must rather have been in the existence of that shadowy, vapour-like

form, comparable to the human breath, in which so many races of mankind

have pictured to themselves the imperishable part of man. It was the misty

ghost, seen in dreams or detected at night amid the shadows of the forest,

that survived the death of the body; the body itself returned to the earth

from whence it had sprung.

This prehistoric belief left its traces in the official religion of later

Egypt. The _Ba_ or “Soul,” with the figure of a bird and the head of a

man, is its direct descendant. As we shall see, the conception of the _Ba_

fits but ill with that of the mummy, and the harmonistic efforts of a

later date were unable altogether to hide the inner contradiction that

existed between them. The soul, which fled on the wings of a bird to the

world beyond the sky, was not easily to be reconciled with the mummified

body which was eventually to lead a life in the other world that should be

a repetition and reflection of its life in this. How the _Ba_ and the

mummy were to be united, the official cult never endeavoured to explain;

the task was probably beyond its powers. It was content to leave the two

conceptions side by side, bidding the individual believer reconcile them

as best he could.

The fact illustrates another which must always be kept in mind in dealing

with Egyptian religion. Up to the last it remained without a philosophic

system. There were, it is true, certain sides of it which were reduced to

systems, certain parts of the official creed which became philosophies.

But as a whole it was a loosely-connected agglomeration of beliefs and

practices which had come down from the past, and one after the other had

found a place in the religion of the State. No attempt was ever made to

form them into a coherent and homogeneous whole, or to find a philosophic

basis upon which they all might rest. Such an idea, indeed, never occurred

to the Egyptian. He was quite content to take his religion as it had been

handed down to him, or as it was prescribed by the State; he had none of

that inner retrospection which distinguishes the Hindu, none of that

desire to know the causes of things which characterised the Greek. The

contradictions which we find in the articles of his creed never troubled

him; he never perceived them, or if he did they were ignored. He has left

to us the task of finding a philosophic basis for his faith, and of fixing

the central ideas round which it revolved; the task is a hard one, and it

is rendered the harder by the imperfection of our materials.

The Egyptian was no philosopher, but he had an immense veneration for the

past. The past, indeed, was ever before him; he could not escape from it.

Objects and monuments which would have perished in other countries were

preserved almost in their pristine freshness by the climate under which he

lived. As to-day, so too in the age of the Pharaohs, the earliest and the

latest of things jostled one another, and it was often difficult to say

which of the two looked the older. The past was preserved in a way that it

could not be elsewhere; nothing perished except by the hand of man. And

man, brought up in such an atmosphere of continuity, became intensely

conservative. Nature itself only increased the tendency. The Nile rose and

fell with monotonous regularity; year after year the seasons succeeded

each other without change; and the agriculturist was not dependent on the

variable alternations of rain and sunshine, or even of extreme heat and

cold. In Egypt, accordingly, the new grew up and was adopted without

displacing the old. It was a land to which the rule did not apply that

“the old order changeth, giving place to new.” The old order might,

indeed, change, through foreign invasion or the inventions of human

genius, but all the same it did not give place to the new. The new simply

took a place by the side of the old.

The Egyptian system of writing is a striking illustration of the fact. All

the various stages through which writing must pass, in its development out

of pictures into alphabetic letters, exist in it side by side. The

hieroglyphs can be used at once ideographically, syllabically, and

alphabetically. And what is true of Egyptian writing is true also of

Egyptian religion. The various elements out of which it arose are all

still traceable in it; none of them has been discarded, however little it

might harmonise with the elements with which it has been combined.

Religious ideas which belong to the lowest and to the highest forms of the

religious consciousness, to races of different origin and different age,

exist in it side by side.

It is true that even in organised religions we find similar combinations

of heterogeneous elements. Survivals from a distant past are linked in

them with the conceptions of a later age, and beliefs of divergent origin

have been incorporated by them into the same creed. But it is a definite

and coherent creed into which they have been embodied; the attempt has

been made to fuse them into a harmonious whole, and to explain away their

apparent divergencies and contradictions. Either the assertion is made

that the creed of the present has come down unchanged from the past, or

else it is maintained that the doctrines and rites of the past have

developed normally and gradually into those of the present.

But the Egyptian made no such endeavour. He never realised that there was

any necessity for making it. It was sufficient that a thing should have

descended to him from his ancestors for it to be true, and he never

troubled himself about its consistency with other parts of his belief. He

accepted it as he accepted the inconsistencies and inequalities of life,

without any effort to work them into a harmonious theory or form them into

a philosophic system. His religion was like his temples, in which the art

and architecture of all the past centuries of his history existed side by

side. All that the past had bequeathed to him must be preserved, if

possible; it might be added to, but not modified or destroyed.

It is curious that the same spirit has prevailed in modern Egypt. The

native never restores. If a building or the furniture within it goes to

decay, no attempt is made to mend or repair it; it is left to moulder on

in the spot where it stands, while a new building or a new piece of

furniture is set up beside it. That the new and the old should not agree

together—should, in fact, be in glaring contrast—is a matter of no moment.

This veneration for the past, which preserves without repairing or

modifying or even adapting to the surroundings of the present, is a

characteristic which is deeply engrained in the mind of the Egyptian. It

had its prior origin in the physical and climatic conditions of the

country in which he was born, and has long since become a leading

characteristic of his race.

Along with the inability to take a general view of the beliefs he held,

and to reduce them to a philosophic system, went an inability to form

abstract ideas. This inability, again, may be traced to natural causes.

Thanks to the perpetual sunshine of the valley of the Nile, the Egyptian

leads an open-air life. Except for the purpose of sleep, his house is of

little use to him, and in the summer months even his sleep is usually

taken on the roof. He thus lives constantly in the light and warmth of a

southern sun, in a land where the air is so dry and clear that the

outlines of the most distant objects are sharp and distinct, and there is

no melting of shadow into light, such as characterises our northern

climes. Everything is clear; nothing is left to the imagination; and the

sense of sight is that which is most frequently brought into play. It is

what the Egyptian sees rather than what he hears or handles that impresses

itself upon his memory, and it is through his eyes that he recognises and

remembers.

At the same time this open-air life is by no means one of leisure. The

peculiar conditions of the valley of the Nile demand incessant labour on

the part of its population. Fruitful as the soil is when once it is

watered, without water it remains a barren desert or an unwholesome marsh.

And the only source of water is the river Nile. The Nile has to be kept

within its banks, to be diverted into canals, or distributed over the

fields by irrigating machines, before a single blade of wheat can grow or

a single crop be gathered in. Day after day must the Egyptian labour,

repairing the dykes and canals, ploughing the ground, planting the seed,

and incessantly watering it; the Nile is ready to take advantage of any

relaxation of vigilance and toil, to submerge or sweep away the cultivated

land, or to deny to it the water that it needs. Of all people the Egyptian

is the most industrious; the conditions under which he has to till the

soil oblige him to be so, and to spend his existence in constant

agricultural work.

But, as I have already pointed out, this work is monotonously regular.

There are no unexpected breaks in it; no moments when a sudden demand is

made for exceptional labour. The farmer’s year is all mapped out for him

beforehand: what his forefathers have done for unnumbered centuries before

him, he too has to do almost to a day. It is steady toil, day after day,

from dawn to night, during the larger portion of the year.

This steady toil in the open air gives no opportunity for philosophic

meditation or introspective theorising. On the contrary, life for the

Egyptian _fellah_ is a very real and practical thing: he knows beforehand

what he has to do in order to gain his bread, and he has no time in which

to theorise about it. It is, moreover, his sense of sight which is

constantly being exercised. The things which he knows and remembers are

the things which he sees, and he sees them clearly in the clear sunshine

of his fields.

We need not wonder, therefore, that the ancient Egyptian should have shown

on the one hand an incapacity for abstract thought, and on the other hand

a love of visible symbols. The two, in fact, were but the reverse sides of

the same mental tendency. Symbolism, indeed, is always necessary before we

can apprehend the abstract: it is only through the sensuous symbol that we

can express the abstract thought. But the Egyptian did not care to

penetrate beyond the expression. He was satisfied with the symbol which he

could see and remember, and the result was that his religious ideas were

material rather than spiritual. The material husk, as it were, sufficed

for him, and he did not trouble to inquire too closely about the kernel

within. The soul was for him a human-headed bird, which ascended on its

wings to the heavens above; and the future world itself was but a

duplicate of the Egypt which his eyes gazed upon below.

The hieroglyphic writing was at once an illustration and an encouragement

of this characteristic of his mind. All abstract ideas were expressed in

it by symbols which he could see and understand. The act of eating was

denoted by the picture of a man with his hand to his mouth, the idea of

wickedness by the picture of a sparrow. And these symbolic pictures were

usually attached to the words they represented, even when the latter had

come to be syllabically and alphabetically spelt. Even in reading and

writing, therefore, the Egyptian was not required to concern himself

overmuch with abstract thought. The concrete symbols were ever before his

eyes, and it was their mental pictures which took the place for him of

abstract ideas.

It must, of course, be remembered that the foregoing generalisations apply

to the Egyptian people as a whole. There were individual exceptions; there

was even a class the lives of whose members were not devoted to

agricultural or other labour, and whose religious conceptions were often

spiritual and sublime. This was the class of priests, whose power and

influence increased with the lapse of time, and who eventually moulded the

official theology of Egypt. Priestly colleges arose in the great

sanctuaries of the country, and gradually absorbed a considerable part of

its land and revenues. At first the priests do not seem to have been a

numerous body, and up to the last the higher members of the hierarchy were

comparatively few. But in their hands the religious beliefs of the people

underwent modification, and even a rudimentary systematisation; the

different independent cults of the kingdom were organised and combined

together, and with this organisation came philosophic speculation and

theorising. If Professor Maspero is right, the two chief schools of

religious thought and systematising in early Egypt were at Heliopolis,

near the apex of the Delta, and Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên, in

Central Egypt. In Hermopolis the conception of creation, not by voice

merely, but even by the mere sound of the voice, was first formed and

worked out while Heliopolis was the source of that arrangement of the

deities into groups of nine which led to the identification of the gods

one with another, and so prepared the way for monotheism.(7) If Heliopolis

were indeed, as seems probable, the first home of this religious theory,

its influence upon the rest of Egypt was profound. Already in the early

part of the historical period, in the age of the Fifth and Sixth

Dynasties, when the religious texts of the Pyramids were compiled, the

scheme which placed the Ennead or group of nine at the head of the

Pantheon had been accepted throughout the country. It was the beginning of

an inevitable process of thought, which ended by resolving the deities of

the official cult into forms or manifestations one of the other, and by

landing its adherents in pantheism.

To a certain extent, therefore, the general incapacity for abstract

thought which distinguished the Egyptians did not hold good of the

priestly colleges. But even among the priests the abstract was never

entirely dissociated from the symbol. Symbolism still dominates the

profoundest thoughts and expressions of the later inscriptions; the writer

cannot free himself from the sensuous image, except perhaps in a few

individual cases. At the most, Egyptian thought cannot rise further than

the conception of “the god who has no form”—a confession in itself of

inability to conceive of what is formless. It is true that after the rise

of the Eighteenth Dynasty the deity is addressed as _Kheper zes-ef_, “that

which is self-grown,” “the self-existent”; but when we find the same

epithet applied also to plants like the balsam and minerals like

saltpetre, it is clear that it does not possess the abstract significance

we should read into it to-day. It simply expresses the conviction that the

god to whom the prayer is offered is a god who was never born in human

fashion, but who grew up of himself, like the mineral which effloresces

from the ground, or the plant which is not grown from seed. Similarly,

when it is said of him that he is “existent from the beginning,”—_kheper

em ḥat_,—or, as it is otherwise expressed, that he is “the father of the

beginning,” the phrase is less abstract than it seems at first sight to

be. The very word _kheper_ or “existent” denotes the visible universe,

while _ḥat_ or “beginning” is the hinder extremity. The phrase can be

pressed just as little as the epithet “lord of eternity,” applied to

deities whose birth and death are nevertheless asserted in the same

breath. Perhaps the most abstract conception of the divine to which the

Egyptian attained was that of “the nameless one,” since the name was

regarded as something very real and concrete, as, in fact, the essence of

that to which it belonged. To say, therefore, that a thing was nameless,

was equivalent to either denying its existence or to lifting it out of the

world of the concrete altogether.

There was a moment in the history of Egypt when an attempt was made to put

a real signification into the apparently abstract terms and phrases

addressed to the gods. The Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten, towards the close of the

Eighteenth Dynasty, appears suddenly on the scene as a royal reformer,

determined to give life and meaning to the language which had described

the supreme deity as “the sole and only god,” the absolute ruler of the

universe, who was from all eternity, and whose form was hidden from men.

But the impulse to the reform came from Asia. Khu-n-Aten’s mother was a

foreigner, and his attempt to engraft Asiatic ideas upon Egyptian

religion, or rather to substitute an Asiatic form of faith for that of his

fathers, proved a failure. The worship of the one supreme deity, whose

visible symbol was the solar disc, though enforced by persecution and by

all the power of the Pharaoh himself, hardly survived his death. Amon of

Thebes and his priesthood came victorious out of the struggle, and the

pantheistic monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was never revived. Symbolism

remained, while the abstract thought, to which that symbolism should have

been a stepping-stone, failed to penetrate into Egyptian religion. The

Egyptian continued to be content with the symbol, as his father had been

before him. But in the priestly colleges and among the higher circles of

culture it became less materialistic; while the mass of the people still

saw nothing but the symbol itself, the priests and scribes looked as it

were beyond it, and saw in the symbol the picture of some divine truth,

the outward garment in which the deity had clothed himself. What

constituted, however, the peculiarity of the Egyptian point of view was,

that this outward garment was never separated from that which it covered;

it was regarded as an integral part of the divine essence, which could no

more be dissociated from it than the surface of a statue can be

dissociated from the stone of which it is made. The educated Egyptian came

to see in the multitudinous gods of the public worship merely varying

manifestations or forms of one divine substance; but still they were

manifestations or forms visible to the senses, and apart from such forms

the divine substance had no existence. It is characteristic that the old

belief was never disavowed, that images were actually animated by the gods

or human personalities whose likeness they bore, and whom they were

expressively said to have “devoured”; indeed, the king still received the

_Sa_ or principle of immortality from contact with the statue of the god

he served; and wonder-working images, which inclined the head towards

those who asked them questions, continued to be consulted in the

temples.(8) At Dendera the soul of the goddess Hathor was believed to

descend from heaven in the form of a hawk of lapis-lazuli in order to

vivify her statue;(9) and the belief is a significant commentary on the

mental attitude of her worshippers.

One result of the Egyptian’s inability or disinclination for abstract

thought was the necessity not only of representing the gods under special

and definite forms, but even of always so thinking of them. The system of

writing, with its pictorial characters, favoured the habit; and we can

well understand how difficult the most educated scribe must have found it

to conceive of Thoth otherwise than as an ibis, or of Hathor otherwise

than as a cow. Whatever may have been the origin of the Egyptian worship

of animals, or—which is something very different—of the identification of

certain individual animals with the principal gods, its continuance was

materially assisted by the sacred writing of the scribes and the pictures

that adorned the walls of the temples. To the ordinary Egyptian, Thoth was

indeed an ibis, and the folk-lore of the great sanctuaries accordingly

described him as such.(10) But to the cultured Egyptian, also, the ibis

was his symbol; and in Egypt, as we have seen, the symbol and what is

symbolised were apt to be confounded together.

The beast-worship of Egypt excited the astonishment and ridicule of the

Greeks and Romans, and the unmeasured scorn of the Christian apologists. I

shall have to deal with it in a later lecture. For the present it is

sufficient to point out how largely it owed its continued existence to the

need for symbolism which characterised Egyptian thought, in spite of the

fact that there was another and contradictory conception which held sway

within Egyptian religion. This was the conception of the divinity of man,

which found its supreme expression in the doctrine that the Pharaoh was

the incarnation of the sun-god. It was not in the brute beast, but in man

himself, that the deity revealed himself on earth.

The origin of the conception must be sought in the early history of the

country. Egypt was not at first the united monarchy it afterwards became.

It was divided into a number of small principalities, each independent of

the other and often hostile. It is probable that in some cases the

inhabitants of these principalities did not belong to the same race; that

while in one the older population predominated, in another the Pharaonic

Egyptians held absolute sway. At all events the manners and customs of

their inhabitants were not uniform, any more than the religious beliefs

they held and the rites they practised. The god who was honoured in one

place was abhorred in another, and a rival deity set over against him.

True to its conservative principles, Egypt never forgot the existence of

these early principalities. They continued to survive in a somewhat

changed form. They became the nomes of Pharaonic Egypt, separate districts

resembling to a certain degree the States of the American Republic, and

preserving to the last their independent life and organisation. Each nome

had its own capital, its own central sanctuary, and its own prince; above

all, it had its own special god or goddess, with their attendant deities,

their college of priests, their ceremonies and their festivals. Up to the

age of the Hyksos conquest the hereditary princes of the nomes were feudal

lords, owning a qualified obedience to the Pharaoh, and furnishing him

with tribute and soldiers when called upon to do so. It was not till after

the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty that the old feudal nobility was

replaced by court officials and a bureaucracy which owed its position to

the king; and even then the descendants of the ancient princes were ever

on the watch to take advantage of the weakness of the central authority

and recover the power they had lost. Up to the last, too, the gods of the

several nomes preserved a semblance of their independent character. It was

only with the rise of the new kingdom and the accession of the Eighteenth

Dynasty that that process of fusion set in to any real purpose which

identified the various deities one with another, and transformed them into

kaleidoscopic forms of Amon or Ra. The loss of their separate and

independent character went along with the suppression of the feudal

families with whom their worship had been associated for unnumbered

generations. The feudal god and the feudal prince disappeared together:

the one became absorbed into the supreme god of the Pharaoh and his

priests, the other into a functionary of the court. It was only in the

hearts and minds of the people that Thoth remained what he had always

been, the lord and master of Hermopolis, and of Hermopolis alone.

The principalities of primitive Egypt gradually became unified into two or

three kingdoms, and eventually into two kingdoms only, those of Upper and

Lower Egypt. Recent discoveries have thrown unexpected light on this early

period of history. At one time the capital of the southern kingdom was

Nekhen, called Hierakonpolis in the Greek period, the site of which is now

represented by the ruins of Kom el-Ahmar, opposite El-Kab. Here, among the

foundations of the ancient temple, Mr. Quibell has found remains which

probably go back to an age before that of Menes and the rise of the united

Egyptian monarchy. Among them are huge vases of alabaster and granite,

which were dedicated by a certain king Besh in the year when he conquered

the people of Northern Egypt. On the other hand, on a stela now at Palermo

a list is given of kings who seem to have reigned over Northern Egypt

while the Pharaohs of Nekhen were reigning in the south.(11)

For how many centuries the two kingdoms existed side by side, sometimes in

peaceful intercourse, sometimes in hostile collision, it is impossible to

say. The fact that Egypt had once been divided into two kingdoms was never

forgotten; down to the last days of the Egyptian monarchs the Pharaoh bore

the title of “lord of the two lands,” and on his head was placed the

twofold crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Nekhen was under the protection

not only of Horus, the god of the Pharaonic Egyptians, but also of Nekheb,

the tutelary goddess of the whole of the southern land. From the Cataract

northward her dominion extended, but it was at El-Kab opposite Nekhen,

where the road from the Red Sea and the mines of the desert reached the

Nile, that her special sanctuary stood. Besh calls himself on his vases

“the son of Nekheb”; and even as late as the time of the Sixth Dynasty the

eldest son of the king was entitled “the royal son of Nekheb.”(12)

Nekheb, the vulture, was the goddess of the south, in contradistinction to

Uazit, the serpent, the goddess of the north. But in both the south and

the north the same dominant race held rule, the same customs prevailed,

and the same language was spoken. The Pharaonic Egyptians, in their

northern advance, had carried with them a common legacy of ideas and

manners. Their religious conceptions had been the same, and consequently

the general form assumed by the religious cult was similar. In spite of

local differences and the self-centred character of the numerous

independent principalities, there was, nevertheless, a family likeness

between them all. Ideas and customs, therefore, which grew up in one place

passed readily to another, and the influence of a particular local

sanctuary was easily carried beyond the limits of the district in which it

stood.

One of the most fundamental of the beliefs which the Pharaonic Egyptians

brought with them was that in the divine origin of certain individuals.

The prince who led them was not only the son of a god or goddess, he was

an incarnation of the god himself. The belief is one of the many facts

which link the Pharaonic civilisation with the culture of primitive

Babylonia. In Babylonia also the king was divine. One of the early kings

of Ur calls himself the son of a goddess, just as Besh does at Nekhen; and

the great conquerors of primeval Asia, Sargon of Akkad and his son

Naram-Sin, give themselves the title of “god” in their inscriptions; while

Naram-Sin is even invoked during his lifetime as “the god of the city of

Agadê” or Akkad. For many generations the Babylonian kings continued to

receive divine honours while they were still alive; and it was not until

after the conquest of Babylonia by a tribe of half-civilised foreigners

from the mountains of Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the

reigning king ceased to be a god. Like the doctrine of the divine right of

kings in England, which could not survive the fall of the Stuarts, the

doctrine of the divine nature of the monarch did not survive in Babylonia

the fall of the native dynasties.

In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to be invoked as a god

after his death. Chapels and priests were consecrated to his memory, and

stated sacrifices and offerings made to him. It was not necessary that the

deified prince should be the supreme sovereign, it was sufficient if he

were the head of a feudal principality. Thus, while Dungi, the supreme

sovereign of Babylonia, receives in his inscriptions the title of “god,”

his vassal Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city of

Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult lasted for many

centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in race, but most of the Babylonian kings

who were thus deified were Semites. It is therefore possible that the

deification of the ruler was of Semitic origin, and only adopted from them

by the older Sumerian population, as in the case of Gudea; it is also

possible that it was one of the consequences of that fusion of the two

races, Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later population and

culture of Babylonia. However this may be, the apotheosis of the

Babylonian king during his lifetime can be traced back as far as Sargon

and Naram-Sin, 3800 B.C. Sargon incorporated Palestine, “the land of the

Amorites,” as it was then called, into his empire, while Naram-Sin

extended his conquests to Mâgan or the Sinaitic Peninsula, thus bringing

the arms and civilisation of Babylonia to the very doors of Egypt. The

precise nature of the connection which existed between the Babylonian and

the Egyptian belief in the divinity of the ruler must be left to future

research.

In the Egyptian mind, at all events, it was a belief that was deeply

implanted. The Pharaoh was a god upon earth. Like the Incas of Peru, he

belonged to the solar race, and the blood which flowed in his veins was

the ichor of the gods. The existence of a similar belief in Peru shows how

easy it was for such a belief to grow up in regard to the leader of a

conquering people who brought with them a higher culture and the arts of

life. But it presupposes religious conceptions which, though

characteristic of Babylonia, are directly contrary to those which seem to

underlie the religion of Egypt. Among the Babylonians the gods assumed

human forms; man had been made in the likeness of the gods, and the gods

therefore were of human shape. The converse, however, was the case in

Egypt. Here the gods, with few exceptions, were conceived of as brute

beasts. Horus was the hawk, Nekheb the vulture, Uazit of Buto the deadly

uræus snake.

There is only one way of explaining the anomaly. The conception of the

gods which made them men must have come from outside, and been imposed

upon a people whose gods were the brute beasts. It must have been the

Pharaonic invaders from Asia to whom the leader they followed was an

incarnate god. Hence it was just this leader and no other who was clothed

with divinity. Hence, too, it was that the older worship of animals was

never really harmonised with the worship of the Pharaoh. The inner

contradiction which existed between the new religious conceptions remained

to the end, in spite of all the efforts of the priestly colleges to make

them agree. Religious art might represent the god with the head of a beast

or bird and the body of a man, the sacred books might teach that the deity

is unconfined by form, and so could pass at will from the body of a man

into that of a beast; but all such makeshifts could not hide the actual

fact. Between the deity who is human and the deity who is bestial no true

reconciliation is possible.

We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh back to Asia, and

the Asiatic element in the Egyptian population. The Pharaonic conquerors

of the valley of the Nile were those “followers of Horus” who worshipped

their leader as a god. It was a god in human form who had led them to

victory, and Horus accordingly continued to be represented as a man, even

though the symbolism of the hieroglyphs united with the creed of the

prehistoric races of Egypt in giving him the head of a hawk.

At first the ruler of each of the small kingdoms into which prehistoric

Egypt was divided, was honoured as a god, like Gudea in Babylonia. When

the kingdoms became, first, vassal principalities under a paramount lord,

and then nomes, the old tradition was still maintained. Divine titles were

given to the nomarchs even in the later times of the united monarchy, and

after their death worship continued to be paid to them.(13) Christian

writers tell us how at Anabê particular individuals were regarded as gods,

to whom offerings were accordingly brought; and Ptah, the tutelary deity

of Memphis, was pictured as a man in the wrappings of a mummy, while to

Anhur of This the human figure was assigned.

With the coalescence of the smaller principalities into two kingdoms, the

deification of the ruler was confined within narrower bounds. But for that

very reason it became more absolute and intense. The supreme sovereign,

the Pharaoh as we may henceforth call him, was a veritable god on earth.

To his subjects he was the source, not only of material benefits, but of

spiritual blessings as well. He was “the good god,” the beneficent

dispenser of all good things.(14) The power of life and death was in his

hand, and rebellion against him was rebellion against the gods. The blood

that flowed in his veins was the same as that which flowed in the veins of

the gods; it was even communicated to him from time to time by his divine

brethren; and the bas-reliefs of a later age, when the traditional belief

had become little more than a symbolical allegory, still depict him with

his back towards the statue of the god, who is transfusing the ichor of

heaven through his veins.(15)

Menes, the king of Upper Egypt, first united under one sceptre the two

kingdoms of the Nile. The divinity which had hitherto been shared between

the Pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt now passed in all it fulness to him.

He became the visible god of Egypt, just as Sargon or Naram-Sin was the

visible god of Akkad. All the attributes of divinity belonged to him, as

they were conceived of by his subjects, and from him they passed to his

successors. Legitimacy of birth was reckoned through the mother, and

through the mother accordingly the divine nature of the Pharaoh was handed

on. Only those who had been born of a princess of the royal family could

be considered to possess it in all its purity; and where this title was

wanting, it was necessary to assume the direct intervention of a god. The

mother of Amon-hotep III. was of Asiatic origin; we read, therefore, on

the walls of the temple of Luxor, that he was born of a virgin and the god

of Thebes. Alexander, the conqueror of Egypt, was a Macedonian; it was

needful, accordingly, that he should be acknowledged as a son by the god

of the oasis of Ammon.(16)

But such consequences of the old Egyptian belief in the incarnation of the

deity in man are leading us away into a field of investigation which will

have to be traversed in a future lecture. For the present, it is

sufficient to keep two facts steadily before the mind: on the one side,

the old Egyptian belief in the divinity of the brute beast; on the other,

the equally old belief in the divinity of man. The two beliefs are not

really to be harmonised one with the other; they were, in fact, derived

from different elements in the Egyptian population; but, with his usual

conservative instinct and avoidance of abstract thought, the Egyptian of

later days co-ordinated them together, and closed his eyes to their actual

incompatibility.

Lecture III. The Imperishable Part Of Man And The Other World.

It has sometimes been asserted by travellers and ethnologists, that tribes

exist who are absolutely without any idea of God. It will usually be found

that such assertions mean little more than that they are without any idea

of what we mean by God: even the Zulus, who saw in a reed the creator of

the world,(17) nevertheless believed that the world had been created by a

power outside themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race of

man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in a power of the kind,

or in a world which is separate from the visible world around us;

statements to the contrary generally rest on ignorance or misconception.

The very fact that the savage dreams, and gives to his dreams the reality

of his waking moments, brings with it a belief in what, for the want of a

better term, I will call “another world.”

This other world, it must be remembered, is material, as material as the

“heavenly Jerusalem” to which so many good Christians have looked forward

even in our own day. The savage has no experience of anything else than

material existence, and he cannot, therefore, rise to the conception of

what we mean by the spiritual, even if he were capable of forming so

abstract an idea. His spiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not

only to be interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols, but

identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The Latin _anima_ meant

“breath” before it meant “the soul.”

This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual has lingered long

in the human mind; indeed, it is questionable whether, as long as we are

human, we shall ever shake ourselves wholly free from it. The greater is

naturally its dominance the further we recede in history. There is

“another world,” but it is a world strangely like our own.

Closely connected with this conception of “another world” is the

conception which man forms concerning his own nature. There are few races

of mankind among whom we do not find in one shape or another the belief in

a second self. Sometimes this second self is in all respects a reflection

and image of the living self, like the images of those we see in our

dreams; and it is more than probable that dreams first suggested it.

Sometimes it is a mere speck of grey vapour, which may owe its origin to

the breath which issues from the mouth and seems to forsake it at death,

or to the misty forms seen after nightfall by the savage in the gloom of

the forest and by the edge of the morass. At times it is conceived of as a

sort of luminous gas or a phosphorescent flash of light, such as is

emitted by decaying vegetation in a damp soil. Or, again, it may be

likened to the bird that flies to heaven, to the butterfly which hovers

from flower to flower, or even to insects like the grasshopper which hop

along the ground. But however it may be envisaged, it is at once

impalpable and material, something that can be perceived by the senses and

yet eludes the grasp.

The Egyptian theory of the nature of man in the historical age of the

nation was very complicated. Man was made up of many parts, each of which

was capable of living eternally. The belief in his composite character was

due to the composite character of the people as described in the last

lecture, added to that conservative tendency which prevented them from

discarding or even altering any part of the heritage of the past. Some at

least of the elements which went “to the making of man” were derived from

different elements in the population. They had been absorbed, or rather

co-ordinated, in the State religion, with little regard to their mutual

compatibility and with little effort to reconcile them. Hence it is

somewhat difficult to distinguish them all one from another; indeed, it is

a task which no Egyptian theologian even attempted; and when we find the

list of them given in full, it is doubtless to secure that no component

part of the individual should be omitted, the name of which had been

handed down from the generations of old.

There were, however, certain component parts which were clearly defined,

and which occupied an important place in the religious ideas of Egypt.

Foremost amongst these was the _Ka_ or “Double.” Underneath the conception

of the Ka lay a crude philosophy of the universe. The Ka corresponded with

the shadow in the visible world. Like the shadow which cannot be detached

from the object, so, too, the Ka or Double is the reflection of the object

as it is conceived of in the mind. But the Egyptian did not realise that

it was only a product of the mind. For him it was as real and material as

the shadow itself; indeed, it was much more material, for it had an

independent existence of its own. It could be separated from the object of

which it was the facsimile and presentment, and represent it elsewhere.

Nay, more than this, it was what gave life and form to the object of which

it was the image; it constituted, in fact, its essence and personality.

Hence it was sometimes interchanged with the “Name” which, in the eyes of

the Egyptian, was the essence of the thing itself, without which the thing

could not exist. In a sense the Ka was the spiritual reflection of an

object, but it was a spiritual reflection which had a concrete form.

The “ideas” of Plato were the last development of the Egyptian doctrine of

the Ka. They were the archetypes after which all things have been made,

and they are archetypes which are at once abstract and concrete. Modern

philosophers have transformed them into the thoughts of God, which realise

themselves in concrete shape. But to the ancient Egyptian the concrete

side of his conception was alone apparent. That the Ka was a creation of

his own mind never once occurred to him. It had a real and substantial

existence in the world of gods and men, even though it was not visible to

the outward senses. Everything that he knew or thought of had its double,

and he never suspected that it was his own act of thought which brought it

into being.

It was symbolism again that was to blame. Once more the symbol was

confused with that for which it stood, and the abstract was translated

into the concrete. The abstract idea of personality became a substantial

thing, to which all the attributes of substantial objects were attached.

Like the “Name,” which was a force with a concrete individuality of its

own, the Ka was as much an individual entity as the angels of Christian

belief.

Between it and the object or person to which it belonged, there was the

same relation as exists between the conception and the word. The one

presupposed the other. Until the person was born, his Ka had no existence;

while, on the other hand, it was the Ka to which his existence was owed.

But once it had come into being the Ka was immortal, like the word which,

once formed, can exist independently of the thought which gave it birth.

As soon as it left the body, the body ceased to live, and did not recover

life and consciousness until it was reunited with its Ka. But while the

body remained thus lifeless and unconscious, the Ka led an independent

existence, conscious and alive.

This existence, however, was, in a sense, quite as material as that of the

body had been upon earth. The Ka needed to be sustained by food and drink.

Hence came the offerings which were made to the dead as well as to the

gods, each of whom had his Ka, which, like the human Ka, was dependent on

the food that was supplied to it. But it was the Ka of the food and the Ka

of the drink upon which the Ka of man or god was necessarily fed. Though

at first, therefore, the actual food and drink were furnished by the

faithful, the Egyptians were eventually led by the force of logic to hold

that models of the food and drink in stone or terra-cotta or wood were as

efficacious as the food and drink themselves. Such models were cheaper and

more easily procurable, and had, moreover, the advantage of being

practically imperishable. Gradually, therefore, they took the place of the

meat and bread, the beer and wine, which had once been piled up in the

dead man’s tomb, and from the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty onwards we

find terra-cotta cakes, inscribed with the name and titles of the

deceased, substituted for the funerary bread.

The same idea as that which led to the manufacture of these sham offerings

had introduced statues and images into the tomb at an early date. In the

tombs of the Third and Fourth and following Dynasties, statues have been

found of a very high order of art. No effort has been spared to make them

speaking likenesses of the men and women in whose tombs they were placed;

even the eyes have been made lifelike with inlaid ivory and obsidian.

Usually, too, the statues are carved out of the hardest, and therefore the

most enduring, of stone, so that, when the corpse of the dead was

shrivelled beyond recognition, his counterpart in stone still represented

him just as he was in life. But the statue had its Ka like the man it

represented, and if the likeness were exact, the Ka of the statue and the

Ka of the man would be one and the same. Hence the Ka could find a fitting

form in which to clothe itself whenever it wished to revisit the tomb and

there nourish itself on the offerings made to the dead by the piety of his

descendants. And even if the mummy perished, the statue would remain for

the homeless Ka.(18)

It was probably on this account that we so often find more than one statue

of the dead man in the same tomb. The more numerous the statues, the

greater chance there was that one at least of them would survive down to

the day when the Ka should at last be again united to its body and soul.

And the priests of Heliopolis discovered yet a further reason for the

practice. From time immemorial Ra the sun-god had been invoked there under

the form of his seven birdlike “souls” or spirits, and double this number

of Kas was now ascribed to him, each corresponding with a quality or

attribute which he could bestow upon his worshippers.(19) Symbols already

existed in the hieroglyphics for these various qualities, so that it was

easy to regard each of them as having a separate and concrete existence,

and so being practically a Ka.

The funerary statue and the ideas connected with it seem to have been

characteristic of Memphis and the school of theology which existed there.

At all events, no similar statues have been discovered at Abydos in the

tombs of the first two (Thinite) dynasties; they make their appearance

with the rise of Memphite influence under the Third Dynasty. And with the

disappearance of the old Memphite empire, they too tend to disappear. The

disturbed condition of Egypt after the fall of the Sixth Dynasty was not

favourable to art, and it was probably difficult to find artists any

longer who could imitate with even approximate accuracy the features of

the dead.

But under the Theban dynasties another kind of image becomes prominent.

This was the Ushebti or “Respondent,” hundreds of which may be seen in

most museums. They are usually small figures of blue or green porcelain,

with a mattock painted under each arm, and a basket on the back. The name

and titles of the deceased are generally inscribed upon them, and not

unfrequently the 6th chapter of the Egyptian funerary ritual or Book of

the Dead. The chapter reads as follows: “O these _ushebtis_, whatever be

the work it is decreed the Osirified one must do in the other world, let

all hindrances to it there be smitten down for him, even as he desires!

Behold me when ye call! See that ye work diligently every moment there,

sowing the fields, filling the canals with water, carrying sand from the

West to the East. Behold me when ye call!”

The chapter explained what the _ushebti_-figures were intended for. Before

the dead man, justified though he had been by faith in Osiris and his own

good deeds, could be admitted to the full enjoyment of the fields of

paradise, it was necessary that he should show that he was worthy of them

by the performance of some work. He was therefore called upon to cultivate

that portion of them which had been allotted to him, to till the ground

and water it from the heavenly Nile. Had he been a peasant while on earth,

the task would have been an easy one; had he, on the contrary, belonged to

the wealthier classes, or been unaccustomed to agricultural labour, it

would have been hard and irksome. Thanks to the doctrine of the Ka,

however, means were found for lightening the obligation. The relatives of

the dead buried with him a number of _ushebti_-figures, each of which

represented a fellah with mattock and basket, and their Kas, it was

believed, would, with the help of the sacred words of the Ritual, assist

him in his work. Sometimes, to make assurance doubly sure, the images were

broken; thus, as it were, putting an end to their earthly existence, and

setting their Kas free.

When once the tomb was closed and the mummy hidden away in the recesses,

it was necessary to find a way by which the Ka could enter the abode of

the dead, and so eat and drink the food that had been deposited there. For

it must be remembered that the Ka from its very nature was subject to the

same limitations as the person whom it represented. If there was no door

it could not enter. Where it differed from the living person was in its

existing in a world in which what are shams and pictures to us were so

many concrete realities. Consequently all that was needed in order to

allow the Ka free entrance into the tomb was to paint a false door on one

of its walls; the Ka could then pass in and out through the Ka of the

door, and so rejoin its mummy or its statue when so it wished.

This false door, in front of which the offerings to the dead were

originally laid, must go back to a primitive period in Egyptian history.

Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that it is presupposed by the

so-called Banner name of the Egyptian Pharaohs.(20) Ever since the first

days of hieroglyphic decipherment, it has been known that besides the name

or names given to the Pharaoh at birth, and commonly borne by him in life,

he had another name not enclosed in a cartouche, but in something that

resembled a banner, and was surmounted by the hawk of the god Horus. It

actually represented, however, not a banner, but the panel above the false

door of a tomb, and the name written within it was the name of the Ka of

the Pharaoh rather than of the Pharaoh himself. It was accordingly the

name by which he was known after death, the name inscribed on the objects

buried in his tomb, and also the name under which he was worshipped

whether in this life or in the next. As the Horus or deified leader who

had subjugated the older inhabitants of Egypt and founded the Pharaonic

dynasties, it was right and fitting that he should be known by the name of

his Ka. It was not so much the Pharaoh that was adored by his subjects, as

the Ka of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was god because the blood of Horus

flowed in his veins.

The earliest monuments of the Pharaohs yet discovered give almost

invariably only the Ka-name of the king. The fact is doubtless due in

great measure to their general character. With few exceptions they consist

of tombstones and other sepulchral furniture. But the objects found in the

foundations of the temple of Nekhen are also examples of the same fact.

The fusion was not yet complete, at all events in the south, between the

Pharaoh as man and the Pharaoh as god; it was his Ka that was divine,

rather than the bodily husk in which it sojourned for a time.

The Ka accordingly occupies a prominent place in the names of the Pharaohs

of the Old Empire, while the sacred art of the temples continued the

ancient tradition down to the latest times. Horus and the Nile-gods, for

instance, present the Ka of Amon-hotep III. along with the infant prince

to the god of Thebes; and at Soleb the same Pharaoh is represented as

making offerings to his own double.(21) Indeed, it is not unfrequent to

find the king and his Ka thus separated from one another and set side by

side; and at times the Ka becomes a mere symbol, planted like a standard

at the monarch’s back.

It was the Ka, therefore, which in the early days of Egyptian religious

thought was more especially associated with the divine nature of the king.

The association of ideas was assisted by the fact that the gods, like men,

had each his individual Ka. And in the older period of Egyptian history

the Ka of the god and not the god himself was primarily the object of

worship. The sacred name of Memphis was Ḥa-ka-Ptaḥ, “the temple of the Ka

of Ptaḥ,” which appears as _Khikuptakh_ in the Tel el-Amarna letters, and

from which the Greeks derived their _Aiguptos_, “Egypt.” Even in the last

centuries of Egyptian independence the prayers addressed to the bull-god

Apis are still made for the most part to his Ka.

The Ka, in fact, was conceived of as the living principle which inspired

both gods and men. Its separation from the body meant what we call death,

and life could return only when the two were reunited. That reunion could

take place only in the other world, after long years had passed and

strange experiences had been undergone by the disembodied Ka. The 105th

chapter of the Book of the Dead contains the words with which on the day

of resurrection the Ka was to be greeted. “Hail,” says the dead man, “to

thee who wast my Ka during life! Behold, I come unto thee, I arise

resplendent, I labour, I am strong, I am hale, I bring grains of incense,

I am purified thereby, and I thereby purify that which goeth forth from

thee.” Then follow the magical words by which all evil was to be warded

off: “I am that amulet of green felspar, the necklace of the god Ra, which

is given unto them that are on the horizon. They flourish, I flourish, my

Ka flourishes even as they, my duration of life flourishes even as they,

my Ka has abundance of food even as they. The scale of the balance rises,

Truth rises high unto the nose of the god Ra on the day on which my Ka is

where I am (?). My head and my arm are restored to me where I am (?). I am

he whose eye seeth, whose ears hear; I am not a beast of sacrifice. The

sacrificial formulæ for the higher ones of heaven are recited where I am.”

As might be expected, the Ka is often represented with the symbol of life

in its hands. At the same time, it is important to remember that, though

under one aspect the Ka was identical with the principle of life, in the

mind of the Egyptian it was separate from the latter, just as it was

separate from consciousness and from the divine essence. These were each

of them independent entities which were possessed by the Ka just as they

were possessed by its human counterpart. Life, consciousness, and

relationship to the gods were all attributes of the Ka, but they were

attributes, each of which had a concrete and independent existence of its

own.

At the outset, doubtless, the Ka was practically identical with the vital

principle. Primitive man does not distinguish as we do between the animate

and the inanimate. He projects his own personality into the things he sees

about him, and ascribes to them the same motive forces as those which move

himself. He knows of only one source of movement and activity, and that

source is life. The stars which travel through the firmament, the arrow

that flies through the air, are either alive or else are directed and

animated by some living power. Movement, in fact, implies life, and the

moving object, whatever it may be, is a living thing.

The old belief or instinct is still strong in the child. He revenges

himself upon the ball or stone that has struck him as though it too were a

living being. In the Mosaic law it is laid down that “if an ox gore a man

or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned”; and similar

penalties were enforced against animals which had injured man, not only in

the Middle Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig was burned

at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in 1266, for having devoured a child; and in 1389 a

horse was brought to trial at Dijon for the murder of a man, and condemned

to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an action was brought against the ants who

had burrowed under the foundations of a monastery, and, after counsel had

been heard on both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banishment by

the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the Protestant chapel at La

Rochelle was first scourged for having abetted heresy, then catechised and

made to recant, and finally baptized.(22)

The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than the orthodox

theologians of La Rochelle. For them, too, action must have implied life,

and the distinction between object and subject had not yet been realised.

Hence the belief that objects as well as persons had each its Ka, a belief

which was strengthened by the fact that they all alike cast shadows before

them, as well as the further belief that the nature of the Ka was in

either case the same. Hence it was, moreover, that the _ushebti_-figures

and other sepulchral furniture were broken in order that their Kas might

be released from them, and so accompany the Ka of the dead man in his

wanderings in the other world. As life and the power of movement deserted

the corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka was separated from it, so too

the Ka of the _ushebti_ passed out of it when its form was mutilated by

breakage. The life that was in it had departed, as it were, into another

world.

It is even possible that the very word _Ka_ had originally a connection

with a root signifying “to live.” At any rate, it was identical in

spelling with a word which denoted “food”; and that the pronunciation of

the two words was the same, may be gathered from the fact that the

Egyptian bas-reliefs sometimes represent the offerings of food made to the

dead or to the gods inside the arms of the symbol of the Ka(23). When we

remember that _vivande_ is nothing more than the Latin _vivenda_, “the

things on which we live,” there arises at least the possibility of an

etymological connection between the double and the principle of life which

it once symbolised.(24)

Now, in my Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_,

I pointed out that the early Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia held a

belief which is almost precisely the same as that of the Egyptians in

regard to the Ka. In Babylonia also, everything had its Zi or “double,”

and the nature of this Zi is in no way distinguishable from that of the

Egyptian Ka. As in Egypt, moreover, the gods had each his Zi as well as

men and things, and, as in Egypt, it was the Zi of the god rather than the

god himself which was primarily worshipped. So marked is the resemblance

between the two conceptions, that in working it out on the Babylonian

side, I could not resist the conviction that there must have been some

connection between them. That was sixteen years ago. Since then

discoveries have been made and facts brought to light which indicate that

a connection really did exist between the Babylonia and the Egypt of the

so-called prehistoric age, and have led me to believe, with Hommel, de

Morgan, and others, that Babylonia was the home and cradle of the

Pharaonic Egyptians. In Sumerian the word Zi signified “life,” and was

denoted by the picture of a flowering reed. It was the life on which was

imprinted the form of the body that was for a time its home, and its

separation from the body meant the death of the latter. The Sumerians

never advanced to the further stage of making the vital principle itself a

separable quality; perhaps the original signification of the word which it

never lost would have prevented this. But they did go on to transform the

Zi into a spirit or demon, who, in place of being the counterpart of some

individual person or thing, could enter at will into any object he chose.

Even in Egypt, traces of the same logical progress in ideas may perhaps be

found. If Professor Maspero is right in his interpretation of certain

passages in the Pyramid texts and Ptolemaic papyri, “The double did not

allow its family to forget it, but used all the means at its disposal to

remind them of its existence. It entered their houses and their bodies,

terrified them, waking and sleeping, by its sudden apparitions, struck

them down with disease or madness, and would even suck their blood like

the modern vampire(25).” Such a conception of the Ka, however, if ever it

existed, must have soon passed away, leaving behind it but few vestiges of

itself.

I have dwelt thus long on the doctrine of the Ka or double on account both

of its importance and of the difficulties it presents to the modern

scholar. Its discovery by Professor Maspero and Sir P. Le Page Renouf

cleared away a host of misconceptions, and introduced light into one of

the darkest corners of Egyptian religion(26). And however strange it may

seem to us, it was in thorough accordance with the simple logic of

primitive man. Given the premisses, the conclusion followed. It was only

when the Egyptian came to progress in knowledge and culture, and new ideas

about his own nature were adopted, that difficulties began to multiply and

the theory of the Ka to become complicated.

Among these new ideas was that of the Khu or “luminous” part of man. On

the recently discovered monuments of the early period, the Khu holds a

place which it lost after the rise of Memphite influence with the Third

Dynasty. We find it depicted on the tombstones of Abydos embraced by the

down-bent arms of the Ka. The Khu, therefore, was conceived of as

comprehended in the human Ka, as forming part of it, though at the same

time as a separate entity. It was, in fact, the soul of the human Ka, and

was accordingly symbolised by the crested ibis(27). It may be that it was

in the beginning nothing more than the phosphorescent light emitted by

decaying vegetation which the belated wayfarer took for a ghost; the

_ginn_ (_jinn_) of the modern Egyptian fellah are similar lights which

flash up suddenly from the ground. But the earliest examples of its use on

the monuments are against such an ignoble origin, and suggest rather that

it was the glorified spirit which mounted up like a bird in the arms of

its Ka towards the brilliant vault of heaven. It is not until we come to

the decadent days of the Greek and Roman periods that the Khu appears in a

degraded form as a malignant ghost which enters the bodies of the living

in order to torment them. No traces of such a belief are to be found in

older days. The Pyramid texts speak of “the four Khu of Horus,” “who live

in Heliopolis,” and were at once male and female, and of the Khu who

brandish their arms and form a sort of bodyguard around the god of the

dead. They are identified with the fixed stars, and more especially with

those of the Great Bear, and in the euhemeristic chronicles of Egyptian

history they become the “Manes” of Manetho, the semi-divine dynasty which

intervened between the dynasties of the gods and of men.(28)