The Khu thus forms a link between men and the gods, and participates in

the divine nature. It is the soul regarded as a godlike essence, as coming

down from heaven rather than as mounting up towards it. It is not only

disembodied, but needs the body no longer; it belongs to the Ka, which

still lives and moves, and not to the mummified corpse from which the

vital spark has fled. It waits on the god of the dead, not on the dead

themselves.

It seems probable, therefore, that in the part of Egypt in which the

doctrine of the Khu grew up, mummification was not practised; and the

probability is strengthened by the fact that, before the rise of the Third

Dynasty, embalming was apparently not frequent in Upper Egypt, even in the

case of the kings. But, however this may be, one thing is certain. The

conception of the Khu cannot have originated in the same part of the

country, or perhaps among the same element in the population, as a

parallel but wholly inconsistent conception which eventually gained the

predominance. According to this conception, the imperishable part of man

which, like the Ka, passed after death into the other world, was the Ba or

“soul.” Like the Khu, the Ba was pictured as a bird; but the bird is

usually given a human head and sometimes human hands.(29) But, while the

Khu was essentially divine, the Ba was essentially human. It is true that

the Ba, as well as the Khu, was assigned to the gods—Ra of Heliopolis was

even credited with seven; but whereas man possessed a Khu or luminous soul

because he was likened to the gods, the gods possessed a Ba because they

were likened to men.

The relation between the two is brought out very clearly in the philosophy

of the so-called Hermetic books, which endeavoured to translate the

theology of Egypt into Greek thought. There we are told that the Khu is

the intelligence (νοῦς), of which the Ba or soul (ψυχή) is as it were the

envelope. As long as the soul is imprisoned in the earthly tabernacle of

the body, the intelligence is deprived of the robe of fire in which it

should be clothed, its brightness is dimmed, and its purity is sullied.

The death of the body releases it from its prison-house; it once more

soars to heaven and becomes a spirit (δαίμων), while the soul is carried

to the hall of judgment, there to be awarded punishment or happiness in

accordance with its deserts.(30) The Khu, in other words, is a spark of

that divine intelligence which pervades the world and to which it must

return; the Ba is the individual soul which has to answer after death for

the deeds committed in the body.

The plover was the bird usually chosen to represent the Ba, but at times

the place of the plover is taken by the hawk, the symbol of Horus and the

solar gods. That the soul should have been likened to a bird is natural,

and we meet with the same or similar symbolism among other peoples. Like

the bird, it flew between earth and heaven, untrammelled by the body to

which it had once been joined. From time to time it visited its mummy; at

other times it dwelt with the gods above. Now and again, so the

inscriptions tell us, it alighted on the boughs of the garden it had made

for itself in life, cooling itself under the sycamores and eating their

fruits. For the Ba was no more immaterial than the Ka; it, too, needed

meat and drink for its sustenance, and looked to its relatives and

descendants to furnish them.

But, as Professor Maspero(31) has pointed out, there was a very real and

fundamental difference between the idea of the Ka or double, and that of

the Ba or soul. The Ka was originally nourished on the actual offerings

that were placed in the tomb of the dead man; it passed into it through

the false door and consumed the food that it found there. But the soul had

ascended to the gods in heaven; it lived in the light of day, not in the

darkness of the tomb; and it is doubtful if it was ever supposed to return

there. To the gods accordingly was committed the care of the Ba, and of

seeing that it was properly provided for. By the power of prayer and

magical incantation, the various articles of food, or, more strictly

speaking, their doubles, were identified with the gods, and communicated

by the gods to the soul. Long before the days when the Pyramid texts had

been compiled, this theory of the nourishment of the soul was applied also

to the nourishment of the Ka, and the older belief in the material eating

and drinking of the Ka had passed away. All that remained of it was the

habitual offering of the food to the dead, a custom which still lingers

among the fellahin of Egypt, both Moslem and Copt.

Besides the double and the two souls, there was yet another immortal

element in the human frame. This was the heart, the seat both of the

feelings and of the mind. But it was not the material heart, but its

immaterial double, which passed after death into the other world. The

material heart was carefully removed from the mummy, and with the rest of

the intestines was usually cast into the Nile. Porphyry(32) tells us that

in his time, when the bodies of the wealthier classes were embalmed, the

Egyptians “take out the stomach and put it into a coffer, and, holding the

coffer to the sun, protest, one of the embalmers making a speech on behalf

of the dead. This speech, which Euphantos translated from his native

language, is as follows: ‘O Lord the Sun, and all ye gods who give life to

man, receive me and make me a companion of the eternal gods. For the gods,

whom my parents made known to me, as long as I have lived in this world I

have continued to reverence, and those who gave birth to my body I have

ever honoured. And as for other men, I have neither slain any, nor

defrauded any of anything entrusted to me, nor committed any other wicked

act; but if by chance I have committed any sin in my life, by either

eating or drinking what was forbidden, not of myself did I sin, but owing

to these members,’—at the same time showing the coffer in which the

stomach was. And having said this, he throws it into the river, and

embalms the rest of the body as being pure. Thus they thought that they

needed to excuse themselves to God for what they had eaten and drunken,

and therefore so reproach the stomach.”(33)

Now and then, however, the heart and intestines were replaced in the

mummy, but under the protection of wax images of the four genii of the

dead—the four Khu of the Book of the Dead. More often they were put into

four vases of alabaster or some other material, which were buried with the

dead.(34) Though the latter practice was not very common, probably on

account of its expense, it must go back to the very beginnings of Egyptian

history. The hieroglyphic symbol of the heart is just one of these vases,

and one of the two names applied to the heart was _ḥati_, “that which

belongs to the vase.” After ages even endeavoured to draw a distinction

between _ab_ “the heart” proper, and _ḥati_ “the heart-sack.”(35)

From the time of the Twelfth Dynasty(36) onwards, the place of the

material heart in the mummy was taken by an amulet, through the influence

of which, it was supposed, the corpse would be secured against all the

dangers and inconveniences attending the loss of its heart until the day

of resurrection. The amulet was in the form of a beetle or scarab, the

emblem of “becoming” or transformation, and on the under side of it there

was often inscribed the 30th chapter of the Book of the Dead, to the words

of which were ascribed a magical effect. The chapter reads as follows: “O

heart (_ab_) of my mother, O heart (_ḥati_) of my transformations! Let

there be no stoppage to me as regards evidence (before the judges of the

dead), no hindrance to me on the part of the Powers, no repulse of me in

the presence of the guardian of the scales! Thou art my Ka in my body, the

god Khnum who makes strong my limbs. Come thou to the good place to which

we are going. Let not our name be overthrown by the lords of Hades who

cause men to stand upright! Good unto us, yea good is it to hear that the

heart is large (and heavy) when the words (of life) are weighed!(37) Let

no lies be uttered against me before God. How great art thou!”

Meanwhile the immaterial heart, the “Ka” of it, which is addressed in the

words just quoted, had made its way through the region of the other world,

until it finally reached the place known as “the Abode of Hearts.” Here in

the judgment-hall of Osiris it met the dead man to whom it had formerly

belonged, and here, too, it accused him of all the evil words and thoughts

he had harboured in his lifetime, or testified to the good thoughts and

words of which he had been the author. For the heart, though the organ

through which his thoughts and words had acted, was not the cause of them;

in its nature it was essentially pure and divine, and it had been an

unwilling witness of the sins it had been forced to know. Eventually it

was weighed in the balance against the image of Truth, and only if the

scales turned in favour of the dead man could it rejoin its former body

and live with it for ever in the islands of the Blest.

The scales and judgment-hall, however, belong to the religious conceptions

which gathered round the name of Osiris, like the Paradise which the risen

mummy looked forward to enjoy. It was only after the worship of Osiris had

become universal throughout Egypt, and the older or local ideas of the

future life had been accommodated to them, that it was possible for an

Egyptian to speak of meeting his disembodied heart, or of the testimony it

could give for or against him before the judges of the dead. The fact that

the use of the scarab does not seem to extend further back than the age of

the Memphite or Theban dynasties, may imply that it was only then that the

Osirian beliefs were officially fitted on to earlier forms of faith.

However this may be, the worship of Osiris and the beliefs attaching to it

must be left to another lecture, and for the present we must pass on to

the mummy itself, the last part of man which it was hoped would be

immortal.

The mummy or Sâḥu has to be carefully distinguished from the Khat or

natural body. The latter was a mere dead shell, seen by the soul but not

affording a resting-place for it. The mummy, on the other hand, contained

within itself the seeds of growth and resurrection. It could be visited by

the soul and inspired by it for a few moments with life, and the Egyptian

looked forward to a time when it would once more be reunited with both its

heart and its soul, and so rise again from the dead.

It is impossible to say how far back in the history of the Egyptian

religion this belief in the immortality of the mummy may go. It can hardly

have originated in the same circle of ideas as the doctrine of the Ka,

though the doctrine of the Ka could easily be reconciled with it. On the

one hand, it seems connected, as we shall see, with the cult of Osiris;

but, on the other hand, there are no traces of mummification in the

prehistoric graves, and it is doubtful whether there are any in the royal

tombs of Negada and Abydos which belong to the age of the First and Second

Dynasties. At all events, the scarab, which accompanied embalmment, first

appears at a much later date, and perhaps had a Memphite origin. There

are, however, indications that the process of embalming first arose among

the pre-Menic rulers of Nekhen, in the neighbourhood of El-Kab. The soil

of El-Kab literally effloresces with the natron, which, it was discovered,

preserved the bodies buried in it; and even as late as the time of the

Pyramid texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the northern sources

of natron were known, it was still necessary for ceremonial purposes that

the materials used by the embalmer should contain some of the natron of

El-Kab.(38)

What was difficult to harmonise with the belief in the resurrection of the

mummy was the belief which made the risen man an “Osiris,” identified,

that is to say, in substance with the god Osiris, and not his old material

self. In the days, therefore, when Greek philosophy took it in hand to

systematise and interpret the theology of Egypt, the risen mummy drops out

of sight. The Khu, as we have seen, becomes the divine intelligence, which

for a time is enshrouded in the human soul; and this again needs the

envelope of the spirit, which sends the breath of life through the veins

before it can tabernacle in the body of man. The Hermetic books tell us

that while body, spirit, and soul are common to man and the beasts, the

divine intelligence is his alone to possess, stripped, indeed, of its

native covering of ethereal fire, but still the veritable spirit of God.

Ever is it seeking to raise the human soul to itself, and so purify it

from the passions and desires with which it is inspired by the body. But

the flesh wages continual war against it, and endeavours to drag the soul

down to its own level. If the soul yields, after death the intelligence

returns to its original state, while the soul is arraigned before the

judgment-seat of heaven, and there being accused by its conscience, the

heart, is condemned to the punishment of the lost. First it is scourged

for its sins, and then handed over to the buffetings of the tempests,

suspended between earth and sky. At times in the form of an evil demon it

seeks alleviation of its torments by entering the body of a man or animal,

whom it drives to murder and madness. But at last, after ages of

suffering, the end comes; it dies the second death, and is annihilated for

ever.

The good soul, on the other hand, which has listened in life to the voice

of the divine intelligence, and struggled to overcome the lusts and

passions of the flesh, obtains after death its reward. Guided by the

intelligence, it traverses space, learning the secrets of the universe,

and coming to understand the things that are dark and mysterious to us

here. At length its education in the other world is completed, and it is

permitted to see God face to face and to lose itself in His ineffable

glory.

I need not point out to you how deeply this Hellenised philosophy of Egypt

has affected the religious thought of Christian Alexandria, and through

Alexandria of Christian Europe. It may be that traces of it may be

detected even in the New Testament. At any rate, much of the psychology of

Christian theologians is clearly derived from it. We are still under the

influence of ideas whose first home was in Egypt, and whose development

has been the work of long ages of time. True or false, they are part of

the heritage bequeathed to us by the past.

Lecture IV. The Sun-God And The Ennead.

In my last lecture, when speaking of the form under which the soul of man

was pictured by the Egyptians, I mentioned that it was often represented

by a hawk, the symbol of the sun-god. Why the hawk should have thus

symbolised the sun is a question that has often been asked. The Egyptians

did not know themselves; and Porphyry, in the dying days of the old

Egyptian faith, gravely declares that it was because the hawk was a

compound of blood and breath! One explanation has been that it was because

the hawk pounces down from the sky like the rays of the sun, which, like

the eagle, he can gaze at without blinking; and a passage in the _Odyssey_

of Homer (xv. 525) has been invoked in favour of this view, where the hawk

is called “the swift messenger of Apollo.” But if there is any connection

between the Homeric passage and the Egyptian symbol, it would show only

that the symbol had been borrowed by the Greek poet. Originally, moreover,

it was only the sun-god of Upper Egypt who was represented even by the

Egyptians under the form of a hawk.

This was Horus, often called in the later texts “Horus the elder” (Hor-ur,

the Greek Aroêris), in order to distinguish him from a wholly different

god, Horus the younger, the son of Isis. His symbol, the hawk, is found on

the early Pharaonic monuments which recent excavations have brought to

light. Sometimes the hawk stands on the so-called standard, which is

really a perch, sometimes on the crenelated circle, which denoted a city

in those primitive days. The standard is borne before the Pharaoh,

representing at once his own title and the nome or principality over which

he held rule; and its resemblance to the stone birds perched on similar

supports, which Mr. Bent found in the ruins of Zimbabwe, suggests a

connection between the prehistoric gold miners of Central Africa and the

early inhabitants of Southern Egypt. On one of the early Egyptian

monuments discovered at Abydos, two hawks stand above the wall of a city

which seems to bear the name of “the city of the kings,”(39) and a slate

plaque found by Mr. Quibell at Kom el-Aḥmar shows us on one side the

Pharaoh of Nekhen inspecting the decapitated bodies of his enemies with

two hawks on standards carried before him, while, on the other side, a

hawk leads the bridled “North” to him under the guise of a prisoner,

through whose lips a ring has been passed.(40) In the first case, the

hawks may represent the districts of which the god they symbolised was the

protecting deity;(41) in the second case, the god and the king must be

identified together. It was as Horus, the hawk, that the Pharaoh had

conquered the Egyptians of the north, and it was Horus, therefore, who had

given them into his hand.

If Dr. Naville is right, Horus the hawk-god is again represented on the

same plaque, with the symbol of “follower,” above a boat which is engraved

over the bodies of the decapitated slain.(42) Countenance is given to this

view by a drawing on the rocks near El-Kab, in which the cartouches of two

kings of the Fourth Dynasty, Sharu and Khufu, are carried in boats on the

prows of which a hawk is perched, while above each name are two other

hawks, standing on the hieroglyph of “gold,” and with the crowns of Upper

and Lower Egypt on their heads. The title “follower of Horus” would take

us back to the earliest traditions of Egyptian history. The “followers of

Horus,” according to the later texts, were the predecessors of Menes and

the First Dynasty of united Egypt, the Pharaohs and princes of the

southern kingdom whose very names were forgotten in after days.

Nevertheless, it was remembered that they had founded the great

sanctuaries of the country; thus an inscription at Dendera declares that

in the reign of king Pepi of the Sixth Dynasty there was found in the wall

of the palace a parchment on which was a plan of the temple drawn upon it

in the time of “the followers of Horus.” The legends of Edfu told how

these followers of Horus had been smiths, armed with weapons of iron, and

how they had driven the enemies of their leader before them until they had

possessed themselves of the whole of Egypt.(43) But many hard-fought

battles were needed before this could be accomplished. Again and again had

the foe been crushed—at Zadmit near Thebes, at Neter-Khadu near Dendera,

at Minia, at Behnesa and Ahnas on the frontier of the Fayyûm, and finally

at Zaru on the Asiatic borders of the Delta. Even here, however, the

struggle was not over. Horus and his followers had to take ship and pursue

the enemy down the Red Sea, inflicting a final blow upon them near

Berenicê, from whence he returned across the desert in triumph to Edfu.

In this legend, which in its present form is not older than the Ptolemaic

period, echoes of the gradual conquest of Egypt by the first followers of

the Pharaohs have probably been preserved, though they have been combined

with a wholly different cycle of myths relating to the eternal struggle

between Horus the son of Isis and his twin brother Set. But the confusion

between the two Horuses must have arisen at an early time. Already a king

of the Third Dynasty, whose remains have been found in the ruins of

Nekhen, and who bore the title of him “who is glorified with the two

sceptres, in whom the two Horus gods are united,” has above his name the

crowned emblems of Horus and Set.(44) The titles of the queens of the

Memphite dynasties make it clear that by the two Horuses are meant the two

kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and we must therefore see in Horus and

Set the symbols of the South and North.(45)

In the rock drawing, south of El-Kab, to which I have alluded a few

minutes ago, the two Horus hawks stand on the symbol of “gold,” the one

wearing the crown of Southern Egypt, the other that of the North. The

“Golden Horus” was, in fact, one of the titles assumed by the Pharaoh at

an early date. Whether the epithet applied to the god represented

originally the golden colour of the wings of the sparrow-hawk, or whether,

as is more probable, it denoted the Horus-hawk of gold who watched over

the destinies of the kings of Upper Egypt in their ancient capital of

Nekhen, it is now impossible to say.(46) Later ages explained it as

referring to the golden rays of the morning sun.

In the time of the Fourth Dynasty the title was attached indifferently to

the Ka or death name given to the Pharaoh after his death, and to the

living name given to him at his birth into this world. The Horus-hawk,

without the symbol of “gold,” surmounted, so far as we know, only the Ka

name. It was the double of the Pharaoh, rather than the Pharaoh himself,

in whom the god had been incarnated. Horus brings the captive northerner

to the king, and presides over his kingdom; but it is only over the royal

Ka that he actually watches.

At Nekhen, the Horus-hawk, to whom the city was dedicated, was represented

under the form of a mummy. It was here, perhaps, that the natron of El-Kab

was first employed to preserve the dead body from decay, and that Horus

was supposed to be entombed, like Osiris at Abydos. At any rate, there is

clearly a connection between the dead and mummified Horus and the Horus

who stands above the name of the Pharaoh’s double. It is probable,

therefore, that the identification of Horus with the kings of Upper Egypt

originated at Nekhen. The Horus-hawk was the token under which they fought

and ruled; it was Horus who had led them to victory, and in whose name the

Pharaonic Egyptians, with their weapons of metal, overcame the neolithic

population of the Nile.

That Horus, accordingly, in one shape or another, should have become the

patron god of so many principalities in Southern Egypt, is in no way

astonishing.(47) He represented the Pharaonic Egyptians; and as they moved

northward, subduing the older inhabitants of the country, they carried his

worship with them. At Heliopolis he was adored as Hor-em-Khuti or

Harmakhis, “Horus issuing from the two horizons,” and identified with Ra,

the sun-god, the patron of the city. His image may still be seen in the

sphinx of Giza, with its human head and lion’s body. At Edfu, where the

Pharaonic invaders appear to have first established themselves, he was

worshipped as Hor-beḥudet under the form of a winged solar disc, a

combination of the orb of the sun with the wings of the hawk.(48) A legend

inscribed on the walls of the temple, which is a curious mixture of

folklore and false etymologising, worked up after the fashion of Lemprière

by the priests of the Ptolemaic period, knows exactly when it was that

this emblem of the god came into existence. It was in the three hundred

and sixty-third year of the reign of Ra-Harmakhis on earth, when he fled

from the rebels who had risen against him in Nubia and had landed at Edfu.

Here Hor-beḥudet, the local deity, paid homage to his suzerain and

undertook to destroy his enemies. But first, he flew up to the sun “as a

great winged disc,” in order that he might discover where they were. Then

in his new form he returned to the boat of Harmakhis, and there Thoth

addressed Ra, saying: “O lord of the gods, the god of Edfu (_Beḥudet_)

came in the shape of a great winged disc: from henceforth he shall be

called Hor-beḥudet.” It was after this that Horus of Edfu and his

followers, “the smiths,” smote the foe from the southern to the northern

border of Egypt.

The legend, or rather the prosaic fiction in which it has been embodied,

has been composed when the original character of Horus had long been

forgotten, and when the sun-god of Heliopolis had become the dominant god

of Egypt. It belongs to the age of theological syncretism, when the gods

of Egypt were resolved one into the other like the colours in a

kaleidoscope, and made intangible and ever-shifting forms of Ra. But it

bears witness to one fact,—the antiquity of the worship of Horus of Edfu

and of the emblem which was associated with him. The winged solar disc

forms part of his earliest history.

The fact is difficult to reconcile with the view of Professor Maspero,

that Horus was originally the sky, and is in favour of the general belief

of Egyptologists, that he was from the outset the sun-god. Such, at all

events, was the opinion of the Egyptians themselves in the later period of

their history. In the Pyramid texts Horus already appears as a solar

deity, and it is only as the sun-god that his identification with the

Pharaohs can be explained. It was not the sky but the sun who watched over

the names of their doubles. It is true that the two eyes of Horus were

said to be the sun and the moon, and that a punning etymology, which

connected his name with the word _her_ or “face,” caused him to be

depicted as the face of the sky, the four locks of hair of which were the

four cardinal points. But the etymology is late, and there is no more

difficulty in understanding how the solar and lunar discs can be called

the eyes of the sun-god, than there is in understanding how the winged

disc was distinguished from him, or how even in modern phrase the “eye”

may be used as a synonym of the whole man. When we speak of “the eye of

God,” we mean God Himself.(49)

There is, however, one newly-discovered monument which may be claimed in

support of Professor Maspero’s theory. Above the Horus-hawk which

surmounts the name of the Third Dynasty king found at Nekhen, is the

hieroglyph of the sky. But the explanation of this is not difficult to

find. On the one hand, the hieroglyph embraces the hawk as the sky does

the sun; on the other hand, it gives the pronunciation of the name of

Horus, the sky in Egyptian being _her_ or _hor_, “the high” and uplifted.

And the name of Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis, “the Horus who issues from the

two horizons,” must be quite as old as the monument of Nekhen. What the

two horizons were is shown us by the hieroglyph which depicts them. They

were the twin mountains between which the sun came forth at dawn, and

between which he again passes at sunset.

The hieroglyph belongs to the very beginning of Pharaonic Egyptian

history. It may have been brought by the Pharaonic immigrants from their

old home in the East. It is at least noticeable that in the Sumerian

language of primitive Babylonia the horizon was called _kharra_ or

_khurra_, a word which corresponds letter for letter with the name of

Horus. The fact may, of course, be accidental, and the name of the

Egyptian god may really be derived from the same root as that from which

the word for “heaven” has come, and which means “to be high.” But the

conception of the twin-mountains between which the sun-god comes forth

every morning, and between which he passes again at nightfall, is of

Babylonian origin. On early Babylonian seal-cylinders we see him stepping

through the door, the two leaves of which have been flung back by its

warders on either side of the mountains, while rays of glory shoot upward

from his shoulders. The mountains were called Mas, “the twins,” in

Sumerian; and the great Epic of Chaldæa narrated how the hero Gilgames

made his way to them across the desert, to a land of darkness, where

scorpion-men, whose heads rise to heaven while their breasts descend to

hell, watched over the rising and the setting of the sun. It is difficult

to believe that such a conception of the horizon could ever have arisen in

Egypt. There the Delta is a flat plain with no hills even in sight, while

in the valley of Upper Egypt there are neither high mountains nor twin

peaks.

Horus himself is, I believe, to be found in the Babylonian inscriptions.

Mention is occasionally made in them of a god Khar or Khur, and in

contracts of the time of Khammurabi (B.C. 2200) we find the name of

Abi-Khar, “my father is Khar.” But the age of Khammurabi was one of

intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt, and the god Khar or Horus is

therefore probably borrowed from Egypt, just as a seal-cylinder informs us

was the case with Anupu or Anubis.(50)

But though the name of Khar or Khur is and must remain Egyptian, Horus has

much in common with the Babylonian sun-god Nin-ip. They are both

warrior-gods; and just as the followers of Horus were workers in iron, so

Nin-ip also was the god of iron. One of his titles, moreover, is that of

“the southern sun”; and on a boundary-stone the eagle standing on a perch

is stated to be “the symbol of the southern sun.”(51)

The goddess with whom Horus of Nekhen was associated was Nekheb with the

vulture’s head. Her temple stood opposite Nekhen at El-Kab on the eastern

bank of the Nile, and at the end of the long road which led across the

desert from the Red Sea. It was at once a sanctuary and a fortress

defending Nekhen on the east. But Nekheb was the goddess not only of

Nekhen, but of all Southern Egypt. We find her in the earliest

inscriptions on the sacred island of Sehêl in the Cataract, where she is

identified with the local goddess Sati. We find her again at Thebes under

the name of Mut, “the mother.” Her supremacy, in fact, went back to the

days when Nekhen was the capital of the south, and its goddess accordingly

shared with it the privileges of domination. When Nekhen fell back into

the position of a small provincial town, Nekheb also participated in its

decline. Under the Theban dynasties, it is true, the name of Mut of Karnak

became honoured throughout Egypt, but her origin by that time had been

forgotten. The Egyptian who brought his offering to Mut never realised

that behind the mask of Mut lay the features of Nekheb of Nekhen.

Mut, however, continued to wear the vulture form, and the titles assumed

by the king still preserved a recollection of the time when Nekheb was the

presiding goddess of the kingdom of the south. From the days of Menes

onward, in the title of “king of Upper and Lower Egypt,” while the serpent

of Uazit symbolised the north, the vulture of Nekheb symbolised the south.

At times, indeed, the uræus of Uazit is transferred to Nekheb; but that

was at an epoch when it had come to signify “goddess,” as the Horus-hawk

signified “god.” From the earliest ages, however, the plant which denoted

the south, and formed part of the royal title, was used in writing her

name. She was emphatically “the southerner,” the mistress of the south,

just as her consort, the mummified Horus, was its lord.

The euhemerising legends of Edfu made Horus the faithful vassal of his

liege lord Ra Harmakhis of Heliopolis. But from a historical point of view

the relations between the two gods ought to have been reversed, and the

legends themselves contained a reminiscence that such was the case. In

describing the victorious march of Horus and his followers towards the

north, they tell us how he made his way past Heliopolis into the Delta,

and even established one of his “forges” on its easternmost borders. The

Horus kings of Upper Egypt made themselves masters of the northern

kingdom, introducing into it the divine hawk they worshipped and the Horus

title over their names.

The sun-god of Heliopolis was represented, like the gods of Babylonia, as

a man and not as a hawk. He was known as Tum or Atmu, who, in the later

days of religious syncretism, was distinguished from the other forms of

the sun-god as representing the setting sun. But Tum was the personal name

of the sun-god; the sun itself was called Ra. As time went on, the

attributes of the god were transferred to the sun; Ra, too, became divine,

and, after being first a synonym of Tum, ended by becoming an independent

deity. While Tum was peculiarly the setting sun, Ra denoted the sun-god in

all his forms and under all his manifestations. He was thus fitted to be

the common god of all Egypt, with whom the various local sun-gods could be

identified, and lose in him their individuality. Ra was a word which meant

“the sun” in all the dialects of the country, and its very want of

theological associations made it the starting-point of a new phase of

religious thought.

It was not until the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty that a special temple was

built to Ra in Heliopolis.(52) Up to that time Ra had been content to

share with Tum the ancient temple of the city, or rather had absorbed Tum

into himself and thus become its virtual possessor. But his religious

importance goes back to prehistoric times. The temple of Heliopolis became

the centre of a theological school which exercised a great influence on

the official religion of Egypt. It was here that the sun-worship was

organised, and the doctrine of creation by generation or emanation first

developed; it was here, too, that the chief gods of the State religion

were formed into groups of nine.(53)

The doctrine of these Enneads or groups of nine was destined to play an

important part in the official creed. From Heliopolis it spread to other

parts of Egypt, and eventually each of the great sanctuaries had its own

Ennead, formed on the model of that of Heliopolis. At Heliopolis the cycle

of the nine supreme gods contained Shu and Tefnut, Seb and Mut, Osiris and

Isis, Set and Nebhât, the four pairs who had descended by successive acts

of generation from Tum, the original god of the nome. We owe the

explanation and analysis of the Ennead to Professor Maspero, who has for

the first time made the origin of it clear.(54)

Tum, who is always represented in human form, was the ancient sun-god and

tutelary deity of Heliopolis. To him was ascribed the creation of the

world, just as it was ascribed by each of the other nomes to their chief

god. But whereas at the Cataract the creator was a potter who had made

things from clay, or at Memphis an artist who had carved them out of

stone, so it was as a father and generator that Tum had called the

universe into being. In the Book of the Dead it is said of him that he is

“the creator of the heavens, the maker of (all) existences, who has

begotten all that there is, who gave birth to the gods, who created

himself, the lord of life who bestows upon the gods the strength of

youth.” An origin, however, was found for him in Nu, the primeval abyss of

waters, though it is possible that Professor Maspero may be right in

thinking that Nu really owes his existence to the goddess Nut, and that he

was introduced into the cosmogony of Heliopolis under the influence of

Asiatic ideas. However this may be, Shu and Tefnut, who immediately

emanated from him, apparently represented the air. Later art pictured them

in Asiatic style as twin lions sitting back to back and supporting between

them the rising or setting sun.(55) But an old legend described Shu as

having raised the heavens above the earth, where he still keeps them

suspended above him like the Greek Atlas. A text at Esna, which identifies

him with Khnum, describes him as sustaining “the floor of the sky upon its

four supports” or cardinal points; “he raised Nut, and put himself under

her like a great column of air.” Tefnut, his twin sister, was the north

wind, which gives freshness and vigour to the world.

The next pair in the Ennead of Heliopolis were Seb and Nut, the earth and

the firmament, who issued from Shu and Tefnut. Then came Osiris and Isis,

the children of the earth and sky, and lastly Set and Nebhât, the one the

representative of the desert land in which the Asiatic nomads pitched

their tents, the other of the civilised Egyptian family at whose head

stood _Neb-hât_, “the lady of the house.” Upon the model of this Ennead

two other minor Enneads were afterwards formed.

But it was only its first father and generator who was the god of the nome

in which the temple of Heliopolis stood. The deities who were derived from

him in the priestly cosmogony were fetched from elsewhere. They were

either elementary deities like Shu and Seb, or else deities whose worship

had already extended all over Egypt, like Osiris and Isis. The goddess

Nebhât seems to have been invented for the purpose of providing Set with a

sister and a consort; perhaps Tefnut, too, had originally come into

existence for the same reason.

The Ennead, once created, was readily adopted by the other nomes of Egypt.

It provided an easy answer to that first question of primitive humanity:

what is the origin of the world into which we are born? The answer was

derived from the experience of man himself; as he had been born into the

world, so, too, it was natural to suppose that the world itself had been

born. The creator must have been a father, and, in a land where the woman

held a high place in the family, a mother as well. Though Tum continued to

be pictured as a man, no wife was assigned him; father and mother in him

were one.

It is impossible not to be reminded of similar supreme gods in the Semitic

kingdoms of Asia. Asshur of Assyria was wifeless;(56) so also was Chemosh

of Moab. Nor does the analogy end here. Creation by generation was a

peculiarly Semitic or rather Babylonian doctrine. The Babylonian Epic of

the Creation begins by describing the generation of the world out of Mummu

or Chaos. And the generation is by pairs as in the Ennead of Heliopolis.

First, Mummu, the one primeval source of all things; then Lakhmu and

Lakhamu, who correspond with Shu and Tefnut; next, Ansar and Kisar, the

firmament and the earth; and lastly, the three great gods who rule the

present world. Of one of these, Ea, the ruler of the deep, Bel-Merodach

the sun-god was born.

Between the Babylonian and the Egyptian schemes the differences are

slight. In the Ennead of Heliopolis, Tum, the offspring of Nu, takes the

place of Mummu, the watery chaos; but this was because he was the god of

the State, and had therefore to be made the creator and placed at the head

of the gods. It merely interposes another link in the chain of generation,

separating Nu from the two elemental deities which in the Babylonian

scheme proceeded immediately from it. For Nu was the exact equivalent of

the Babylonian Mummu. Both denote that watery chaos out of which, it was

believed, all things have come. And what makes the fact the more

remarkable is, that though the conception of a primeval watery chaos was

natural in Babylonia, it was not so in Egypt. Babylonia was washed by the

waters of the Persian Gulf, out of which Ea, the god of the deep, had

arisen, bringing with him the elements of culture, and the waves of which

at times raged angrily and submerged the shore. But the Egyptians of

history lived on the banks of a river and not by the sea; it was a river,

too, whose movements were regular and calculable, and which bestowed on

them all the blessings they enjoyed. So far from being an emblem of chaos

and confusion, the Nile was to them the author of all good. I do not see

how we can avoid the conclusion that between the Ennead of Heliopolis with

its theory of cosmology, and the cosmological doctrines of Babylonia, a

connection of some sort must have existed.(57)

Indeed, the native name of Heliopolis is suggestive of Asiatic relations.

It is the On of the Old Testament, and was called On of the north to

distinguish it from another On, the modern Erment, in the south. It was

symbolised by a fluted and painted column of wood,(58) in which some have

seen an emblem of the sun-god, like the sun-pillars of Semitic faith. But

the name of On was not confined to Egypt. There was another Heliopolis in

Syria, called On of the Beka’a by Amos (i. 5), where the sun-god was

worshipped under the form of a stone. And in Palestine itself Beth-el,

“the house of God,” was known in earlier ages as Beth-On. It is true that

the name of On may have been carried into Asia in the days when the Hyksos

dynasties ruled over Egypt, but it is more probable that both Beth-On and

the On near Damascus go back to an older date. In any case they testify to

some kind of contact between the sun-worship of Heliopolis in Egypt and

that of Syria and Palestine.(59)

Between Tum, the sun-god of Northern Egypt, and Horus, the sun-god of the

South, there was one notable difference. While Horus was a hawk, Tum was a

man. In this respect, again, he resembled the gods of Babylonia, who are

always depicted in human form. It is difficult to find any other Egyptian

deity who was similarly fortunate. Osiris, indeed, was originally a man,

but at an early date he became confounded with his symbol, the ram, in his

title of “lord of Daddu.” Professor Maspero thinks that Khnum at the

Cataract may also have been originally a man; but if so, he too became a

ram before the beginning of history. Ptaḥ of Memphis and Anher of This are

the only other gods who appear consistently in human shape, and Ptaḥ is a

mummy, while Anher, like Tum, was the sun.(60)

With the adoption of the Ennead and the cosmological ideas it embodied, a

new element entered into the theology of the Egyptian temples. This was

the identification of one god with another, or, to speak more exactly, the

loss of their individuality on the part of the gods. The process was begun

when the priests of Heliopolis took such of the divinities as were

recognised throughout Egypt, and transmuted them into successive phases in

the creative action of their local god. It was completed when other

religious centres followed the example of Heliopolis, and formed Enneads

of their own. In each case the local god stood of necessity at the head of

the Ennead, and in each case also he was assimilated to Tum. Whatever may

have previously been his attributes, he thus became a form of the sun-god.

A dual personality was created, which soon melted into one.

But it was not as Tum that the sun-god of Heliopolis thus made his way

victoriously through the land of Egypt. It was under the more general and

undefined name of Ra that he was accepted in the Egyptian sanctuaries. Tum

remained the local god of Heliopolis, or else formed part of a solar

trinity in which he represented the setting sun. But Ra became a divine

Pharaoh, in whom the world of the gods was unified.

The kings of the Fifth Dynasty called themselves his sons. Hitherto the

Pharaohs had been incarnations of the sun-god, like the earlier monarchs

of Babylonia; henceforward the title of Horus was restricted to their

doubles in the other world, while that of “Son of the Sun” was prefixed to

the birth-name which they bore on earth. The same change took place also

in Babylonia. There it was due to the invasion of foreign barbarians, and

the establishment of a foreign dynasty at Babylon, where the priests

refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of a king who had not been adopted

as son by the sun-god Bel-Merodach. Perhaps a similar cause was at work in

Egypt. The Fifth Dynasty came from Elephantinê, an island which was not

only on the extreme frontier of Egypt, but was inhabited then as now by a

non-Egyptian race; it may be that the price of their acknowledgment by the

priests and princes of Memphis was their acceptance of the title of “Son

of Ra.” It narrowed their pretensions to divinity, and at the same time

implied their submission to the god of the great sanctuary which stood in

such close relations with Memphis. As we have seen, the first monument on

which the winged solar disc is found is that of a king of the Fifth

Dynasty; it there overshadows his figure and his two names; but though the

hawk of Horus stands above the name of his double, his birth-name is

without the title of “Son of Ra.”

When once the principle had been adopted that the leading gods of Egypt

were but varying forms of the sun-god, it was easy to construct Enneads,

whatever might be the number of the deities it was wished to bring into

them. Thus at Heliopolis itself Horus the son of Isis was introduced, his

confusion with the sun-god Horus facilitating the process. At This, Anher

was identified with Shu; at Thebes, Amon was made one with Tum and Ra,

with Mentu and Mut. Where a goddess was at the head of the local Pantheon

the process was the same; she interchanged with the other goddesses of the

country, and even with Tum himself. At all events, Horapollo (i. 12)

states that Nit of Sais was at once male and female.

One result of all this kaleidoscopic interchange was the growth of

trinities in which the same god appears under three separate forms. At

Heliopolis, for example, Harmakhis became identified with Tum, and the

trinity of Tum, Ra, and Harmakhis grew up, in which Harmakhis was the sun

of the morning and Tum of the evening, while Ra embodied them both. From

one point of view, in fact, Harmakhis and Tum were but different aspects

under which Ra could be envisaged; from another point, Ra, Tum, and

Harmakhis were three persons in one god.

I believe that Professor Maspero is right in holding that the Egyptian

trinity is of comparatively late origin and of artificial character.(61)

He points out that it presupposes the Ennead, and in some cases, at least,

can be shown to have been formed by the union of foreign elements. Thus at

Memphis the triad was created by borrowing Nefer-Tum from Heliopolis and

Sekhet from Latopolis, and making the one the son of the local god Ptaḥ,

and the other his wife. The famous trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus,

which became a pattern for the rest of Egypt, was formed by transferring

Nebhât and Anubis, the allies of Osiris, to his enemy Set, and so throwing

the whole of the Osirian legend into confusion. The trinity of Thebes is

confessedly modern; it owed its origin to the rise of the Theban

dynasties, when Thebes became the capital of Egypt, and its god Amon

necessarily followed the fortunes of the local prince. Mut, “the mother,”

a mere title of the goddess of Southern Egypt, was associated with him,

and the triad was completed by embodying in it Ptaḥ of Memphis, who had

been the chief god of Egypt when Thebes was still a small provincial town.

At a subsequent date, Khonsu, the moon-god, took the place of Ptaḥ.(62)

We can thus trace the growth of the Egyptian trinity and the ideas and

tendencies which lay behind it. It was the culminating stage in the

evolution of the religious system which took its first start among the

priests of Heliopolis. First creation by means of generation, then the

Ennead, and lastly the triad and the trinity—such were the stages in the

gradual process of development. And the doctrine of the trinity itself

reached its highest point of perfection in that worship of Osiris of which

I shall speak in a future lecture.

But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine of the

trinity. Generation in the case of a god could not be the same as in the

case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless proved this. It was

inevitable, therefore, that it should come to be conceived of as

symbolical like the generation of thought, all the more since the deities

who had proceeded from Tum were all of them symbols representing the

phenomena of the visible world. Hence the idea of generation passed

naturally into that of emanation, one divine being emanating from another

as thought emanates from thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of

symbolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the expression of an

idea meant a concrete form. Seb and Nut were the divine ideas which

underlay the earth and the firmament and kept them in existence, but they

were at the same time the earth and the firmament themselves. They

represented thought in a concrete form, if we may borrow a phrase from the

Hegelian philosophy.

The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon by Greek thinkers in

the days when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the old world and the

new. It afforded an explanation not only of creation, but also of the

origin of evil, and had, moreover, behind it the venerable shadow of

Egyptian antiquity. It became the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the

Gnostic systems, and through them made its way into Christian thought.

From another point of view it may be regarded as an anticipation of the

doctrine of evolution.

The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was accomplished long

before the Pyramid texts were written under the kings of the Fifth and

Sixth Dynasties. The Ennead appears in them as a long established

doctrine, with all its consequences. The solar faith had laid firm hold of

Egyptian religion, and gained a position from which it was never to be

dislodged. Henceforward Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and

beliefs which flowed from it, and the gods and goddesses of the land

assumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not before, a new

view of the future life obtained official sanction, which substituted the

sun-god for Osiris and the solar bark for the Osirian paradise. But I must

leave an account of it to another occasion, and confine myself at present

to the last and most noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.

It is perhaps hardly correct to apply to it the term development. It was

rather a break in the religious tradition of Egypt, an interruption in the

normal evolution of the Egyptian creed, which accordingly made but little

permanent impression on the religious history of the nation. But in the

religious history of mankind it is one of the most interesting of

episodes. Like Mosaism in Israel, it preached the doctrine of monotheism

in Egypt; but unlike Mosaism, its success was only temporary. Unlike

Mosaism, moreover, it was a pantheistic monotheism, and it failed

accordingly in its struggle with the nebulous polytheism of Egypt.

One of the last Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty was Amon-hotep IV.

Since the conquest of Syria by his ancestor Thothmes III., and the

establishment of an empire which extended to the banks of the Euphrates,

Asiatic manners and customs had poured into Egypt in an ever-increasing

flood, and with them the ideas and religious beliefs of the Semitic East.

Amon-hotep III., the father of Amon-hotep IV., had maintained the older

traditions of the Egyptian court, so far at least as religion was

concerned, though his mother and wife had alike been foreigners. But his

son appears to have been young at the time of his father’s death. He was

accordingly brought up under the eye and influence of his mother Teie, and

his temperament seems to have seconded the teaching he received from her.

His features are those of a philosophic visionary rather than of a man of

action, of a religious reformer rather than of a king. He flung himself

eagerly into a religious movement of which he was the mainspring and

centre, and for the first time in history there was persecution for

religion’s sake.

For numberless centuries the Egyptian had applied the title of “the one

god” to the divinity he was adoring at the moment, or who presided over

the fortunes of his city or nome. But he did not mean to exclude by it the

existence of other deities. The “one god” was unique only to the

worshipper, and to the worshipper only in so far as his worship for the

moment was addressed to this “one god” alone. When with the growth of the

solar theory the deities of Egypt began to be resolved into one another,

the title came to signify that attribute of divinity which unified all the

rest. But to the Egyptian, it must be remembered, the attribute was a

concrete thing; and though in one sense Amon and Khnum and Horus denoted

the attributes of Ra, in another sense they were distinct personalities

with a distinct history behind them. The result was what I have called a

nebulous polytheism, in which the individual deities of the Egyptian

Pantheon had melted like clouds into one another; they had lost their

several individualities, but had not gained a new individuality in return.

The conservative spirit, which forbade the Egyptian to break with the

traditions of the past and throw aside any part of his heritage, prevented

him from taking the final step, and passing out of polytheism into

monotheism.

It was just this step, however, that was taken by Amon-hotep IV. and his

followers, and which at once stamps the non-Egyptian character of his

religious reformation. Henceforward there was to be but one God in Egypt,

a God who was omnipresent and omniscient, existing everywhere and in

everything, and who would brook no rival at his side. He was not, indeed,

a new god, for he had already revealed himself to the generations of the

past under the form of Ra, and his visible symbol was the solar disc. But

Ra had been ignorantly worshipped; unworthy language had been used of him,

and he had been confounded with gods who were no gods at all. The new and

purified conception of the supreme divinity needed a new name under which

it could be expressed, and this was found in Aten, “the solar disc,” or

Aten-Ra, “the disc of the sun.”

It was not probable that Amon of Thebes and his worshippers would bow

their heads to the new faith without a struggle. It was Amon who had led

the fathers of Amon-hotep IV. to victory, who had given them their empire

over the world, and upon whose city of Thebes the spoils of Asia had been

lavished. A fierce contest broke out between the Theban priesthood and the

heretical king. The worship of Amon was proscribed, his very name was

erased from the monuments on which it was engraved, and a shrine of the

rival deity was erected at the very gates of his ancient temple. The

Pharaoh changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, “the glory of the

solar disc,” and thereby publicly proclaimed his renunciation of the

religion of which he was the official head.

But in the end the priests of Amon prevailed. Khu-n-Aten was forced to

leave the capital of his fathers, and, carrying with him the State

archives and the adherents of the new faith, he built a new city for

himself midway between Minia and Siût, where the mounds of Tel el-Amarna

now mark its site. Here, surrounded by a court which was more than half

Asiatic in blood and belief, he raised a temple to the new God of Egypt,

and hard by it a palace for himself. The new creed was accompanied by a

new style of art; the old traditions of Egyptian art were thrown aside,

and a naturalistic realism, sometimes of an exaggerated character, took

their place. The palace and temple were alike made glorious with brilliant

painting and carved stone, with frescoed floors and walls, with columns

and friezes inlaid with gold and precious stones, with panels of pictured

porcelain, and with statuary which reminds us of that of later Greece.(63)

Gardens were planted by the edge of the Nile, and carriage roads

constructed in the desert, along which the king and his court took their

morning drives. Then, returning to his palace, the Pharaoh would preach or

lecture on the principles and doctrines of the new faith.

It was officially called “the doctrine,” which, as Professor Erman

remarks, shows that it possessed a dogmatically-formulated creed. Its

teachings are embodied in the hymns inscribed on the walls of the tombs of

Tel el-Amarna. The God, whose visible symbol is the solar disc, is He, as

we learn from them, who has created all things, “the far-off heavens,

mankind, the animals and the birds; our eyes are strengthened by his

beams, and when he reveals himself all flowers grow and live; at his

rising the pastures bring forth, they are intoxicated before his face; all

the cattle skip on their feet, and the birds in the marshes flutter with

joy.” It is he “who brings in the years, creates the months, makes the

days, reckons the hours; he is lord of time, according to whom men

reckon.”(64) Beside Him, “there is no other” God.

“Beautiful is thy setting,” begins another hymn, “O living Aten, thou lord

of lords and king of the two worlds! When thou unitest thyself with the

heaven at thy setting, mortals rejoice before thy countenance, and give

honour to him who has created them, and pray to him who has formed them in

the presence of Khu-n-Aten, thy son, whom thou lovest, the king of Egypt

who liveth in truth. All Egypt and all lands within the circle that thou

treadest in thy glory, praise thee at thy rising and at thy setting. O

God, who in truth art the living one, who standest before our eyes, thou

createst that which was not, thou formest it all; we also have come into

being through the word of thy mouth.”(65)

The solar disc was thus, as it were, the mask through which the supreme

Creator revealed himself. And this Creator was the one true living God,

living eternally, brooking the worship of no other god at his side, and,

in fact, the only God who existed in truth. All other gods were false, and

the followers of Aten-Ra were accordingly called upon to overthrow their

worship and convert their worshippers. At the same time, Aten was the

father of all things; he had called all things into existence by the word

of his mouth, men equally with the beasts and birds, the flowers and the

far-off heaven itself. If, therefore, men refused to worship him, it was

because they had been led astray by falsehood and ignorance, or else were

wilfully blind.

Whatever measure of success the reforms of Khu-n-Aten attained among the

natives of Egypt, they must have possessed in so far as they represented a

reformation, and not the introduction of a new and foreign cult. There

must have been a section of the people, more especially among the educated

classes, whose religious ideas were already tending in that direction, and

who were therefore prepared to accept the new “doctrine.” The language

often used of the gods, if strictly interpreted, implied a more or less

modified form of monotheism; the Egyptian deities, as we have seen, had

come to be resolved into manifestations of the sun-god, and the symbol of

the new faith enabled it to be connected with the ancient worship of Ra.

The old sun-worship of Heliopolis formed a bridge which spanned the gulf

between Amon and Aten. Indeed, the worship of the solar disc itself was

not absolutely strange. An Egyptian, for instance, who was buried at Kom

el-Aḥmar, opposite El-Kab, in the reign of Thothmes III., speaks of being

“beloved by the beams of the solar disc” (_Aten-Ra_); and though no

determinative of divinity is attached to the words, it was but a step

forward to make the disc the equivalent of the sun-god.

Nevertheless, between the “doctrine” of Khu-n-Aten and the older Egyptian

ideas of the sun-god there was a vast, if not impassable, distance. The

“doctrine” was no result of a normal religious evolution. That is proved

not only by the opposition with which it met and the violent measures that

were taken to enforce it, but still more by its rapid and utter

disappearance or extermination after the death of its royal patron. It

came from Asia, and, like the Asiatic officials, was banished from Egypt

in the national reaction which ended in the rise of the Nineteenth

Dynasty.

The god of Khu-n-Aten, in fact, has much in common with the Semitic Baal.

Like Baal, he is the “lord of lords,” whose visible symbol is the solar

orb. Like Baal, too, he is a jealous god, and the father of mankind. It is

true that Baal was accompanied by the shadowy Baalat; but Baalat, after

all, was but his pale reflection, necessitated by the genders of Semitic

grammar; and in some parts of the Semitic world even this pale reflection

was wanting. Chemosh of Moab, for instance, and Asshur of Assyria were

alike wifeless.

On the other hand, between Aten and the Semitic Baal there was a wide and

essential difference. The monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was pantheistic, and as

a result of this the god he worshipped was the god of the whole universe.

The character and attributes of the Semitic Baal were clearly and sharply

defined. He stood outside the creatures he had made or the children of

whom he was the father. His kingdom was strictly limited, his power itself

was circumscribed. He was the “lord of heaven,” separate from the world

and from the matter of which it was composed.

But Aten was in the things which he had created; he was the living one in

whom all life is contained, and at whose command they spring into

existence. There was no chaos of matter outside and before him; he had

created “that which was not,” and had formed it all. He was not,

therefore, a national or tribal god, whose power and protection did not

extend beyond the locality in which he was acknowleged and the territory

on which his high places stood; on the contrary, he was the God of the

whole universe; not only Egypt, but “all lands” and all peoples are called

upon to adore him, and even the birds and the flowers grow and live

through him. For the first time in history, so far as we know, the

doctrine was proclaimed that the Supreme Being was the God of all mankind.

The fact is remarkable from whatever point of view it may be regarded. The

date of Khu-n-Aten is about 1400 B.C., a century before the Exodus and the

rise of Mosaism. More than once it has been suggested that between Mosaism

and the “doctrine” of Aten there may have been a connection. But in

Mosaism we look in vain for any traces of pantheism. The Yahveh of the

Commandments stands as much outside His creation as the man whom He had

made in His own image; His outlines are sharply defined, and He is the God

of the Hebrews rather than of the rest of the world. The first Commandment

bears the fact on its forefront: other nations have their gods whose

existence is admitted, but Yahveh is the God of Israel, and therefore Him

only may Israel serve.

Lecture V. Animal Worship.

St. Clement of Alexandria thus describes the religion of his Egyptian

neighbours (_Pædag._ iii. 2): “Among (the Egyptians) the temples are

surrounded with groves and consecrated pastures; they are provided with

propylæa, and their courts are encircled with an infinite number of

columns; their walls glitter with foreign marbles and paintings of the

highest art; the sanctuary is resplendent with gold and silver and

electrum, and many-coloured stones from India and Ethiopia; the shrine

within it is veiled by a curtain wrought with gold. But if you pass beyond

into the remotest part of the enclosure in the expectation of beholding

something yet more excellent, and look for the image which dwells in the

temple, a _pastophorus_ or some other minister, singing a pæan in the

Egyptian language with a pompous air, draws aside a small portion of the

curtain, as if about to show us the god; and makes us burst into a loud

laugh. For no god is found therein, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a

serpent sprung from the soil, or some such brute animal ... and the

Egyptian deity is revealed as a beast that rolls itself on a purple

coverlet.”

St. Clement was a Christian philosopher and apologist, but the animal

worship of the Egyptians was quite as much an object of ridicule to the

pagan writers of Greece and Rome. “Who has not heard,” says Juvenal

(_Sat._ xv.),—“who has not heard, where Egypt’s realms are named—

“What monster gods her frantic sons have framed?

Here Ibis gorged with well-grown serpents, there

The crocodile commands religious fear;...

And should you leeks or onions eat, no time

Would expiate the sacrilegious crime;

Religious nations sure, and blest abodes,

Where every orchard is o’errun with gods!”

A Roman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was torn to pieces by

the mob before the eyes of Diodorus, although the Romans were at the time

masters of the country, and the reigning Ptolemy did his utmost to save

the offender.(66) For the majority of the people the cat was an incarnate

god.

This worship of animals was a grievous puzzle to the philosophers of the

classical age. The venerable antiquity of Egypt, the high level of its

moral code, and, above all, the spiritual and exalted character of so much

of its religion, had deeply impressed the thinking world of the Roman

Empire. That world had found, in a blending of Egyptian religious ideas

with Greek metaphysics, a key to the mysteries of life and death; in the

so-called Hermetic books the old beliefs and religious conceptions of

Egypt were reduced to a system and interpreted from a Greek point of view,

while the Neo-Platonic philosophy was an avowed attempt to combine the

symbolism of Egypt with the subtleties of Greek thought. But the animal

worship was hard to reconcile with philosophy; even symbolism failed to

explain it away, or to satisfy the mind of the inquirer. Plutarch had

boldly denied that the worship of an animal was in any way more absurd

than that of an image; the deity, if so he chose, could manifest himself

in either equally well. Porphyry had recourse to the doctrine of the

transmigration of souls. If the soul migrated after death into the body of

some lower animal, he urged, it would communicate to the latter a portion

of the divine essence. But after all this was no explanation of the

worship paid to the animal; the soul had not been worshipped while it was

still in the body of its original possessor, and there was therefore no

reason why it should be worshipped when it was embodied in another form.

Moreover, metempsychosis in the Greek sense was never an Egyptian

doctrine. All the Egyptian held was that the soul, after it had been

justified and admitted to a state of blessedness, could enter for a time

whatever material form it chose; could fly to heaven, for instance, in the

body of a swallow, or return to the mummified body in which it had once

dwelt. But such embodiments were merely temporary, and matters of free

choice; they were like a garment, which the soul could put on and take off

at will.

Modern writers have found it as difficult to explain the animal worship of

ancient Egypt as the philosophers and theologians of Greece and Rome.

Creuzer declared that it was the result of a poverty of imagination, and

that the beasts were worshipped because they embodied certain natural

phenomena. Lenormant argued, on the other hand, that it was due to a high

spiritual conception of religion, which prevented the Egyptians from

adoring lifeless rocks and stones like the other nations of antiquity. Of

late the tendency has been to see in it a sort of totemism which prevailed

among the aboriginal population of the country, and was tolerated by the

higher religion of the Pharaonic immigrants. In this case it would

represent the religion of the prehistoric race or races, and its

admittance into the official religion would be paralleled by the history

of Braḥmanism, which has similarly tolerated the cults and superstitions

of the aboriginal tribes of India. Indeed, it is possible to discover an

analogous procedure in the history of Christianity itself. The lower

beliefs and forms of worship can be explained away wherever needful with

the help of symbolism and allegory, while the mass of the people are left

in the undisturbed enjoyment of the religious ideas and rites of their

forefathers.

Recent discoveries, however, have cast a new light on the matter. The

early monuments of Egyptian history, found in the neolithic graves and

among the remains of the first dynasties, have shown that the animal

worship of Egypt was only part of a larger system. Slate plaques, on which

are represented the actions of Pharaohs who preceded Menes or were his

immediate successors, prove that the prevailing system of religion must

have been one closely akin to African fetishism. The gods appear

frequently, but they always appear under the form of what in later times

were regarded as their symbols. Sometimes the symbol is an animal or bird,

but sometimes also it is a lifeless object. The human forms, to which we

are accustomed in later Egyptian art, are absent;(67) there is nothing to

tell us that the religion of the time was in any way distinguished from

the fetishism of Dahomey or the Congo.

Thus on a slate plaque from Kom el-Aḥmar (opposite El-Kab(68)) we see the

Pharaoh entering the hall in which lie the bodies of his decapitated foes,

while four standards are borne before him. On the first two are the hawks

of Horus, on the third the jackal of Anubis, on the last an object which

may be intended for a lock of hair.(69) On the reverse of the plaque the

god is bringing before him the prisoners of the north. But the god is a

hawk, whose human hand grasps the rope by which the conquered enemy is

dragged along. On a plaque of equally early date, found at Abydos, five

standards are depicted, the foot of each of which is shaped like a hand

holding a rope. Above the first two standards are the jackals of Anubis,

on the next the ibis of Thoth, then the hawk of Horus, and, finally, the

curious object which is the emblem of Min. On a still older plaque from

the same locality the names of the cities ruled (or conquered) by the

Pharaoh are inscribed, each within its battlemented wall, while above is

the animal god by which it is said to be “beloved” or perhaps “destroyed.”

The last of the cities is “the royal” capital, above which stand the two

hawks of Horus, who are perched on the standards of the king; behind it

are the names of the other towns under the protection of the scorpion of

Selk, the lion of Sekhet, and the hawk of Horus.(70)

But we can trace the standards and the symbols upon them still farther

back. M. de Morgan has pointed out that the rude and primitive boats

painted on the pottery of the prehistoric graves have their prows

ornamented with standards which are precisely the same in shape as the

standards that were borne before the Pharaoh. On the top of one is perched

a hippopotamus, on another a fish; on another is a flowering branch, on

another the sail of a ship.(71) We may conclude, therefore, that both

standards and symbols were characteristic of the older population of the

country whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found when they entered it. But the

symbols had no connection with any kind of writing; we look in vain,

either on the pottery or on any other object of prehistoric art, for

hieroglyphic signs. The standard may have been adopted by the invading

race from their conquered subjects, and so introduced into their system of

writing; originally it was nothing but a primeval flagstaff at the prow of

a boat. And, like the flagstaff, the symbol that served as a flag must

have been of aboriginal invention.

Such, then, is the conclusion to which we are led by the newly-found

monuments of early Egypt. On the Pharaonic monuments of that remote age

the gods are not yet human; they are still represented by animals and

other fetishes. And these fetishes have been borrowed from the older

population of the valley of the Nile, along with the so-called standard on

the top of which they were placed.

The standard with the emblem upon it denoted a nome in the historical days

of Egypt. The emblem represented the god of the nome, or rather of the

chief sanctuary in the nome. Where the god of the nome was Horus, the hawk

appeared upon the standard; where two Horus-gods were worshipped, there

were two hawks. As the prehistoric boat had been placed under the

protection of the deity whose fetish or symbol was planted at its prow, so

the nome was under the protection of the god whose emblem was erected on

its standard. The standards borne before the Pharaoh on the plaque of Kom

el-Aḥmar were the standards of the nomes over which he claimed rule.

It would seem, then, that the god of a nome was in most instances the god

of the aboriginal tribe which originally inhabited it, and that the

symbols by which these gods were known were primitively the gods

themselves. On the plaque of Abydos it is not Selk or Sekhet who is the

protecting deity of the city, but the scorpion and the lion. And by the

side of animals and birds, as we have seen, we find also inanimate objects

which are on exactly the same footing as the animals and birds. The

primitive religion of Egypt must have been a form of fetishism.

But in passing from the older population to the Asiatic immigrants it

underwent a change. The same slate plaques which portray Horus as a hawk

and Anubis as a jackal, represent the king under the likeness of a bull.

It is a literal pictorial rendering of the phrase so often met with in the

inscriptions, in which the Pharaoh is described as a bull trampling on his

enemies. The animal has ceased to represent the actual reality, and has

become a symbol.

And this symbolism, it will be noticed, accompanies the introduction of

symbolic writing. The figure of the bull which denotes the Pharaoh, is as

much a symbol as the fish which forms part of his name. It is therefore

fair to conclude that the hawk which brings the captured enemy to the king

is also a symbol. The fetish has become symbolic; the hawk is no longer a

god in and for itself, but because it is the embodiment of the divine

Horus.

It was but a step further to unite the symbol with the human form. The

process involved the disuse of inanimate objects; only the living could be

fitly joined together. Horus could be depicted as a man with a hawk’s

head; it was less easy to combine the symbol of Min with a man’s limbs.

Such anthropomorphising followed necessarily from the deification of the

Pharaoh. The race which turned its human leader into a god was bound to

represent its gods under human form. In Egypt, however, the older element

in the population, with its religious ideas, was too strong to be wholly

disregarded by the ruling caste. The compromise, which had transformed the

fetish into a symbol, ended by retaining the animal forms of the gods, but

in subordination to the form of man. Henceforth, for the State religion,

Horus wore merely the mask of a hawk.(72)

That the official figures of the gods were thus a compromise between two

antagonistic currents of religious thought, appears very clearly when we

compare Egypt with Babylonia. In Babylonia, also, there were symbols

attached to the gods, some of them representing animals and birds, others

inanimate objects. In Babylonia, moreover, the king was a god, both in his

lifetime and after his death. But in Babylonia the figures of the gods of

the State religion were all human; it was only the demons of the popular

cult who were allowed to retain the bodies of beasts and birds. The gods

themselves were all depicted in human form. The reason of this is simple:

in Babylonia the Semitic conception of the deity was predominant; there

was no fetishism to be conciliated, no animal worship to be reconciled

with a higher faith. The emblems of the gods remained emblems, and the

gods of heaven clothed themselves with the same form as the human god on

earth.

In the retention of the primitive animal worship, therefore, we must see

an evidence not only of the strength of that portion of the population to

whom it originally belonged, but also of the conservative spirit which

characterised the Egyptians. In this case, however, the conservative

spirit was the result of the influence of the conquered race; art

continued to represent Horus with the head of a hawk, just because those

who believed him to be a bird continued to form an important part of the

population. The popular cult and the popular superstitions were too widely

spread to be disregarded.

Egyptian orthodoxy found a ready way in which to explain the animal forms

of its gods. The soul, once freed from its earthly body, could assume

whatever shape it chose, or rather, could inhabit as long as it would

whatever body it chose to enter. And what was true of the human soul was

equally true of the gods. They too were like men, differing indeed from

men only in so far as they were already in the other world, and thus freed

from the trammels and limitations of our present existence. The soul of

Ra, which was practically Ra himself, could appear under the form of a

bird, if so he willed. Transmigration from one body to another, indeed,

never presented any difficulty to the Egyptian mind. It could be effected

by the magician by means of his spells; and there were stories, like the

folk-tales of modern Europe, which told how the life and individuality of

a man could pass into the bodies of animals, and even into seeds and

trees. The belief is common to most primitive peoples, and is doubtless

due to the dreams in which the sleeper imagines himself possessed of some

bodily form that is not his own.

We must then regard the animal worship of Egypt as the survival of an

early fetishism. But it is a survival which has had to accommodate itself

to the antagonistic conceptions of an anthropomorphic faith. By the side

of the deified king the deified animal was allowed to remain, and man and

beast were mixed together in religious art. It was parallel to the

juxtaposition of pictorial ideographs and phonetically-spelt words in the

writing of a later day. And just as it was only the cultivated classes to

whom the written characters were symbols with a meaning other than that

which they bore to the eye, so too it was only these same cultivated

classes to whom the sacred animals were symbols and embodiments of the

deity, rather than the deity itself. The masses continued to be

fetish-worshippers like the earlier inhabitants of the country from whom

most of them drew their descent.

To this fact we must ascribe the extraordinary hold which the worship of

animals had upon the Egyptian people as a whole up to the period of their

conversion to Christianity. While the walls of the temple were covered

with pictures in which the gods were represented in human or semi-human

form, the inner shrine which they served to surround and protect contained

merely the beast or bird in which the deity was believed to be incarnated

for the time. When the god revealed himself to his worshipper, it was as a

hawk or a crocodile. The fact would be inexplicable if the priests alone

were privileged to see him, as has often been maintained. Such, however,

was not the case. Every Egyptian, whatever might be his rank and station,

could follow the processions in the temple, could enter its inner

chambers, and gaze upon the incarnated deity, provided only that he had

conformed to the preliminary requirements of the ritual and were not

unclean.(73) The temple was not the exclusive property of a privileged

caste; it was only the foreigner and the unbeliever who was forbidden to

tread its courts. It was open to the Egyptian populace, and to the

populace the sacred animals were the gods themselves.

We do not know whether the hawk which represented Horus, and in which the

soul of the god tabernacled for a time, was distinguished from other hawks

by special marks. We know, however, that this was the case with some of

the sacred animals. According to Herodotus (iii. 28), the bull Apis of

Memphis was required to be black, with a white triangle on his forehead,

an eagle on his back, double hairs in his tail, and a beetle on his

tongue; and though the extant figures of the god do not support the

precise description given by the Greek writer, they show that certain

characteristic marks were really required. In this way the incarnation of

the god was separated from other animals of the same species, upon whom,

however, some part of his divinity was reflected. Since any bull might

have become the habitation of the deity, it was necessary to treat the

whole species with respect.

The bull Apis was an incarnation of Ptaḥ, “the new life of Ptaḥ,” as he is

often called on the votive tablets. We must see in him accordingly the

local fetish of the pre-dynastic Egyptians who lived in the district where

Memphis afterwards arose. In fact the bull was sacred throughout the whole

of this region. In the neighbouring city of Heliopolis the place of Apis

was taken by another bull, Ur-mer, or Mnevis, as the Greeks miscalled him.

Mnevis was the incarnation of the sun-god, and, like Apis, it was needful

that he should be black. Nor was the worship of the bull confined to the

north. At Erment also, near Thebes, Mentu, the god of the nome, was

incarnated in the bull Bakis.(74) The sanctity of the bull is not

difficult to understand among an agricultural people in an early stage of

development. In India the bull is still sacred; and Sir Samuel Baker tells

us that the tribes of the Upper Nile still abstain from eating the flesh

of the ox. In Phrygia the slaughter of an ox was punishable with

death;(75) the first king of the country was supposed to have been a

peasant, and his ox-drawn cart was preserved in the temple of Kybelê.

Among the Egyptians themselves, as we have seen, the Pharaoh was

symbolised under the form of a bull at the very beginning of history.

The bull, then, must have been worshipped in the neighbourhood of Memphis

and Heliopolis before it became the incarnation of Ptaḥ or Ra. It follows,

moreover, that as yet it was no one particular bull to whom divine honours

were paid; there was no one particular bull into whom the soul of one of

the gods of the Pharaonic Egyptians had as yet entered, thus setting it

apart from all others. The bull was still a fetish pure and simple; it was

the whole species that was sacred, and not a single member of it.

That this was indeed the case, is proved by a custom which lasted down to

the latest times. Not only was the sacred bull or the sacred hawk

mummified after death, but other bulls and hawks also. There were

cemeteries of mummified animals, just as there were cemeteries of

mummified men. Vast cemeteries of cats have been found at Bubastis, at

Beni-Hassan, and other places; so too there were cemeteries of hawks and

crocodiles, of jackals and bulls. We are still ignorant of the exact

conditions under which these creatures were embalmed and buried. It is

impossible to suppose that a solemn burial was provided for all the

individual members of a species which was accounted sacred in a particular

nome, much less for all its individual members throughout Egypt, as seems

to have been imagined by Herodotus (ii. 41); there must have been certain

limitations within which such a burial was permitted or ordained. And

sometimes there was no burial at all; the mummy of the sacred animal of

Set, for instance, has never been found.

Still the fact remains that not only were the bodies of the Apis or the

Mnevis mummified and consigned to a special burying-place, but the bodies

of other bulls as well. Doubtless the Egyptian of the Pharaonic period had

an excellent reason to give for the practice. Just as the servants of the

prince were buried around their master, or as the _ushebti_-figures were

placed in the tomb of the dead, so the ordinary bull was interred like the

divine incarnations of Ptaḥ and Ra, in the hope that its double might

accompany the spirit of the god in the other world. The scenes of country

life painted on the walls of the tombs contain pictures of sheep and

cattle whose _kas_ were, in some way or other, believed to exist in the

Egyptian paradise, and a mummified bull had as much right to the hope of a

future existence as a mummified man. The very act of embalming implied the

possibility of its union with Osiris.

Egyptian logic soon converted the possibility into a fact. With the growth

of the Osirian cult the dead Apis became, like the pious Egyptian, one

with Osiris, the lord of the other world. His identity with Ptaḥ paled and

disappeared before his newer identity with Osiris. At first he was

Osiris-Apis, “the Osirified bull-god,” as guardian only of the necropolis

of Memphis; then as god also of both Memphis and Egypt in life as well as

in death. Under the Ptolemies, Greek ideas gathered round the person of a

deity who thus united in himself the earlier and later forms of Egyptian

belief, and out of the combination rose the Serapis of the classical age,

whose worship exercised so great an influence on the Roman world. In the

features of the human Serapis, with his majestic face and flowing beard,

it is difficult to recognise the bull-god of primitive Egypt.

The history of Serapis is on a large scale what that of the other sacred

animals of Egypt is on a smaller scale. Mnevis was a lesser Apis; as

Heliopolis waned before Memphis, so did its divine bull before the rival

deity of the capital. They had both started on an equal footing, and had

followed the fortunes of the cities where they were adored. At Mendes it

was not a bull, but a ram, that was the object of worship, and in which

the priests beheld an incarnation of Ra,(76) though the accidental fact

that the word _ba_ meant alike “ram” and “soul” caused later generations

to identify it with the “soul” of Osiris. In the Fayyûm it was the

crocodile which naturally became the god Sebek or Sukhos, and at a later

time Pete-sukhos, “the gift of Sukhos.” In the latter name we read the

signs of a growing disinclination to see in the animal the god himself or

even his soul or double; the Sukhos becomes “the gift of Sukhos,” separate

from the god, and bestowed by him upon man.

There were other nomes besides the Fayyûm in which the crocodile was

worshipped. It was the sacred animal of Onuphis in the Delta, and of Ombos

in the far south of Egypt. But we must not expect to find a Sebek and a

sacred crocodile always accompanying one another. There could be cases in

which the crocodile was identified with other gods than Sebek,—with Set,

for example, as at Nubti, near Dendera. The sacred animal existed before

the god whose incarnation he afterwards became. The neolithic races were

in the valley of the Nile before the Pharaonic Egyptians, and the deities

they adored were consequently also there before the gods of the intruding

race. Ptaḥ, with his human figure, would not have been transformed into

the bull Apis if the bull had not been already in possession.

The name of the god Thoth is itself a proof of this. Thoth was the god of

Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên, and his patronage of writing and books

shows that he must have been the deity of the Pharaonic race. The god to

whom the invention of the hieroglyphs was ascribed, could not have been

the god of an illiterate population.

Now the Egyptian form of the name Thoth is Deḥuti (or Zeḥuti), “he who

belongs to the ibis.”(77) Thoth, therefore, was not originally the ibis,

and, in spite of his bird’s head, the human body which he retained was a

traditional evidence of the fact. He was merely “attached to the

ibis,”—attached, that is to say, to the place where the ibis was the

fetish of the aborigines.

According to Manetho, it was not until the reign of the second king of the

Second Dynasty that Apis, Mnevis, and Mendes “were adjudged to be gods.”

This must mean that it was then that the State religion admitted for the

first time that the official gods of Memphis, Heliopolis, and Mendes were

incarnated in the sacred animals of the local cults. That the statement is

historically correct, may be gathered from the fact that the temples of

Memphis and Heliopolis were dedicated to Ptaḥ and Tum, and not to Apis and

Mnevis. When they were built the divinity of the bull had not yet been

officially recognised. The gods in whose honour they were founded were

gods of human form, and gods of human form they continued to be. Down to

the last days of Egyptian paganism the sun-god of Heliopolis was not a

bull, but a man; and though the mummified Apis watched over the cemeteries

of Memphis, the god of its great temple remained a mummified man and not a

mummified bull.

One of the legends elaborately concocted in the temples out of old

folk-tales and etymological puns explained the animal forms of the gods as

the result of the murder of Osiris by Typhon or Set. The fear of sharing

his fate made them hide themselves, it was related, in the bodies of the

beasts.(78) But the explanation must belong to an age when the

introduction of foreign ideas had thrown discredit on the old worship of

animals. In earlier times no explanation was needed. The belief in the

power possessed by the soul of migrating from one body into another, and

the symbolism of which the hieroglyphic writing was at once the expression

and the cause, formed an easy bridge by which the fetishism of neolithic

Egypt and the anthropomorphism of historical Egypt could be joined

together. Horus is a hawk and the Pharaoh is a bull on the earliest

monuments we possess, and such visible symbols necessarily reacted on a

people, one half at least of whom already acknowledged the hawk and the

bull as their gods. The official recognition of Apis and Mnevis and Mendes

was the last step in the process of incorporating the aboriginal

superstitions and practices into the State religion, and giving them

official sanction. The parallelism with Braḥmanism in India is complete.

But we have still to ask why it was that the bull was worshipped in one

district of prehistoric Egypt, the hawk in another? Why was it that a

particular fetish was the protecting deity of a particular sanctuary or

nome? To this there can be but one answer. A modified form of totemism

must once have been known in the valley of the Nile. The sacred animal

must have been the last representative of the totem of the tribe or clan.

The emblems borne on the flagstaffs of the prehistoric boats, like the

emblems on the standards of the several nomes, must have been the animals

or objects in which the clans saw the divine powers which held them

together, and from which, it may be, they were derived. The subsequent

history of animal worship in Egypt is a continuous drifting away from this

primitive totemism. The inanimate objects first fall into the background;

then, under the influence of a higher form of religion, the animals become

symbols, and assume semi-human shapes, and finally one only out of a

species is selected to become the incarnation of a god. But the god of

whom he is the incarnation is a very different god from the divinity that

was believed to reside in the original fetish. It is a god in the Asiatic

and not in the African sense, a god whose nature is spiritual and free

from the limitations of our earthly existence, so that he can enter at any

moment into whatsoever form he desires. The old fetishes survived, indeed,

but it was as amulets and charms; and to these the multitude transferred

its faith as the State religion became more and more unintelligible to it.

The magic lock of hair and image of a serpent preserved at Saft el-Henna,

and said by the priests to have belonged to the sun-god, had doubtless

come down from the days of fetishism.

It has often been asserted that besides the bull or the ram or the

crocodile, there were other creatures of a composite or fabulous character

which were also accounted sacred by the Egyptians. It is true that the

sacred animal and symbol of Set seems to be of this nature. His forked

tail and ass-like ears make it difficult to believe that any existing

beast ever served for his portrait. But the sphinx, in whom the men of the

Eighteenth Dynasty saw the image of Harmakhis, the rising sun, or the

phœnix in whom the sun-god of Heliopolis was incarnated, belongs to a

different category. They are not sacred animals in the sense in which Apis

and Mnevis were so.

The sphinx, like the symbol of Set, is one of those composite creatures

which meet us from time to time in Egyptian art. It has been said that

such composite creatures were as real to the Egyptian as the cattle and

sheep he tended in the fields; that he was quite as much prepared to meet

with them in the desert, as the ancient Greek would have been to meet with

a satyr in the woods or a Highlander with a kelpie by the waterside. Very

possibly that was the case; it will not, however, explain their origin, or

the forms that were assigned to them. Why, for instance, should the sphinx

of Giza be in the form of a lion with a human head?

Once more we must look to Asia for an explanation. The sphinx of Giza was

the guardian of the tombs of the dead; it protected them from the

spiritual foes whose home was in the desert. “I protect thy sepulchral

chapel,” it is made to say in an inscription, “I watch over thy sepulchral

chamber, I keep away the stranger who would enter, I overthrow the foe

with their weapons, I drive the wicked from thy tomb, I annihilate thy

opponents ... so that they return no more.”(79) The sphinx, in fact,

performed precisely the same office as the winged bulls that guarded the

entrance to an Assyrian palace, or the cherubim who stood at the gates of

the garden of Eden.

The winged bulls and the cherubim were composite creatures, and came

originally from Babylonia. Babylonia was the primal home, indeed, of all

such animal combinations. They were painted on the walls of the temple of

Bel at Babylon, and their existence formed an essential part of the

Babylonian cosmogony. That cosmogony rested on the doctrine of a contest

between the powers of light and darkness, of order and chaos, and on the

final victory of the gods of light. There was a world of chaos as well as

a world of order; and before the present creation could be evolved with

its settled laws and definite boundaries, there had been of necessity

another creation in which all things were confused and chaotic. The brood

of Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, corresponded with the creatures of the

actual world which the gods of light had called into existence; they were

abortive attempts at creation, composed of limbs which matched not

together, “men with the body of birds, or the faces of ravens.”

This brood of chaos were the demons who were the enemies of Bel-Merodach

and his followers. In order to oppose them successfully, it was needful

that there should be similarly composite creatures, who, instead of being

on the side of evil, were under the orders of the gods. By the side of the

evil demon, therefore, there was the “good cherub,” who protected the

pious Babylonian, and barred the way to the spirits of wickedness. The

winged bull with his human head defended the approach to a temple or

house; men with the bodies of scorpions guarded the gateways of the sun.

This curious similarity in the functions assigned to the images of

composite animals both in Egypt and Babylonia, raises the presumption that

the composite forms themselves were ultimately derived from a Babylonian

source. That such was the case we now have proof.

On the slate plaques and mace-heads of Nekhen and Abydos we find composite

forms similar to those of Babylonia. What afterwards became the

Hathor-headed column appears as a human face with a cow’s ears and horns.

Below are two monsters with a dog’s body and a lion’s head, whose

intertwined necks are snakes. What makes the latter representation the

more interesting is, that M. Heuzey has pointed out exactly the same

figures on an early Babylonian seal now in the Louvre.(80) Like the

seal-cylinder, therefore, which distinguishes the early period of Egyptian

history, the composite monsters of which the sphinx and the symbol of Set

were surviving examples indicate direct communication with Chaldæa.

And, it must be remembered, it is only in Chaldæa that they find their

explanation. Here they originated in the religious and cosmological ideas

associated with the physical features of the country. The sphinx of Giza

still guards the desert of Giza, because ages ago the flooding waves of

the Persian Gulf made the Babylonians believe that the world had arisen

out of a watery chaos peopled by unformed creatures of monstrous shape.

The case of the phœnix or _bennu_ is somewhat different. Here we have to

do not with a fabulous monster, but with an existing bird of which a

fabulous story was told. The bird was not an eagle, as Herodotos supposed,

but a heron, which at an early date seems to have been confounded with the

crested ibis, the symbol of the _khu_ or luminous soul. It was, in fact,

the spirit of the sun-god, and later legends declared that it stood and

sang on the top of a tree at Heliopolis, while a flame burst forth beside

it, and the sun rose from the morning sky. With sunset it became an

Osiris, whose mummy was interred at Heliopolis, to awake again to life

with the first rays of the rising sun. It was thus for Christian writers

an emblem of the resurrection, and as such its story is told by St.

Clement of Rome:(81) “There is a certain bird which is called the phœnix.

This is the only one of its kind, and it lives five hundred years. When

the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself

a nest of frankincense and myrrh and other spices, into which, when the

time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays a certain

kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead

bird, brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired strength, it takes

up the nest in which are the bones of its parent, and, bearing these, it

passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis.

And, flying in open day in the sight of all men, it places them on the

altar of the sun, and, having done this, it hastens back to its former

abode. The priests then inspect the chronological registers, and find that

it has returned exactly when the five hundredth year is completed.”(82)

The legend of the phœnix has grown up round the belief that the

disembodied soul could enter at will into the body of a bird. The phœnix

was allied to the hawk of Horus, and probably was originally identical

with that primitive symbol of the soul (_khu_), the name of which means

literally “the luminous.” It will be remembered that the Pyramid texts

speak of the “four _khu_” or “luminous souls of Horus” “who live in

Heliopolis,” and the sun-god of that city was usually invoked by his _bau_

or “souls,” figured as three birds which appear as three ostriches on

objects found in the tomb of Menes.(83) On an early seal-cylinder of

Babylonian type the _bennu_ or _khu_ is termed “the double of Horus.”(84)

The story of the phœnix illustrates the influence exercised by the

pictorial character of Egyptian writing upon the course of religious

thought. The soul was first symbolised by a bird. It passed out of the

corpse and into the air like a bird; it was free to enter whatever body it

chose, and the body of a bird was that which it would naturally choose.

Even to-day the belief is not extinct in Europe that the spirits of the

dead pass into the forms of swallows or doves. But at first it was

immaterial what bird was selected to express pictorially the idea of a

soul. It was the ostrich when the latter still existed in Southern Egypt;

then it became the plover, in consequence, probably, of a similarity in

sound between the name of the plover and that of the soul. At other times

the favourite symbol was the crested ibis, whose name was identical with a

word that signified “light.” Around the conception of the soul there

accordingly gathered associations with the light, and more especially with

the light of the sun. The sun-god, too, had a double and a soul; what

could be more fitting, therefore, than that they should be represented by

the crested ibis? It was but a step farther to see in the bird an

incarnation of the sun-god himself.

The subsequent development of the myth was due to the fact that the god of

Heliopolis continued to be depicted as a man. His human form was too

stereotyped in religious art to be changed, and the phœnix consequently

was never actually identified with him. It was his soul, but it was not Ra

himself. The combination of the man and the beast could be tolerated only

when both were co-ordinate survivals from a distant past. The inner

contradiction between the human and the bestial god was then obscured or

ignored.

With the human god was closely connected the ancestor worship, which was

quite as much a characteristic of Egypt as the worship of animals. It was

due in the first instance, perhaps, to the belief that the _Ka_ of the

dead man needed food and nourishment, and that if he did not receive them

the hungry double would revenge himself on the living. To this day the

Egyptian fellahin, both Moslem and Copt, visit the tombs of their

forefathers at certain times in the year, and, after eating and drinking

beside them, place a few grains of wheat or some similar offering on a

shelf in front of a window-like opening into the tomb. But the belief in

the material needs of the _Ka_ would not of itself have sufficed to

support the long lines of priests who were attached to the cult of the

dead, or the prayers that were addressed to them. It was the deification

of the Pharaoh which caused “prophets” of Khufu and Khafra to be still

consecrated in the days of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty,(85) and prevented the

forms of the sacred animals from being pictured on the temple walls. As

long as there was a human god on earth, there could also be a human god in

heaven; and in the Pyramid texts of the Sixth Dynasty the dead Pepi or

Teta is as much a god as any deity in the pantheon.

When the Osirian faith had spread throughout Egypt, and the pious Egyptian

looked forward after death to becoming himself an “Osiris,” there was

still greater reason for the divine honours that were paid to the

ancestor. In paying them to him the worshipper was paying them to the god

of the dead. And the god of the dead was himself one of the ancestors of

the Egyptian people. He was a human god who had once ruled on earth, and

he still governed as a Pharaoh in the world beyond the grave. As the

Pharaoh was a theomorphic man, so Osiris was an anthropomorphic god. In

him the cult of the ancestor reached its fullest development.

It was natural that Pharaonic Egypt should have been, so far as we know,

the birthplace of euhemerism. Where the gods had human forms, and the men

were gods, it was inevitable that it should arise. The deification of the

Pharaoh prevented any line being drawn between the living man and the

deity he worshipped. As the man could be a god, so too could the god be a

man. The gods of Egypt were accordingly transformed into Pharaohs, who

lived and conquered and died like the Pharaohs of history. They differed

from the men of to-day only in having lived long ago, and on that account

being possessed of powers which are now lost. That they should have died

did not make them less divine and immortal. The Pharaoh also died like the

ancestors who were worshipped at the tombs, but death meant nothing more

than passing into another form of existence. It was merely a re-birth

under new conditions. The _Ka_ continued as before; there was no change in

outward shape or in the moral and intellectual powers.

In fact, the death of the god was a necessary accompaniment of an

anthropomorphic form of religion. In Babylonia the temples of the gods

were also their tombs, and even among the Greeks the sepulchre of Zeus was

pointed out in Krete. The same cult was paid to the dead Naram-Sin or the

dead Gudea in Chaldæa that was paid to the dead Khufu in Egypt. We have no

need to seek in any peculiarly Egyptian beliefs an explanation of the

ancestor worship which, along with the deification of the king, it shared

with Babylonia.

The euhemerism of the Egyptian priesthood sounded the knell of the old

faith. As the centuries passed, purer and higher ideas of the Godhead had

grown up, and between the “formless” and eternal Creator of the world and

the man who had become a god, the distance was too great to be spanned. On

the one side, the gods of the national creed had been resolved one into

another, till no distinctive shape or character was left to any one of

them; on the other side, they had been transformed into mere human kings

who had ruled over Egypt long ago. The pantheistic Creator and the deified

Egyptians of vulgar and prosaic history could not be harmonised together.

The multitude might be content with its sacred animals and its amulets,

but the thinking portion of the nation turned to Greek metaphysics or a

despairing scepticism. Already, in the time of the Eleventh Dynasty, the

poet who composed the dirge of king Antef gives pathetic expression to his

doubts(86)—

“What is fortune? say the wise.

Vanished are the hearths and homes,

What he does or thinks, who dies,

None to tell us comes.