which have emanated from the school of Heliopolis. They deal with the
destiny of the Ba or “soul” rather than with that of the Osirian, and
describe the transformations which it can undergo if fortified with the
words of the ritual. It may at will transform itself into a hawk of gold,
a lotus flower, the moon-god or Ptaḥ, even into a viper, a crocodile, or a
goose. But first it must fly to Heliopolis and the solar deities who
reside there, and it is in Heliopolis that its transformation into the god
Ptaḥ is to take place.
The next chapter, the 91st, transports us into a different atmosphere of
religious thought. It deals with the reunion of the soul and the body. But
the two which follow forbid the Egyptian to believe that this meant a
sojourn of the soul in the tomb. On the contrary, the soul, it is said, is
not to be “imprisoned”; while the 93rd chapter “opens the gates of the
sepulchre to the soul and the shadow (_khaib_), that they may go forth and
employ their limbs.” And the land to which they were to go was a land of
sunlight.
From this point onwards the Book of the Dead is purely Osirian in
character. But beliefs derived from the solar cult have been allowed to
mingle with the Osirian elements; thus the bark of the sun-god has been
identified with the bark which carried the Osirian dead to the fields of
Alu, and Osiris is even permitted to assign a place to his faithful
servants in the boat of Ra instead of in the paradise over which he
himself rules. And the Osirian elements themselves belong to two different
periods or two different schools of thought. In the earlier chapters the
paradise of Osiris is gained like the paradise of Ra, by the magical power
of the words of the ritual and the offerings made by the friends of the
dead; from the 125th chapter onwards the test of righteousness is a moral
one; the dead man has to be acquitted by his conscience and the tribunal
of Osiris before he can enter into everlasting bliss.
The bark which carried the followers of Osiris has been explained by the
Pyramid texts. When the dead man had ascended to heaven, either by the
ladder which rose from the earth at Hermopolis or in some other way, he
found his path barred by a deep lake or canal. According to one myth, he
was carried across it on the wings of the ibis Thoth, but the more general
belief provided for him the boat of the ferryman Nu-Urru,(158) the
prototype of the Greek Charon. The fusion of the Osirian creed with the
solar cult, however, caused the boat of Nu-Urru and the bark of the
sun-god to be confounded together, and accordingly three chapters
(c.-cii.) have been added to that in which the boat of the Egyptian Charon
is referred to, “in order to teach the luminous spirit (_khu_) how to
enter the bark among the servants of Ra.” In the next chapter, Hathor,
“the lady of the west,” is the object of prayer.
Two chapters (cv. and cvi.) are now interpolated from the ritual of Ptaḥ.
They take us back to the age when offerings were made to the _ka_ of the
dead and not to the gods, and declare that abundant food should be given
it “each day in Memphis.” They have little to do with the destinies of the
Osirian in the paradise of Alu. These are once more resumed in the 107th
chapter: the fields of Alu are described, and the life led by those who
enjoy them.
With the 125th chapter we enter the “Hall of the Two Truths,” where Osiris
sits on his throne of judgment, and the soul is justified or condemned for
the deeds it had done in the flesh. It is no longer ceremonial, but moral
purity that is required: the follower of Osiris is to be saved not by the
words and prayers of the ritual, however correctly they may be pronounced,
but by his acts and conduct in this lower world. We are transported into a
new atmosphere, in which religion and morality for the first time are
united in one: the teaching of the prophet has taken the place of the
teaching of the priest.
All the blessings promised to the disciples of other creeds than the
Osirian are now granted to the soul who has passed unscathed through the
hall of judgment. Not only the fields of Alu are his, but the solar bark
as well, to which the school of Heliopolis looked forward; even the old
belief which confined the Ka to the narrow precincts of the tomb was not
forgotten, and the 132nd chapter instructs the Osirian how to “wander at
will to see his house.” Like Osiris himself, he can take part in the
festival of the dead, and share in the offerings that are presented at it.
Free access is allowed him to all parts of the other world: whatever
heaven or hell had been imagined in the local sanctuaries of Egypt was
open to him to visit as he would.
The later chapters of the Book of the Dead take us back to the earth. They
are concerned with the mummy and its resting-place, with the charms and
amulets which preserved the body from decay, or enabled the soul to
inspire it once more with life. They form a sort of appendix, dealing
rather with the beliefs and superstitions of the people, than with the
ideas of the theologians, about the gods and the future life.(159)
The order in which I have referred to the chapters of the book are those
of the Theban texts as edited by Dr. Naville. But it must not be supposed
that it constitutes an integral part of the original work. As a matter of
fact there are very few copies of the book, even among those which belong
to the Theban period, in which anything like all the chapters is to be
found. Indeed, it is difficult to say how many chapters a complete edition
of it ought to contain. Pierret made them one hundred and sixty-five; the
latest editors raise them to over two hundred. The reason of this is easy
to explain. The separate chapters are for the most part intended for
special purposes or special occasions, and each, therefore, has had a
separate origin. They have been collected from all sides, and thrown
together with very little attempt at arrangement or order. They belong to
different periods of composition and different schools of religious
thought: some of them mount back to the remotest antiquity, others are
probably even later than the foundation of the united monarchy. Hence, as
a rule, only a selection of them was inscribed on the rolls of papyrus
that were buried with the dead, or on the coffin and sepulchral objects
deposited in the tomb; it was only the most important of them that the
Osirian was likely to need in the other world. Indeed, in some cases only
the semblance of a text seems to have been thought necessary. The copies
made for the dead usually abound with errors, and some have actually been
found in which the text is represented by a number of unmeaning signs. The
Book of the Dead, moreover, was continually growing. The oldest texts are
the shortest and most simple, the latest are the longest and most crowded
with chapters. As fresh prayers and formulæ for protecting the dead in the
other world, or directing them on their journey, were discovered in the
local sanctuaries, they were added in the form of chapters; no precaution,
it was felt, should be omitted which might secure the safety of those who
had passed beyond the grave.
The Book of the Dead was thus a growth, and a growth it remained. It never
underwent the systematic revision which has been the lot of most other
sacred books. We look in it in vain for traces of an individual editor.
And on this account its form and even its language were never fixed. The
prayers and formulæ it contained were, it is true, stereotyped, for their
success depended on their correct recitation; but beyond this the utmost
latitude was allowed in the way of addition or change. A Masoretic
counting of words and syllables would have been inconceivable to the
Egyptian.
In later days, more especially in the Greek period, the Book of the Dead
served as a basis for other religious compositions which claimed divine
authorship, and the authority due to such an origin. Of these the most
popular was the Book of Respirations (_Shâ-n-Sensenu_), which derives its
inspiration from chapters liv. to lxiii. of the Book of the Dead, and is
ascribed to the god Thoth. In anticipation of the apocalyptic literature
of the Jews, the writer describes the condition of the soul in the next
world, following closely the indications of the old ritual, and declaring
how the “Respirations” it contains were first “made by Isis for her
brother Osiris to give life to his soul, to give life to his body, to
rejuvenate all his members anew.” The soul of the Osirian is said to
“live” by means of the book that is thus provided for him, for he “has
received the Book of Respirations, that he may breathe with his soul ...
that he may make any transformation at his will ... that his soul may go
wherever it desireth.”(160) We are reminded in these words of the last
chapter of the Book of Revelation (xxii. 7, 18, 19).
The Book of the Dead was the oldest of the sacred books of Egypt. It was
also in universal use. Whatever other articles of belief he may have held,
the Egyptian of the historical age was before all things else a follower
of Osiris. It was as an Osirian that he hoped to traverse the regions that
lay beyond the tomb, and whose geography and inhabitants were revealed to
him in the Osirian ritual. From this point of view, accordingly, the Book
of the Dead may be termed the Bible of the Egyptians. But it was not
without rivals. We have seen that even in the Book of the Dead the heaven
of Osiris is not the only heaven to which the dead may look forward.
Osiris has a rival in the sun-god, and a place in the solar bark seems
almost as much coveted as a place in the fields of Alu. The solar cult of
Heliopolis had indeed to yield to the more popular cult of Osiris, but it
was on condition that the cult of Osiris recognised and admitted it. To be
a follower of Osiris did not prevent the believing Egyptian from being
also a follower of the god Ra.
In the latter part of the Theban period the solar cult received a fresh
impulse and developed a new life. The attempt of Khu-n-Aten to establish a
new faith, the outward symbol of which was the solar disc, was but an
indication of the general trend of religious thought, and the Asiatic
conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty introduced into Egypt the worship and
creed of the sun-god Baal. One by one the gods were identified with Ra;
Amon himself became Amon-Ra, and the local deity of Thebes passed into a
pantheistic sun-god. It was under these conditions that a new ritual was
compiled for the educated classes of Egypt, or at all events was adopted
by the religion of the State. This was the Book _Am Duat_, the Book of the
Other World.
Copies of it are written on the walls of the dark chambers in the rock-cut
labyrinths wherein the kings of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties
were laid to rest. In the tomb of Seti I. we find two versions, one in
which the text is given in full, another in which the usual plan is
followed of giving only the last five sections completely, while extracts
alone are taken from the first seven. The text is profusely illustrated by
pictures, in order that the dead might have no difficulty in understanding
the words of the ritual, or in recognising the friends and enemies he
would meet in the other world.
Unlike the Book of the Dead, the Book Am Duat is a systematic treatise,
which bears the stamp of individual authorship. It is an apocalypse
resting on an astronomical foundation, and is, in fact, a minute and
detailed account of the passage of the sun-god along the heavenly river
Ur-nes during the twelve hours of the night. Each hour is represented by a
separate locality in the world of darkness, enclosed within gates, and
guarded by fire-breathing serpents and similar monsters. As the bark of
the sun-god glides along, the gates are successively opened by the magical
power of the words he utters, and their guardians receive him in peace.
Immediately he has passed the gates close behind him, and the region he
has left is once more enveloped in darkness.
But though he is thus able to illuminate for the brief space of an hour
the several regions of the other world, it is not as the living sun-god of
day that he voyages along the infernal river, but as “the flesh of
Ra”—that is to say, as that mortal part of his nature which alone could
die and enter the realm of the dead. The river is a duplicate of the Nile,
with its strip of bank on either side, its fields and cities, even its
nomes, wherein the god, like the Pharaoh, assigns land and duties to his
followers. For the followers of Ra have a very different lot before them
from that which awaited the followers of Osiris. There was no land of
everlasting light and happiness to which they could look forward, nor was
their destiny hereafter dependent on their conduct in this life. Their
supreme end was to accompany the sun-god in his bark as he passed each
night through the twelve regions of the dead, and this could be attained
only by a knowledge of the ritual of Am Duat and the mystic formulæ it
contained. Few, however, of those who started with the sun-god on his
nocturnal voyage remained with him to the last; most of them were stopped
in the regions through which he passed, where fields were granted them
whose produce they might enjoy, and where each night for a single hour
they formed as it were a bodyguard around the god and lived once more in
the light. Even the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt were condemned to dwell
for ever in this gloomy Hades, along with Osiris and the Khû or luminous
souls of an earlier faith. Those who were happy enough by virtue of their
knowledge and spells to emerge with Ra into the dawn of a new day,
henceforth had their home in the solar bark, and were absorbed into the
person of the god.
But it was not only the friends and followers of Ra who thus accompanied
him in his journey through the other world; his enemies were there also,
and the horrible punishments they had to endure, as depicted on the walls
of the royal tombs, were worthy of the imagination of a Dante. The banks
of the infernal river were lined with strange and terrible monsters, some
of them the older deities and spirits of the popular creed, others mere
creations of symbolism, others creatures of composite form to whose
invention the older mythology contributed. Fire-breathing serpents are
prominent among them, lighting up the darkness for the friends of Ra, and
burning his foes with their poisonous flames.(161)
The artificial character of this picture of the other world is clear at
the first glance. With the pedantic attention to details which
characterised the Egyptian, every part of it has been carefully
elaborated. The names and forms of the personages who stand on the banks
of the infernal river or enter the boat of Ra, as with each successive
hour he passes into a new region, are all given; even the exact area of
each region is stated, though the measurements do not agree in all the
versions of the book. But the best proof of its artificial nature is to be
found in a fact first pointed out by Professor Maspero. Two of the older
conceptions of the other world and the life beyond the grave, which
differed essentially from the solar doctrine, are embedded in it, but
embedded as it were perforce. In the fourth and fifth hours or regions we
have a picture of the future life as it was conceived by the worshippers
of Sokaris in the primitive days of Memphis; in the sixth and seventh, the
tribunal and paradise of Osiris.
The kingdom of Sokaris represented that dreary conception of an
after-existence which was associated with the ka. Like the mummy, the ka
was condemned to live in the dark chamber of the tomb, whence it crept
forth at night to consume the food that had been offered to it, and
without which it was doomed to perish. Long before the age when the Book
of Am Duat was written, this primitive belief had passed away from the
minds of men; but the tradition of it still lingered, and had secured a
permanent place in the theological lore of Egypt. It has accordingly been
annexed as it were by the author of the book, and transformed into two of
the regions of the night through which the solar bark has to pass. But the
terms in which the kingdom of Sokaris had been described were too
stereotyped to be ignored or altered, and the solar bark is accordingly
made to pass above the primitive Hades, the voices of whose inhabitants
are heard rising up in an indistinct murmur though their forms are
concealed from view. A memory is preserved even of the sandy desert of
Giza and Saqqâra, where the inhabitants of Memphis were buried, and over
which Sokaris ruled as lord of the dead. The realm of Sokaris is pictured
as an enclosure of sand, flanked on either side by a half-buried sphinx.
The author of the Book of Am Duat has dealt with the heaven of Osiris as
he has done with the Hades of Sokaris. Osiris and his paradise have been
transported bodily to the nocturnal path of the sun-god, and condemned to
receive what little light is henceforth allowed them from the nightly
passage of the solar bark. Thoth guides the bark to the city which
contains the tomb of Osiris, that mysterious house wherein are the four
human forms of the god. On the way the serpent Neha-hir has to be
overcome; he is but another form of the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ra,
who thus takes the place of Set, the enemy of Osiris. When the sixth
region is passed, which is a sort of vestibule to the “retreat” of Osiris
in the seventh, other enemies of Osiris—of whom, however, the Osirian
doctrine knew but little—are being put to death in true solar fashion.
Perhaps the most noteworthy fact in this description of the kingdom of
Osiris is, that not only all the gods of the Osirian cycle are relegated
to it, including the hawk Horus, but also the Khû or luminous manes and
the ancient kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. The fact points unmistakably
to the great antiquity of the Osirian creed. It went back to a time when
as yet the Egyptian monarchy was not united, and when the _khû_ or
luminous soul held the same place in Egyptian thought as had been held at
an earlier time by the _ka_ and later by the soul or _ba_. So undoubted
was the fact that the old Pharaohs of primeval Egypt had died in the
Osirian faith, that the author of the Book of Am Duat could not disregard
it; he was forced to place the predecessors of a Seti or a Ramses, for
whom the book was copied, in one of the murky regions of the other world
instead of in the solar bark. They had been followers of Osiris and not of
Ra, and there was accordingly no place for them in the boat of the
sun-god.
Osiris is thus subordinated to the sun. The god of the dead is not allowed
to rule even in his own domains. Such light and life as are graciously
permitted to him come from the passing of the solar bark once in each
twenty-four hours. He has lost the bright and happy fields of Alu, he has
had to quit even the judgment-hall where he decided the lot of man. Osiris
and his creed are deposed to make way for another god with another and a
lower form of doctrine.
The fact was so patent, that a second solar apocalypse was written in
order to smooth it away. This was the Book of the Gates or of Hades, a
copy of which is also inscribed in the tomb of Seti. It differs only in
details from the Book Am Duat; the main outlines of the latter, with the
passage of the solar bark through the twelve hours or regions of the
night, remain unaltered. But the details vary considerably. The gates
which shut the hours off one from the other become fortified pylons,
guarded by serpents breathing fire. The Hades of Sokaris is suppressed,
and the judgment-hall of Osiris is introduced between the fifth and sixth
hours. The object of the judgment, however, seems merely the punishment of
the enemies of the god, who are tied to stakes and finally burned or
otherwise put to death in the eighth hour. Among them appears Set in the
form of a swine, who is driven out of the hall of judgment by a
cynocephalous ape. As for the righteous, they are still allowed to
cultivate the fields of the kingdom of Osiris; but it is a kingdom which
is plunged in darkness except during the brief space of time when the bark
of the sun-god floats through it. Osiris, nevertheless, is acknowledged as
lord of the world of the dead, in contradistinction to the Book Am Duat,
which assigns him only a portion of it; and when the sun-god emerges into
the world of light at the end of the twelfth hour, it is by passing
through the hands of Nut, the sky, who stands on the body of Osiris,
“which encircles the other world.” Nor is the serpent Apophis, the enemy
of Ra, confounded with Set; his overthrow by Tum takes place in the first
hour, before the tribunal of Osiris is reached.
The theology of the two books resembles the Taoism of China in its
identification of religion with the knowledge of magical formulæ. The
moral element which distinguished the Osirian faith has disappeared, and
salvation is made to depend on the knowledge of a mystical apocalypse.
Only the rich and cultivated have henceforth a chance of obtaining it. And
even for them the prospect was dreary enough. A few—the innermost circle
of disciples—might look forward to absorption into the sun-god, which
practically meant a loss of individuality; for the rest there was only a
world of darkness and inaction, where all that made life enjoyable to the
Egyptian was absent. The author of the Book of the Gates gives expression
to the fact when he tells us that as the last gate of the other world
closes behind the sun-god, the souls who are left in darkness groan
heavily. To such an end had the learned theology of Egypt brought both the
people and their gods!
We need not wonder that under the influence of such teaching the
intellectual classes fell more and more into a hopeless scepticism, which
saw in death the loss of all that we most prize here below. On the one
side, we have sceptical treatises like the dialogue between the jackal and
the Ethiopian cat, where the cat, who represents the old-fashioned
orthodoxy, has by far the worst of the argument;(162) on the other side,
the dirge on the death of the wife of the high priest of Memphis, which I
have quoted in an earlier lecture—
“The underworld is a land of thick darkness,
A sorrowful place for the dead.
They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken.”
It was better, indeed, that it should be so than that they should awaken
only to lead the existence which the Book of Am Duat describes.
How far the doctrines of the solar theology extended beyond the narrow
circle in which they originated, it is difficult to say. In the nature of
the case they could not become popular, as they started from an assumption
of esoteric knowledge. We know that the majority of the Egyptians
continued to hold to the Osirian creed up to the last days of paganism—or
at all events they professed to do so—and as long as the Osirian creed was
retained the moral element in religion was recognised. In one respect,
however, the solar theology triumphed. The gods of Egypt, including Osiris
himself, were identified with the sun-god, and became forms or
manifestations of Ra. Egyptian religion became pantheistic; the divinity
was discovered everywhere, and the shadowy and impersonal forms of the
ancient deities were mingled together in hopeless confusion. It seemed
hardly to matter which was invoked, for each was all and all were each.
Gnosticism was the natural daughter of the solar theology. The doctrine
that knowledge is salvation and that the gods of the popular cult are
manifestations of the sun-god, was applied to explain the origin of evil.
Evil became the result of imperfection and ignorance, necessarily inherent
in matter, and arising from the fact that the creation is due to the last
of a long series of æons or emanations from the supreme God. The æons are
the legitimate descendants of the manifold deities whom the Egyptian
priests had resolved into forms of Ra, while the identification of evil
with the necessary imperfection of matter deprives it of a moral element,
and finds a remedy for it in the _gnosis_ or “knowledge” of the real
nature of things. Even the strange monsters and symbolic figures which
play so large a part in the solar revelation are reproduced in Gnosticism.
Abraxas and the other curiously composite creatures engraved on Gnostic
gems have all sprung from the Books of Am Duat and the Gates, along with
the allegorical meanings that were read into them. However much the solar
school of theology may have been for the old religion of Egypt a teaching
of death, in the Gnosticism of the first Christian centuries it was born
anew.
Lecture IX. The Popular Religion Of Egypt.
Thus far I have dealt with the official religion of ancient Egypt, with
the religion of the priests and princes, the scribes and educated classes.
This is naturally the religion of which we know most. The monuments that
have come down to us are for the most part literary and architectural, and
enshrine the ideas and beliefs of the cultivated part of the community.
The papyri were written for those who could read and write, the temples
were erected at the expense of the State, and the texts and figures with
which they were adorned were engraved or painted on their walls under
priestly direction. The sculptured and decorated tomb, the painted
mummy-case, the costly sarcophagus, the roll of papyrus that was buried
with the dead, were all alike the privilege of the wealthy and the
educated. The grave that contained the body of the poor contained little
else than the coarse cere-cloths in which it was wrapped. Our knowledge,
therefore, of the religion of the people, of the popular religion as
distinguished from the religion of official orthodoxy, is, and must be,
imperfect. We have to gather it from the traces it has left in the
religion of the State, from stray references to it in literature, from a
few rare monuments which have come down to us, from its survivals in the
modern folk-lore and superstitions of Egypt, or from its influence on the
decaying faith of the classical age.
There was, however, a popular religion by the side of the official
religion, just as there is in all countries which possess an organised
faith. And if it is difficult to understand fully the religion of the
uneducated classes in Western Europe to-day, or to realise their point of
view, it must be much more difficult to do so in the case of ancient
Egypt. Here our materials are scanty, and the very fact that we know as
much as we do about the religion of the upper class makes it additionally
harder to estimate them aright.
A considerable portion of the fellahin were descended from the earlier
neolithic population of Egypt, whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found already
settled in the country. In a former lecture I have endeavoured to show
that they were fetish-worshippers, and that among their fetishes animals
were especially prominent. They had no priests, for fetishism is
incompatible with a priesthood in the proper sense of the term. Neither
did they embalm their dead; all those beliefs and ideas, therefore, which
were connected with a priesthood and the practice of embalming must have
come to them from without; the gods and sacerdotal colleges of the State
religion, the Osirian creed, and the belief in the resurrection, must have
been for them of foreign origin. And of foreign origin they doubtless
remained to the bulk of the nation down to the last days of paganism.
Amon and Ra and Osiris were indeed familiar names, the temple festivals
were duly observed, and the processions in honour of the State gods duly
attended; and after the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the fusion
between the different elements in the population was completed, the
practice of mummification became general; but the names of the State gods
were names only, to which the peasant attached a very different meaning
from that which official orthodoxy demanded. He still worshipped the tree
whose shady branches arose on the edge of the desert or at the corner of
his field, or brought his offerings to some animal, in which he saw not a
symbol or an incarnation of Horus and Sekhet, but an actual hawk and cat.
How deeply rooted this belief in the divinity of animals was in the minds
of the people, is shown by the fact that the State religion had to
recognise it just as Mohammed had perforce to recognise the sanctity of
the “Black Stone” of the Kaaba. As we have seen, the second king of the
Second Thinite Dynasty is said to have legalised the worship of the bull
Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the ram of Mendes; and though
the official explanation was that these animals were but incarnations of
Ptaḥ and Ra to whom the worship was really addressed, it was an
explanation about which the people neither knew nor cared. The divine
honours they paid to the bulls and ram were paid to the animals
themselves, and not to the gods of the priestly cult.
Here and there a few evidences have been preserved to us that such was the
fact. In the tomb of Ra-zeser-ka-seneb, for instance, at Thebes, the
artist has introduced a picture of a peasant making his morning prayer to
a sycamore which stands at the end of a corn-field, while offerings of
fruit and bread and water are placed on the ground beside it.(163) The
official religion endeavoured to legalise this old tree worship much in
the same way as Christianity endeavoured to legalise the old worship of
springs, by attaching the tree to the service of a god, and seeing in it
one of the forms in which the deity manifested himself. Thus “the sycamore
of the south” became the body of Hathor, whose head was depicted appearing
from its branches, while opposite Siût it was Hor-pes who took the
goddess’s place.(164) Like other beliefs and practices which go back to
the neolithic population of Egypt, the ancient tree worship is not yet
extinct. On either side of the Nile sacred trees are to be found, under
which the offering of bread and water is still set, though the god of the
official cult of Pharaonic Egypt, to whom the worship was nominally paid,
has been succeeded by a Mohammedan saint. By the side of the tree often
rises the white dome of the tomb of a “shêkh,” to whom the place is
dedicated, reminding us of a picture copied by Wilkinson in a sepulchre at
Hû, in which a small chapel, representing the tomb of Osiris, stands by
the side of a tree on whose branches is perched the _bennu_ or
phœnix.(165) The most famous of these trees, however, that of Matarîya, is
an object of veneration to the Christian rather than to the Mohammedan.
The Holy Family, it is said, once rested under its branches during their
flight into Egypt; in reality it represents a sycamore in which the soul
of Ra of Heliopolis must have been believed to dwell.
Professor Maspero has drawn attention to certain stelæ in the museum of
Turin, which show how, even in the lower middle class, it was the animal
itself and not the official god incarnated in it that was the object of
worship. On one of them, which belongs to the age of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, huge figures of a swallow and a cat are painted, with a table of
offerings standing before them, as well as two kneeling scribes, while the
accompanying inscriptions tell us that it was to “the good” swallow and
the “good” cat, and not to any of the State gods who may have hidden
themselves under these animal forms, that flowers were being offered and
prayers made. On another stela we find two pet cats, who are sitting on a
shrine and facing one another, and whom their mistresses—two of the women
who wailed at funerals—adore in precisely the same language as that which
was used of Osiris or Amon.(166) In the quarries north of Qurna is a
similar representation of a cow and a cobra, which stand face to face with
a table of offerings between them, while a worshipper kneels at the side,
and a half-obliterated inscription contains the usual formulæ of
adoration.(167) Still more curious is a stela, now in the museum of Cairo,
on which an ox is represented inside a shrine, while underneath it is a
Greek inscription declaring that the “Kretan” who had dedicated the
monument could interpret dreams, thanks to the commandment of “the god.”
The god, it will be noticed, is not Apis, but an ordinary ox.
But of all the animals who thus continued to be the real gods of the
people in spite of priestly teaching and State endowments, none were so
numerous or were so universally feared and venerated as the snakes. The
serpent was adored where Amon was but a name, and where Ra was looked upon
as belonging, like fine horses and clothes, to the rich and the mighty.
The prominence of the serpent in Egyptian mythology and symbolism
indicates how plentiful and dangerous it must have been in the early days
of Egypt, and what a lasting impression it made upon the native mind. When
the banks of the Nile were an uninhabitable morass, and the neolithic
tribes built their huts in the desert, the snake must indeed have been a
formidable danger. The most deadly still frequent the desert; it is only
in the cultivated land that they are comparatively rare. In Egypt, as
elsewhere, the cultivation of the soil and the habits of civilised life
have diminished their number, and driven them into the solitudes of the
wilderness. But when the Pharaonic Egyptians first arrived in the valley
of the Nile, when the swamps were being drained, the jungle cleared away,
and the land sown with the wheat of Babylonia, the serpent was still one
of the perils of daily life. A folk-tale which has been appropriated and
spoilt by the priestly compilers of the legend of Ra, tells how the
sun-god was bitten by a venomous snake which lay in his path, and how the
poison ran through his veins like fire. The symbol of royalty adopted by
the earliest Pharaohs was the cobra; it symbolised the irresistible might
and deadly power of the conquering chieftain which, like the dreaded cobra
of the desert, overcame the inhabitants of the country, and compelled them
to regard him with the same awe and terror as the serpent itself.
Down to the last the embalmers and gravediggers and others who had to
attend to the funeral arrangements of the dead, and consequently lived in
the neighbourhood of the necropolis, were more exposed to the chances of
snake-bite than the inhabitants of the cultivated land. The necropolis was
invariably in the desert, and the nature of their occupation obliged them
to excavate the sand or visit the dark chambers of the dead where the
snake glided unseen. It is not surprising, therefore, that the veneration
of the snake was especially strong among the population of the cemeteries.
Those who inhabited the necropolis of Thebes have left us prayers and
dedications to the goddess Mert-seger, who is represented as a cobra or
some equally deadly serpent, though at times she is decently veiled under
the name of an official deity. Once her place is taken by two snakes, at
another time by a dozen of them. She was, in fact, the tutelary goddess of
the necropolis, and hence received the title of “the Western Crest”—that
is to say, the crest of the western hills, where the earliest tombs of
Thebes were situated. Professor Maspero has translated an interesting
inscription made in her honour by one of the workmen employed in the
cemetery. “Adoration to the Western Crest,” it begins, “prostrations
before her double! I make my adoration, listen! Ever since I walked on the
earth and was an attendant in the Place of Truth (the cemetery), a man,
ignorant and foolish, who knew not good from evil, I committed many sins
against the goddess of the Crest, and she punished me. I was under her
hand night and day; while I cowered on the bed like a woman with child, I
cried for breath, and no breath came to me, for I was pursued by the
Western Crest, the mightiest of all the gods, the goddess of the place;
and behold I will declare to all, great and small, among the workmen of
the necropolis: Beware of the Crest, for there is a lion in her, and she
strikes like a lion that bewitches, and she is on the track of all who sin
against her! So I cried to my mistress, and she came to me as a soft
breeze, she united herself with me, causing me to feel her hand; she
returned to me in peace, and made me forget my troubles by giving me
breath. For the Western Crest is appeased when the cry is made to her;—so
says Nefer-ab, the justified. He says: Behold, hear, all ears who live on
earth, beware of the Western Crest!”(168)
It is clear that Nefer-ab suffered from asthma, that he believed it had
been inflicted upon him by the local goddess for some sin he had committed
against her, and that he further believed his penitence and cry for help
to have induced her to come to him and cure him. And this goddess was a
snake. Here, in the necropolis of Thebes, therefore, the snake played the
same part as a healer that it did in the worship of Asklêpios. It will be
remembered that the first temple raised to Æsculapius at Rome was built
after a plague, from which the city was supposed to have been delivered by
a serpent hidden in the marshes of the Tiber. The serpent that destroys
also heals; by the side of Kakodæmon there is also the good snake
Agathodæmon.
Mert-seger, the serpent of the necropolis, did not wholly escape the
patronage of the State religion. Like the local cults of aboriginal India
over which Braḥmanism has thrown its mantle, the cult of Mert-seger was
not left wholly unnoticed by the organised religion of the State. A chapel
was erected to her in the orthodox form, and it is from this chapel that
most of the stelæ have come which have revealed the existence of the old
worship. In some of them Mert-seger is identified with Mut, or even with
Isis; but such an identification was never accepted or understood by her
illiterate worshippers. For them she continued to be what she had been to
their forefathers, simply a serpent and nothing more. The old faith has
survived centuries of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a modified form.
Professor Maspero discovered that the local Mohammedan saint, whose tomb
is not far from the ancient chapel of Mert-seger, is still believed to
work miracles of healing. He has taken the place of the serpent goddess;
that is all.(169)
The serpent, however, was not always venerated because it was feared. It
lived underground, and was thus, in a special sense, the oldest inhabitant
of the land, and the guardian of the soil. The Telmessians told Krœsus
that it was “a child of the earth.”(170) The harmless snakes that frequent
the village houses of modern Egypt are still regarded as the “protectors”
of the household. The bowl of milk is provided for them as regularly as it
once was in Wales for the fairies, and many tales are told of the
punishment a neglect of the household _ḥarrâs_ or “guardian” will entail.
For its poison continues to exist, though held in reserve, and is
communicable by other means than the fangs. At Helwân near Cairo, for
instance, I was told of one of these guardian snakes which once missed its
female mate and supposed it had been killed. Thereupon it crept into the
_zîr_ or jar in which water is kept, and poisoned the water in it. But the
female having soon afterwards made its appearance, it was observed to
glide into a basin of milk, then to crawl along the ground so that the
clotted dust might adhere to its body, and again to enter the _zîr_. As
the dust fouled the water, the people of the house knew that the latter
must have been poisoned, and accordingly poured it on the ground. In this
case the snake provided the remedy for the mischief it had the power to
cause.(171)
But the Agathodæmon or serpent guardian of the house not only still
survives among the fellahin of Egypt, serpent worship still holds
undiminished sway in the valley of the Nile. In a crater-like hollow of
the mountain cliff of Shêkh Herîdî there are two domed tombs, dedicated
not to a Christian or a Mohammedan saint, but to a snake and his female
mate. Shêkh Herîdî, in fact, is a serpent, and the place he inhabits is
holy ground. Pilgrimages are made annually to it, and the festival of the
“Shêkh,” which takes place in the month that follows Ramadan, is attended
by crowds of sailors and other devout believers, who encamp for days
together in the neighbourhood of the shrine.
They have no doubt about the miraculous powers possessed by the snake. It
is as thick as a man’s thigh, and, if treated irreverently, breathes
flames of fire into the face of the spectator, who immediately dies. If it
is cut in pieces, the pieces reunite of their own accord, and the blood
flowing from them marks a spot where gold is hidden in the ground.
Paul Lucas, in the early part of the eighteenth century, tells us that in
his time it was called “the angel,” and that shortly before his visit to
the Nile it had cured a woman of Ekhmîm of paralysis, from which she had
suffered for eight years, by simply crawling up into her litter when she
was brought to its dwelling-place. Paul Lucas himself was a witness of its
supernatural gifts. It was brought to him by the keeper of the shrine when
he was visiting a Bey on the opposite side of the river. Suddenly it
disappeared, and was nowhere to be found; but a messenger, who was sent
post haste to the shrine, returned with the information that “the angel
was already there, and had advanced more than twenty steps to meet the
dervish who takes care of it.”(172)
Norden, a few years later, has a similar tale to relate. He was told that
the serpent-saint “never dies,” and that it “cures and grants favours to
all those who implore its aid and offer sacrifices to it.” The cures were
effected by the mere presence of the snake, which came in person to those
who desired its help. The Christians, he adds, admit the miraculous powers
of the Shêkh equally with the Mohammedans, only they explain them as due
to a demon who clothes himself in a serpent’s form.(173)
Saint or demon, however, Shêkh Herîdî is really the lineal descendant of a
serpent which has been worshipped in its neighbourhood since the
prehistoric days of Egypt. A bronze serpent with the head of Zeus Serapis
has been found in the mounds of Benâwît, on the western side of the Nile,
which face the entrance to the shrine of the Shêkh; and the nome in which
the shrine is situated was that of Du-Hefi, “the mountain of the snake.”
The serpent of Shêkh Herîdî, with his miraculous powers of healing, must
thus have been already famous in the days when the nomes of Upper Egypt
first received their names. The old neolithic population of the desert
must have already venerated the snake that dwelt in the cleft of the rock
above which now rises the sacred “tomb” of Shêkh Herîdî.(174)
The faith of the people dies hard. The gods and goddesses, the theology
and speculations of the official religion of Egypt, have passed away, but
the old beliefs and superstitions which were already in possession of the
land when the Pharaonic Egyptians first entered it, have survived both
Christianity and Mohammedanism. The theological systems of Heliopolis or
Thebes are like the sacred trees, which, according to Dr.
Schweinfurth,(175) were brought from Southern Arabia along with the
deities with whose cult they were associated; when the deities themselves
ceased to be worshipped, the trees also ceased to be cultivated, and so
disappeared from a soil wherein they had been but exotics. But the
religion of the great mass of the people remained rooted as it were in the
soil, like the palm or the acacia. It flowed like a strong current under
the surface of the theology of the State, contemptuously tolerated by the
latter, and in its turn but little affected by it. The theology of the
State might incorporate and adapt the beliefs of the multitude; to the
multitude the State theology was a “tale of little meaning, though the
words were strong.”
If we would know what the bulk of the people thought of those deities whom
the higher classes regarded as manifestations of a single ineffable and
omnipotent divine power, we must turn to the folk-tales which were taken
up and disfigured by the rationalising priests of a later period, when
they combined together in a connected story all that had been said about
the gods of the local sanctuaries. Each sanctuary came to possess its
euhemerising legend of the chief divinity to whom it was consecrated; the
divinity was transformed into an earthly king, and his history was
concocted partly out of popular tales, associated for the most part with
particular relics and charms, partly from forced etymologies of proper
names. At how early a date these artificial legends first came into
existence we do not know, but we already meet with examples of them in the
time of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. They belong, however, to
the age when the rationalistic process of resolving the gods into human
princes had already begun,—the counter side of the process that had turned
the Pharaoh into a god,—and their artificial character is betrayed by the
attempt to extract history from learned but unscientific explanations of
the origin of local and other names.
Here, for instance, is one which was compiled for the temple of the
sun-god at Heliopolis, and is contained in a Turin papyrus of the age of
the Twentieth Dynasty: “Account of the god who created himself, the
creator of heaven, of earth, of the gods, of men, of wild beasts, of
cattle, of reptiles, of fowls, and of fish; the king of men and gods, to
whom centuries are but as years; who possesses numberless names which no
man knoweth, no, not even the gods.
“Isis was a woman, more knowing in her malice than millions of men, clever
among millions of the gods, equal to millions of spirits, to whom as unto
Ra nothing was unknown either in heaven or upon earth.
“The god Ra came each day to sit upon his throne; he had grown old, his
mouth trembled, his slaver trickled down to the earth, and his saliva
dropped upon the ground. Isis kneaded it with her hand along with the dust
that had adhered to it; she moulded therefrom a sacred serpent, to which
she gave the form of a spear-shaft. She wound it not about her face, but
flung it on the road along which the great god walked, as often as he
wished, in his twofold kingdom.
“The venerable god went forth, the (other) gods accompanied him, he walked
along as on other days. Then the sacred serpent bit him. The divine god
opened his mouth, and his cry rang to heaven. His Ennead of gods called:
‘What is it?’ and the gods cried, ‘Look there!’ He could make no answer,
his jaws chattered, his limbs shook, the venom took hold of his flesh as
the Nile covers its banks (with water).
“When the heart of the great god was quieted, he called to his followers:
‘Come to me, ye children of my limbs, ye gods who have emanated from me!
Something painful hath hurt me; my heart perceiveth it, yet my eyes see it
not; my hand hath not wrought it, nothing that I have made knoweth what it
is, yet have I never tasted suffering like unto it, and there is no pain
which is worse.... I went forth to see what I had created, I was walking
in the two lands which I have made, when something stung me which I knew
not. Was it fire, was it water? My heart is in flames, my limbs tremble,
all my members shiver. Let there be brought unto me the children of the
gods of beneficent words, who have understanding mouths, and whose power
reaches unto heaven.’
“The children of the gods came, full of woe; Isis came with her magic;
with her mouth full of the breath of life, whose recipes destroy pain,
whose word gives life to the dead. She said: ‘What is it, what is it, O
father of the gods? A serpent hath wrought this suffering in thee, one of
thy creatures hath lifted up his head against thee. Surely he shall be
overthrown by beneficent incantations; I will make him retreat at the
sight of thy rays.’
“The holy god opened his mouth: ‘I walked along the road, travelling
through the two lands of the earth, after the desire of my heart, that I
might see what I had created; then was I bitten by a serpent that I saw
not. Is it fire, is it water? I am colder than water, I am hotter than
fire, all my limbs sweat, I tremble, my eye is unsteady, I see not the
sky, drops roll from my face as in the season of summer.’
“Isis replied to Ra: ‘O tell me thy name, father of the gods, then shall
he live who is released (from pain) by thy name.’ But Ra answers: ‘I have
created heaven and earth, I have set the hills in order, and made all
beings that are thereon. I am he who created the water, and caused the
primeval ocean to issue forth. I created the spouse of his (divine)
mother. I created the heavens and the secrets of the two horizons, and
have ordered the souls of the gods. I am he who illuminates all things at
the opening of his eyes; if he closes his eyes, all is dark. The water of
the Nile rises when he bids it; the gods know not his name. I make the
hours and create the days, I send the year and create the inundation, I
make the fire that lives, I purify the house. I am Khepera in the morning,
Ra at noon, and Tum at evening.’
“The venom departed not, it advanced further, the great god became no
better. Then Isis said to Ra: ‘Thy name was not pronounced in the words
thou hast repeated. Tell it to me and the poison will depart; then shall
he live whose name is (thus) named.’
“The poison glowed like fire; it was hotter than the flame of fire. The
majesty of Ra said: ‘I grant thee leave that thou shouldest search within
me, O mother Isis! and that my name pass from my bosom into thine.’
“So the god hid himself from the (other) gods; his everlasting bark was
empty. When the moment arrived for extracting the heart (whereon the name
was written), Isis said to her son Horus: ‘He must yield up unto thee his
two eyes (the sun and moon).’
“So the name of the great god was taken from him, and Isis, the great
enchantress, said: ‘Depart, O poison, leave Ra: let the eye of Horus go
forth from the god and shine out of his mouth. I, I have done it; I throw
on the earth the victorious poison, for the name of the great god is
extracted from him. Let Ra live and the poison die!’ So spake Isis, the
great one, the regent of the gods, who knows Ra and his true name.”
The writer of the papyrus adds that the recital of this legend is an
excellent charm against the poison of a snake, especially if it is written
and dissolved in water, which is then drunk by the patient; or if it is
inscribed on a piece of linen, and hung around his neck.(176)
The contrast is striking between the introduction to the legend and the
euhemeristic spirit that elsewhere prevails in it, and can be explained,
even in the case of such disregarders of consistency as the Egyptians,
only on the supposition that the Ra of folk-lore and the Ra of theology
were held to be the same merely in name. Not even a pretence is made of
regarding Isis as a goddess; she is simply a common witch, who resorts to
magic in order to force Ra to hand over his name and therewith his powers
to her son Horus. The virtue of the name, and the power conferred by a
knowledge of it, are features common to the folk-lore of most countries.
They take us back to that primitive phase of thought which not only
identifies the name with the person or thing it represents, but makes it a
separate entity with an existence of its own.
The legend of the sun-god of Edfu is equally instructive, though in its
present form it is not earlier than the Ptolemaic age. This begins as
follows: “In the three hundred and sixty-third year of the reign of
Ra-Harmakhis, the ever-living, Ra was in Nubia with his soldiers. Enemies,
however, conspired (_uu_) against him; hence the country has ever since
borne the name of the land of Conspirators (_Uaua_). Then the god Ra went
his way in his bark along with his followers, and landed in the nome of
Edfu. Here the god Hor-Beḥudet (the winged disc) entered the bark of Ra
and said to his father: ‘O Harmakhis, I see how the enemy have conspired
against their lord.’ Then said the Majesty of Ra-Harmakhis to the person
of Hor-Beḥudet: ‘O son of Ra, exalted one, who hast emanated from me,
smite the enemy before thee forthwith.’ Hor-Beḥudet flew up to the sun in
the form of a great winged disc; on that account he is ever since called
the great god, the lord of heaven. He espied the enemy from the sky, he
followed them in the form of a great winged disc. Through the attack which
he made upon them in front, their eyes saw no longer, their ears heard no
longer, each slew his neighbour forthwith, there remained not one alive.
Then Hor-Beḥudet came in a many-coloured form as a great winged disc into
the bark of Ra-Harmakhis. And Thoth said to Ra: ‘Lord of the gods, the god
of Beḥudet (Edfu) has come in the form of a great winged disc: from this
day forth he shall be called Hor-Beḥudet (Horus of Edfu).’ And he said
(again): ‘From this day forth the city of Edfu shall be called the city of
Hor-Beḥudet.’ Then Ra embraced the form of Hor, and said to Hor-Beḥudet:
‘Thou makest the water of Edfu (red with blood like) grapes, and thy heart
is rejoiced thereat.’ Hence this water of Edfu is called (the water of
grapes).
“And Hor-Beḥudet said: ‘March on, O Ra, and behold thine enemies under thy
feet in this land.’ When the Majesty of Ra had turned back, and the
goddess Astartê with him, he saw the enemy lying on the ground, each
extended like a prisoner. Then said Ra to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘That is a suitable
life.’ Hence the seat of Hor-Beḥudet has ever since been called the place
of the Suitable Life. And Thoth said: ‘It was a piercing (_deb_) of my
enemies.’ So the nome of Edfu (_Deb_) has been called ever since by that
name. And Thoth said to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘Thou art a great protection’ (_mâk
âa_). Great in Protection (_âa mâk_) accordingly has the sacred bark of
Horus been ever since called.
“Then Ra spake to the gods who were with him: ‘Let us voyage (_khen_) in
our bark on the Nile; we are rejoiced, for our enemies lie on the ground.’
The (canal) in which the great god was has ever since been called the
Water of Voyaging (_Pe-khen_).
“Then the enemies of Ra entered the water: they changed themselves into
crocodiles and hippopotamuses. But Harmakhis voyaged on the water in his
bark. When the crocodiles and hippopotamuses came up to him, they opened
their jaws in order to destroy the Majesty of Harmakhis. Then came
Hor-Beḥudet with his followers the blacksmiths (_mesniu_); each held an
iron lance and chain in his hand, wherewith he smote the crocodiles and
the hippopotamuses. Then three hundred and eighty-one of the enemy were
brought to the spot, who had been killed in sight of the city of Edfu.
“And Harmakhis said to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘Let my image be in Southern Egypt,
since there it is that the victory was gained’ (_nekht âḥ_). So the
dwelling-place of Hor-Beḥudet (at Edfu) has ever since been called the
Victorious (_Nekht-âḥ_). And Thoth said, when he had seen the enemy lying
on the ground: ‘Glad are your hearts, O gods of heaven; glad are your
hearts, O gods of earth! Horus the younger is come in peace; he has
wrought wonders in his journey which he undertook in accordance with the
Book of the Slaying of the Hippopotamus.’ Ever since was there (at Edfu) a
forge (_mesen_) of Horus.(177)
“Hor-Beḥudet changed his form into that of a winged solar disc, which
remained there above the prow of the bark of Ea. He took with him Nekheb,
the goddess of the south, and Uazit, the goddess of the north, in the form
of two serpents, in order to annihilate the enemy in their crocodile and
hippopotamus bodies in every place to which he came, both in Southern and
in Northern Egypt.
“Then the enemy fled before him, they turned their faces towards the
south, their hearts sank within them from fear. But Hor-Beḥudet was behind
them in the bark of Ra, with an iron lance and chain in his hand. With him
were his followers, armed with weapons and chains. Then beheld he the
enemy towards the south-east of Thebes in a plain two schœni in size.”
Here follows an account of the several battles which drove the enemies of
Horus from place to place until eventually all Egypt passed under his
sway. The first battle, that which took place south-east of Thebes, was at
Aa-Zadmi, so called from the “wounds” inflicted on the foe, which
henceforth bore the sacred name of Hât-Ra, “the House of Ra.” The second
was at Neter-khadu, “the divine carnage,” to the north-east of Dendera;
the third at Hebnu, near Minia, in the nome of the Gazelle; and others
followed at Oxyrrhynchus or Beḥnesa, and Herakleopolis or Aḥnas, where a
twofold Mesen or “Forge” was established. Then the foe were driven through
the Delta and defeated at Zaru on its eastern frontier, whence they fled
in ships down the Red Sea, but were finally overthrown at Shas-ḥer, near
the later Berenikê, at the end of the road that led across the desert from
the Nile.
Meanwhile, on the 7th of Tybi, their leader “Set had come forward and
cried horribly, uttering curses upon the deed of Hor-Beḥudet in slaying
the enemy. And Ra said to Thoth: ‘The horrible one cries loudly on account
of what Hor-Beḥudet has done against him.’ Thoth replied to Ra: ‘Let the
cries be called horrible from this day forward.’ Hor-Beḥudet fought long
with Set; he flung his iron at him, he smote him to the ground in the city
which henceforward was called Pa-Reḥeḥui (the House of the Twins).(178)
When Hor-Beḥudet returned, he brought Set with him; his spear stuck in his
neck, his chain was on his hand; the mace of Horus had smitten him, and
closed his mouth. He brought him before his father Ra.
“Then Ra said to Thoth: ‘Let the companions of Set be given to Isis and
Horus her son, that they may deal with them as they will.’... So Horus the
son of Isis cut off the head of Set and his confederates before his father
Ra and all the great Ennead. He carried him under his feet through the
land, with the axe on his head and in his back.”
Set, however, was not slain. He transformed himself into a serpent, and
the battles succeeded which ended with the victory at Shas-ḥer in the land
of Uaua. After this “Harmakhis came in his bark and landed at Thes-Hor
(the Throne of Horus or Edfu). And Thoth said: ‘The dispenser of rays who
cometh forth from Ra has conquered the enemy in his form (of a winged
disc); let him be named henceforward the dispenser of rays who cometh
forth from the horizon.’ And Ra said to Thoth: ‘Bring this sun (the winged
disk) to every place where I am, to the seats of the gods in Southern
Egypt, to the seats of the gods in Northern Egypt, (to the seats of the
gods) in the other world, that it may drive all evil from its
neighbourhood.’ Thoth brought it accordingly to all places, as many as
exist where there are gods and goddesses. It is the winged solar disc
which is placed over the sanctuaries of all gods and goddesses in Egypt,
since these sanctuaries are also that of Hor-Beḥudet.”(179)
The legend is a curious combination of the traditions relative to the
conquest of the neolithic population by the Pharaonic Egyptians, of the
myth of Osiris, of etymological speculations about the meaning of certain
proper names, and of an attempt to explain the origin of the winged solar
disc. We may gather from it that the disc was first used as an ornament at
Edfu, and that it was believed, like the winged bulls of Assyria, to have
the power of preventing the demons of evil from passing the door over
which it was placed. Whether, however, this was one of the superstitions
of the older people, or whether it was brought by the conquerors from
their Babylonian home, is doubtful; perhaps the fact that the disc was a
symbolic and architectural ornament, and was confined, so far as we know,
to the temples of the official gods, points in the latter direction. It is
otherwise with the temple relics mentioned in a legend which has been
preserved on a granite shrine of the Ptolemaic epoch, that long served as
a water-trough by the side of the well at El-Arîsh. The temple from which
it originally came was that of At-Nebes, the sacred name of the city of
Qesem or Goshen, now Saft el-Henna. The legend begins by describing the
reign of Shu, who fortified At-Nebes against “the children of Apophis,”
the Semites of “the red desert,” who came from the East “at nightfall upon
the road of At-Nebes” to invade Egypt. Here he dwelt in his palace, and
from hence he “ascended into heaven,” when he had grown old and the time
had come for him to die. He was succeeded by his son Seb, who “discussed
the history of the city with the gods who attended him, (and they told
him) all that happened when the Majesty of Ra was in At-Nebes, the
conflicts of the king Tum in this locality, the valour of the Majesty of
Shu in this city ... (and the wonders that) the serpent-goddess Ankhet had
done for Ra when he was with her; the victories of the Majesty of Shu,
smiting the evil ones, when he placed her upon his brow. Then said the
Majesty of Seb: ‘I also (will place) her upon my head, even as my father
Shu did.’ Seb entered the temple of Aart (Lock of Hair) together with the
gods that were with him; then he stretched forth his hand to take the
casket in which (Ankhet) was; the serpent came forth and breathed its
vapour on the Majesty of Seb, confounding him greatly; those who followed
him fell dead, and his Majesty himself was burned in that day. When his
Majesty had fled to the north of At-Nebes, with the fire of the cobra upon
him, behold, when he came to the fields of henna, the pain of his burn was
not yet assuaged, and the gods who followed him said unto him: ‘Come, let
them take the lock (_aart_) of Ra which is there, when thy Majesty shall
go to see it and its mystery, and his Majesty shall be healed (as soon as
it is placed) upon thee.’ So the Majesty of Seb caused the magic lock of
hair to be brought to Pa-Aart (the House of the Lock), for which was made
that reliquary of hard stone which is hidden in the secret place of
Pa-Aart, in the district of the divine lock of the god Ra; and behold the
fire departed from the limbs of the Majesty of Seb. And many years
afterwards, when this lock of hair was brought back to Pa-Aart in
At-Nebes, and cast into the great lake of Pa-Aart, whose name is the
Dwelling of Waves, in order that it might be purified, behold the lock
became a crocodile; it flew to the water and became Sebek, the divine
crocodile of At-Nebes.”(180)
Inside the shrine is a picture of the two relics, the cobra which adorned
the head-dress of the Pharaoh, and the _aart_ or lock of hair which was
supposed to give its name to the temple. They were doubtless preserved at
At-Nebes, and shown to the faithful as the veritable objects which had
proved the bane and the antidote of the god Seb. They introduce us to a
side of Egyptian religion which, though essentially characteristic of the
popular faith, had also received the sanction of the official creed. The
belief in amulets and charms was too deeply engrained in the popular mind
to be ignored; they were consequently taken under the patronage of the
gods, and a theory was invented to explain their efficacy. Already the
later chapters of the Book of the Dead are concerned with the various
amulets which were necessary to the preservation or resuscitation of the
body; and even if the latter were regarded as symbolic, they were concrete
symbols—symbols, that is to say, which actually possessed the virtues
ascribed to them. Just as the name was a concrete entity, expressive of
the very essence of the thing to which it was applied, so too the symbol
was an entity with a concrete existence of its own. The materialistic
tendency of Egyptian thought, added to the fetishism of the earlier
stratum of native religion, produced this result. The doctrine of the Ka
furnished a theory by which the educated classes could explain the
efficacy of the amulet and the active virtues of the symbol. It was the
Ka, the spiritual and yet materialised double, of the amulet that worked
the charm—that made the scarab, for instance, a substitute for the living
heart, or the _dad_—the symbol of stability—a passport to the other
world.(181)
The amulets buried with the dead, the relics preserved in the temples, had
originally been the fetishes of the earlier population of Egypt. They
hardly changed their character when they became symbols endowed with
mysterious properties, or relics of the State gods which still possessed
miraculous powers. The peasant might be told in the ritual of Amon: in
“the sanctuary of the god clamour is an abomination to him: pray for
thyself with a loving heart, in which the words remain hidden; that he may
supply thy need, hear thy words and accept thine offering”;(182) but it
was a teaching that was far above him. When he entered the sanctuary it
was to see the processions of the priests and the relics preserved in it,
and it was in these relics that he still put his trust. It was not only in
Ethiopia that there were moving and speaking statues which elected the
king by taking him by the hand; in Thebes itself, under the priestly kings
of the Twentieth Dynasty, we find wonder-working statues whose reality was
guaranteed by the priesthood. One of them, it was said, was sent to Asia,
where it delivered a king’s daughter from the demon that possessed her,
and afterwards returned in a moment to Thebes of its own accord; while
others answered the questions addressed to them by nodding the head, or
even pronounced prophecies regarding the future.(183) Indeed, as we have
seen, the old theory of the ka implied that the statue of the dead man
could be reanimated in a sense by his spirit; and a text at Dendera speaks
of the soul of Hathor descending from heaven as a human-headed hawk of
lapis-lazuli, and uniting itself with her image. The peasant, therefore,
might be excused if he remained true to the superstitions and traditions
of his ancestors, and left the official religion, with its one ineffable
god, to those who were cultured enough to understand it. Like the peasant
of modern Italy, he was content with a divinity that he could see and
handle, and about whose wonder-working powers he had no doubt. Materialism
is the basis of primitive religion; the horizon of primitive man is
limited, and he has not yet learnt to separate thought from the senses
through which alone his narrow world is known to him. The simple faith of
a child often wears a very materialistic form.
Lecture X. The Place Of Egyptian Religion In The History Of Theology.
In the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to bring before you the more
salient points in the religion of the ancient Egyptians, in so far as they
illustrate their conception of the divine. But we must remember that all
such descriptions of ancient belief must be approximate only. We cannot
put ourselves in the position of those who held it; our inherited
experiences, our racial tendencies, our education and religious ideas, all
alike forbid it. If the Egyptians of the Theban period found it difficult
to understand the ritual of their own earlier history, and misinterpreted
the expressions and allusions in it, how much more difficult must it be
for us to do so. The most ordinary religious terms do not bear for us the
same meaning that they bore for the Egyptians. The name of God calls up
other associations and ideas; the very word “divine” has a different
signification in the ancient and the modern world among Eastern and
Western peoples. In fact, the more literal is our translation of an old
religious text, the more likely we are to misunderstand it.
And yet in one sense we are the religious heirs of the builders and
founders of the Egyptian temples. Many of the theories of Egyptian
religion, modified and transformed no doubt, have penetrated into the
theology of Christian Europe, and form, as it were, part of the woof in
the web of modern religious thought. Christian theology was largely
organised and nurtured in the schools of Alexandria, and Alexandria was
not only the meeting-place of East and West, it was also the place where
the decrepit theology of Egypt was revivified by contact with the
speculative philosophy of Greece. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Jew met
there on equal terms, and the result was a theological system in which
each had his share. In Philo, we are told, we find Moses Platonising; but
the atmosphere in which he did so was that of the old Egyptian faith. And
what was true of the philosophy of Philo was still more true of the
philosophy of Alexandrine Christianity.
You cannot but have been struck by the similarity of the ancient Egyptian
theory of the spiritual part of man to that which underlies so much
Christian speculation on the subject, and which still pervades the popular
theology of to-day. There is the same distinction between soul and spirit,
the same belief in the resurrection of a material body, and in a heaven
which is but a glorified counterpart of our own earth. Perhaps, however,
the indebtedness of Christian theological theory to ancient Egyptian dogma
is nowhere more striking than in the doctrine of the Trinity. The very
terms used of it by Christian theologians meet us again in the
inscriptions and papyri of Egypt.
Professor Maspero has attempted to show that the Egyptian doctrine of the
Trinity was posterior to that of the Ennead.(184) Whether this were so or
not, it makes its appearance at an early date in Egyptian theology, and
was already recognised in the Pyramid texts. Originally the trinity was a
triad like those we find in Babylonian mythology. Here and there the
primitive triads survived into historical times, like that of Khnum and
the two goddesses of the Cataract. But more frequently the trinity was an
artificial creation, the formation of which can still be traced. Thus at
Thebes the female element in it was found in Mut, “the mother” goddess, a
title of the supreme goddess of Upper Egypt; while Khonsu, the moon-god,
or Mentu, the old god of the nome, became the divine son, and so took a
place subordinate to that of the local god Amon. Sometimes recourse was
had to grammar, and the second person in the trinity was obtained by
attaching the feminine suffix to the name of the chief god. In this way
Amon-t was grammatically evolved from Amon, and even Ra-t from Ra.
Elsewhere an epithet of the god was transformed into his son; at Memphis,
for example, Imhotep, “he who comes in peace,” a title of Ptaḥ, became his
son and the second person in the trinity. Other members of the trinity
were fetched from neighbouring cities and nomes; Nit of Sais had Osiris as
a husband, and Sekhet of Letopolis and Bast of Bubastis were successively
regarded as the wives of Ptaḥ.
The triad consisted of a divine father, wife, and son. It was thus a
counterpart of the human family, and belonged to the same order of ideas
as that which explained the creation of the world by a process of
generation. This was the cosmology of Heliopolis, and it is probable that
to Heliopolis also we must ascribe the doctrine of the Trinity. At any
rate the doctrine seems to have been solar in its origin. As Tum, the god
of sunset, was identical with Khepera, the sun of the morning, and Ra, the
sun of the noonday,—all three being but one god under diverse forms,—so
the divine father was believed to engender himself in the person of the
divine son, and the divine mother to be one with the divine father and
son. The divine essence remained necessarily the same, whatever might be
the forms or names under which it displayed itself; and the name, it must
be remembered, had for the Egyptian a separate and real existence. The
father became the son and the son the father through all time, and of both
alike the mother was but another form. It was eternal fatherhood, eternal
motherhood, and eternal generation. The development of the doctrine was
assisted by that identification of the Egyptian deities with the sun-god
which ended in solar pantheism, as well as by the old theory of the ka, of
a personality distinguishable from that to which it belonged, identical
with that of which it was the double, and yet at the same time enjoying an
independent existence of its own.
With the spread of the Osirian form of faith the doctrine of the Trinity
became universal throughout Egypt. The organisation of the faith had
included the reduction of the cycle of divinities connected with Osiris
into a trinity. Thoth and Anubis, Nebhât and Set, were separated from him,
and henceforth he was made the head of a triad, in which Isis was the
second person, and Horus, the avenger of his father, was the third. How
completely the father and son were merged together may be seen from a hymn
to Horus which has been translated by Chabas(185)—
“The gods are joyous at the arrival of Osiris,
the son of Horus, the intrepid,
the truth-speaking, the son of Isis, the heir of Osiris. The
divine chiefs join him,
the gods recognise the omnipotent child himself ...
the reign of justice belongs to him.
Horus has found his justification, to him is given the title of
his father;
he appears with the _atef_-crown by order of Seb. He takes the
royalty of the two worlds,
the crown of Upper Egypt is placed upon his head.
He judges the world as he likes,
heaven and earth are beneath his eye,
he commands mankind—the intellectual beings, the race of the
Egyptians and the northern barbarians.
The circuit of the solar disc is under his control;
the winds, the waters, the wood of the plants, and all
vegetables....
Sanctifying, beneficent is his name ...
evil flies afar off, and the earth brings forth abundantly under
her lord.
Justice is confirmed by its lord, who chases away iniquity.
Mild is thy heart, O (Osiris) Un-nefer, son of Isis;
he has taken the crown of Upper Egypt; for him is acknowleged the
authority of his father in the great dwelling of Seb;
he is Ra when speaking, Thoth when writing; the divine chiefs are
at rest.”
Here Osiris is identified with Horus, and so becomes the son of his own
wife.
The Egyptian trinity has thus grown out of the triad under the influence
of the solar theology, and of the old conception of a personality which
possessed a concrete form. Once introduced into the Osirian creed, it
spread with it throughout Egypt, and became a distinguishing feature of
Egyptian theology. Along with the doctrines of the resurrection of the
body and of a judgment to come, it passed into the schools of Alexandria,
and was there thrown into the crucible of Greek philosophy. The Platonic
doctrine of ideas was adapted to the Egyptian doctrine of personality, and
the three persons of the trinity became Unity, Mind, and Soul—absolute
thought, absolute reason, and absolute energy.(186)
But while, on the one hand, there is continuity between the religious
thought of ancient Egypt and the religious thought of the world of to-day,
there is also continuity, on the other hand, between the religion of Egypt
and that of primitive Babylonia. In the course of these lectures I have
more than once pointed to the fact: the Pharaonic Egyptians were of
Asiatic origin and they necessarily brought with them the religious ideas
of their Eastern home. As we come to know more both of early Babylonian
civilisation and of the beginnings of Egyptian history, we shall doubtless
discover that the links between them are closer than we at present
imagine, and much that is now obscure will become clear and distinct.
Meanwhile there is one link which I cannot pass over. Astro-theology once
played a considerable part in the religion of the Egyptians. In the
historical age it has lost its importance; the stars have been identified
with the official deities, who have accordingly absorbed their individual
attributes; but echoes of the worship formerly paid to them are still
heard in the Pyramid texts. Saḥu or Orion is still remembered as a mighty
hunter, whose hunting-ground was the plain of heaven, and whose prey were
the gods themselves. When he rises, it is said in the Pyramid of Unas,
“the stars fight together, and the archers patrol” the sky which drops
with rain; the smaller stars which form his constellation pursue and lasso
the gods as the human hunter lassoes the wild bull; they slay and
disembowel their booty, and boil the flesh in glowing caldrons. The
“greater gods” are hunted “in the morning,” those of less account at
mid-day, the “lesser gods” “at evening, and Saḥu refreshes himself with
the divine banquet,” feeding on their bodies and absorbing “their magic
virtues.” “The great ones of the sky” launch “the flames against the
caldrons wherein are the haunches of the followers” of the gods; the
pole-star, “who causes the dwellers in the sky to march in procession
round” Orion, “throws into the caldron the legs of their wives.”(187) We
are transported to the cannibal’s kitchen of some African chieftain, such
as that represented on a curious stela found in Darfûr, and now in the
museum of Constantinople. The whole description takes us back to a period
in the history of Egypt long anterior to that of the Pyramids, when the
Pharaonic invaders were first beginning to mingle with the older
population of the land and become acquainted with its practices. In the
days of Unas the real meaning of the expressions handed down by
theological conservatism had been forgotten, or was interpreted
metaphorically; but they remained to prove that the age when Orion was
still an object of worship superior to the gods of heaven was one which
went back to the very dawn of Pharaonic history. The cult of the stars
must have been brought by “the followers of Horus” from their Asiatic
home.(188)
The fame of Orion was eclipsed in later days by that of Sopd or Sirius.
But this had its reason in the physio-graphical peculiarities of Egypt.
The heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, that is to say, its first
appearance along with the sun, corresponded with the rise of the Nile in
Upper Egypt, and accordingly became a mark of time, and the starting-point
of the solar year. Its importance therefore was great, not only for the
calendar, but also for those agricultural operations upon which the very
existence of Egypt depended. We need not wonder, accordingly, if with the
settlement of the Pharaonic Egyptians in the valley of the Nile the
worship and name of Orion fell more and more into the background, while
that of Sirius became pre-eminent. How far back the pre-eminence of Sirius
reaches may be gathered from the fact that the twentieth nome of Northern
Egypt—that of Goshen—derived its name from a combination of the mummified
hawk of Horus and the cone which, as Brugsch first showed,(189) represents
the shaft of zodiacal light that accompanies the rising of Sirius before
the dawn of day. Sopd or Sirius is thus identified with the dead Horus who
presided over Nekhen in Upper Egypt, and preceded Osiris as the god of the
dead.(190)
Of the other stars and constellations we do not know much. The Great Bear
was called “the haunch of beef,” and was at times identified with Set, and
made the abode of the souls of the wicked. Not far off was the
hippopotamus, which Brugsch would identify with Draco; while among other
constellations were to be found the Lion and the Horus-hawk, as well as a
warrior armed with a spear.
All over the world the more prominent stars and constellations have
received names. But it is only the more prominent and brilliant among them
of which this is true. So far as we know, the only people who have ever
systematically mapped out the heavens, dividing the stars into groups, and
giving to each group a name of its own, were the Babylonians; and it was
from the Babylonians that the constellations as known to Greeks and
Romans, to Hindus, or to Chinese, were ultimately derived. The inference,
therefore, is near at hand, that the primitive Egyptians also were
indebted for their map of the sky to the same source. And the inference is
supported by more than one fact.
On the one side, the names of several of the constellations were the same
among both Babylonians and Egyptians. Of this the Twins, Aquarius, or the
Family, are examples, while it can hardly be an accident that Orion in
both systems of astronomy is a giant and a hunter. “The Bull of heaven”
was a Babylonian star, and Jupiter bore the Sumerian name of Gudi-bir,
“the Bull of light”; in the Pyramid texts also we have a “Bull of heaven,”
the planet Saturn according to Brugsch, Jupiter according to Lepsius.
Still more striking are the thirty-six Egyptian decans, the stars who
watched for ten days each over the 360 days of the ancient Egyptian year,
and were divided into two classes or hemispheres, those of the day and
those of the night.(191) Not only did the early Chaldæan year similarly
consist of 360 days; it too was presided over by thirty-six “councillor”
stars, half of which were above the earth, while the other half were below
it.(192) Such a coincidence cannot have been accidental; the Babylonian
and Egyptian decans must have had the same origin.
But there was yet a further parallelism between the stellar theology of
Egypt and that of Babylonia. In both countries the worship of the stars
passed into an astro-theology. The official gods were identified with the
planets and fixed stars, and the stellar cult of the people was thus
absorbed into the State religion. But whereas this astro-theology was
characteristic of Babylonia, it has done little more than leave its traces
on the historical religion of Egypt. Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were
identified with Horus under different forms, and Mercury with Set, while
Venus became “the bark (_za_)(193) of the phœnix” or soul “of Osiris.”
Sirius was made the star of Isis, Orion the star of Osiris. But, like the
cult of the stars itself, this astro-theology belongs to a far-off age in
Egyptian history. It is the last faint reflection of a phase of religious
thought which had passed away when the monumental records first begin.
It is the same with a curious echo of ancient Babylonian cosmology, to
which Prof. Hommel has drawn our attention. The old Babylonian Epic of the
Creation begins with the words—
“At that time the heaven above was not known by name,
the earth beneath was not named,
in the beginning the deep was their generator,
the chaos of the sea was the mother of them all.”
The lines are the introduction to a story of the Creation of which they
form an integral part. On the walls of the Pyramid of Pepi I. we read
again almost the same words. Pepi, it is said, “was born of his father
Tum. At that time the heaven was not, the earth was not, men did not
exist, the gods were not born, there was no death.”(194) But here the
words have been introduced without connection with the context; they
cohere neither with what precedes nor with what follows them, and are
evidently nothing but an old formula torn from the cosmogony to which they
once belonged, and repeated without a clear understanding of what they
really meant. The phrases are found again in the later religious
literature of Egypt, embedded in it like flies in amber or the fossils in
an old sea-beach.(195) To recover their original meaning we must betake
ourselves to the clay tablets of Assyria and Babylonia, and the
cosmological theories of early Chaldæa. They presuppose that story of a
creation out of the chaos of the deep which was indigenous in Babylonia
alone.
This deep, which lay at the foundation of Babylonian cosmology, was
symbolised in the temples by a “sea” across which the images of the gods
were carried in “ships” on their days of festival. In Babylonia such
“seas” had a reason for their existence. The Persian Gulf, it was
believed, was the cradle of Babylonian culture; it was also the source of
that cosmogony which saw in the deep the “mother” of all things. That it
should have its mimic representatives in the temples of the country was
but natural; it was from the “deep” that the gods had come, and the deep
was still the home of the culture-god Ea.(196)
In Egypt, on the other hand, the sea was out of place nay more, it was
altogether unnatural. If water were needed, the sacred Nile flowed at the
foot of the temple or else there were canals which conducted the waters of
the river through the temple lands. There was no primeval deep to be
symbolised, no Persian Gulf out of which the culture-god had risen with
the gifts of civilisation. If the gods desired to sail in their barks, it
was reasonable to suppose that they would do so on the Nile or its
tributary canals. And yet the supposition would be wrong. The gods had
indeed their sacred “ships” as in Babylonia; but, as in Babylonia, it was
on an artificially-constructed lake that they floated, and not, as a rule,
on the river Nile. Could anything indicate more clearly the origin of the
religious beliefs and practices of the Pharaonic Egyptians? Like the brick
tombs of the Old Empire, with their recessed panels and pilasters, it
points to Babylonia and the cosmological theories which had their birth in
the Babylonian plain.(197)
The religion of ancient Egypt is thus no isolated fact. It links itself,
on the one hand, with the beliefs and religious conceptions of the
present, and, on the other hand, with those of a yet older past. But it is
a linking only; Egyptian religion is no more the religion of ancient
Babylonia than it is modern Christianity. In Egypt it assumed a form
peculiar to itself, adapting itself to the superstitions and habits of the
earlier inhabitants of the land, and developing the ideas which lay latent
within it. It was characterised by the inexorable logic with which each of
these ideas was followed to its minutest conclusions, and at the same time
by the want of any attempt to harmonise these conclusions one with the
other, however inconsistent they might be. It was also characterised by a
spirit of creativeness; the Egyptian created new religious conceptions
because he was not afraid to follow his premisses to their end.
But he was intensely practical. Abstractions as such had little attraction
for him, and he translated them into material form. The symbolism of his
system of writing favoured the process: even such an abstract idea as that
of “becoming” became for him a “transformation” or “change of outward
shape.” In spite, therefore, of the spirituality and profundity of much of
his theology, his religion remained essentially materialistic. The gods
might indeed pass one into the other and be but the manifold forms under
which the ever-changing divine essence manifested itself, but this was
because it was one with nature and the infinite variety which nature
displays. Even the supreme god of Khu-n-Aten incorporated himself at it
were in the visible orb of the sun.
The incarnation of the deity accordingly presented no difficulty to the
Egyptian mind. It followed necessarily from the fundamental principles of
his creed. The divinity which permeated the whole of nature revealed
itself more clearly than elsewhere in that which possessed life. Egyptian
religious thought never quite shook itself free from the influences of the
primitive belief that life and motion were the same. Whatever moves
possesses life, whatever lives must move;—such was, and still is, one of
the axioms of primitive man. And since the deity manifested itself in
movement, it could be recognised in whatever was alive. Man on the one
side became a god in the person of the Pharaoh, the gods on the other side
became men who had lived and died like Osiris, or had ruled over Egypt in
the days of old. Even the ordinary man contained within him a particle or
effluence of the divine essence which could never die; and the bodily husk
in which it was incarnated could, under certain conditions, acquire the
properties of that divinity to which it had afforded a home. That the
divine essence could thus assume an individual form, was part of the
doctrine which saw, in the manifold varieties of nature, the
manifestations of a “single god.” The belief in the incarnation of the
deity was a necessary consequence of a materialistic pantheism. And it
mattered little whether the incarnation took place under a human or under
an animal shape; the human and the animal god had alike been a heritage
from elements which, diverse though they may have been in origin, combined
to form the Egyptian people, and both the man and the beast were alike
living and therefore divine. The beast was more mysterious than the man,
that was all; the workings of its mind were more difficult to comprehend,
and the language it spoke was more unintelligible. But on that very
account it was better adapted for the symbolism which literature and
education encouraged, and which became an essential part of the texture of
Egyptian thought.
If, then, we would understand the conception of the divine formed by the
educated Egyptian of the historical age, we must remember the
characteristics of Egyptian thought which lay behind it. Materialism and
symbolism constituted the background of Egyptian religion. The one
presupposed the other, for the symbol presented the abstract idea in a
material and visible shape, while the materialism of the Egyptian mind
demanded something concrete which the senses could apprehend. The
conception of the ka, with which Egyptian religion begins, is
characteristic of Egyptian religious thought up to the last. It is like
the “materialised spirits” of modern spiritualism, spirits which are
merely matter in an etherialised form. The Egyptian gave not only shape
but substance to his mental and spiritual creations; like the “ideas” of
Plato, they became sensuous realities like the written symbols which
expressed them. Not only were the name and the thing never dissociated
from one another, the name was looked on as the essence of the thing, and
the name included its expression in both sound and writing. The bird which
represented the idea of “soul” became in time the soul itself.
This very fact assisted in spiritualising Egyptian religion. Ideas and
their symbols interchange one with the other; the ideas, moreover, develop
and pass out of one form into another. The identification, therefore, of
the abstract and the concrete, of ideas and substantial existence, made a
pantheistic conception of the universe easy. The divinity clothed itself
in as many forms as there were symbols to express it, and these forms
passed one into the other like phases of thought. The Egyptian was the
first discoverer of the term “becoming,” and the keynote of his creed was
the doctrine of transformation.
Transformation, it must be remembered, is not transmigration. There was no
passage of an individual soul from body to body, from form to form; the
divine essence permeated all bodies and forms alike, though it manifested
itself at a given moment only under certain ones. It was in this power of
manifestation that the transformation consisted. Had the Egyptian not been
fettered by his materialistic symbolism, he would doubtless have gone
further and concluded that the various manifestations of the divinity were
subjective only—existing, that is to say, only in the mind of the
observer; as it was, he held them to be objective, and to possess the same
substantial reality as the symbolic pictures by which they were denoted.
With all this, however, there was no severe literalism in the
interpretation of the symbol. Whatever may have been the case at the
outset, the symbol was as much a metaphor in the historical ages of
Egyptian history as are the metaphors of our own language. When the
Egyptian spoke of “eating” his god, he meant no more than we do when we
speak of “absorbing” a subject.(198) The Pyramid texts are full of such
faded and forgotten metaphors; the Egyptian was conservative above all
other men, and the language of religion is conservative above all others.
Doubtless, in some cases, he was the victim of the symbols and metaphors
he used; but in this respect he does not stand alone. Where he has no
rival is in the magnitude of the part played in his religion by the symbol
and its logical development.
It was just this symbolism which enabled him to retain, on the one hand,
all the old formulæ with their gross materialism and childlike views of
the universe, and, on the other hand, to attain to a conception of the
divine being which was at once spiritual and sublime. For Egyptian
religion, as we find it in the monuments of the educated classes before
the decay of the monarchy, was, in spite of its outward show of symbols
and amulets, full of high thoughts and deep emotions. I cannot do better
than quote the words in which it is described by one of its least
prejudiced students, Professor Maspero:(199) “When we put aside the
popular superstitions and endeavour solely to ascertain its fundamental
doctrines, we soon recognise that few religions have been so exalted in
their principles. The Egyptians adored a being who was unique, perfect,
endowed with absolute knowledge and intelligence, and incomprehensible to
such an extent that it passes man’s powers to state in what he is
incomprehensible. He is ‘the one of one, he who exists essentially, the
only one who lives substantially, the sole generator in heaven and earth,
who is not himself generated.’ Always the same, always immutable in his
immutable perfection, always present in the past as in the future, he
fills the universe without any form in the world being able to give even a
feeble idea of his immensity; he is felt everywhere, he is perceived
nowhere.
“Unique in essence, he is not unique in person. He is father because he
exists, and the force of his nature is such that he is eternally
begetting, without ever growing weak or exhausted. He has no need to go
outside himself for this act of generation; he finds in his own bosom the
material of his perpetual fatherhood. Alone in the plenitude of his being
he conceives his offspring; and as in him there can be no distinction
between conception and birth, from all eternity ‘he produces in himself
another self.’ He is at once the divine father, mother, and son. Conceived
of God, born of God, without separating from God, these three persons are
God in God, and, far from dividing the primitive unity of the divine
nature, they all three combine to constitute his infinite perfection.
“Doubtless the mind of the uneducated classes could neither understand nor
rise to such lofty heights. Human intelligence supports with difficulty so
pure an idea of an absolute being. All the attributes of divinity—his
immensity, his eternity, his independence—place him at an infinite
distance from ourselves; to comprehend and participate in them, we must
make him think as we think, we must lend him our passions and subject him
to our laws. God must take upon him, with human nature, all the weaknesses
that accompany it, all the infirmities under which it labours; in a word,
the Word must become flesh. The immaterial god must incarnate himself,
must come to the land of Egypt and people it with the gods, his children.
Each of the persons of the primitive trinity thus became independent and
formed a new type, from which, in their turn, other lower types emanated.
From trinity to trinity, from personification to personification, that
truly incredible number of divinities was soon reached, with forms
sometimes grotesque and often monstrous, who descended by almost
insensible degrees from the highest to the lowest ranks of nature. The
scribes, the priests, the officials, all the educated world, in fact, of
Egyptian society, never professed that gross paganism which caused Egypt
to be called with justice ‘the mother of superstitions.’ The various names
and innumerable forms attributed by the multitude to as many distinct and
independent divinities, were for them merely names and forms of one and
the same being. ‘God, when he comes as a generator, and brings to light
the latent forces of the hidden causes, is called Ammon; when he is the
spirit who embodies all that is intelligent, he is Imhotep; when he is he
who accomplishes all things with art and verity, he is Phthah; when he is
God good and beneficent, he is Osiris.’ What the scribe means by these
words is the mysterious infinite which animates the universe, the eternal,
impenetrable to eyes of flesh, but perceived vaguely by the eyes of the
spirit. Behind the sensuous appearance, behind the manifestation of the
divine nature wherein the popular imagination fancied it saw that nature
itself, he beheld confusedly a being obscure and sublime, a full
comprehension of whom is denied him, and the feeling of this
incomprehensible presence lends to his prayer a deep and thrilling accent,
a sincerity of thought and emotion, a thousand times more touching than
that medley of amorous puerilities, of mystic languors and morbid
contrition, which is so often the substitute for religious poetry.”
There were two deep-rooted conceptions in the Egyptian mind which had much
to do with the purity and sublimity of his religious ideas. One of these
was the conception of a divine law which governed the universe, and to
which the gods themselves had to submit. The other was that of a moral
God, of a “good being” who rewarded—not piety but—uprightness, and
punished iniquity. The world was ordered and controlled, not by chance or
caprice, but by a fixed law, which was, characteristically enough,
impersonated in the goddess Mât. And this law, unlike the blind destiny of
the Greek or Roman, was at once divine and moral; it not only represented
the order of the universe, against which there was no appeal, but it also
represented an order which was in accordance with justice and truth. The
law which all must obey under penalty of being cast into outer darkness,
was an intelligent and moral law; it commended itself necessarily and
instinctively to all intelligent beings whose thoughts, words, and deeds
were alike righteous. Only those who had conformed to it could be admitted
after death into the paradise of Osiris or into the company of the gods,
and the seal of justification was the pronouncement that the dead man had
“spoken the truth,” and that his confession in the judgment-hall of Osiris
had been in agreement with the truth and with the eternal order of the
universe.
Of the moral character of the Osirian creed I have already spoken. It is
the first official recognition by religion that what God requires is
uprightness of conduct and not ceremonial orthodoxy, the first
identification of religion with morality. And the god who required this
uprightness of conduct was not a “lord of hosts,” who compelled adoration
by the display of his power, but Un-nefer, “the good being,” who existed
in order to do good to men. In the conflict with evil he had apparently
been worsted; but though he had died a shameful death, his disciples
believed that it had been endured on their behalf, and that for those who
followed in his footsteps, and whose lives resembled his, he had provided
a better and a happier Egypt in another world, into which sin and pain and
death could not enter, and where he ruled eternally over the cities and
fields of the blest.
In the Osirian creed, writer after writer has discovered “fore-gleams” of
Christianity more striking even than the doctrine of the Trinity, which
belongs to the philosophy of faith. But there is nothing wonderful in the
continuity of religious thought. One of the chief lessons impressed upon
us by the science of the century which has just passed away, is that of
continuity; throughout the world of nature there is no break, no isolated
link in the long chain of antecedent and consequent, and still less is
there any in the world of thought. Development is but another name for the
continuity which binds the past to the present with stronger fetters than
those of destiny. It is not only the philosophy of Christianity, or the
wider and more general doctrines of its creed, which find an echo in the
religion of ancient Egypt; in details also Egypt is linked with the modern
world. Long before the Hebrew prophets pictured the kingdom of the
Messiah, an Egyptian poet, in the reign of Thothmes III., had said: “A
king shall come from the south, Ameni, the truth-declaring, by name. He
shall be the son of a woman of Nubia, and will be born in [the south]....
He shall assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and lift up the red crown of the
north. He shall unite the double crown.... The people of the age of the
son of man shall rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They
shall be removed far from evil, and the wicked shall humble their mouths
for fear of him. The Asiatics shall fall before his blows, and the Libyans
before his flame. The wicked shall wait on his judgments, the rebels on
his power. The royal serpent on his brow shall pacify the revolted. A wall
shall be built, even that of the prince, that the Asiatics may no more
enter into Egypt.”(200)
Yet more striking is the belief in the virgin-birth of the god Pharaoh,
which goes back at least to the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty. On the
western wall of one of the chambers in the southern portion of the temple
of Luxor, Champollion first noticed that the birth of Amon-hotep III. is
portrayed. The inscriptions and scenes which describe it have since been
copied, and we learn from them that he had no human father; Amon himself
descended from heaven and became the father of the future king. His mother
was still a virgin when the god of Thebes “incarnated himself,” so that
she might “behold him in his divine form.” And then the hieroglyphic
record continues with words that are put into the mouth of the god.
“Amon-hotep,” he is made to say, “is the name of the son who is in thy
womb. He shall grow up according to the words that proceed out of thy
mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and righteousness in this land unto
its very end. My soul is in him, (and) he shall wear the twofold crown of
royalty, ruling the two worlds like the sun for ever.”(201)
But Amon-hotep III. was not the first of whom it had been said that his
father was a god. Fragments of a similar text have been found by Dr.
Naville at Dêr el-Bâharî, from which we may gather that queen Hatshepsu
also claimed to have been born of Amon. How much further back in Egyptian
history the belief may go we do not know: the kings of the Fifth and Sixth
Dynasties called themselves sons of the sun-god, and the Theban monarchs
whose virgin-mothers were wedded to Amon, incarnate in the flesh, did but
work out the old conception in a more detailed and definite way.
It was given to the Egyptians to be one among the few inventive races of
mankind. They were pioneers of civilisation; above all, they were the
inventors of religious ideas. The ideas, it is true, were not
self-evolved; they presupposed beliefs which had been bequeathed by the
past; but their logical development and the forms which they assumed were
the work of the Egyptian people. We owe to them the chief moulds into
which religious thought has since been thrown. The doctrines of emanation,
of a trinity wherein one god manifests himself in three persons, of
absolute thought as the underlying and permanent substance of all things,
all go back to the priestly philosophers of Egypt. Gnosticism and
Alexandrianism, the speculations of Christian metaphysic and the
philosophy of Hegel, have their roots in the valley of the Nile. The
Egyptian thinkers themselves, indeed, never enjoyed the full fruition of
the ideas they had created; their eyes were blinded by the symbolism which
had guided their first efforts, their sight was dulled by overmuch
reverence for the past, and the materialism which came of a contentment
with this life. They ended in the scepticism of despair or the prosaic
superstitions of a decadent age. But the task which dropped from their
hands was taken up by others; the seeds which they had sown were not
allowed to wither, and, like the elements of our culture and civilisation,
the elements also of our modes of religious thought may be traced back to
the “dwellers on the Nile.” We are heirs of the civilised past, and a
goodly portion of that civilised past was the creation of ancient Egypt.