In Egypt, life was the thing sacred. Hence all that had life, all
that produced and all that ended life, was in a way divine. Hence
death, too, was sacred. The Egyptian lived in the contemplation of
death. His coffin was made in his lifetime; his ancestors were
embalmed. The sovereign’s tomb was built to last for, not centuries,
but thousands of years.
The highest form of the religious belief of the Egyptians included
the idea that the soul was immortal. In the religion of Egypt were
united the worship of Nature, and of the spirit which underlies and
animates Nature.
=The Egyptian Gods.=--Having depended on the Nile and the Sun for the
vegetation needed for their food, the people conceived human forms for
them, and for the prolific Earth, as deities; namely, Osiris as the Nile
and the Sun, and Isis as the Earth. These were the only divinities that
were worshiped throughout Egypt. In later times they came to be regarded
as divinities of the sun and the moon.
Another god, Anubis, worshiped in the form of a human being with the
head of a dog, is represented as an Egyptian Hermes.
Whatever higher religious ideas may have been held by learned priests,
the worship of the common people was chiefly adoration of animals. The
sacred bull, called Apis, was worshiped at Memphis with the highest
honors. All Egypt rejoiced on his annual birthday festival, and there
was a public mourning when he died. The dog, the hawk, the white ibis,
and the cat, were also specially revered. The sparrow-hawk, with human
head and outspread wings, denoted the soul flying through space, to
animate a new body. Thus we find mingled, in the religion of Egypt,
gross superstition in the masses of the people, along with the spiritual
conceptions of cultivated minds.
=The Future Life.=--In a papyrus-book, discovered in the royal tombs of
Thebes, called the Book of the Dead, we read in pictured writing of a
second life, and of a Hall of Judgment, where the god Osiris sits,
provided with a balance, a secretary, and forty-two attendant-judges. In
the balance the soul is weighed against a statue of divine justice,
placed in the other scale, which is guarded by the god Anubis. The
assistant-judges give separate decisions, after the person on trial has
pleaded his cause before them. The soul rejected as unworthy of the
Egyptian heaven was believed to be driven off to some dark realm, to
assume the form of a beast, in accordance with a low character and
sensual nature. An acquitted soul joined the throng of the blest.
=Embalming.=--The religion of the people was connected with the practice
of embalming the bodies of the dead. This art seems to have derived its
origin from the idea that the preservation of the body was necessary for
the return of the soul to the human form after it had completed its
cycle of existence of three or ten thousand years. The art appears as
old as 4000 B. C., at least, for the bodies of Cheops, Mycerinus, and
others of the age of the fourth dynasty, were embalmed.