Antiquity of Egypt--Guesses at origin of the people--
Chronological views of the religion--Permanence and changes--
Local and syncretic worship--Elements of pure belief and of
totemism--Authorities for facts--Monuments and Greek
reports--Contending theories of modern authors--Study of the
gods, their beasts, their alliances and mutations--Evidence
of ritual--A study of the Osiris myth and of the development
of Osiris-Savage and theological elements in the myth--Moral
aspect of the religion--Conclusion.
Even to the ancients Egypt was antiquity, and the Greeks sought in the
dateless mysteries of the Egyptian religion for the fountain of all that
was most mysterious in their own. Curiosity about the obscure beginnings
of human creeds and the first knowledge of the gods was naturally
aroused by that spectacle of the Pantheon of Egypt. Her highest gods
were abstractions, swathed, like the Involuti of the Etrurians, in veils
of mystic doctrine; yet in the most secret recess of her temples the
pious beheld "a crocodile, a cat, or a serpent, a beast rolling on a
purple couch".*
* Clem. Alex., _Paedagog_., iii. 2 (93).
In Egypt, the earlier ages and the later times beheld a land dominated
by the thought of death, whose shadow falls on the monarch on his
crowning day, whose whisper bids him send to far-off shores for the
granite and the alabaster of the tomb. As life was ruled by the idea
of death; so was fact conquered by dream, and all realities hastened to
lose themselves in symbols; all gods rushed to merge their identity in
the sun, as moths fly towards the flame of a candle. This spectacle of
a race obedient to the dead and bowing down before the beasts, this
procession of gods that were their own fathers and members together in
Ra, wakened the interest of the Greeks, who were even more excited by
the mystery of extreme age that hid the beginnings of Egypt. Full of
their own memories and legends of tribal movements, of migrations, of
invasions, the Greeks acknowledged themselves children of yesterday in
face of a secular empire with an origin so remote that it was scarcely
guessed at in the conjectures of fable. Egypt presented to them, as to
us, the spectacle of antique civilisation without a known beginning.
The spade of to-day reveals no more than the traditions of two thousand
years ago. The most ancient relics of the earliest dynasty are the
massive works of an organised society and an accomplished art. There is
an unbridged interval between the builders of the mysterious temple hard
by the Sphinx and their predecessors, the chippers of palaeolithic flint
axes in the river drift. We know not whence the Egyptians came; we only
trifle with hypotheses when we conjecture that her people are of an
Asiatic or an African stock; we know not whether her gods arose in the
fertile swamps by Nile-side, or whether they were borne in arks, like
the Huitzilopochtli of Mexico, from more ancient seats by the piety
of their worshippers. Yet as one great river of mysterious source flows
throughout all Egypt, so through the brakes and jungles of her religion
flows one great myth from a distant fountain-head, the myth of Osiris.*
* As to the origin of the Egyptians, the prevalent belief
among the ancients was that they had descended the Nile from
the interior of Africa. Cf. Diodorus Siculus, iii. 8. Modern
theorists occasionally lean in this direction. Dumichen,
_Geschichte des Alien AEgyptiens_, i. 118. Again, an attempt
has been made to represent them as successful members of a
race whereof the Bushmen of South Africa are the social
failures. M. Maspero conceives, once more, that the
Egyptians were "proto-Semitic," ethnologically related to the
people of Eastern Asia, and the grammar of their language
has Semitic affinities. But the connection, if it ever
existed, is acknowledged to be extremely remote. Maspero,
_Hist, de l'Orient_, 4th edit., p. 17. De Rouge writes,
"Tout nous ramene vers la parente primitive de Mitsraim
(Egyptains) et de Canaan" (_Recherches sur les Muniments_,
p. 11).
The questions which we have to ask in dealing with the mythology of
Egypt come under two heads: First, What was the nature of Egyptian
religion and myth? Secondly, How did that complex mass of beliefs and
practices come into existence?
The question, _What was the religion of Egypt?_ is far from simple. In
a complete treatise on the topic, it would be necessary to ask in reply,
At what period, in what place, and among what classes of society did
the religion exist which you wish to investigate? The ancient Egyptian
religion had a lifetime so long that it almost requires to be meted by
the vague measures of geological time. It is historically known to us,
by the earliest monuments, about the date at which Archbishop Usher
fixed the Creation. Even then, be it noticed, the religion of Egypt was
old and full-grown; there are no historical traces of its beginnings.
Like the material civilisation, it had been fashioned by the unrecorded
_Sheshoa Hor_, "the servants of Horus," patriarchs dwelling with the
blessed. In the four or five thousand years of its later existence,
Egyptian religion endured various modifications.* It was a conservative
people, and schooled by the wisdom of the sepulchre. But invaders,
Semitic, Ethiopian and Greek, brought in some of their own ideas.
Priestly colleges developed novel dogmas, and insensibly altered ritual
The thought of hundreds of generations of men brooded, not fruitlessly,
over the problems of the divine nature. Finally, it is likely that in
Egypt, as elsewhere, the superstitions of the least educated and
most backward classes, and of subject peoples on a lower level of
civilisation, would again and again break up, and win their way to the
surface of religion. Thus a complete study of Egyptian faiths would be
chronological--would note the setting and rising of the stars of elder
and later deities.
* Professor Lieblein, maintaining this view, opposes the
statement of Mr. Le Page Renouf, who writes: "The earliest
monuments which have been discovered present to us the very
same fully developed civilisation and the same religion as
the later monuments" (_Hib. Lectures_, 1880, p. 81). But it
is superfluous to attack a position which Mr. Le Page Renouf
does not appear really to hold. He admits the existence of
development and evolution in Egyptian religious thought "I
believe, therefore, that, after closely approaching the
point at which polytheism might have turned into monotheism,
the religious thought of Egypt turned aside into a wrong
track" (Op. cit, p. 236).
The method of a systematic history of Egyptian religion would not be
regulated by chronology alone. Topographical and social conditions
would also claim attention. The favoured god or gods of one nome
(administrative district), or of one town, or of one sacred metropolis,
were not the gods of another metropolis, or town, or nome, though some
deities were common to the whole country. The fundamental character
might be much the same in each case, but the titles, and aspects, and
ritual, and accounts of the divine genealogy varied in each locality.
Once more, the "syncretic" tendency kept fusing into one divine name
and form, or into a family triad of gods (mother, father and son),
the deities of different districts, which, beneath their local
peculiarities, theologians could recognise as practically the same.
While political events and local circumstances were thus modifying
Egyptian religion, it must never be forgotten that the different classes
of society were probably by no means at one in their opinions. The
monuments show us what the kings believed, or at least what the kings
practised, record the prayers they uttered and the sacrifices they
offered. The tombs and the papyri which contain the _Book of the Dead_
and other kindred works reveal the nature of belief in a future life,
with the changes which it underwent at different times. But the people,
the vast majority, unlettered and silent, cannot tell us what _they_
believed, or what were their favourite forms of adoration. We are
left to the evidence of amulets, of books of magic, of popular tales,
surviving on a papyrus here and there, and to the late testimony of
Greek writers--Herodotus, Diodorus, the author of the treatise _De
Osiride et hide_, and others. While the clergy of the twentieth dynasty
were hymning the perfections of Ammon Ra--"so high that man may not
attain unto him, dweller in the hidden place, him whose image no man has
beheld"--the peasant may have been worshipping, like a modern Zulu, the
serpents in his hovel, or may have been adoring the local sacred cat
of his village, or flinging stones at the local sacred crocodile of
his neighbours. To the enlightened in the later empire, perhaps to the
remotest unknown ancestors also, God was self-proceeding, self-made,
manifest in the deities that were members together in him of godhead.
But the peasant, if he thinks of the gods at all, thinks of them walking
the earth, like our Lord and the saints in the Norse nursery tales, to
amuse themselves with the adventures of men. The peasant spoke of the
Seven Hathors, that come like fairy godmothers to the cradle of each
infant, and foretell his lot in life.*
* Compare Maspero, _Hist, de l'Orient_., 4th edit., pp. 279-
288, for the priestly hymns and the worship of beasts. "The
lofty thoughts remained the property of a small number of
priests and instructed people; they did not penetrate the
mass of the population. Far from that, the worship of
animals, goose, swallow, cat, serpent, had many more
followers than Amnion Ra could count." See also Tiele,
_Manuel de l'Hist. des Rel._, Paris, 1880, pp. 46, 47. For
the folk-lore of wandering gods see Maspero, _Contes
Egyptiens_, Paris, 1882, p. 17.
It is impossible, of course, to write here a complete history of
Egyptian religion, as far as it is to be extracted from the books and
essays of learned moderns; but it has probably been made clear that
when we speak of the religion and mythology of Egypt, we speak of a very
large and complicated subject. Plainly this is a topic which the lay
student will find full of pitfalls, and on which even scholars may well
arrive at contradictory opinions. To put the matter briefly, where one
school finds in the gods and the holy menagerie of Egyptian creeds
the corruption of a primitive monotheism, its opponents see a crowd of
survivals from savagery combined with clearer religious ideas, which are
the long result of civilised and educated thought.* Both views may be
right in part.
* The English leader of the former school, the believer in a
primitive purity, corrupted and degraded but not
extinguished, is Mr. Le Page Renouf (_Hibbert Lectures_,
London, 1879). It is not always very easy to make out what
side Mr. Le Page Renouf does take. For example, in his
_Hibbert Lectures_, p. 89, he speaks somewhat
sympathetically of the "very many eminent scholars, who,
with full knowledge of all that can be said to the contrary,
maintain that the Egyptian religion is essentially
monotheistic". He himself says that "a power without a name
or any mythological characteristic is constantly referred to
in the singular number, and can only be regarded as the
object of that _sensus numinis_, or immediate perception of
the Infinite." which is "the result of an intuition as
irresistible as the impressions of our senses". If this be
not primitive instinctive monotheism, what is it? Yet Mr.
Le Page Renouf says that Egyptian polytheism, after closely
approaching the point where it might have become monotheism,
went off on a wrong track; so the Egyptians after all were
polytheists, not monotheists (op. cit., p. 235). Of similar
views are the late illustrious Vicomte de Rouge, M.
Mariette, M. Pierret, and Brugsch Pasha (_Rel. und Myth, der
Alien Egypter_, vol i., Leipzig, 1884). On the other side,
on the whole regarding Egyptian creeds as a complex mass of
early uncivilised and popular ideas, with a later priestly
religion tending towards pantheism and monotheism, are M.
Maspero, Professor Tiele, Professor Lieblein (English
readers may consult his pamphlet, _Egyptian Religion_,
Leipzig, 1884), M. Edward Meyer, (_Geschichte des
Alterthums_, Stuttgart, 1884), Herr Pietsch. mann
(_Zeitschrtftfur Ethnologic_, Berlin, 1878, art. "Fetisch
Dienst"), and Professor Tiele (_Manuel de l'Histoire des
Religions_, Paris, 1880, and "_History of Egyptian Religion,
English translation_, 1882).
After this preamble let us endeavour to form a general working idea of
what Egyptian religion was as a whole. What kind of religion did the
Israelites see during the sojourn in Egypt, or what presented itself to
the eyes of Herodotus? Unluckily we have no such eye-witnesses of the
earlier Egyptian as Bernal Diaz was of the Aztec temples. The Bible says
little that is definite about the theological "wisdom of the Egyptians".
When confronted with the sacred beasts, Herodotus might have used with
double truth the Greek saw: "A great ox has trod upon my tongue".* But
what Herodotus hinted at or left unsaid is gathered from the evidence of
tombs and temple walls and illuminated papyri.
One point is certain. Whatever else the religion of Egypt may at any
time have been, it struck every foreign observer as polytheism.**
Moreover, it was a polytheism like another. The Greeks had no
difficulty, for example, in recognising amongst these beast-headed
monsters gods analogous to their own. This is demonstrated by the
fact that to almost every deity of Egypt they readily and unanimously
assigned a Greek divine name. Seizing on a certain aspect of Osiris and
of his mystery-play, they made him Dionysus; Hor became Apollo; Ptah,
Hephaestus: Ammon Ra, Zeus; Thoth, Hermes, and so on with the rest.
The Egyptian deities were recognised as divine beings, with certain
(generally ill-defined) departments of Nature and of human activity
under their care. Some of them, like Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), were
esteemed elemental forces or phenomena, and were identified with the
same personal phenomena or forces, Uranus and Gaea, in the Greek system,
where heaven and earth were also parents of many of the gods.
* AEschylus, _Agamemnon_, 37, (--------)
** Maspero, Musee de Boulaq, p. 150; Le Page Renouf, Hib.
Led., pp. 85,86.
Thus it is indisputably clear that Egyptian religion had a polytheistic
aspect, or rather, as Maspero says, was "a well-marked polytheism";
that in this regard it coincided with other polytheisms, and that this
element must be explained in the Egyptian, as it is explained in the
Greek or the Aztec, or the Peruvian or the Maori religion.* Now an
explanation has already been offered in the mythologies previously
examined. Some gods have been recognised, like Rangi and Papa, the Maori
heaven and earth (Nut and Seb), as representatives of the old personal
earth and heaven, which commend themselves to the barbaric fancy. Other
gods are the informing and indwelling spirits of other phenomena, of
winds or sea or woods. Others, again, whatever their origin, preside
over death, over the dead, over the vital functions, such as love,
or over the arts of life, such as agriculture; and these last gods
of departments of human activity were probably in the beginning
culture-heroes, real, or more likely ideal, the first teachers of men.
* "It is certainly erroneous to consider Egyptian religion
as a polytheistic corruption of a prehistoric monotheism. It
is more correct to say that, while polytheistic in
principle, the religion developed in two absolutely opposite
directions. On one side, the constant introduction of new
gods, local or foreign; on the other, a groping after a
monotheism never absolutely reached. The learned explained
the crowd of gods as so many incarnations of the one hidden
uncreated deity."--Tiele, _Manuel de l'Histoire des
Religions_, p. 46.
In polytheisms of long standing all these attributes and functions have
been combined and reallotted, and the result we see in that confusion
which is of the very essence of myth. Each god has many birth-places,
one has many sepulchres, all have conflicting genealogies. If these
ideas about other polytheisms be correct, then it is probable that they
explain to a great extent the first principles of the polytheism of
Egypt They explain at least the factors in Egyptian religion, which the
Greeks recognised as analogous with their own, and which are found among
polytheists of every degree of culture, from New Zealand to Hellas. If
ever Ptah, or any other name, represented "Our Father" as he is known
to the most backward races, he was buried into the background by gods
evolved from ghosts, by departmental gods, and by the gods of races
amalgamated in the course of conquest and settlement.
Leaving on one side, then, for the moment, the vast system of
ancestor-worship and of rites undertaken for the benefit of the dead,
and leaving aside the divinity of the king, polytheism was the most
remarkable feature of Egyptian religion. The foreign traveller in the
time of the pyramid-builders, as in the time of Ramses II., or of the
Ptolemies, or of the Roman domination, would have found a crowd of gods
in receipt of honour and of sacrifice. He would have learned that one
god was most adored in one locality, another in another, that Ammon Ra
was predominant in Thebes; Ra, the sun-god, in Heliopolis; Osiris in
Abydos, and so forth. He would also have observed that certain animals
were sacred to certain gods, and that in places where each beast was
revered, his species was not eaten, though it might blamelessly be
cooked and devoured in the neighbouring nome or district, where another
animal was dominant. Everywhere, in all nomes and towns, the adoration
of Osiris, chiefly as the god and redeemer of the dead, was practised.*
* On the different religions of different nomes, and
especially the animal worship, see Pietschmann, _Der
AEgyptische Fetischdienst und Goetterglaube, Zeitschrtft fuer
Ethnologie_, 1878, p. 168.
While these are the general characteristics of Egyptian religion, there
were inevitably many modifications in the course of five thousand years.
If one might imagine a traveller endowed, like the Wandering Jew, with
endless life, and visiting Egypt every thousand, or every five hundred
years, we can fancy some of the changes in religion which he would
observe. On the whole, from the first dynasty and the earliest
monuments to the time when Hor came to wear a dress like that of a Roman
centurion, the traveller would find the chief figures of the Pantheon
recognisably the same. But there would be novelties in the manner of
worshipping and of naming or representing them. "In the oldest
tombs, where the oldest writings are found, there are not many gods
mentioned--there are Osiris, Horus, Thot, Seb, Nut, Hathor, Anubis,
Apheru, and a couple more."* Here was a stock of gods who remained in
credit till "the dog Anubis" fled from the Star of Bethlehem. Most of
these deities bore birth-marks of the sky and of the tomb. If Osiris
was "the sun-god of Abydos," he was also the murdered and mutilated
culture-hero. If Hor or Horus was the sun at his height, he too had
suffered despiteful usage from his enemies. Seb and Nut (named on the
coffin of Mycerinus of the fourth dynasty in the British Museum) were
our old friends the personal heaven and earth. Anubis, the jackal, was
"the lord of the grave," and dead kings are worshipped no less than
gods who were thought to have been dead kings. While certain gods, who
retained permanent power, appear in the oldest monuments, sacred animals
are also present from the first.
* Lieblein, _Egyptian Religion_, p. 7.
The gods, in fact, of the earliest monuments were beasts. Here is one of
the points in which a great alteration developed itself in the midst
of Egyptian religion. Till the twelfth dynasty, when a god is mentioned
(and in those very ancient remains gods are not mentioned often), "he is
represented by his animal, or with the name spelled out in hieroglyphs,
often beside the bird or beast".* "The jackal stands for Anup (Anubis),
the frog for Hekt, the baboon for Tahuti (Thoth). It is not till after
Semitic influence had begun to work in the country that any figures of
gods are found." By "figures of gods" are meant the later man-shaped
or semi-man-shaped images, the hawk-headed, jackal-headed, and similar
representations with which we are familiar in the museums. The change
begins with the twelfth dynasty, but becomes most marked under the
eighteenth. "During the ancient empire," says M. Maspero, "I only find
monuments at four points--at Memphis, at Abydos, in some parts of Middle
Egypt, at Sinai, and in the valley of Hammamat. The divine names appear
but occasionally, in certain unvaried formulae. Under the eleventh and
twelfth dynasties Lower Egypt comes on the scene. The formulae are more
explicit, but the religious monuments rare. From the eighteenth dynasty
onwards, we have _representations_ of all the deities, accompanied
by legends more or less developed, and we begin to discover books of
ritual, hymns, amulets, and other objects."** There are also sacred
texts in the Pyramids.
* Flinders Petrie, _Arts of Ancient Egypt_, p. 8.
** _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, i. 124.
Other changes, less important than that which turned the beast-god
into a divine man or woman, often beast-headed, are traced in the very
earliest ages. The ritual of the holy bulls (Hapi, Apis) makes its
official appearance under the fourth king of the first, and the first
king of the second dynasties.* Mr. Le Page Renouf, admitting this,
thinks the great development of bull-worship later.** In the third
dynasty the name of Ra, sun, comes to be added to the royal names of
kings, as Nebkara, Noferkara, and so forth.*** Osiris becomes more
important than the jackal-god as the guardian of the dead. Sokar,
another god of death, shows a tendency to merge himself in Osiris.
With the successes of the eighteenth dynasty in Thebes, the process of
_syncretism_, by which various god-names and god-natures are mingled, so
as to unite the creeds of different nomes and provinces, and blend
all in the worship of the Theban Ammon Ra, is most notable. Now arise
schools of theology; pantheism and an approach to monotheism in the
Theban god become probable results of religious speculations and
imperial success. These tendencies are baffled by the break-up of the
Theban supremacy, but the monotheistic idea remains in the esoteric
dogmas of priesthoods, and survives into Neo-Platonism. Special changes
are introduced--now, as in the case of worship of the solar disk by a
heretic king; earlier, as in the prevalence of Set-worship, perhaps by
Semitic invaders.****
* Brugsch, _History of Egypt_, English transl., i. 59, 60.
** Hib. Lect., pp. 237, 238.
*** Op. cit. i. p. 56.
**** For Khunaten, and his heresy of the disk in Thebes, see
Brugsch, op. cit., i. 442. It had little or no effect on
myth. Tiele says (_Hist. Egypt. Rel._, p. 49), "From the
most remote antiquity Set is one of the Osirian circle, and
is thus a genuine Egyptian deity".
It is impossible here to do more than indicate the kind of modification
which Egyptian religion underwent. Throughout it remained constant
in certain features, namely, the _local_ character of its gods, their
usefulness to the dead (their _Chthonian_ aspect), their tendency to be
merged into the sun, Ra, the great type and symbol and source of life,
and, finally, their inability to shake off the fur and feathers of the
beasts, the earliest form of their own development. Thus life,
death, sky, sun, bird, beast and man are all blended in the religious
conceptions of Egypt. Here follow two hymns to Osiris, hymns of the
nineteenth and twentieth dynasties, which illustrate the confusion of
lofty and almost savage ideas, the coexistence of notions from every
stage of thought, that make the puzzle of Egyptian mythology.
"Hail to thee, Osiris, eldest son of Seb, greatest of the six deities
born of Nut, chief favourite of thy father, Ra, the father of fathers;
king of time, master of eternity; one in his manifestations, terrible.
When he left the womb of his mother he united all the crowns, he fixed
the urseus (emblem of sovereignty) on his head. God of many shapes, god
of the unknown name, thou who hast many names in many provinces; if Ra
rises in the heavens, it is by the will of Osiris; if he sets, it is at
the sight of his glory."*
In another hymn** Osiris is thus addressed: "King of eternity, great
god, risen from the waters that were in the beginning, strong hawk, king
of gods, master of souls, king of terrors, lord of crowns, thou that
art great in Hnes, that dost appear at Mendes in the likeness of a ram,
monarch of the circle of gods, king of Amenti (Hades), revered of gods
and men, who so knoweth humility and reckoneth deeds of righteousness,
thereby knows he Osiris."***
* From Abydos, nineteenth dynasty. Maspero, _Musee de
Boulaq_, pp. 49,50.
** Twentieth dynasty. _Op. cit._, p. 48.
*** "This phase of religious thought," says Mr. Page Renouf,
speaking of what he calls _monotheism_, "is chiefly
presented to us in a large number of hymns, beginning with
the earliest days of the eighteenth dynasty. It is certainly
much more ancient, but.... none of the hymns of that time
have come down to us." See a very remarkable pantheistic
hymn to Osiris, "lord of holy transformations," in a passage
cited, _Hib. Lect_., p. 218, and the hymns to Amnion Ra,
"closely approaching the language of monotheism," pp. 225,
226. Excellent examples of pantheistic litanies of Ra are
translated from originals of the nineteenth dynasty, in
_Records of the Past_, viii. 105-128. The royal Osiris is
identified with Ra. Here, too, it is told how Ra smote Apap,
the serpent of evil, the Egyptian Ahi.
Here the noblest moral sentiments are blended with Oriental salutations
in the worship of a god who, for the moment, is recognised as lord
of lords, but who is also a ram at Mendes. This apparent confusion of
ideas, and this assertion of supremacy for a god who, in the next
hymn, is subjected to another god, mark civilised polytheism; but the
confusion was increased by the extreme age of the Egyptian faith, and
by the doubt that prevailed as to the meaning of tradition. "The
seventeenth chapter of the _Book of the Dead_" which seems to contain
a statement of the system of the universe as understood at Heliopolis
under the first dynasties, "is known to us by several examples of the
eleventh and twelfth dynasties." _Each of the verses had already been
interpreted in three or four different ways_; so different, that,
according to one school, the Creator, _Ra-Show_, was the solar fire;
according to another school, not the fire, but the waters! The _Book
of the Dead_, in fact, is no book, but collections of pamphlets, so to
speak, of very different dates. "Plan or unity cannot be expected," and
glosses only some four thousand years old have become imbedded in really
ancient texts.* Fifteen centuries later the number of interpretations
had considerably increased.**
Where the Egyptians themselves were in helpless doubt, it would be
vain to offer complete explanations of their opinions and practices
in detail; but it is possible, perhaps, to account for certain large
elements of their beliefs, and even to untie some of the knots of the
Osirian myth.
The strangest feature in the rites of Egypt was animal-worship, which
appeared in various phases. There was the local adoration of a beast,
a bird, or fish, to which the neighbours of other districts were
indifferent or hostile. There was the presence of the animal in the most
sacred _penetralia_ of the temple; and there was the god conceived of,
on the whole, as anthropomorphic, but often represented in art, after
the twelfth dynasty, as a man or woman with the head of a bird or
beast.***
* Cf. Tiele, _Hist Egypt_. Rel., pp. 26-29, and notes.
** Maspero, _Musee de Boulaq_, p. 149.
*** As to the animals which were sacred and might not be
eaten in various nomes, an account will be found in
Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, ii. 467. The English reader
will find many beast-headed gods in the illustrations to
vol. iii. The edition referred to is Birch's, London, 1878.
A more scientific authority is Lanzoni, _Dizion. Mit_.
These points in Egyptian religion have been the great puzzle both of
antiquity and of modern mythology. The common priestly explanations
varied. Sometimes it was said that the gods had concealed themselves in
the guise of beasts during the revolutionary wars of Set against Horus.*
Often, again, animal-worship was interpreted as symbolical; it was not
the beast, but the qualities which he personified that were adored.**
Thus Anubis, really a jackal, is a dog, in the explanations of Plutarch,
and is said to be worshipped for his fidelity, or because he can see in
the night, or because he is the image of time. "As he brought forth all
things out of himself, and contains all things within himself, he gets
the title of dog."*** Once more, and by a nearer approach to what is
probably the truth, the beast-gods were said to be survivals of the
badges (representing animals) of various tribal companies in the forces
of Osiris. Such were the ideas current in Graeco-Roman speculation,
nor perhaps is there any earlier evidence as to the character of native
interpretation of animal-worship. The opinion has also been broached
that beast-worship in Egypt is a refraction from the use of hieroglyphs.
If the picture of a beast was one of the signs in the writing of a god's
name, adoration might be transferred to the beast from the god. It is
by no means improbable that this process had its share in producing
the results.**** Some of the explanations of animal-worship which were
popular of old are still in some favour.
* De Is. et Os., lxxii.
** Op. cit., xi.
*** Ibid., xliv.
**** Pietschmann, op. cit., p. 163, contends that the
animal-worship is older than these Egyptian modes of writing
the divine names, say of Amnion Ra or Hathor. Moreover, the
signs were used in writing the names because the gods were
conceived of in these animal shapes.
Mr. Le Page Renouf appears to hold that there was something respectably
mythical in the worship of the inhabitants of zoological and botanical
gardens, something holy apparent at least to the devout.* He quotes the
opinion attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, that the beasts were symbols
of deity, not deities, and this was the view of "a grave opponent".
Mr. Le Page Renouf also mentions Porphyry's theory, that "under the
semblance of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which
the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature".** It is
evident, of course, that all of these theories may have been held by the
learned in Egypt, especially after the Christian era, in the times of
Apollonius and Porphyry; but that throws little light on the motives and
beliefs of the pyramid-builders many thousands of years before, or of
the contemporary peasants with their worship of cats and alligators. In
short, the systems of symbolism were probably made after the facts, to
account for practices whose origin was obscure. Yet another hypothesis
is offered by Mr. Le Page Renouf, and in the case of Set and the
hippopotamus is shared by M. Maspero. Tiele also remarks that some
beasts were promoted to godhead comparatively late, because their names
resembled names of gods.***
* _Hibbert Lectures_, pp. 6, 7.
** _De Abst_., iv. c. 9.
*** _Theolog. Tidjsch_., 12th year, p. 261.
The gods, in certain cases, received their animal characteristics by
virtue of certain unconscious puns or mistakes in the double senses of
words. Seb is the earth. Seb is also the Egyptian name for a certain
species of goose, and, in accordance with the _homonymous_ tendency
of the mythological period of all nations, the god and the bird were
identified.* Seb was called "the Great Cackler".** Again, the god Thoth
was usually represented with the head of an ibis. A mummied ibis "in
the human form is made to represent the god Thoth".*** This connection
between Thoth and the ibis Mr. Le Page Renouf explains at some length as
the result of an etymological confusion.**** Thus metaphorical language
reacted upon thought, and, as in other religions, obtained the mastery.
While these are the views of a distinguished modern Egyptologist,
another Egyptologist, not less distinguished, is of an entirely opposite
opinion as to the question on the whole. "It is possible, nay, certain,"
writes M. Maspero, "that during the second Theban empire the learned
priests may have thought it well to attribute a symbolical sense to
certain bestial deities. But whatever they may have worshipped in
Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, and not a hieroglyph, that the first
worshippers of the ibis adored."***** M. Meyer is of the same opinion,
and so are Professor Tiele and M. Perrot.******
* For a statement of the theory of "homonymous tendency,"
see Selected Essays, Max Mueller, i. 299, 245. For a
criticism of the system, see Mythology in Encyclop, Brit.,
or in La Mythologie, A. Lang, Paris, 1886.
** Hibbert Lectures, 1880, p. 111.
*** Wilkinson, iii. 325.
**** Op. cit., pp. 116, 117, 237.
***** Revue de V Histoire des Religions, vol. i.
****** Meyer, Oeschichte des Alterthums, p. 72; Tiele,
Manuel, p. 45; Perrot and Chipiez, Egyptian Art, English
transl., i. 54. Hist. Egypt. Rel., pp. 97, 103. Tiele finds
the origin of this animal-worship in "animism," and supposes
that the original colonists or conquerors from Asia found it
prevalent in and adopted it from an African population.
Professor Tiele does not appear, when he wrote this chapter,
to have observed the world-wide diffusion of animal-worship
in totem ism, for he says, "Nowhere else does the worship
of animals prevail so extensively as among African peoples".
While the learned have advanced at various periods these conflicting
theories of the origin of Egyptian animal-worship, a novel view was
introduced by Mr. M'Lennan. In his essays on _Plant and Animal Worship_,
he regarded Egyptian animal-worship as only a consecrated and elaborate
survival of totemism. Mr. Le Page Renouf has ridiculed the "school-boy
authorities on which Mr. M'Lennan relied".* Nevertheless, Mr. M'Lennan's
views are akin to those to which M. Maspero and MM. Perrot and Chipiez
are attached, and they have also the support of Professor Sayce.
"These animal forms, in which a later myth saw the shapes assumed by the
affrighted gods during the great war between Horus and Typhon, take us
back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt was
still totemism. They are survivals from a long-forgotten past, and
prove that Egyptian civilisation was of slow and independent growth, the
latest stage only of which is revealed to us by the monuments. Apis of
Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and Pachis of Hermonthis are all links
that bind together the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Egypt of the stone
age. These were the sacred animals of the clans which first settled
in these localities, and their identification with the deities of the
official religion must have been a slow process, never fully carried
out, in fact, in the minds of the lower classes."**
* Hibbert Lectures, pp. 6, 30.
** Herodotus, p. 344.
Thus it appears that, after all, even on philological showing, the
religions and myths of a civilised people may be illustrated by the
religions and myths of savages. It is in the study of savage totemism
that we too seek a partial explanation of the singular Egyptian
practices that puzzled the Greeks and Romans, and the Egyptians
themselves. To some extent the Egyptian religious facts were purely
totemistic in the strict sense.
Some examples of the local practices and rites which justify this
opinion may be offered. It has been shown that the totem of each
totem-kindred among the lower races is sacred, and that there is a
strict rule against eating, or even making other uses of, the sacred
animal or plant.* At the same time, one totem-kindred has no scruple
about slaying or eating the totem of any other kindred. Now similar
rules prevailed in Egypt, and it is not easy for the school which
regards the holy beasts as _emblems_, or as the results of misunderstood
language, to explain why an emblem was adored in one village and
persecuted and eaten in the next. But if these usages be survivals of
totemism, the practice at once ceases to be isolated, and becomes part
of a familiar, if somewhat obscure, body of customs found all over
the world. "The same animal which was revered and forbidden to be
slaughtered for the altar or the table in one part of the country was
sacrificed and eaten in another."**
* This must be taken generally. See Spencer and Gillen in
the _Natives of Central Australia_, where each kin helps the
others to kill its own totem.
** Wilkinson, _Ancient Egyptians_, ii. 467.
Herodotus bears testimony to this habit in an important passage. He
remarks that the people of the Theban nome whose god, Ammon Ra, or
Khnum, was ram-headed, abstain from sheep and sacrifice goats; but
the people of Mendes, whose god was goat-headed, abstain from goats,
sacrifice sheep, and hold all goats in reverence.*
These local rites, at least in Roman times, caused civil brawls, for the
customs of one town naturally seemed blasphemous to neighbours with a
different sacred animal. Thus when the people of Dog-town were feasting
on the fish called oxyrrhyncus, the citizens of the town which revered
the oxyrrhyncus began to eat dogs, to which there is no temptation.
Hence arose a riot.**
* Herodotus, ii. 42-46. The goat-headed Mendesian god Pan,
as Herodotus calls him, is recognised by Dr. Birch as the
goat-headed Ba-en-tattu. Wilkinson, ii. 512, note 2.
** De Is. et Os., 71, 72.
The most singular detail in Juvenal's famous account of the war between
the towns of Ombi and Tentyra does not appear to be a mere invention.
They fought "because each place loathes the gods of its neighbours".
The turmoil began at a sacred feast, and the victors devoured one of the
vanquished. Now if the religion were really totemistic, the worshippers
would be of the same blood as the animal they worshipped, and in eating
an adorer of the crocodile, his enemies would be avenging the eating
of their own sacred beast. When that beast was a crocodile, probably
nothing but starvation or religious zeal could induce people to taste
his unpalatable flesh. Yet "in the city Apollinopolis it is the custom
that every one must by all means eat a bit of crocodile; and on one day
they catch and kill as many crocodiles as they can, and lay them out in
front of the temple ". The mythic reason was that Typhon, in his flight
from Horus, took the shape of a crocodile. Yet he was adored at various
places where it was dangerous to bathe on account of the numbers and
audacity of the creatures. Mummies of crocodiles are found in various
towns where the animal was revered.*
It were tedious to draw up a list of the local sacred beasts of Egypt;**
but it seems manifest that the explanation of their worship as totems
at once colligates it with a familiar set of phenomena. The symbolic
explanations, on the other hand, are clearly fanciful, mere _jeux
d'esprit_. For example, the sacred shrew-mouse was locally adored, was
carried to Butis on its death, and its mummy buried with care, but the
explanation that it "received divine honours because it is blind, and
darkness is more ancient than light," by no means accounts for the
mainly _local_ respect paid to the little beast.***
* Wilkinson, iii. 329. Compare AElian, x. 24, on the enmity
between worshippers of crocodiles and hawks (and Strabo,
xvii. 558). The hawk-worshippers averred that the hawk was a
symbol of fire; the crocodile people said that their beast
was an emblem of water; but why one city should be so
attached to water-worship and its neighbour to tire-worship
does not appear.
** A good deal of information will be found in Wilkinson's
third volume, but must be accepted with caution.
*** Wilkinson, iii. 33; Plutarch, Sympos., iv. quaest. 5;
Herodot, ii. 67.
If this explanation of the _local_ worship of sacred beasts be admitted
as plausible, the beast-headed gods, or many of them, may be accounted
for in the same way. It is always in a town where a certain animal is
locally revered that the human-shaped god wearing the head of the same
animal finds the centre and chief holy place of his worship. The cat is
great in Bubastis, and there is Bast, and also the cat-headed Sekhet* of
Memphis. The sheep was great in Thebes, and there was the sacred city of
the ram-headed Khnum or Ammon Ra.** If the crocodile was held in supreme
regard at Ombos, there, too, was the sacred town of the crocodile-headed
god, Sebak.
* Wilkinson, iii. 286. But the cat, though Bubastis was her
centre and metropolis, was sacred all over the land. Nor was
puss only in this proud position. Some animals were
_universally_ worshipped.
** The inconsistencies of statement about this ram-headed
deity in Wilkinson are most confusing. Ammon is an adjective
= "hidden," and is connected with the ram-headed Khnum, and
with the hawk-headed Ra, the sun.
While Greek writers like Porphyry and Plutarch and Jamblichus repeat the
various and inconsistent Egyptian allegorical accounts of the origin of
those beast-headed gods, the facts of their worship and chosen residence
show that the gods are only semi-anthropomorphic refinements or
successors of the animals. It has been said that these representations
are later in time, and it is probable that they are later in evolution,
than the representations of the deities as mere animals. Nor, perhaps,
is it impossible to conjecture how the change in art was made. It is a
common ritual custom for the sacrificer to cover himself with the skin
and head of the animal sacrificed. In Mexico we know that the Aztec
priests wore the flayed skins of their human victims. Herodotus mentions
that on the one awful day when a sheep was yearly sacrificed in Thebes,
the statue of Zeus, as he calls him, was draped in the hide of the
beast. In the same way certain Californian tribes which worship the
buzzard sacrifice him, "himself to himself," once a year, and use his
skin as a covering in the ritual.* Lucian gives an instance in his
treatise _De Dea Syria_ (55): "When a man means to go on pilgrimage to
Hierapolis, he sacrifices a sheep and eats of its flesh. He then kneels
down and draws the head over his own head, praying at the same time to
the god." Chaldean works of art often represent the priest in the skin
of the god, sometimes in that of a fish.**
It is a conjecture not unworthy of consideration that the human gods
with bestial heads are derived from the aspect of the celebrant clad in
the pelt of the beast whom he sacrifices. In Egyptian art the heads of
the gods are usually like masks, or flayed skins superimposed on the
head of a man.*** If it be asked _why_ the celebrant thus disguises
himself in the sacrifice, it is only possible to reply by guess-work.
But the hypothesis may be hazarded that this rite was one of the many
ways in which the sacred animal has been propitiated in his death by
many peoples. It is a kind of legal fiction to persuade him that, like
the bear in the Finnish Kalewala and in the Red Indian and Australian
legend, "he does not die". His skin is still capering about on other
shoulders.****
* [Robinson, _Life in California_, pp. 241, 803;]
Herodotus, ii. 42.
** Menant, _Recherehes_, ii. 49. See a collection of cases
in our _Cupid and Psyche_, pp. lviii., lix.
*** The idea is Professor Robertson Smith's.
**** For examples of propitiation of slain animals by this
and other arts, see _Prim. Cult_, i. 467, 469. When the
Koriaks slay a bear or wolf, they dress one of their people
in his skin, and dance round him, chanting excuses. We must
not forget, while offering this hypothesis of the origin of
beast-headed gods, that representations of this kind in art
may only be a fanciful kind of shorthand. Everyone knows the
beasts which, in Christian art, accompany the four
Evangelists. These do not, of course, signify that St.
John was of the eagle totem kin, and St. Mark of the stock
of the lion. They are the beasts of Ezekiel and the
Apocalypse, regarded as types of the four Gospel writers.
Moreover, in mediaeval art, the Evangelists are occasionally
represented with the heads of their beasts--John with an
eagle's head, Mark with a lion's, Luke with that of an ox.
See _Bulletin, Com. Hist. Archeol_., iv. 1852. For this
note I am indebted to M. H. Gaidoz.
While Egyptian myth, religion and ritual is thus connected with the
beliefs of the lower races, the animal-worship presents yet another
point of contact. Not only were beasts locally adored, but gods were
thought of and represented in the shape of various different beasts. How
did the evolution work its way? what is the connection between a lofty
spiritual conception, as of Ammon Ra, the lord of righteousness, and
Osiris, judge of the dead, and bulls, rams, wolves, cranes, hawks, and
so forth? Osiris especially had quite a collection of bestial heads,
and appeared in divers bestial forms.* The bull Hapi "was a fair and
beautiful image of the soul of Osiris," in late ritual.** We have read
a hymn in which he is saluted as a ram. He also "taketh the character
of the god Bennu, with the head of a crane," and as Sokar Osiris has
the head of a hawk.*** These phenomena could not but occur, in the
long course of time, when political expediency, in Egypt, urged the
recognition of the identity of various local deities. In the same way
"Ammon Ra, like most of the gods, frequently took the character of other
deities, as Khem, Ra and Chnumis, and even the attributes of Osiris
".****
* Cf. Wilkinson, iii. 86, 87.
** De Is. et Os., 29.
***Wilkinson, iii. 82.
****Op. cit., iii, 9.
There was a constant come and go of attributes, and gods adopted each
other's symbols, as kings and emperors wear the uniform of regiments in
each other's service. Moreover, it is probable that the process so
amply illustrated in Samoan religion had its course in Egypt, and that
different holy animals might be recognised as aspects of the same deity.
Finally, the intricate connection of gods and beasts is no singular or
isolated phenomenon. From Australia upwards, a god, perhaps originally,
conceived of as human and moral in character, is also recognised in a
totem, as Pund-jel in the eagle-hawk. Thus the confusion of Egyptian
religion is what was inevitable in a land where new and old did not
succeed and supersede each other, but coexisted on good terms. Had
religion not been thus confused, it would have been a solitary exception
among the institutions of the country.
The peculiarity of Egypt, in religion and myth as in every other
institution, is the retention of the very rudest and most barbarous
things side by side with the last refinements of civilisation (Tiele,
Manuel, p. 44). The existence of this conservatism (by which we profess
to explain the Egyptian myths and worship) is illustrated, in another
field, by the arts of everyday life, and by the testimony of the
sepulchres of Thebes. M. Passalacqua, in some excavations at Quoarnah
(Gurna), struck on the common cemetery of the ancient city of Thebes.
Here he found "the mummy of a hunter, with a wooden bow and twelve
arrows, the shaft made of reed, the points of hardened wood tipped
with edged flints. Hard by lay jewels belonging to the mummy of a young
woman, pins with ornamental heads, necklaces of gold and lapis-lazuli,
gold earrings, scarabs of gold, bracelets of gold," and so forth
(Chabas, _Etudes sur l'Antiquity Historique_, p. 390). The refined art
of the gold-worker was contemporary, and this at a late period, with
the use of flint-headed arrows, the weapons commonly found all over
the world in places where the metals had never penetrated. Again, a
razor-shaped knife of flint has been unearthed; it is inscribed in
hieroglyphics with the words, "The great Sam, son of Ptah, chief of
artists ". The "Sams" were members of the priestly class, who fulfilled
certain mystic duties at funerals. It is reported by Herodotus that the
embalmers opened the bodies of the dead with a knife of stone; and the
discovery of such a knife, though it had not belonged to an embalmer,
proves that in Egypt the stone age did not disappear, but coexisted
throughout with the arts of metal-working. It is alleged that flint
chisels and stone hammers were used by the workers of the mines
in Sinai, even under Dynasties XII., XIX. The soil of Egypt, when
excavated, constantly shows that the Egyptians, who in the remote age of
the pyramid-builders were already acquainted with bronze, and even
with iron, did not therefore relinquish the use of flint knives and
arrow-heads when such implements became cheaper than tools of metal, or
when they were associated with religion. Precisely in the same way did
the Egyptians, who, in the remotest known times, had imposing religious
ideas, decline to relinquish the totems and beast-gods and absurd or
blasphemous myths which (like flint axes and arrow-heads) are everywhere
characteristic of savages. The fact is, that the Egyptian mind, when
turned to divine matters, was constantly working on, and working over,
the primeval stuff of all mythologies and of all religions. First, there
is the belief in a moral guardian and father of men; this is expressed
in the sacred hymns. Next, there is the belief in "a strange and
powerful race, supposed to have been busy on earth before the making,
or the evolution, or the emergence of man"; this is expressed in
the mythical legends. The Egyptians inherited a number of legends of
extra-natural heroes, not unlike the savage Qat, Cagn, Yehl, Pund-jel,
Ioskeha and Quahteaht, the Maori Tutenganahau and the South Sea
Tangaroa. Some of these were elemental forces, personified in human
or bestial guise; some were merely idealised medicine-men. Their
"wanderings, rapes and manslaughters and mutilations," as Plutarch says,
remained permanently in legend. When these beings, in the advance of
thought, had obtained divine attributes, and when the conception of
abstract divinity, returning, perhaps, to its first form, had become
pure and lofty, the old legends became so many stumbling-blocks to the
faithful. They were explained away as allegories (every student having
his own allegorical system), or the extranatural beings were taken (as
by Plutarch) to be "demons, not gods ".
A brief and summary account of the chief figures in the Egyptian
pantheon will make it sufficiently plain that this is a plausible theory
of the gods of Egypt, and a probable interpretation of their adventures.
Accepting the classification proposed by M. Maspero, and remembering the
limitations under which it holds good, we find that:--
1. The gods of death and the dead were Sokari, Isis and Osiris, the
young Horus and Nephthys.*
2. The elemental gods were Seb and Nut, of whom Seb is the earth and Nut
the heavens. These two, like heaven and earth in almost all mythologies,
are represented as the parents of many of the gods. The other elemental
deities are but obscurely known.
3. Among solar deities are at once recognised Ra and others, but
there was a strong tendency to identify each of the gods with the sun,
especially to identify Osiris with the sun in his nightly absence.**
Each god, again, was apt to be blended with one or more of the sacred
animals. "Ra, in his transformations, assumed the form of the lion, cat
and hawk."*** "The great cat in the alley of persea trees at Heliopolis,
which is Ra, crushed the serpent."****
* Their special relation to the souls of the departed is
matter for a separate discussion.
** "The gods of the dead and the elemental gods were almost
all identified with the sun, for the purpose of blending
them in a theistic unity" (Maspero, _Rev. de l'hist. des
Rel_., i. 126).
*** Birch, in Wilkinson, iii. 59.
***Le Page Renouf, op. cit., p. 114.
In different nomes and towns, it either happened that the same gods had
different names, or that analogies were recognised between different
local gods; in which case the names were often combined, as in Ammon-Ra,
Sabek-Ra, Sokar-Osiris, and so forth.
Athwart all these classes and compounds of gods, and athwart the
theological attempt at constructing a monotheism out of contradictory
materials, came that ancient idea of dualism which exists in the myths
of the most backward peoples. As Pund-jel in Australia had his enemy,
the crow, as in America Yehl had his Khanukh, as Ioskeha had his
Tawiscara, so the gods of Egypt, and specially Osiris, have their Set or
Typhon, the spirit who constantly resists and destroys.
With these premises we approach the great Osirian myth.
THE OSIRIAN MYTH.
The great Egyptian myth, the myth of Osiris, turns on the antagonism of
Osiris and Set, and the persistence of the blood-feud between Set and
the kindred of Osiris.* To narrate and as far as possible elucidate this
myth is the chief task of the student of Egyptian mythology.
Though the Osiris myth, according to Mr. Le Page Renouf, is "as old as
Egyptian civilisation," and though M. Maspero finds the Osiris myth in
all its details under the first dynasties, our accounts of it are by no
means so early.**
* Herodotus, ii. 144.
** The principal native documents are the Magical Harris
Papyrus, of the nineteenth or twentieth dynasty, translated
by M. Chabas (Records of the Past, x. 137); the papyrus of
Nebseni (eighteenth dynasty), translated by M. Naville, and
in Records of Past, x. 159; the hymn to Osiris, on a stele
(eighteenth dynasty) translated by M. Chabas (Rev. Archeol.,
1857; Records of Past, iv. 99); "The Book of Respirations,"
mythically said to have been made by Isis to restore Osiris--
"Book of the Breath of Life" (the papyrus is probably of
the time of the Ptolemies--Records of Part, iv. 119); "The
Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys," translated by M. de
Horrack (Records of Past, ii. 117). There is also "The Book
of the Dead": the version of M. Pierret, (Paris, 1882) is
convenient in shape (also Birch, in Bunsen, vol. v.). M. de
Naville's new edition is elaborate and costly, and without a
translation. Sarcophagi and royal tombs (Champollion) also
contain many representations of the incidents in the myth.
"The myth of Osiris in its details, the laying out of his
body by his wife Isis and his sister Nephthys, the
reconstruction of his limbs, his mythical chest, and other
incidents connected with his myth are represented in detail
in the temple of Philae" (Birch, ap. Wilkinson, iii. 84).
The reverent awe of Herodotus prevents him from describing
the mystery-play on the sufferings of Osiris, which he says
was acted at Sais, ii. 171, and ii. 61, 67, 86. Probably the
clearest and most consecutive modern account of the Osiris
myth is given by M. Lefebure in Les Yeux d'Horus et Osiris.
M. Lefebure's translations are followed in the text; he is
not, however, responsible for our treatment of the myth. The
Ptolemaic version of the temple of Edfou is published by M.
Naville, _Mythe d'Horus_ (Geneva, 1870).
They are mainly allusive, without any connected narrative. Fortunately
the narrative, as related by the priests of his own time, is given
by the author of _De Iside et Osiride_, and is confirmed both by the
Egyptian texts and by the mysterious hints of the pious Herodotus. Here
we follow the myth as reported in the Greek tract, and illustrated by
the monuments.
The reader must, for the moment, clear his mind of all the many theories
of the meaning of the myth, and must forget the lofty, divine and
mystical functions attributed by Egyptian theologians and Egyptian
sacred usage to Osiris. He must read the story simply as a story, and he
will be struck with its amazing resemblances to the legends about their
culture-heroes which are current among the lowest races of America and
Africa.
Seb and Nut--earth and heaven--were husband and wife. In the _De Iside_
version, the sun cursed Nut that she should have no child in month or
year; but thanks to the cleverness of a new divine co-respondent, five
days were added to the calendar. This is clearly a later edition to the
fable. On the first of those days Osiris was born, then Typhon or Set,
"neither in due time, nor in the right place, but breaking through with
a blow, he leaped out from his mother's side".*
* De Iside et Osiride, xii. It is a most curious coincidence
that the same story is told of Indra in the Rig- Veda, iv.
18, 1. "This is the old and well-known path by which all
the gods were born: thou mayst not, by other means, bring
thy mother unto death." Indra replies, "I will not go out
thence, that is a dangerous way: right through the side will
I burst". Compare (Leland, Algonquin Legends, p. 15) the
birth of the Algonquin Typhon, the evil Malsumis, the wolf.
"Glooskap said, 'I will be born as others are'." But the
evil Malsumis thought himself too great to be brought forth
in such a manner, and declared that he would burst through
his mother's side. Mr. Leland's note, containing a Buddhist
and an Armenian parallel, but referring neither to Indra nor
Typhon, shows the _bona fides_ of the Algonquin report. The
Bodhisattva was born through his mother's right side (Kern..
Der Buddhismus, 30). The Irish version is that our Lord was
born through the crown of the head of the Virgin, like
Athene. _Saltair na Rann_, 7529, 7530. Se" also Liebrecht,
_Zur Volkskunde_, p. 490. For the Irish and Buddhist legends
(there is an Anglo-Saxon parallel) I am indebted to Mr
Whitley Stokes. Probably the feeling that a supernatural
child should have no natural birth, and not the borrowing of
ideas, accounts for those strange similarities of myth.
Isis and Nephthys were later-born sisters. The Greek version of the myth
next describes the conduct of Osiris as a "culture-hero". He instituted
laws, taught agriculture, instructed the Egyptians in the ritual of
worship, and won them from "their destitute and bestial mode of living".
After civilising Egypt, he travelled over the world, like the Greek
Dionysus, whom he so closely resembles in some portions of his legend
that Herodotus supposed the Dionysiac myth to have been imported from
Egypt.* In the absence of Osiris, his evil brother, Typhon, kept quiet.
But, on the hero's return, Typhon laid an ambush against him, like
AEgisthus against Agamemnon. He had a decorated coffer (mummy-case?) made
of the exact length of Osiris, and offered this as a present to any one
whom it would fit. At a banquet all the guests tried it; but when Osiris
lay down in it, the lid was closed and fastened with nails and melted
lead. The coffer, Osiris and all, was then thrown into the Nile. Isis,
arrayed in mourning robes like the wandering Demeter, sought Osiris
everywhere lamenting, and found the chest at last in an _erica_ tree
that entirely covered it. After an adventure like that of Demeter with
Triptolemus, Isis obtained the chest. During her absence Typhon lighted
on it as he was hunting by moonlight; he tore the corpse of Osiris into
fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. Isis sought for the mangled
remnants, and, whenever she found one, buried it, each tomb being
thenceforth recognised as "a grave of Osiris". Precisely the same fable
occurs in Central Australian myths of the Alcheringa, or legendary
past.**
* "Osiris is Dionysus in the tongue of Hellas" (Herodotus,
ii. 144, ii. 48). "Most of the details of the mystery of
Osiris, as practised by the Egyptians, resemble the Dionysus
mysteries of Greece.... Methinks that Melampus, Amythaon's
son, was well seen in this knowledge, for it was Melampus
that brought among the Greeks the name and rites and phallic
procession of Dionysus." (Compare Dels, et Os., xxxv.) The
coincidences are probably not to be explained by borrowing;
many of them are found in America.
** Spencer and Gillen, p. 399.
The wives "search for the murdered man's mutilated parts". It is a
plausible suggestion that, if graves of Osiris were once as common in
Egypt as cairns of Heitsi Eibib are in Namaqualand to-day, the existence
of many tombs of one being might be explained as tombs of his scattered
members, and the myth of the dismembering may have no other foundation.
On the other hand, it must be noticed that a swine was sacrificed to
Osiris, at the full moon, and it was in the form of a black swine that
Typhon assailed Horus, the son of Osiris, whose myth is a _doublure
or replica_, in some respects, of the Osirian myth itself.1 We may
conjecture, then, that the fourteen portions into which the body of
Osiris was rent may stand for the fourteen days of the waning moon.** It
is well known that the phases of the moon and lunar eclipses are
almost invariably accounted for in savage science by the attacks of a
beast--dog, pig, dragon, or what not--on the heavenly body. Either of
these hypothesis (the Egyptians adopted the latter)*** is consistent
with the character of early myth, but both are merely tentative
suggestions.****
* In the Edfou monuments Set is slain and dismembered in the
shape of a red hippopotamus (Naville, Mythe d'Horus, p. 7).
** The fragments of Osiris were sixteen, according to the
texts of Deuderah, one for each nome.
*** De Is. et Os., xxxv.
**** Compare Lefebure, Les Yeux d'Horus, pp. 47 48.
The phallus of Osiris was not recovered, and the totemistic habit
which made the people of three different districts abstain from three
different fish--_lepidotus, phagrus and oxyrrhyncus_--was accounted for
by the legend that these fish had devoured the missing portion of the
hero's body.
So far the power of evil, the black swine Typhon, had been triumphant.
But the blood-feud was handed on to Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. To
spur Horus on to battle, Osiris returned from the dead, like Hamlet's
father. But, as is usual with the ghosts of savage myth, Osiris
returned, not in human, but in bestial form as a wolf.* Horus was
victorious in the war which followed, and handed Typhon over bound in
chains to Isis. Unluckily Isis let him go free, whereon Horus pushed off
her crown and placed a bull's skull on her head.
There the Greek narrator ends, but** he expressly declines to tell the
more blasphemous parts of the story, such as "the dismemberment of Horus
and the beheading of Isis". Why these myths should be considered "more
blasphemous" than the rest does not appear.
It will probably be admitted that nothing in this sacred story would
seem out of place if we found it in the legends of Pund-jel, or Cagn,
or Yehl, among Australians, Bushmen, or Utes, whose own "culture-hero,"
like the ghost of Osiris, was a wolf. This dismembering of Osiris in
particular resembles the dismembering of many other heroes in American
myth; for example, of Chokanipok, out of whom were made vines and
flint-stones. Objects in the mineral and vegetable world were explained
in Egypt as transformed parts or humours of Osiris, Typhon and other
heroes.***
* Wicked squires in Shropshire (Miss Burns, Shropshire Folk-
Lore) "come" as bulls. Osiris, in the Mendes nonie, "came"
as a ram (Marietta, Denderah, iv. 75).
** De Is, et Os., xx.
***Magical Text, nineteenth dynasty, translated by Dr. Birch
Records of Past vi. 115; Lefebure, Osiris, pp. 100,
113,124, 205; Livre des Morts chap. xvii.; Records of Past,
x. 84.
Once more, though the Egyptian gods are buried here and are immortal in
heaven, they have also, like the heroes of Eskimos and Australians and
Indians of the Amazon, been transformed into stars, and the priests
could tell which star was Osiris, which was Isis, and which was Typhon.*
Such are the wild inconsistencies which Egyptian religion shares with
the fables of the lowest races. In view of these facts it is difficult
to agree with Brugsch** that "from the root and trunk of a pure
conception of deity spring the boughs and twigs of a tree of myth, whose
leaves spread into a rank impenetrable luxuriance ". Stories like the
Osiris myth--stories found all over the whole world--spring from no pure
religious source, but embody the delusions and fantastic dreams of the
lowest and least developed human fancy and human speculation. And these
flourish, like mistletoe on the oak, over the sturdier growth of a
religious conception of another root.
The references to the myth in papyri and on the monuments, though
obscure and fragmentary, confirm the narrative of the _De Iside_. The
coffer in which Osiris foolishly ventured himself seems to be alluded
to in the Harris magical papyrus.*** "Get made for me a shrine of eight
cubits. Then it was told to thee, O man of seven cubits, How canst thou
enter it? And it had been made for thee, and thou hast reposed in it."
* Custom and Myth, "Star Myths"; De Rouge, Nouv. Not., p.
197; Lefebure, Osiris, p. 213.
** Religion und Mythologie, p. 99.
*** Records of Past, x. 154.
Here, too, Isis magically stops the mouths of the Nile, perhaps to
prevent the coffer from floating out to sea. More to the point is one
of the original "Osirian hymns" mentioned by Plutarch.* The hymn is on
a stele, and is attributed by M. Chabas, the translator, to the
seventeenth dynasty.** Osiris is addressed as the joy and glory of his
parents, Seb and Nut, who overcomes his enemy. His sister, Isis, accords
to him due funeral rites after his death and routs his foes. Without
ceasing, without resting, she sought his dead body, and wailing did she
wander round the world, nor stopped till she found him. Light flashed
from her feathers.*** Horus, her son, is king of the world.
Such is a _precis_ of the mythical part of the hymn. The rest regards
Osiris in his religious capacity as a sovereign of nature, and as the
guide and protector of the dead. The hymn corroborates, as far as it
goes, the narrative of the Greek two thousand years later. Similar
confirmation is given by "The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys," a
papyrus found within a statue of Osiris in Thebes. The sisters wail for
the dead hero, and implore him to "come to his own abode". The theory
of the birth of Horus here is that he was formed out of the scattered
members of Osiris, an hypothesis, of course, inconsistent with the other
myths (especially with the myth that he dived for the members of Osiris
in the shape of a crocodile),**** and, therefore, all the more mythical.
* De Is. et Os., 211.
** Rev. Archeol., May, 1857.
*** The Greek version says that Isis took the form of a
swallow.
**** Mariette, Denderah, iv. 77, 88, 89.
The "Book of Respirations," finally, contains the magical songs by which
Isis was feigned to have restored breath and life to Osiris.* In the
representations of the vengeance and triumph of Horus on the temple
walls of Edfou in the Ptolemaic period, Horus, accompanied by Isis,
not only chains up and pierces the red hippopotamus (or pig in some
designs), who is Set, but, exercising reprisals, cuts him into pieces,
as Set cut Osiris. Isis instructs Osiris as to the portion which
properly falls to each of nine gods. Isis reserves his head and
"saddle"; Osiris gets the thigh; the bones are given to the cats. As
each god had his local habitation in a given town, there is doubtless
reference to local myths. At Edfou also the animal of Set is sacrificed,
symbolically in his image made of paste, a common practice in ancient
Mexico.**
* Records of Past, iv. 121.
** Herodotus, ii. 47; De. Is. et Os., 90. See also
Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras, who sacrificed a bull made of
paste, Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 436.
Many of these myths, as M. Naville remarks, are doubtless ratiological:
the priests, as in the Brahmanas, told them to account for peculiar
parts of the ritual, and to explain strange local names. Thus the
names of many places are explained by myths setting forth that they
commemorate some event in the campaign of Horus against Set. In
precisely the same way the local superstitions, originally totemic,
about various animals were explained by myths attaching these animals to
the legends of the gods.
Explanations of the Osiris myth thus handed down to us were common
among the ancient students of religion. Many of them are reported in the
familiar tract De Iside et Osiride. They are all the interpretations of
civilised men, whose method is to ask themselves, "Now, if _I_ had
told such a tale as this, or invented such a mystery-play of divine
misadventures, what meaning could _I_ have intended to convey in what
is apparently blasphemous nonsense?" There were moral, solar, lunar,
cosmical, tellurian, and other methods of accounting for a myth which,
in its origin, appears to be one of the world-wide early legends of the
strife between a fabulous good being and his brother, a fabulous evil
being. Most probably some incidents from a moon-myth have also crept
into, or from the first made part of, the tale of Osiris. The enmity
of Typhon to the eyes of Horus, which he extinguishes, and which are
restored,* has much the air of an early mythical attempt to explain the
phenomena of eclipses, or even of sunset. We can plainly see how local
and tribal superstitions, according to which this or that beast, fish,
or tree was held sacred, came to be tagged to the general body of the
myth. This or that fish was not eaten; this or that tree was holy; and
men who had lost the true explanation of these superstitions explained
them by saying that the fish had tasted, or the tree had sheltered.
* Livre des Moris, pp. 112, 118.
This view of the myth, while it does not pretend to account for every
detail, refers it to a large class of similar narratives, to
the barbarous dualistic legends about the original good and bad
extra-natural beings, which are still found current among contemporary
savages. These tales are the natural expression of the savage fancy, and
we presume that the myth of the mutilated Osiris survived in Egypt, just
as the use of flint-headed arrows and flint knives survived during
millenniums in which bronze and iron were perfectly familiar. The cause
assigned is adequate, and the process of survival is verified.
Whether this be the correct theory of the fundamental facts of the
myth or not, it is certain that the myth received vast practical and
religious developments. Orisis did not remain the mere culture-hero
of whom we have read the story, wounded in the house of his friends,
dismembered, restored and buried, reappearing as a wolf or bull, or
translated to a star. His worship pervaded the whole of Egypt, and his
name grew into a kind of hieroglyph for all that is divine.
"The Osirian type, in its long evolution, ended in being the symbol of
the whole deified universe--underworld and world of earth, the waters
above and the waters below. It is Osiris that floods Egypt in the Nile,
and that clothes her with the growing grain. His are the sacred eyes,
the sun that is born daily and meets a daily death, the moon that every
month is young and waxes old. Osiris is the soul that animates these,
the soul that vivifies all things, and all things are but his body. He
is, like Ra of the royal tombs, the earth and the sun, the creator and
the created."*
* Lefebure, Osiris, p. 248.
Such is the splendid sacred vestment which Egyptian theology wove for
the mangled and massacred hero of the myth. All forces, all powers, were
finally recognised in him; he was sun and moon, and the maker of all
things; he was the truth and the life; in him all men were justified.
On the origin of the myth philology throws no light. M. Lefebure
recognises in the name Osiris the meaning of "the infernal abode," or
"the nocturnal residence of the sacred eye," for, in the duel of Set
and Horus, he sees a mythical account of the daily setting of the sun.*
"Osiris himself, the sun at his setting, became a centre round which the
other incidents of the war of the gods gradually crystallised." Osiris
is also the earth. It would be difficult either to prove or disprove
this contention, and the usual divergency of opinion as to the meaning
and etymology of the word "Osiris" has always prevailed.** The Greek***
identifies Osiris with Hades. "Both," says M. Lefebure, "originally
meant the dwellings--and came to mean the god--of the dead." In the
same spirit Anubis, the jackal (a beast still dreaded as a ghost by the
Egyptians), is explained as "the circle of the horizon," or "the portals
of the land of darkness," the gate kept, as Homer would say, by Hades,
the mighty warden. Whether it is more natural that men should represent
the circle of the horizon or the twilight at sunset as a jackal, or that
a jackal-totem should survive as a god, mythologists will decide for
themselves.****
* Osiris, p. 129. So Lieblein, op. cit., p. 7.
** See the guesses of etymologists (Osiris, pp. 132,133).
Horus has even been connected with the Greek Hera, as the
atmosphere!
*** De Is. Os., 75.
**** Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 112-114, 237.
The jackal, by a myth that cannot be called pious, was said to have
eaten his father, Osiris. Mr. Frazers theory of Osiris as somehow
connected with vegetation will be found in his _Golden Bough_. His
master, Mannhardt, the great writer on vegetation myths, held that
Osiris was the sun.
The conclusions to be drawn from so slight a treatment of so vast a
subject are, that in Egypt, as elsewhere, a mythical and a religious, a
rational and an irrational stream of thought flowed together, and even
to some extent mingled their waters. The rational tendency, declared in
prayers and hymns, amplifies the early human belief in a protecting
and friendly personal power making for righteousness. The irrational
tendency, declared in myth and ritual, retains and elaborates the
early human confusions of thought between man and beast and god, things
animate and inanimate. On the one hand, we have almost a recognition
of supreme divinity; on the other, savage rites and beliefs, shared by
Australians and Bushmen. It is not safe or scientific to call one of
those tendencies earlier than the other; perhaps we know no race so
backward that it is not influenced by forms of both. Nor is it safe
or scientific to look on ruder practices as corruptions of the purer
beliefs. Perhaps it may never be possible to trace both streams to the
same fountain-head; probably they well up from separate springs in the
nature of man. We do but recognise and contrast them; the sources of
both are lost in the distance, where history can find no record of
actual experience. Egyptian religion and myth are thus no isolated
things; they are but the common stuff of human thought, decorated or
distorted under a hundred influences in the course of unknown centuries
of years.