Chapter VI.

The Gods of Egypt.

§ 1. Antiquity and Extent of Egyptian Civilization.

§ 2. Religious Character of the Egyptians. Their Ritual.

§ 3. Theology of Egypt. Sources of our Knowledge concerning it.

§ 4. Central Idea of Egyptian Theology and Religion. Animal Worship.

§ 5. Sources of Egyptian Theology. Age of the Empire and Affinities of

the Race.

§ 6. The Three Orders of Gods.

§ 7. Influence of Egypt upon Judaism and Christianity.

§ 1. Antiquity and Extent of Egyptian Civilization.

The ancient Egyptians have been the object of interest to the civilized

world in all ages; for Egypt was the favorite home of civilization,

science, and religion. It was a little country, the gift of the river

Nile; a little strip of land not more than seven miles wide, but

containing innumerable cities and towns, and in ancient times supporting

seven millions of inhabitants. Renowned for its discoveries in art and

science, it was the world's university; where Moses and Pythagoras,

Herodotus and Plato, all philosophers and lawgivers, went to school. The

Egyptians knew the length of the year and the form of the earth; they

could calculate eclipses of the sun and moon; were partially acquainted

with geometry, music, chemistry, the arts of design, medicine, anatomy,

architecture, agriculture, and mining. In architecture, in the qualities

of grandeur and massive proportions, they are yet to be surpassed. The

largest buildings elsewhere erected by man are smaller than their

pyramids; which are also the oldest human works still remaining, the

beauty of whose masonry, says Wilkinson, has not been surpassed in any

subsequent age. An obelisk of a single stone now standing in Egypt weighs

three hundred tons, and a colossus of Ramses II. nearly nine hundred. But

Herodotus describes a monolithic temple, which must have weighed five

thousand tons, and which was carried the whole length of the Nile, to the

Delta. And there is a roof of a doorway at Karnak, covered with sandstone

blocks forty feet long. Sculpture and bas-reliefs three thousand five

hundred years old, where the granite is cut with exquisite delicacy, are

still to be seen throughout Egypt. Many inventions, hitherto supposed to

be modern, such as glass, mosaics, false gems, glazed tiles, enamelling,

were well known to the Egyptians. But, for us, the most fortunate

circumstance in their taste was their fondness for writing. No nation has

ever equalled them in their love for recording all human events and

transactions. They wrote down all the details of private life with

wonderful zeal, method, and regularity. Every year, month, and day had its

record, and thus Egypt is the monumental land of the earth. Bunsen says

that "the genuine Egyptian writing is at least as old as Menes, the

founder of the Empire; perhaps three thousand years before Christ." No

other human records, whether of India or China, go back so far. Lepsius

saw the hieroglyph of the reed and inkstand on the monuments of the fourth

dynasty, and the sign of the papyrus roll on that of the twelfth dynasty,

which was the last but one of the old Empire. "No Egyptian," says

Herodotus, "omits taking accurate note of extraordinary and striking

events." Everything was written down. Scribes are seen everywhere on the

monuments, taking accounts of the products of the farms, even to every

single egg and chicken. "In spite of the ravages of time, and though

systematic excavation has scarcely yet commenced," says Bunsen, "we

possess chronological records of a date anterior to any period of which

manuscripts are preserved, or the art of writing existed in any other

quarter." Because they were thus fond of recording everything, both in

pictures and in three different kinds of writing; because they were also

fond of building and excavating temples and tombs in the imperishable

granite; because, lastly, the dryness of the air has preserved for us

these paintings, and the sand which has buried the monuments has prevented

their destruction,--we have wonderfully preserved, over an interval of

forty-five centuries, the daily habits, the opinions, and the religious

faith of that ancient time.

The oldest mural paintings disclose a state of the arts of civilization so

advanced as to surprise even those who have made archæology a study, and

who consequently know how few new things there are under the sun. It is

_not_ astonishing to find houses with doors and windows, with verandas,

with barns for grain, vineyards, gardens, fruit-trees, etc. We might also

expect, since man is a fighting animal, to see, as we do, pictures of

marching troops, armed with spears and shields, bows, slings, daggers,

axes, maces, and the boomerang; or to notice coats of mail, standards,

war-chariots; or to find the assault of forts by means of scaling-ladders.

But these ancient tombs also exhibit to us scenes of domestic life and

manners which would seem to belong to the nineteenth century after our

era, rather than to the fifteenth century before it. Thus we see monkeys

trained to gather fruit from the trees in an orchard; houses furnished

with a great variety of chairs, tables, ottomans, carpets, couches, as

elegant and elaborate as any used now. There are comic and _genre_

pictures of parties, where the gentlemen and ladies are sometimes

represented as being the worse for wine; of dances where ballet-girls in

short dresses perform very modern-looking pirouettes; of exercises in

wrestling, games of ball, games of chance like chess or checkers, of

throwing knives at a mark, of the modern thimblerig, wooden dolls for

children, curiously carved wooden boxes, dice, and toy-balls. There are

men and women playing on harps, flutes, pipes, cymbals, trumpets, drums,

guitars, and tambourines. Glass was, till recently, believed to be a

modern invention, unknown to the ancients. But we find it commonly used as

early as the age of Osertasen I., more than three thousand eight hundred

years ago; and we have pictures of glass-blowing and of glass bottles as

far back as the fourth dynasty. The best Venetian glass-workers are unable

to rival some of the old Egyptian work; for the Egyptians could combine

all colors in one cup, introduce gold between two surfaces of glass, and

finish in glass details of feathers, etc., which it now requires a

microscope to make out. It is evident, therefore, that they understood the

use of the magnifying-glass. The Egyptians also imitated successfully the

colors of precious stones, and could even make statues thirteen feet high,

closely resembling an emerald. They also made mosaics in glass, of

wonderfully brilliant colors. They could cut glass, at the most remote

periods. Chinese bottles have also been found in previously unopened tombs

of the eighteenth dynasty, indicating commercial intercourse reaching as

far back as that epoch. They were able to spin and weave, and color cloth;

and were acquainted with the use of mordants, the wonder in modern

calico-printing. Pliny describes this process as used in Egypt, but

evidently without understanding its nature. Writing-paper made of the

papyrus is as old as the Pyramids. The Egyptians tanned leather and made

shoes; and the shoemakers on their benches are represented working exactly

like ours. Their carpenters used axes, saws, chisels, drills, planes,

rulers, plummets, squares, hammers, nails, and hones for sharpening. They

also understood the use of glue in cabinet-making, and there are paintings

of veneering, in which a piece of thin dark wood is fastened by glue to a

coarser piece of light wood. Their boats were propelled by sails on yards

and masts, as well as by oars. They used the blow-pipe in the manufacture

of gold chains and other ornaments. They had rings of gold and silver for

money, and weighed it in scales of a careful construction. Their

hieroglyphics are carved on the hardest granite with a delicacy and

accuracy which indicates the use of some metallic cutting instrument,

probably harder than our best steel. The siphon was known in the fifteenth

century before Christ. The most singular part of their costume was the

wig, worn by all the higher classes, who constantly shaved their heads, as

well as their chins,--which shaving of the head is supposed by Herodotus

to be the reason of the thickness of the Egyptian skull. They frequently

wore false beards. Sandals, shoes, and low boots, some very elegant, are

found in the tombs. Women wore loose robes, ear-rings, finger-rings,

bracelets, armlets, anklets, gold necklaces. In the tombs are found vases

for ointment, mirrors, combs, needles. Doctors and drugs were not unknown

to them; and the passport system is no modern invention, for their deeds

contain careful descriptions of the person, exactly in the style with

which European travellers are familiar. We have only mentioned a small

part of the customs and arts with which the tombs of the Egyptians show

them to have been familiar. These instances are mostly taken from

Wilkinson, whose works contain numerous engravings from the monuments

which more than verify all we have said.

The celebrated French Egyptologist, M. Mariette, has very much enlarged

our knowledge of the more ancient dynasties, by his explorations, first

under a mission from the French government, and afterward from that of

Egypt. The immense temples and palaces of Thebes are all of a date at

least B.C. 1000. We know the history of Egypt very well as far back as the

time of the Hyksôs, or to the eighteenth dynasty. M. Mariette has

discovered statues and Sphinxes which he believes to have been the work of

the Hyksôs, the features being wholly different from that of the typical

Egyptian. Four of these Sphinxes, found by Mariette on the site of the old

Tanis, have the regular body of a lion, according to the canon of Egyptian

art, but the human heads are wholly un-Egyptian. Mariette, in describing

them, says that in the true Egyptian Sphinx there is always a quiet

majesty, the eye calm and wide open, a smile on the lips, a round face,

and a peculiar coiffure with wide open wings. Nothing of this is to be

found in these Sphinxes. Their eyes are small, the nose aquiline, the

cheeks hard, the mouth drawn down with a grave expression.

These Shepherd Kings, the Hyksôs, ruled Lower Egypt, according to Manetho,

five hundred and eleven years, which, according to Renan,[150] brings the

preceding dynasty (the fourteenth of Manetho) as early as B.C. 2000.

Monuments of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties are common. The oldest

obelisk dates B.C. 2800. Thanks to the excavations of M. Mariette, we now

have a large quantity of sculptures and statues of a still earlier epoch.

M. Renan describes[151] tombs visited by himself, which he considers to be

the oldest known, and which he regards as being B.C. 4000,[152] where were

represented all the details of domestic life. The tone of these pictures

was glad and gay; and, what is remarkable, they had no trace of the

funeral ritual or the god Osiris. These were not like tombs, but rather

like homes. To secure the body from all profanation, it was concealed in a

pit, carefully hidden in the solid masonry. These tombs belong to the six

first dynasties.

The great antiquity of Egyptian civilization is universally admitted; but

to fix its chronology and precise age becomes very difficult, from the

fact that the Egyptians had no era from which to date forward or backward.

This question we shall return to in a subsequent section of this chapter.

§ 2. Religious Character of the Egyptians. Their Ritual.

But, wonderful as was the civilization of Egypt, it is not this which now

chiefly interests us. They were prominent among all ancient nations for

their interest in religion, especially of the ceremonial part of religion,

or worship. Herodotus says: "They are of all men the most excessively

attentive to the worship of the gods." And beside his statement to that

effect, there is evidence that the origin of much of the theology,

mythology, and ceremonies of the Hebrews and Greeks was in Egypt. "The

names of almost all the gods," says Herodotus, "came from Egypt into

Greece" (Euterpe, 50). The Greek oracles, especially that of Dodona, he

also states to have been brought from Egypt (II. 54-57), and adds,

moreover, that the Egyptians were the first who introduced public

festivals, processions, and solemn supplications, which the Greeks learned

from them. "The Egyptians, then," says he, "are beyond measure scrupulous

in matters of religion (§ 64). They invented the calendar, and connected

astrology therewith." "Each month and day," says Herodotus (II. 82), "is

assigned to some particular god, and each person's birthday determines his

fate." He testifies (II. 123) that "the Egyptians were also the first to

say that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body perishes it

transmigrates through every variety of animal." It seems apparent, also,

that the Greek mysteries of Eleusis were taken from those of Isis; the

story of the wanderings of Ceres in pursuit of Proserpine being manifestly

borrowed from those of Isis in search of the body of Osiris. With this

testimony of Herodotus modern writers agree. "The Egyptians," says

Wilkinson, "were unquestionably the most pious nation of all antiquity.

The oldest monuments show their belief in a future life. And Osiris, the

Judge, is mentioned in tombs erected two thousand years before Christ."

Bunsen tells us that "it has at last been ascertained that all the great

gods of Egypt are on the oldest monuments," and says: "It is a great and

astounding fact, established beyond the possibility of doubt, that the

empire of Menes on its first appearance in history possessed an

established mythology, that is, a series of gods. Before the empire of

Menes, the separate Egyptian states had their temple worship regularly

organized."

Everything among the Egyptians, says M. Maury,[153] took the stamp of

religion. Their writing was so full of sacred symbols that it could

scarcely be used for any purely secular purpose. Literature and science

were only branches of theology. Art labored only in the service of worship

and to glorify the gods. Religious observances were so numerous and so

imperative, that the most common labors of daily life could not be

performed without a perpetual reference to some priestly regulation. The

Egyptian only lived to worship. His fate in the future life was constantly

present to him. The sun, when it set, seemed to him to die; and when it

rose the next morning, and tricking its beams flamed once more in the

forehead of the sky, it was a perpetual symbol of a future resurrection.

Religion penetrated so deeply into the habits of the land, that it almost

made a part of the intellectual and physical organization of its

inhabitants. Habits continued during many generations at last become

instincts, and are transmitted with the blood.[154] So religion in Egypt

became an instinct. Unaltered by the dominion of the Persians, the

Ptolemies, and Romans, it was, of all polytheisms, the most obstinate in

its resistance to Christianity, and retained its devotees down to the

sixth century of our era.[155]

There were more festivals in Egypt than among any other ancient people,

the Greeks not excepted. Every month and day was governed by a god. There

were two feasts of the New-Year, twelve of the first days of the months,

one of the rising of the dog-star (Sirius, called Sothis), and others to

the great gods, to seed-time and harvest, to the rise and fall of the

Nile. The feast of lamps at Sais was in honor of Neith, and was kept

throughout Egypt.[156] The feast of the death of Osiris; the feast of his

resurrection (when people called out, "We have found him! Good luck!");

feasts of Isis (one of which lasted four days); the great feast at

Bubastis, greatest of all,--these were festivals belonging to all Egypt.

On one of them as many as seven hundred thousand persons sailed on the

Nile with music. At another, the image of the god was carried to the

temple by armed men, who were resisted by armed priests in a battle in

which many were often killed.

The history of the gods was embodied in the daily life of the people. In

an old papyrus described by De Rougé,[157] it is said: "On the twelfth of

Chorak no one is to go out of doors, for on that day the transformation

of Osiris into the bird Wennu took place; on the fourteenth of Toby no

voluptuous songs must be listened to, for Isis and Nepthys bewail Osiris

on that day. On the third of Mechir no one can go on a journey, because

Set then began a war." On another day no one must go out. Another was

lucky, because on it the gods conquered Set; and a child born on that day

was supposed to live to a great age.

Every temple had its own body of priests. They did not constitute an

exclusive caste, though they were continued in families. Priests might be

military commanders, governors of provinces, judges, and architects.

Soldiers had priests for sons, and the daughters of priests married

soldiers. Of three brothers, one was a priest, another a soldier, and a

third held a civil employment.[158] Joseph, a stranger, though naturalized

in the country, received as a wife the daughter of the High-Priest of On,

or Heliopolis.

The priests in Egypt were of various grades, as the chief priests or

pontiffs, prophets, judges, scribes, those who examined the victims,

keepers of the robes, of the sacred animals, etc.

Women also held offices in the temple and performed duties there, though

not as priestesses.

The priests were exempt from taxes, and were provided for out of the

public stores. They superintended sacrifices, processions, funerals, and

were initiated into the greater and lesser mysteries; they were also

instructed in surveying. They were particular in diet, both as to quantity

and quality. Flesh of swine was particularly forbidden, and also that of

fish. Beans were held in utter abhorrence, also peas, onions, and garlic,

which, however, were offered on the altar. They bathed twice a day and

twice in the night, and shaved the head and body every three days. A great

purification took place before their fasts, which lasted from seven to

forty-two days.

They offered prayers for the dead.

The dress of the priests was simple, chiefly of linen, consisting of an

under-garment and a loose upper robe, with full sleeves, and the

leopard-skin above; sometimes one or two feathers in the head.

Chaplets and flowers were laid upon the altars, such as the lotus and

papyrus, also grapes and figs in baskets, and ointment in alabaster vases.

Also necklaces, bracelets, and jewelry, were offered as thanksgivings and

invocations.

Oxen and other animals were sacrificed, and the blood allowed to flow over

the altar. Libations of wine were poured on the altar. Incense was offered

to all the gods in censers.

Processions were usual with the Egyptians; in one, shrines were carried on

the shoulders by long staves passed through rings. In others the statues

of the gods were carried, and arks like those of the Jews, overshadowed by

the wings of the goddess of truth spread above the sacred beetle.

The prophets were the most highly honored of the priestly order. They

studied the ten hieratical books. The business of the stolists[159] was to

dress and undress the images, to attend to the vestments of the priests,

and to mark the beasts selected for sacrifice. The scribes were to search

for the Apis, or sacred bull, and were required to possess great learning.

The priests had no sinecure; their life was full of minute duties and

restrictions. They seldom appeared in public, were married to one wife,

were circumcised like other Egyptians, and their whole time was occupied

either in study or the service of their gods. There was a gloomy tone to

the religion of Egypt, which struck the Greeks, whose worship was usually

cheerful. Apuleius says "the gods of Egypt rejoice in lamentations, those

of Greece in dances." Another Greek writer says, "The Egyptians offer

their gods tears."

Until Swedenborg[160] arrived, and gave his disciples the precise measure

and form of the life to come, no religion has ever taught an immortality

as distinct in its outline and as solid in its substance as that of the

Egyptians. The Greek and Roman hereafter was shadowy and vague; that of

Buddhism remote; and the Hebrew Beyond was wholly eclipsed and overborne

by the sense of a Divine presence and power immanent in space and time. To

the Egyptian, this life was but the first step, and a very short one, of

an immense career. The sun (Ra) alternately setting and rising, was the

perpetually present type of the progress of the soul, and the Sothiac

period (symbolized by the Phoenix) of 1421 years from one heliacal rising

of Sirius at the beginning of the fixed Egyptian year to the next, was

also made to define the cycle of human transmigrations. Two Sothiac

periods correspond nearly to the three thousand years spoken of by

Herodotus, during which the soul transmigrates through animal forms before

returning to its human body. Then, to use the Egyptian language, the soul

arrived at the ship of the sun and was received by Ra into his solar

splendor. On some sarcophagi the soul is symbolized by a hawk with a human

head, carrying in his claws two rings, which probably signify the two

Sothiac cycles of its transmigrations.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,[161] is as

old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain

extracts from the Ritual of the Dead. One hundred and forty-six chapters

of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the

Turin papyrus, the most complete in Europe. Chapters of it are found on

mummy-cases, on the wraps of mummies, on the walls of tombs, and within

the coffins on papyri. This Ritual is all that remains of the Hermetic

Books which constituted the library of the priesthood. Two antagonist

classes of deities appear in this liturgy as contending for the soul of

the deceased,--Osiris and his triad, Set and his devils. The Sun-God,

source of life, is also present.

An interesting chapter of the Ritual is the one hundred and twenty-fifth,

called the Hall of the Two Truths. It is the process of "separating a

person from his sins," not by confession and repentance, as is usual in

other religions, but by denying them. Forty-two deities are said to be

present to feed on the blood of the wicked. The soul addresses the Lords

of Truth, and declares that it has not done evil privily, and proceeds to

specifications. He says: "I have not afflicted any. I have not told

falsehoods. I have not made the laboring man do more than his task. I have

not been idle. I have not murdered. I have not committed fraud. I have not

injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of

the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not cheated by false

weights. I have not kept milk from sucklings. I have not caught the sacred

birds." Then, addressing each god by name, he declares: "I have not been

idle. I have not boasted. I have not stolen. I have not counterfeited, nor

killed sacred beasts, nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor

despised God in my heart." According to some texts, he declares,

positively, that he has loved God, that he has given bread to the hungry,

water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and an asylum to the

abandoned.

Funeral ceremonies among the Egyptians were often very imposing. The cost

of embalming, and the size and strength of the tomb, varied with the

position of the deceased. When the seventy days of mourning had elapsed,

the body in its case was ferried across the lake in front of the temple,

which represented the passage of the soul over the infernal stream. Then

came a dramatic representation of the trial of the soul before Osiris. The

priests, in masks, represented the gods of the underworld. Typhon accuses

the dead man, and demands his punishment. The intercessors plead for him.

A large pair of scales is set up, and in one scale his conduct is placed

in a bottle, and in the other an image of truth. These proceedings are

represented on the funeral papyri. One of these, twenty-two feet in

length, is in Dr. Abbott's collection of Egyptian antiquities, in New

York. It is beautifully written, and illustrated with careful drawings.

One represents the Hall of the Two Truths, and Osiris sitting in

judgment, with the scales of judgment before him.[162]

Many of the virtues which we are apt to suppose a monopoly of Christian

culture appear as the ideal of these old Egyptians. Brugsch says a

thousand voices from the tombs of Egypt declare this. One inscription in

Upper Egypt says: "He loved his father, he honored his mother, he loved

his brethren, and never went from his home in bad-temper. He never

preferred the great man to the low one." Another says: "I was a wise man,

my soul loved God. I was a brother to the great men and a father to the

humble ones, and never was a mischief-maker." An inscription at Sais, on a

priest who lived in the sad days of Cambyses, says: "I honored my father,

I esteemed my mother, I loved my brothers. I found graves for the unburied

dead. I instructed little children. I took care of orphans as though they

were my own children. For great misfortunes were on Egypt in my time, and

on this city of Sais."

Some of these declarations, in their "self-pleasing pride" of virtue,

remind one of the noble justification of himself by the Patriarch

Job.[163] Here is one of them, from the tombs of Ben-Hassan, over a Nomad

Prince:--

"What I have done I will say. My goodness and my kindness were ample. I

never oppressed the fatherless nor the widow. I did not treat cruelly the

fishermen, the shepherds, or the poor laborers. There was nowhere in my

time hunger or want. For I cultivated all my fields, far and near, in

order that their inhabitants might have food. I never preferred the great

and powerful to the humble and poor, but did equal justice to all."

A king's tomb at Thebes gives us in few words the religious creed of a

Pharaoh:--

"I lived in truth, and fed my soul with justice. What I did to men was

done in peace, and how I loved God, God and my heart well know. I have

given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked,

and a shelter to the stranger. I honored the gods with sacrifices, and the

dead with offerings."

A rock at Lycopolis pleads for an ancient ruler thus: "I never took the

child from its mother's bosom, nor the poor man from the side of his

wife." Hundreds of stones in Egypt announce as the best gifts which the

gods can bestow on their favorites, "the respect of men, and the love of

women."[164] Religion, therefore, in Egypt, connected itself with morality

and the duties of daily life. But kings and conquerors were not above the

laws of their religion. They were obliged to recognize their power and

triumphs as not their own work, but that of the great gods of their

country. Thus, on a monumental stele discovered at Karnak by M. Mariette,

and translated by De Rougé,[165] is an inscription recording the triumphs

of Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty (about B.C. 1600), which

sounds like the song of Miriam or the Hymn of Deborah. We give some

stanzas in which the god Amun addresses Thothmes:--

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Syrian princes;

Under thy feet they lie throughout the breadth of their country,

Like to the Lord of Light, I made them see thy glory,

Blinding their eyes with light, O earthly image of Amun!

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Asian peoples;

Captive now thou hast led the proud Assyrian chieftains;

Decked in royal robes, I made them see thy glory;

In glittering arms and fighting, high in thy lofty chariot.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down western nations;

Cyprus and the Ases have both heard thy name with terror;

Like a strong-horned bull I made them see thy glory;

Strong with piercing horns, so that none can stand before him.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Lybian archers;

All the isles of the Greeks submit to the force of thy spirit;

Like a regal lion, I made them see thy glory;

Couched by the corpse he has made, down in the rocky valley.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down the ends of the ocean.

In the grasp of thy hand is the circling zone of the waters;

Like the soaring eagle, I have made them see thy glory,

Whose far-seeing eye there is none can hope to escape from."

A similar strain of religious poetry is in the Papyrus of Sallier, in the

British Museum.[166] This is an epic by an Egyptian poet named Pentaour,

celebrating the campaigns of Ramses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, of

the nineteenth dynasty. This great king had been called into Syria to put

down a formidable revolt of the Kheta (the Hittites of the Old Testament).

The poem seems to have been a famous one, for it had the honor of being

carved in full on the walls at Karnak, a kind of immortality which no

other epic poet has ever attained. It particularly describes an incident

in the war, when, by a stratagem of the enemy, King Ramses found himself

separated from the main body of his army and attacked by the enemy in full

force. Pentaour describes him in this situation as calling on Amun, God of

Thebes, for help, recounting the sacrifices he had offered to him, and

asking whether he would let him die in this extremity by the ignoble hands

of these Syrian tribes. "Have I not erected to thee great temples? Have I

not sacrificed to thee thirty thousand oxen? I have brought from

Elephantina obelisks to set up to thy name. I invoke thee, O my father,

Amun. I am in the midst of a throng of unknown tribes, and alone. But Amun

is better to me than thousands of archers and millions of horsemen. Amun

will prevail over the enemy." And, after defeating his foes, in his song

of triumph, the king says, "Amun-Ra has been at my right and my left in

the battles; his mind has inspired my own, and has prepared the downfall

of my enemies. Amun-Ra, my father, has brought the whole world to my

feet."[167]

Thus universal and thus profound was the religious sentiment among the

Egyptians.

§ 3. Theology of Egypt. Sources of our Knowledge concerning it.

As regards the theology of the Egyptians and their system of ideas, we

meet with difficulty from the law of secrecy which was their habit of

mind. The Egyptian priesthood enveloped with mystery every opinion, just

as they swathed the mummies, fold above fold, in preparing them for the

tomb. The names and number of their gods we learn from the monuments.

Their legends concerning them come to us through Plutarch, Herodotus,

Diodorus, and other Greek writers. Their doctrine of a future life and

future judgment is apparent in their ceremonies, the pictures on the

tombs, and the papyrus Book of the Dead. But what these gods _mean_, what

are their offices, how they stand related to each other and to mankind,

what is the ethical bearing of the religion, it is not so easy to learn.

Nevertheless, we may find a clew to a knowledge of this system, if in no

other way, at least by ascertaining its central, ruling idea, and pursuing

this into its details. The moment that we take this course, light will

begin to dawn upon us. But before going further, let us briefly inquire

into the sources of our knowledge of Egyptian mythology.

The first and most important place is occupied by the monuments, which

contain the names and tablets of the gods of the three orders. Then come

the sacred books of the Egyptians, known to us by Clemens Alexandrinus.

From him we learn that the Egyptians in his time had forty-two sacred

books in five classes. The first class, containing songs or hymns in

praise of the gods, were very old, dating perhaps from the time of Menes.

The other books treated of morals, astronomy, hieroglyphics, geography,

ceremonies, the deities, the education of priests, and medicine. Of these

sacred Hermaic books, one is still extant, and perhaps it is as

interesting as any of them. We have two copies of it, both on papyrus, one

found by the French at Thebes, the other by Champollion in Turin. And

Lepsius considers this last papyrus to be wholly of the date of the

eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty, consequently fifteen hundred or sixteen

hundred years before Christ, and the only example of an Egyptian book

transmitted from the times of the Pharaohs. Bunsen believes it to belong

to the fourth class of Hermaic books, containing Ordinances as to the

First Fruits, Sacrifices, Hymns, and Prayers. In this book the deceased

is the person who officiates. His soul journeying on gives utterance to

prayers, confessions, invocations. The first fifteen chapters, which make

a connected whole, are headed, "Here begins the Sections of the

Glorification in the Light of Osiris." It is illustrated by a picture of a

procession, in which the deceased soul follows his own corpse as chief

mourner, offering prayers to the Sun-God. Another part of the book is

headed, "The Book of Deliverance, in the Hall of twofold Justice," and

contains the divine judgments on the deceased. Forty-two gods occupy the

judgment-seat. Osiris, their president, bears on his breast the small

tablet of chief judge, containing a figure of Justice. Before him are seen

the scales of divine judgment. In one is placed the statue of Justice, and

in the other the heart of the deceased, who stands in person by the

balance containing his heart, while Anubis watches the other scale. Horus

examines the plummet indicating which way the beam inclines. Thoth, the

Justifier the Lord of the Divine Word, records the sentence.[168]

§ 4. Central Idea of Egyptian Theology and Religion. Animal Worship.

We now proceed to ask what is the IDEA of Egyptian mythology and theology?

We have seen that the idea of the religion of India was Spirit; the One,

the Infinite, the Eternal; a pure spiritual Pantheism, from which the

elements of time and space are quite excluded. The religion of Egypt

stands at the opposite pole of thought as its antagonist. Instead of

Spirit, it accepts Body; instead of Unity, Variety; instead of Substance,

Form. It is the physical reaction from Brahmanism. Instead of the worship

of abstract Deity, it gives us the most concrete divinity, wholly

incarnated in space and time. Instead of abstract contemplation, it gives

us ceremonial worship. Instead of the absorption of man into God, it gives

us transmigration through all bodily forms.[169] It so completely

incarnates God, as to make every type of animal existence divine; hence

the worship of animals. It makes body so sacred, that the human body must

not be allowed to perish. As the Brahman, contemplating eternity, forgot

time, and had no history, so on the other hand the Egyptian priest, to

whom every moment of time is sacred, records everything and turns every

event into history; and as it enshrines the past time historically on

monuments, so it takes hold of future time prophetically through oracles.

The chief peculiarity about the religion of Egypt, and that which has

always caused the greatest astonishment to foreigners, was the worship of

animals. Herodotus says (Book II. § 65), "That all animals in Egypt, wild

and tame, are accounted sacred, and that if any one kills these animals

wilfully he is put to death." He is, however, mistaken in asserting that

_all_ animals are sacred; for many were not so, though the majority were.

Wilkinson gives a list of the animals of Egypt to the number of over one

hundred, more than half of which were sacred, and the others not. As

hunting and fishing were favorite sports of the Egyptians, it is apparent

that there must have been animals whom it was lawful to kill.

Nevertheless, it is certain that animal worship is a striking peculiarity

of the Egyptian system. Cows were sacred to Isis, and Isis was represented

in the form of a cow. The gods often wore the heads of animals; and Kneph,

or Amun, with the ram's head, is one of the highest of the gods, known

among the Greeks as Jupiter Ammon. The worship of Apis, the sacred bull of

Memphis, the representative of Osiris, was very important among the

Egyptian ceremonies. Plutarch says that he was a fair and beautiful image

of the soul of Osiris. He was a bull with black hair, a white spot on his

forehead, and some other special marks. He was kept at Memphis in a

splendid temple. His festival lasted seven days, when a great concourse of

people assembled. When he died his body was embalmed and buried with great

pomp, and the priests went in search of another Apis, who, when discovered

by the marks, was carried to Memphis, carefully fed and exercised, and

consulted as an oracle. The burial-place of the Apis bulls was, a few

years ago, discovered near Memphis. It consists of an arched gallery hewn

in the rock, two thousand feet long and twenty feet in height and breadth.

On each side is a series of recesses, each containing a large sarcophagus

of granite, fifteen by eight feet, in which the body of a sacred bull was

deposited. In 1852 thirty of these had been already found. Before this

tomb is a paved road with lions ranged on each side, and before this a

temple with a vestibule.

In different parts of Egypt different animals were held sacred. The animal

sacred in one place was not so regarded in another district. These sacred

animals were embalmed by the priests and buried, and the mummies of dogs,

wolves, birds, and crocodiles are found by thousands in the tombs. The

origin and motive of this worship is differently explained. It is certain

that animals were not worshipped in the same way as the great gods, but

were held sacred and treated with reverence as containing a divine

element. So, in the East, an insane person is accounted sacred, but is not

worshipped. So the Roman Catholics distinguish between Dulia and Latria,

between the worship of gods and reverence of saints. So, too, Protestants

consider the Bible a holy book and the Sabbath a holy day, but without

worshipping them. It is only just to make a similar distinction on behalf

of the Egyptians. The motives usually assigned for this worship--motives

of utility--seem no adequate explanation. "The Egyptians," says Wilkinson,

"may have deified some animals to insure their preservation, some to

prevent their unwholesome meat being used as food." But no religion was

ever established in this way. Man does not worship from utilitarian

considerations, but from an instinct of reverence. It is possible, indeed,

that such a reverential instinct may have been awakened towards certain

animals, by seeing their vast importance arising from their special

instincts and faculties. The cow and the ox, the dog, the ibis, and the

cat, may thus have appeared to the Egyptians, from their indispensable

utility, to be endowed with supernatural gifts. But this feeling itself

must have had its root in a yet deeper tendency of the Egyptian mind. They

reverenced the mysterious manifestation of God in all outward nature. No

one can look at an animal, before custom blinds our sense of strangeness,

without a feeling of wonder at the law of instinct, and the special,

distinct peculiarity which belongs to it. Every variety of animals is a

manifestation of a divine thought, and yet a thought hinted rather than

expressed. Each must mean something, must symbolize something. But what

does it mean? what does it symbolize? Continually we seem just on the

point of penetrating the secret; we almost touch the explanation, but are

baffled. A dog, a cat, a snake, a crocodile, a spider,--what does each

mean? why were they made? why this infinite variety of form, color,

faculty, character? Animals thus in their unconscious being, as

expressions of God's thoughts, are mysteries, and divine mysteries.[170]

Now every part of the religion of Egypt shows how much they were attracted

toward _variety_, toward nature, toward the outward manifestations of the

Divine Spirit. These tendencies reached their utmost point in their

reverence for animal life. The shallow Romans, who reverenced only

themselves, and the Greeks, who worshipped nothing but human nature more

or less idealized, laughed at this Egyptian worship of animals and plants.

"O sacred nation! whose gods grow in gardens!" says Juvenal. But it

certainly shows a deeper wisdom to see something divine in nature, and to

find God in nature, than to call it common and unclean. And there is more

of truth in the Egyptian reverence for animal individuality, than in the

unfeeling indifference to the welfare of these poor relations which

Christians often display. When Jesus said that "not a sparrow falls to the

ground without your Father," he showed all these creatures to be under the

protection of their Maker. It may be foolish to worship animals, but it is

still more foolish to despise them.

That the belief in transmigration is the explanation of animal worship is

the opinion of Bunsen. The human soul and animal soul, according to this

view, are essentially the same,--therefore the animal was considered as

sacred as man. Still, we do not _worship_ man. Animal worship, then, must

have had a still deeper root in the sense of awe before the mystery of

organized life.

§ 5. Sources of Egyptian Theology. Age of the Empire and Affinities of the

Race.

But whence came this tendency in the human mind? Did it inhere in the

race, or was it the growth of external circumstances? Something, perhaps,

may be granted to each of these causes. The narrow belt of fertile land in

Egypt, fed by the overflowing Nile, quickened by the tropical sun, teeming

with inexhaustible powers of life, continually called the mind anew to the

active, creative powers of nature. And yet it may be suspected that the

law of movement by means of antagonism and reaction may have had its

influence also here. The opinion is now almost universal, that the impulse

of Egyptian civilization proceeded from Asia. This is the conclusion of

Bunsen at the end of his first volume. "The cradle of the mythology and

language of Egypt," says he, "is Asia. This result is arrived at by the

various ethnological proofs of language which finds Sanskrit words and

forms in Egypt, and of comparative anatomy, which shows the oldest

Egyptian skulls to have belonged to Caucasian races." If, then, Egyptian

civilization proceeded from Central Asia, Egyptian mythology and religion

probably came as a quite natural reaction from the extreme spiritualism of

the Hindoos. The question which remains is, whether they arrived at their

nature-worship directly or indirectly; whether, beginning with Fetichism,

they ascended to their higher conceptions of the immortal gods; or,

beginning with spiritual existence, they traced it downward into its

material manifestations; whether, in short, their system was one of

evolution or emanation. For every ancient theogony, cosmogony, or ontogony

is of one kind or the other. According to the systems of India and of

Platonism, the generation of beings is by the method of emanation.

Creation is a falling away, or an emanation from the absolute. But the

systems of Greek and Scandinavian mythology are of the opposite sort. In

these, spirit is evolved from matter; matter up to spirit works. They

begin with the lowest form of being,--night, chaos, a mundane egg,--and

evolve the higher gods therefrom.

It is probable that we find in Egypt a double tendency. One is the Asiatic

spiritualism, the other the African naturalism. The union of the ideal and

the real, of thought and passion, of the aspirations of the soul and the

fire of a passionate nature, of abstract meditation and concrete life, had

for its result the mysterious theology and philosophy which, twenty

centuries after its burial under the desert sands, still rouses our

curiosity to penetrate the secret of this Sphinx of the Nile.

We have seen in a former section that the institutions of Egypt, based on

a theocratic monarchy, reach back into a dim and doubtful antiquity.

Monuments, extending through thirty-five centuries, attest an age

preceding all written history. These monuments, so far as deciphered by

modern Egyptologists, have confirmed the accuracy of the lists of kings

which have come to us from Manetho. We have no monument anterior to the

fourth dynasty, but at that epoch we find the theocracy fully

organized.[171] The general accuracy of Manetho's list has been

demonstrated by the latest discoveries of M. Mariette, and has rendered

doubtful the idea of any of the dynasties being contemporaneous.

The main chronological points, however, are by no means as yet fixed.

Thus, the beginning of the first dynasty is placed by Böckh at B.C. 5702,

by Lepsius B.C. 3892, by Bunsen B.C. 3623, by Brugsch B.C. 4455, by Lauth

B.C. 4157, by Duncker 3233.[172] The period of the builders of the great

Pyramids is fixed by Bunsen at B.C. 3229, by Lepsius at B.C. 3124, by

Brugsch at B.C. 3686, by Lauth at B.C. 3450, and by Böckh at B.C.

4933.[173]

The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that there were three hundred and

thirty-one kings, from Menes to Moeris, whose names they read out of a

book. After him came eleven others, of whom Sethos was the last. From

Osiris to Amasis they counted fifteen thousand years, though Herodotus did

not believe this statement. If the three hundred and forty-two kings

really existed, it would make Menes come B.C. 9150,--at an average of

twenty-five years' reign to each king. Diodorus saw in Egypt a list of

four hundred and seventy-nine kings. But he says in another place that

Menes lived about four thousand seven hundred years before his time.

Manetho tells us that from Menes there were thirty dynasties, who reigned

five thousand three hundred and sixty-six years. But he gives a list of

four hundred and seventy-two kings in these dynasties, to the time of

Cambyses. The contradictions are so great, and the modes of reconciling

Manetho, Herodotus, Diodorus, Eratosthenes, and the monuments are so

inadequate, that we must regard the whole question of the duration of the

monarchy as unsettled. But from the time when the calendar must have been

fixed, from the skill displayed in the Pyramids, and other reasons

independent of any chronology, Duncker considers the reign of Menes as old

as B.C. 3500.

The history of Egypt is divided into three periods, that of the old, the

middle, and the new monarchy. The first extends from the foundation of the

united kingdom by Menes to the conquest of the country by the Hyksôs. The

second is from this conquest by the Hyksôs till their expulsion. The

third, from the re-establishment of the monarchy by Amosis to its final

conquest by Persia. The old monarchy contained twelve dynasties; the

Hyksôs or middle monarchy, five; the new monarchy, thirteen: in all,

thirty.

The Hyksôs, or Shepherd Kings, were at first supposed to be the Hebrews:

but this hypothesis adapted itself to none of the facts. A recent treatise

by M. Chabas[174] shows that the Hyksôs were an Asiatic people, occupying

the country to the northeast of Egypt. After conquering Lower Egypt,

Apapi was king of the Hyksôs and Tekenen-Ra ruled over the native

Egyptians of the South. A papyrus, as interpreted by M. Chabas, narrates

that King Apapi worshipped only the god Sutech (Set), and refused to allow

the Egyptian gods to be adored. This added to the war of races a war of

religion, which resulted in the final expulsion of the Shepherds, about

B.C. 1700. The Hyksôs are designated on the monuments and in the papyri as

the "Scourge" or "Plague," equivalent in Hebrew to the _Tzir'ah,_ commonly

translated "hornet," but evidently the same as the Hebrew _tzavaath_,

"plague," and the Arabic _tzeria_, "scourge," or "plague."[175]

According to the learned Egyptologist, Dr. Brugsch, the Hebrew slaves in

Egypt are referred to in a papyrus in the British Museum of the date of

Ramses II. (B.C. 1400), in a description by a scribe named Pinebsa of the

new city of Ramses. He tells how the slaves throng around him to present

petitions against their overseers. Another papyrus reads (Lesley, "Man's

Origin and Destiny"): "The people have erected twelve buildings. They made

their tale of bricks daily, till they were finished." The first

corroboration of the biblical narrative which the Egyptian monuments

afford, and the first synchronism between Jewish and Egyptian history,

appear in the reign of Ramses II., about B.C. 1400, in the nineteenth

dynasty.

It appears from the monuments and from the historians that somewhere about

B.C. 2000, or earlier, this great movement of warlike nomadic tribes

occurred, which resulted in the conquest of Lower Egypt by the pastoral

people known as Hyksôs. It was perhaps a movement of Semitic races, the

Bedouins of the desert, like that which nearly three thousand years after

united them as warriors of Islam to overflow North Africa, Syria, Persia,

and Spain. They oppressed Egypt for five hundred years (Brugsch), and

appear on the monuments under the name of Amu (the herdsmen) or of Aadu

(the hated ones). Their kings resided at Tanis (in Egyptian Avaris), in

the Delta. That their conquests had a religious motive, and were made,

like that of Mohammed, in the interest of monotheism, seems possible. At

all events, we find one of them, Apapi, erecting a temple to Sutech (the

Semitic Baal), and refusing to allow the worship of other deities.[176]

The majority of Egyptologists believe that the Hebrews entered Egypt while

these Hyksôs kings, men of the same Semitic family and monotheistic

tendencies, were ruling in Lower Egypt. The bare subterranean temple

discovered by M. Mariette, with the well near it filled with broken

statues of the Egyptian gods, is an indication of those tendencies. The

"other king, who knew not Joseph," was a king of the eighteenth dynasty,

who conquered the Hyksôs and drove them out of Egypt. Apparently the

course of events was like that which many centuries later occurred in

Spain. In both cases, the original rulers of the land, driven to the

mountains, gradually reconquered their country step by step. The result of

this reconquest of the country would also be in Egypt, as it was in Spain,

that the Semitic remnants left in the land would be subject to a severe

and oppressive rule. The Jews in Egypt, like the Moors in Spain, were

victims of a cruel bondage. Then began the most splendid period of

Egyptian history, during the seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, and

fourteenth centuries before Christ. The Egyptian armies overran Syria,

Asia Minor, and Armenia as far as the Tigris.

Ramses II., the most powerful monarch of this epoch, is probably the king

whose history is given by Herodotus and other Greek writers under the name

of Sesostris.[177] M. de Rougé believes himself able to establish this

identity. He found in the Museum at Vienna a stone covered with

inscriptions, and dedicated by a person whose name is given as Ramses

Mei-Amoun, exactly in the hieroglyphics of the great king. But this

person's name is also written elsewhere on the stone _Ses_, and a third

time as _Ses Mei-amoun,_ showing that _Ses_ was a common abbreviation of

Ramses. It is also written _Sesu_, or _Sesesu_, which is very like the

form in which Diodorus writes Sesostris, namely, _Sesoosis_.[178] Now

Ramses II., whose reign falls about B.C. 1400, erected a chain of

fortresses to defend the northeastern border of Egypt against the Syrian

nomads. One of these fortresses was named from the King Ramses, and

another Pachtum. The papyri contain accounts of these cities. One papyrus,

in the British Museum,[179] is a description by a scribe named Pinebsa, of

the aspect of the city Ramses, and of the petitions of the laborers for

relief against their overseers. These laborers are called _Apuru_,

Hebrews. In a papyrus of the Leyden Museum, an officer reports to his

superior thus: "May my lord be pleased. I have distributed food to the

soldiers and to the Hebrews, dragging stones for the great city Ramses

Meia-moum. I gave them food monthly." This corresponds with the passage

(Exodus i. 11): "They built for Pharaoh treasure-cities, Pithom and

Raamses."[180]

The birth of Moses fell under the reign of Ramses II. The Exodus was under

that of his successor, Menepthes. This king had fallen on evil times; his

power was much inferior to that of his great predecessor; and he even

condescended to propitiate the anti-Egyptian element, by worshipping its

gods. He has left his inscription on the monuments with the title,

"Worshipper of Sutech-Baal in Tanis." The name of Moses is Egyptian, and

signifies "the child."

"Joseph," says Brugsch, "was never at the court of an Egyptian Pharaoh,

but found his place with the Semitic monarchs, who reigned at Avaris-Tanis

in the Delta, and whose power extended from this point as far as Memphis

and Heliopolis." The "king who knew not Joseph" was evidently the

restored Egyptian dynasty of Thebes. These monarchs would be naturally

averse to all the Palestinian inhabitants of the land. And the monuments

of their reigns represent the labors of subject people, under

task-masters, cutting, carrying, and laying stones for the walls of

cities.

To what race do the Egyptians belong? The only historic document which

takes us back so far as this is the list of nations in the tenth chapter

of Genesis. We cannot, indeed, determine the time when it was written. But

Bunsen, Ebers,[181] and other ethnologists are satisfied that the author

of this chapter had a knowledge of the subject derived either from the

Phoenicians or the Egyptians. Ewald places his epoch with that of the

early Jewish kings. According to this table the Egyptians were descended

from Ham, the son of Noah, and were consequently of the same original

stock with the Japhetic and Semitic nations. They were not negroes, though

their skin was black, or at least dark.[182] According to Herodotus they

came from the heart of Africa; according to Genesis (chap. x.) from Asia.

Which is the correct view?

The Egyptians themselves recognized no relationship with the negroes, who

only appear on the monuments as captives or slaves.

History, therefore, helps us little in this question of race. How is it

with Comparative Philology and Comparative Anatomy?

The Coptic language is an idiom of the old Egyptian tongue, which seems to

belong to no known linguistic group. It is related to other African

languages only through the lexicon, and similarly with the Indo-European.

Some traces of grammatic likeness to the Semitic may be found in it; yet

the view of Bunsen and Schwartz, that in very ancient times it arose from

the union of Semitic and Indo-European languages, remains only a

hypothesis.[183] Merx (in Schenkel's Bibel-Lexicon) says this view "rests

upon a wish formed in the interest of the Philosophy of History; and the

belief of a connection between these tongues is not justified by any

scientific study of philology. No such ethnological affinity can be

granted,--a proof of which is that all facts in its favor are derived from

common roots, none from common grammar." Benfey, however, assumed two

great branches of Semitic nationalities, one flowing into Africa, the

other into Western Asia.[184] Ebers[185] gives some striking resemblances

between Egyptian and Chaldaic words, and says he possesses more than three

hundred examples of this kind; and in Bunsen's fifth volume are

comparative tables which give as their result that a third part of the old

Egyptian words in Coptic literature are Semitic, and a tenth part

Indo-European. If these statements are confirmed, they may indicate some

close early relations between these races.

The anatomy of the mummies seems to show a wide departure from negro

characteristics. The skull, chin, forehead, bony system, facial angle,

hair, limbs, are all different. The chief resemblances are in the flat

nose, and form of the backbone.[186] Scientific ethnologists have

therefore usually decided that the old Egyptians were an Asiatic people

who had become partially amalgamated with the surrounding African tribes.

Max Duncker comes to this conclusion,[187] and says that the Berber

languages are the existing representatives of the old Egyptian. This is

certainly true as concerns the Copts, whose very name is almost identical

with the word "Gupti," the old name from which the Greeks formed the term

Ægypti.[188] Alfred Maury (Revue d. D. Mondes, September, 1867) says that,

"according to all appearances, Egypt was peopled from Asia by that Hamitic

race which comprised the tribes of Palestine, Arabia, and Ethiopia. Its

ancient civilization was, consequently, the sister of that which built

Babylon and Nineveh. In the valley of the Nile, as in those of the

Euphrates and the Tigris, religion gave the motive to civilization, and in

all the three nations there was a priesthood in close alliance with an

absolute monarchy." M. de Rougé is of the same opinion. In his examination

of the monuments of the oldest dynasties, he finds the name given to the

Egyptians by themselves to be merely "the Men" (Rut),--a word which by the

usual interchange of R with L, and of T with D, is identical with the

Hebrew Lud (plural Ludim), whom the Book of Genesis declares to have been

a son of Misraim. This term was applied by the Israelites to all the races

on the southeast shore of the Mediterranean. It is, therefore, believed by

M. de Rougé that the Egyptians were of the same family with these Asiatic

tribes on the shores of Syria. Here, then, as in so many other cases, a

new civilization may have come from the union of two different races,--one

Asiatic, the other African. Asia furnished the brain, Africa the fire, and

from the immense vital force of the latter and the intellectual vigor of

the former sprang that wonderful civilization which illuminated the world

during at least five thousand years.

§ 6. The Three Orders of Gods.

The Egyptian theology, or doctrine of the gods, was of two

kinds,--esoteric and exoteric, that is, an interior theology for the

initiated, and an exterior theology for the uninitiated. The exterior

theology, which was for the whole people, consisted of the mythological

accounts of Isis and Osiris, the judgments of the dead, the transmigration

of the soul, and all matters connected with the ceremonial worship of the

gods. But the interior, hidden theology is supposed to have related to the

unity and spirituality of the Deity.

Herodotus informs us that the gods of the Egyptians were in three orders;

and Bunsen believes that he has succeeded in restoring them from the

monuments. There are eight gods of the first order, twelve gods of the

second order, and seven gods of the third order. The gods of the third

order are those of the popular worship, but those of the first seem to be

of a higher and more spiritual class. The third class of gods were

representative of the elements of nature, the sun, fire, water, earth,

air. But the gods of the first order were the gods of the priesthood,

understood by them alone, and expressing ideas which they shrank from

communicating to the people. The spiritual and ideal part of their

religion the priests kept to themselves as something which the people were

incapable of understanding. The first eight gods seem to have been a

representation of a process of divine development or emanation, and

constituted a transition from the absolute spiritualism of the Hindoos to

the religion of nature and humanity in the West. The Hindoo gods were

emanations of spirit: the gods of Greece are idealizations of Nature. But

the Egyptian gods represent spirit passing into matter and form.

Accordingly, if we examine in detail the gods of the first order, who are

eight, we find them to possess the general principle of self-revelation,

and to constitute, taken together, a process of divine development. These

eight, according to Bunsen, are Amn, or Ammon; Khem, or Chemmis; Mut, the

Mother Goddess; Num, or Kneph; Seti, or Sate; Phtah, the Artist God; Net,

or Neith, the Goddess of Sais; and Ra, the Sun, the God of Heliopolis. But

according to Wilkinson they stand in a little different order: 1. Neph, or

Kneph; 2. Amun, or Ammon; 3. Pthah; 4. Khem; 5. Sate; 6. Maut, or Mut; 7.

Pasht, or Diana; and 8. Neith, or Minerva, in which list Pasht, the

Goddess of Bubastis, is promoted out of the second order and takes the

place of Ra, the Sun, who is degraded.

Supposing these lists to be substantially correct, we have, as the root of

the series, Ammon, the Concealed God, or Absolute Spirit. His titles

indicate this dignity. The Greeks recognized him as corresponding to their

Zeus. He is styled King of the Gods, the Ruler, the Lord of Heaven, the

Lord of the Thrones, the Horus or God of the Two Egypts. Thebes was his

city. According to Manetho, his name means concealment; and the root "Amn"

also means to veil or conceal. His original name was Amn; thus it stands

in the rings of the twelfth dynasty. But after the eighteenth dynasty it

is Amn-Ra, meaning the Sun. "Incontestably," says Bunsen, "he stands in

Egypt as the head of the great cosmogonic development."

Next comes Kneph, or God as Spirit,--the Spirit of God, often confounded

with Amn, also called Cnubis and Num. Both Plutarch and Diodorus tell us

that his name signifies Spirit, the Num having an evident relation with

the Greek πνεῦμα, and the Coptic word "Nef," meaning also to blow. So too

the Arabic "Nef" means breath, the Hebrew "Nuf," to flow, and the Greek

πνέω, to breathe. At Esneh he is called the Breath of those in the

Firmament; at Elephantina, Lord of the Inundations. He wears the ram's

head with double horns (by mistake of the Greeks attributed to Ammon), and

his worship was universal in Ethiopia. The sheep are sacred to him, of

which there were large flocks in the Thebaid, kept for their wool. And the

serpent or asp, a sign of kingly dominion,--hence called basilisk,--is

sacred to Kneph. As Creator, he appears under the figure of a potter with

a wheel. In Philæ he is so represented, forming on his wheel a figure of

Osiris, with the inscription, "Num, who forms on his wheel the Divine

Limbs of Osiris." He is also called the Sculptor of all men, also the god

who made the sun and moon to revolve. Porphyry says that Pthah sprang from

an egg which came from the mouth of Kneph, in which he is supported by

high monumental authority.

The result of this seems to be that Kneph represents the absolute Being as

Spirit, the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters,--a moving

spirit pervading the formless chaos of matter.

Perhaps the next god in the series is Pthah, by the Greeks called

Hephæstus, or Vulcan, representing formation, creation by the truth,

stability; called in the inscriptions, Lord of Truth, Lord of the

Beautiful Face, Father of the Beginnings, moving the Egg of the Sun and

Moon. With Horapollo and Plutarch, we may consider the Scarabeus, or

Beetle, which is his sign, as an emblem of the world and its creation. An

inscription calls him Creator of all things in the world. Iamblicus says,

"The God who creates with truth is Pthah." He was also connected with the

sun, as having thirty fingers,--the number of days in a month. He is

represented sometimes as a deformed dwarf.

The next god in the series is Khem, the Greek Pan,--the principle of

generation, sometimes holding the ploughshare.

Then come the feminine principles corresponding with these three latter

gods. Amun has naturally no companion. Mut, the mother, is the consort of

Khem the father. Seti,--the Ray or Arrow,--a female figure, with the horns

of a cow, is the companion of Kneph. And Neith, or Net, the goddess of

Sais, belongs to Pthah. The Greek Minerva Athênê is thought to be derived

from Neith by an inversion of the letters,[189]--the Greeks writing from

left to right and the Egyptians from right to left. Her name means, "I

came from myself." Clemens says that her great shrine at Sais has an open

roof with the inscription, "I am all that was and is and is to be, and no

mortal has lifted my garment, and the fruit I bore is Helios." This would

seem to identify her with Nature.

For the eighth god of the first order we may take either Helios or Ra or

Phra, the Sun-God; from whence came the name of the Pharaohs, or we may

take Pasht, Bubastis, the equivalent of the Greek Diana. On some accounts

it would seem that Ra was the true termination of this cycle. We should

then have, proceeding from the hidden abyss of pure Spirit, first a

breathing forth, or spirit in motion; then creation, by the word of truth;

then generation, giving life and growth; and then the female qualities of

production, wisdom, and light, completed by the Sun-God, last of the

series. Amn, or Ammon, the Concealed God, is the root, then the creative

power in Kneph, then the generative power in Khem, the Demiurgic power in

Ptah, the feminine creative principle of Nature in Neith, the productive

principle in Mut, or perhaps the nourishing principle, and then the living

stimulus of growth, which carries all forward in Ra.

But we must now remember that two races meet in Egypt,--an Asiatic race,

which brings the ideas of the East; and an Ethiopian, inhabitants of the

land, who were already there. The first race brought the spiritual ideas

which were embodied in the higher order of gods. The Africans were filled

with the instinct of nature-worship. These two tendencies were to be

reconciled in the religion of Egypt. The first order of gods was for the

initiated, and taught them the unity, spirituality, and creative power of

God.[190] The third order--the circle of Isis and Osiris--were for the

people, and were representative of the forms and forces of outward

nature. Between the two come the second series,--a transition from the one

to the other,--children of the higher gods, parents of the lower,--neither

so abstract as the one nor so concrete as the other,--representing neither

purely divine qualities on the one side, nor merely natural forces on the

other, but rather the faculties and powers of man. Most of this series

were therefore adopted by the Greeks, whose religion was one essentially

based on human nature, and whose gods were all, or nearly all, the ideal

representations of human qualities. Hence they found in Khunsu, child of

Ammon, their Hercules, God of Strength; in Thoth, child of Kneph, they

found Hermes, God of Knowledge; in Pecht, child of Pthah, they found their

Artemis, or Diana, the Goddess of Birth, protector of women; in Athor, or

Hathor, they found their Aphroditê, Goddess of Love. Seb was Chronos, or

Time; and Nutpe was Rhea, wife of Chronos.

The third order of gods are the children of the second series, and are

manifestations of the Divine in the outward universe. But though standing

lowest in the scale, they were the most popular gods of the Pantheon; had

more individuality and personal character than the others; were more

universally worshipped throughout Egypt, and that from the oldest times.

"The Osiris deities," says Herodotus, "are the only gods worshipped

throughout Egypt." "They stand on the oldest monuments, are the centre of

all Egyptian worship, and are perhaps the oldest original objects of

reverence," says Bunsen. How can this be if they belong to a lower order

of Deities, and what is the explanation of it? There is another historical

fact also to be explained. Down to the time of Ramses, thirteen hundred

years before Christ, Typhon, or Seth, the God of Destruction, was the

chief of this third order, and the most venerated of all the gods. After

that time a revolution occurred in the worship, which overthrew Seth, and

his name was chiselled out of the monuments, and the name of Amun inserted

in its place. This was the only change which occurred in the Egyptian

religion, so far as we know, from its commencement until the time of the

Cæsars.[191] An explanation of both these facts may be given, founded on

the supposed amalgamation in Egypt of two races with their religions.

Supposing that the gods of the higher orders represented the religious

ideas of a Semitic or Aryan race entering Egypt from Asia, and that the

Osiris group were the gods of the African nature-worship, which they found

prevailing on their arrival, it is quite natural that the priests should

in their classification place their own gods highest, while they should

have allowed the external worship to go on as formerly, at least for a

time. But, after a time, as the tone of thought became more elevated, they

may have succeeded in substituting for the God of Terror and Destruction a

higher conception in the popular worship.

The myth of Isis and Osiris, preserved for us by Plutarch, gives the most

light in relation to this order of deities.

Seb and Nutpe, or Nut, called by the Greeks Chronos and Rhea, were the

parents of this group. Seb is therefore Time, and Nut is Motion or perhaps

Space. The Sun pronounced a curse on them, namely, that she should not be

delivered, on any day of the year. This perhaps implies the difficulty of

the thought of Creation. But Hermes, or Wisdom, who loved Rhea, won, at

dice, of the Moon, five days, the seventieth part of all her

illuminations, which he added to the three hundred and sixty days, or

twelve months. Here we have a hint of a correction of the calendar, the

necessity of which awakened a feeling of irregularity in the processes of

nature, admitting thereby the notion of change and a new creation. These

five days were the birthdays of the gods. On the first Osiris is born, and

a voice was heard saying, "The Lord of all things is now born." On the

second day, Arueris-Apollo, or the elder Horus; on the third, Typhon, who

broke through a hole in his mother's side; on the fourth, Isis; and on the

fifth, Nepthys-Venus, or Victory. Osiris and Arueris are children of the

Sun, Isis of Hermes, Typhon and Nepthys of Saturn.

Isis became the wife of Osiris, who went through the world taming it by

means of oratory, poetry, and music. When he returned, Typhon took

seventy-two men and also a queen of Ethiopia, and made an ark the size of

Osiris's body, and at a feast proposed to give it to the one whom it

should fit. Osiris got into it, and they fastened down the lid and

soldered it and threw it into the Nile. Then Isis put on mourning and went

to search for it, and directed her inquiries to little children, who were

hence held by the Egyptians to have the faculty of divination. Then she

found Anubis, child of Osiris, by Nepthys, wife of Typhon, who told her

how the ark was entangled in a tree which grew up around it and hid it.

The king had made of this tree a pillar to support his house. Isis sat

down weeping; the women of the queen came to her, she stroked their hair,

and fragrance passed into it. She was made nurse to the queen's child, fed

him with her finger, and in the night-time, by means of a lambent flame,

burned away his impurities. She then turned herself into a swallow and

flew around the house, bewailing her fate. The queen watched her

operations, and being alarmed cried out, and so robbed her child of

immortality. Isis then begged the pillar, took it down, took out the

chest, and cried so loud that the younger son of the king died of fright.

She then took the ark and the elder son and set sail. The cold air of the

river chilled her, and she became angry and cursed it, and so dried it up.

She opened the chest, put her cheek to that of Osiris and wept bitterly.

The little boy came and peeped in; she gave him a terrible look, and he

died of fright. Isis then came to her son Horus, who was at nurse at Buto.

Typhon, hunting by moonlight, saw the ark, with the body of Osiris, which

he tore into fourteen parts and threw them about. Isis went to look for

them in a boat made of papyrus, and buried each part in a separate place.

After this the soul of Osiris returned out of Hades to train up his son.

Then came a battle between Horus and Typhon, in which Typhon was

vanquished, but Isis allowed him to escape. There are other less important

incidents in the story, among them that Isis had another son by the soul

of Osiris after his death, who is the god called Harpocrates, represented

as lame and with his finger on his mouth.[192]

Plutarch declares that this story is symbolical, and mentions various

explanations of the allegory. He rejects, at once, the rationalistic

explanation, which turns these gods into eminent men,--sea-captains, etc.

"I fear," says he, "this would be to stir things that are not to be

stirred, and to declare war (as Simonides says), not only against length

of time, but also against many nations and families of mankind, whom a

religious reverence towards these gods holds fast bound like men

astonished and amazed, and would be no other than going about to remove so

great and venerable names from heaven to earth, and thereby shaking and

dissolving that worship and persuasion that hath entered almost all men's

constitutions from their very birth, and opening vast doors to the

atheists' faction, who convert all divine matters into human." "Others,"

he says, "consider these beings as demons intermediate between gods and

men. And Osiris afterwards became Serapis, the Pluto of the under-world."

Other explanations of the myth are given by Plutarch. First, the

geographical explanation. According to this, Osiris is Water, especially

the Nile. Isis is Earth, especially the land of Egypt adjoining the Nile,

and overflowed by it. Horus, their son, is the Air, especially the moist,

mild air of Egypt. Typhon is Fire, especially the summer heat which dries

up the Nile and parches the land. His seventy-two associates are the

seventy-two days of greatest heat, according to the Egyptian opinion.

Nepthys, his wife, sister of Isis, is the Desert outside of Egypt, but

which in a higher inundation of the Nile being sometimes overflowed,

becomes productive, and has a child by Osiris, named Anubis. When Typhon

shuts Osiris into the ark, it is the summer heat drying up the Nile and

confining it to its channel. This ark, entangled in a tree, is where the

Nile divides into many mouths at the Delta and is overhung by the wood.

Isis, nursing the child of the king, the fragrance, etc., represent the

earth nourishing plants and animals. The body of Osiris, torn by Typhon

into fourteen parts, signifies either the division of the Nile at its

mouths or the pools of water left after the drying up of the inundation.

There is so much in this account which accords with the facts, that there

can be no doubt of its correctness so far as it goes. At the same time it

is evidently an incomplete explanation. The story means this, but

something more. Beside the geographical view, Plutarch therefore adds a

scientific and an astronomical explanation, as well as others more

philosophical. According to these, Osiris is in general the productive,

the creative power in nature; Isis, the female property of nature, hence

called by Plato the nurse; and Typhon the destructive property in nature;

while Horus is the mediator between creation and destruction. And thus we

have the triad of Osiris, Typhon, and Horus, essentially corresponding to

the Hindoo triad, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, and also to the Persian triad,

Ormazd, Ahriman, and Mithra. And so this myth will express the Egyptian

view of the conflict of good and evil in the natural world.

But it seems very likely that it was the object of the priests to elevate

this Osiris worship to a still higher meaning, making it an allegory of

the struggles, sorrows, and self-recovery of the human soul. Every human

soul after death took the name and symbols of Osiris, and then went into

the under-world to be judged by him. Connected with this was the doctrine

of transmigration, or the passage of the soul through various bodies,--a

doctrine brought out of Egypt by Pythagoras. These higher doctrines were

taught in the mysteries. "I know them," says Herodotus, "but must not tell

them." Iamblicus professes to explain them in his work on the Mysteries.

But it is not easy to say how much of his own Platonism he has mingled

therewith. According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all

things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity. The One was to be

venerated in silence. Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his

self-consciousness. After this in Amun, his intellect became truth,

shedding light. Truth working by art is Pthah, and art producing good is

Osiris.

Another remarkable fact must be at least alluded to. Bunsen says, that,

according to the whole testimony of the monuments, Isis and Osiris not

only have their roots in the second order, but are also themselves the

first and the second order. Isis, Osiris, and Horus comprise all Egyptian

mythology, with the exception of Amun and Neph. Of this fact I have seen

no explanation and know of none, unless it be a sign of the purpose of the

priests to unite the two systems of spiritualism and nature-worship into

one, and to elevate and spiritualize the lower order of gods.

One reason for thinking that the religious system of the priests was a

compromise between several different original tendencies is to be found in

the local worship of special deities in various places. In Lower Egypt the

highest god was Pthah, whom the Greeks identified with Vulcan; the god of

fire or heat, father of the sun. He was in this region the chief god,

corresponding to Ammon in Upper Egypt. Manetho says that Pthah reigned

nine thousand years before the other gods,--which must mean that this was

by far the oldest worship in Egypt. As Ammon is the head of a cosmogony

which proceeds according to emanation from spirit down to matter, so Pthah

is at the beginning of a cosmogony which ascends by a process of evolution

from matter working up to spirit. For from Pthah (heat) comes light, from

light proceeds life, from life arise gods, men, plants, animals, and all

organic existence. The inscriptions call Pthah, "Father of the Father of

the Gods," "King of both Worlds," the "God of all Beginnings," the "Former

of Things." The egg is one of his symbols, as containing a germ of life.

The scarabæus, or beetle, which rolls its ball of earth, supposed to

contain its egg, is dedicated to Pthah. His sacred city was Memphis, in

Lower Egypt. His son, Ra, the Sun-God, had his temple at On, near by,

which the Greeks called Heliopolis, or City of the Sun. The cat is sacred

to Ra. As Pthah is the god of all beginnings in Lower Egypt, so Ra is the

vitalizing god, the active ruler of the world, holding a sceptre in one

hand and the sign of life in the other.

The goddesses of Lower Egypt were Neith at Sais, Leto, the goddess whose

temple was at Buto, and Pacht at Babastis. In Upper Egypt, as we have

seen, the chief deity was Amun, or Ammon, the Concealed God, and Kneph, or

Knubis. With them belonged the goddess Mut[193] (the mother) and Khonso.

The two oldest gods were Mentu, the rising sun, and Atmu, the setting sun.

We therefore find traces of the same course of religious thought in Egypt

as we shall afterward find in Greece. The earlier worship is of local

deities, who are afterwards united in a Pantheon. As Zeus was at first

worshipped in Dodona and Arcadia, Apollo in Crete and Delos, Aphroditê in

Cyprus, Athênê at Athens, and afterward these tribal and provincial

deities were united in one company as the twelve gods of Olympus, so in

Egypt the various early theologies were united in the three orders, of

which Ammon was made the head. But, in both countries, each city and

province persevered in the worship of its particular deity. As Athênê

continued to be the protector of Athens, and Aphroditê of Cyprus, so, in

Egypt, Set continued to be the god of Ombos, Leto of Buto, Horus of Edfu,

Khem of Coptos.

Before concluding this section, we must say a word of the practical

morality connected with this theology. We have seen, above, the stress

laid on works of justice and mercy. There is a papyrus in the Imperial

library at Paris, which M. Chabas considers the oldest book in the world.

It is an autograph manuscript written B.C. 2200, or four thousand years

ago, by one who calls himself the son of a king. It contains practical

philosophy like that of Solomon in his proverbs. It glorifies, like the

Proverbs, wisdom. It says that "man's heart rules the man," that "the bad

man's life is what the wise know to be death," that "what we say in secret

is known to him who made our interior nature," that "he who made us is

present with us though we are alone."

Is not the human race one, when this Egyptian four thousand years ago,

talks of life as Solomon spoke one thousand years after, in Judæa; and as

Benjamin Franklin spoke, three thousand years after Solomon, in America?

§ 7. Influence of Egypt on Judaism and Christianity.

How much of the doctrine and ritual of Egypt were imported into Judaism by

Moses is a question by no means easy to settle. Of Egyptian theology

proper, or the doctrine of the gods, we find no trace in the Pentateuch.

Instead of the three orders of deities we have Jehovah; instead of the

images and pictures of the gods, we have a rigorous prohibition of

idolatry; instead of Osiris and Isis, we have a Deity above all worlds and

behind all time, with no history, no adventures, no earthly life. But it

is perhaps more strange not to find any trace of the doctrine of a future

life in Mosaism, when this was so prominent among the Egyptians. Moses

gives no account of the judgment of souls after death; he tells nothing of

the long journey and multiform experiences of the next life according to

the Egyptians, nothing of a future resurrection and return to the body.

His severe monotheism was very different from the minute characterization

of gods in the Egyptian Pantheon. The personal character of Jehovah, with

its awful authority, its stern retribution and impartial justice, was

quite another thing from the symbolic ideal type of the gods of Egypt.

Nothing of the popular myth of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Typhon is found in

the Pentateuch, nothing of the transmigration of souls, nothing of the

worship of animals; nothing of the future life and judgment to come;

nothing of the embalming of bodies and ornamenting of tombs. The cherubim

among the Jews may resemble the Egyptian Sphinx; the priests' dress in

both are of white linen; the Urim and Thummim, symbolic jewels of the

priests, are in both; a quasi-hereditary priesthood is in each; and both

have a temple worship. But here the parallels cease. Moses left behind

Egyptian theology, and took only some hints for his ritual from the Nile.

There may perhaps be a single exception to this statement. According to

Brugsch[194] and other writers, the Papyrus buried with the mummy

contained the doctrine of the Divine unity. The name of God was not

given, but instead the words NUK PU NUK, "I am the I am," corresponding

to the name given in Exodus iii. 14, Jahveh (in a corrupt form Jehovah).

This name, Jahveh, has the same meaning with the Egyptian Nuk pu Nuk, "I

am the I am." At least so say Egyptologists. If this is so, the

coincidence is certainly very striking.

That some of the ritualism to which the Jews were accustomed in Egypt

should have been imported into their new ceremonial, is quite in

accordance with human nature. Christianity, also, has taken up many of the

customs of heathenism.[195] The rite of circumcision was probably adopted

by the Jews from the Egyptians, who received it from the natives of

Africa. Livingstone has found it among the tribes south of the Zambesi,

and thinks this custom there cannot be traced to any Mohammedan source.

Prichard believes it, in Egypt, to have been a relic of ancient African

customs. It still exists in Ethiopia and Abyssinia. In Egypt it existed

far earlier than the time of Abraham, as appears by ancient mummies.

Wilkinson affirms it to have been "as early as the fourth dynasty, and

probably earlier, long before the time of Abraham." Herodotus tells us

that the custom existed from the earliest times among the Egyptians and

Ethiopians, and was adopted from them by the Syrians of Palestine. Those

who regard this rite as instituted by a Divine command may still believe

that it already existed among the Jews, just as baptism existed among them

before Jesus commanded his disciples to baptize. Both in Egypt and among

the Jews it was connected with a feeling of superiority. The circumcised

were distinguished from others by a higher religious position. It is

difficult to trace the origin of sentiments so alien to our own ways of

thought; but the hygienic explanation seems hardly adequate. It may have

been a sign of the devotion of the generative power to the service of God,

and have been the first step out of the untamed license of the passions,

among the Africans.

It has been supposed that the figure of the Cherubim among the Jews was

derived from that of the Sphinx. There were three kinds of Sphinxes in

Egypt,--the _andro-sphinx_, with the head of a man and the body of a lion;

the _crio-sphinx_, with the head of a ram and the body of a lion; and the

_hieraco-sphinx_, with the head of a hawk and a lion's body. The first was

a symbol of the union of wisdom and strength. The Sphinx was the solemn

sentinel, placed to watch the temple and the tomb, as the Cherubim watched

the gates of Paradise after the expulsion of Adam. In the Cherubim were

joined portions of the figure of a man with those of the lion, the ox, and

the eagle. In the Temple the Cherubim spread their wings above the ark;

and Wilkinson gives a picture from the Egyptian tombs of two kneeling

figures with wings spread above the scarabæus. The Persians and the Greeks

had similar symbolic figures, meant to represent the various powers of

these separate creatures combined in one being; but the Hebrew figure was

probably imported from Egypt.

The Egyptians had in their temples a special interior sanctuary, more holy

than the rest. So the Jews had their Holy of Holies, into which only the

high-priest went, separated by a veil from the other parts of the Temple.

The Jews were commanded on the Day of Atonement to provide a scapegoat, to

carry away the sins of the people, and the high-priest was to lay his

hands on the head of the goat and confess the national sins, "putting them

upon the head of the goat" (Lev. xvi. 21, 22), and it was said that "the

goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited."

So, among the Egyptians, whenever a victim was offered, a prayer was

repeated over its head, "that if any calamity were about to befall either

the sacrifices or the land of Egypt, it might be averted on this

head."[196]

Such facts as these make it highly probable that Moses allowed in his

ritual many ceremonies borrowed from the Egyptian worship.

That Egyptian Christianity had a great influence on the development of the

system of Christian doctrine is not improbable.[197] The religion of

ancient Egypt was very tenacious and not easily effaced. Successive waves

of Syrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman conquest rolled over the land,

scarcely producing any change in her religion or worship. Christianity

conquered Egypt, but was itself deeply tinged with the faith of the

conquered. Many customs found in Christendom may be traced back to Egypt.

The Egyptian at his marriage put a gold ring on his wife's finger, as a

token that he intrusted her with all his property, just as in the Church

of England service the bridegroom does the same, saying, "With all my

worldly goods I thee endow." Clemens tells us that this custom was derived

by the Christians from the Egyptians. The priests at Philæ threw a piece

of gold into the Nile once a year, as the Venetian Doge did into the

Adriatic. The Feast of Candles at Sais is still marked in the Christian

calendar as Candlemas Day. The Catholic priest shaves his head as the

Egyptian priest did before him. The Episcopal minister's linen surplice

for reading the Liturgy is taken from the dress of obligation, made of

linen, worn by the priest in Egypt. Two thousand years before the Pope

assumed to hold the keys, there was an Egyptian priest at Thebes with the

title of "Keeper of the two doors of Heaven."[198]

In the space which we have here at command we are unable to examine the

question of doctrinal influences from Egypt upon orthodox Christianity.

Four doctrines, however, are stated by the learned Egyptologist, Samuel

Sharpe, to be common to Egyptian mythology and church orthodoxy. They are

these:--

1. That the creation and government of the world is not the work of one

simple and undivided Being, but of one God made up of several persons.

This is the doctrine of plural unity.

2. That salvation cannot be expected from the justice or mercy of the

Supreme Judge, unless an atoning sacrifice is made to him by a divine

being.

3. That among the persons who compose the godhead, one, though a god,

could yet suffer pain and be put to death.

4. That a god or man, or a being half god and half a man once lived on

earth, born of an earthly mother but without an earthly father.

The gods of Egypt generally appear in triads, and sometimes as three gods

in one. The triad of Thebes was Amun-Ra, Athor, and Chonso,--or father,

mother, and son. In Nubia it was Pthah, Amun-Ra, and Horus-Ra. At Philæ it

was Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Other groups were Isis, Nephthys, and Horus;

Isis, Nephthys, and Osiris; Osiris, Athor, and Ra. In later times Horus

became the supreme being, and appears united with Ra and Osiris in one

figure, holding the two sceptres of Osiris, and having the hawk's head of

Horus and the sun of Ra. Eusebius says of this god that he declared

himself to be Apollo, Lord, and Bacchus. A porcelain idol worn as a charm

combines Pthah the Supreme God of Nature, with Horus the Son-God, and

Kneph the Spirit-God. The body is that of Pthah, God of Nature, with the

hawk's wings of Horus, and the ram's head of Kneph. It is curious that

Isis the mother, with Horus the child in her arms, as the merciful gods

who would save their worshippers from the vengeance of Osiris the stern

judge, became as popular a worship in Egypt in the time of Augustus, as

that of the Virgin and Child is in Italy to-day. Juvenal says that the

painters of Rome almost lived by painting the goddess Isis, the Madonna of

Egypt, which had been imported into Italy, and which was very popular

there.

In the trial of the soul before Osiris, as represented on tablets and

papyri, are seen the images of gods interceding as mediators and offering

sacrifices on its behalf. There are four of these mediatorial gods, and

there is a tablet in the British Museum in which the deceased is shown as

placing the gods themselves on the altar as his sin-offering, and pleading

their merits.[199]

The death of Osiris, the supreme god of all Egypt, was a central fact in

this mythology. He was killed by Typhon, the Egyptian Satan, and after

the fragments of his body had been collected by "the sad Isis," he

returned to life as king of the dead and their judge.[200]

In connection with these facts it is deserving of notice that the doctrine

of the trinity and that of the atonement began to take shape in the hands

of the Christian theologians of Egypt. The Trinity and its symbols were

already familiar to the Egyptian mind. Plutarch says that the Egyptians

worshipped Osiris, Isis, and Horus under the form of a triangle. He adds

that they considered everything perfect to have three parts, and that

therefore their good god made himself threefold, while their god of evil

remained single. Egypt, which had exercised so powerful an influence on

the old religion of Rome, was destined also greatly to influence

Christianity. Alexandria was the head-quarters of learning and profound

religious speculations in the first centuries. Clemens, Origen, Dionysius,

Athanasius, were eminent teachers in that school. Its doctrines were[201]

that God had revealed himself to all nations by his Logos, or Word.

Christianity is its highest revelation. The common Christian lives by

faith, but the more advanced believer has gnosis, or philosophic insight

of Christianity as the eternal law of the soul. This doctrine soon

substituted speculation in place of the simplicity of early Christianity.

The influence of Alexandrian thought was increased by the high culture

which prevailed there, and by the book-trade of this Egyptian city. All

the oldest manuscripts of the Bible now extant were transcribed by

Alexandrian penmen. The oldest versions were made in Alexandria. Finally

the intense fervor of the Egyptian mind exercised its natural influence on

Christianity, as it did on Judaism and Heathenism. The Oriental

speculative element of Egyptian life was reinforced by the African fire;

and in Christianity, as before in the old religion, we find both working

together. By the side of the Alexandrian speculations on the nature of God

and the Trinity appear the maniacal devotion of the monks of the Thebaid.

The ardor of belief which had overcome even the tenacity of Judaism, and

modified it into its two Egyptian forms of the speculations of Philo and

the monastic devotion of the Therapeutæ, reappeared in a like action upon

Christian belief and Christian practice. How large a part of our present

Christianity is due to these two influences we may not be able to say. But

palpable traces of Egyptian speculation appear in the Church doctrines of

the Trinity and atonement, and the material resurrection[202] of the same

particles which constitute the earthly body. And an equally evident

influence from Egyptian asceticism is found in the long history of

Christian monasticism, no trace of which appears in the New Testament, and

no authority for which can be found in any teaching or example of Christ.

The mystical theology and mystical devotion of Egypt are yet at work in

the Christian Church. But beside the _doctrines_ directly derived from

Egypt, there has probably come into Christianity another and more

important element from this source. The _spirit_ of a race, a nation, a

civilization, a religion is more indestructible than its forms, more

pervasive than its opinions, and will exercise an interior influence long

after its outward forms have disappeared. The spirit of the Egyptian

religion was reverence for the divine mystery of organic life, the worship

of God in creation, of unity in variety, of each in all. Through the

Christian Church in Egypt, the schools of Alexandria, the monks of the

Thebaid, these elements filtered into the mind of Christendom. They gave a

materialistic tone to the conceptions of the early Church, concerning God,

Satan, the angels and devils, Heaven, Hell, the judgment, and the

resurrection. They prevented thereby the triumph of a misty Oriental

spiritualism. Too gross indeed in themselves, they yet were better than

the Donatism which would have turned every spiritual fact into a ghost or

a shadow. The African spirit, in the fiery words of a Tertullian and an

Augustine, ran into a materialism, which, opposed to the opposite extreme

of idealism, saved to the Church its healthy realism.

The elaborate work of Bunsen on "Egypt's Place in Universal History" does

not aid us much in finding the place of Egyptian religion in universal

religion. It was strictly an ethnic religion, never dreaming of extending

itself beyond the borders of the Nile, until long after the conquest of

Egypt by the Romans. Then, indeed, Egyptian temples were welcomed by the

large hospitality of Rome, and any traveller may see the ruins of the

temple of Serapis[203] at Pozzuoli, and that of Isis at Pompeii. The gods

of Greece, as we have seen, took some hints from Egypt, but the Greek

Olympus, with its bright forms, was very different from the mysterious

sombre worship of Egypt.

The worship of variety, the recognition of the Divine in nature, the

sentiment of wonder before the mystery of the world, the feeling that the

Deity is in all life, in all form, in all change as well as in what is

permanent and stable,--this is the best element and the most original part

of the Egyptian religion. So much we can learn from it positively; and

negatively, by its entire dissolution, its passing away forever, leaving

no knowledge of itself behind, we can learn how empty is any system of

faith which is based on concealment and mystery. All the vast range of

Egyptian wisdom has gone, and disappeared from the surface of the earth,

for it was only a religion of the priests, who kept the truth to

themselves and did not venture to communicate it to the people. It was

only priestcraft, and priestcraft, like all other craft, carries in itself

the principle of death. Only truth is immortal,--open, frank, manly truth.

Confucius was true; he did not know much, but he told all he knew. Buddha

told all he knew. Moses told all he heard. So they and their works

continue, being built on faith in men. But the vast fabric of Egyptian

wisdom,--its deep theologies, its mysterious symbolism, its majestic art,

its wonderful science,--remain only as its mummies remain and as its tombs

remain, an enigma exciting and baffling our curiosity, but not adding to

our real life.