Part 10 (2/2)

We need not wonder that under the influence of such teaching the intellectual cla.s.ses fell more and more into a hopeless scepticism, which saw in death the loss of all that we most prize here below. On the one side, we have sceptical treatises like the dialogue between the jackal and the Ethiopian cat, where the cat, who represents the old-fas.h.i.+oned orthodoxy, has by far the worst of the argument;(162) on the other side, the dirge on the death of the wife of the high priest of Memphis, which I have quoted in an earlier lecture-

”The underworld is a land of thick darkness, A sorrowful place for the dead.

They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken.”

It was better, indeed, that it should be so than that they should awaken only to lead the existence which the Book of Am Duat describes.

How far the doctrines of the solar theology extended beyond the narrow circle in which they originated, it is difficult to say. In the nature of the case they could not become popular, as they started from an a.s.sumption of esoteric knowledge. We know that the majority of the Egyptians continued to hold to the Osirian creed up to the last days of paganism-or at all events they professed to do so-and as long as the Osirian creed was retained the moral element in religion was recognised. In one respect, however, the solar theology triumphed. The G.o.ds of Egypt, including Osiris himself, were identified with the sun-G.o.d, and became forms or manifestations of Ra. Egyptian religion became pantheistic; the divinity was discovered everywhere, and the shadowy and impersonal forms of the ancient deities were mingled together in hopeless confusion. It seemed hardly to matter which was invoked, for each was all and all were each.

Gnosticism was the natural daughter of the solar theology. The doctrine that knowledge is salvation and that the G.o.ds of the popular cult are manifestations of the sun-G.o.d, was applied to explain the origin of evil.

Evil became the result of imperfection and ignorance, necessarily inherent in matter, and arising from the fact that the creation is due to the last of a long series of aeons or emanations from the supreme G.o.d. The aeons are the legitimate descendants of the manifold deities whom the Egyptian priests had resolved into forms of Ra, while the identification of evil with the necessary imperfection of matter deprives it of a moral element, and finds a remedy for it in the _gnosis_ or ”knowledge” of the real nature of things. Even the strange monsters and symbolic figures which play so large a part in the solar revelation are reproduced in Gnosticism.

Abraxas and the other curiously composite creatures engraved on Gnostic gems have all sprung from the Books of Am Duat and the Gates, along with the allegorical meanings that were read into them. However much the solar school of theology may have been for the old religion of Egypt a teaching of death, in the Gnosticism of the first Christian centuries it was born anew.

Lecture IX. The Popular Religion Of Egypt.

Thus far I have dealt with the official religion of ancient Egypt, with the religion of the priests and princes, the scribes and educated cla.s.ses.

This is naturally the religion of which we know most. The monuments that have come down to us are for the most part literary and architectural, and enshrine the ideas and beliefs of the cultivated part of the community.

The papyri were written for those who could read and write, the temples were erected at the expense of the State, and the texts and figures with which they were adorned were engraved or painted on their walls under priestly direction. The sculptured and decorated tomb, the painted mummy-case, the costly sarcophagus, the roll of papyrus that was buried with the dead, were all alike the privilege of the wealthy and the educated. The grave that contained the body of the poor contained little else than the coa.r.s.e cere-cloths in which it was wrapped. Our knowledge, therefore, of the religion of the people, of the popular religion as distinguished from the religion of official orthodoxy, is, and must be, imperfect. We have to gather it from the traces it has left in the religion of the State, from stray references to it in literature, from a few rare monuments which have come down to us, from its survivals in the modern folk-lore and superst.i.tions of Egypt, or from its influence on the decaying faith of the cla.s.sical age.

There was, however, a popular religion by the side of the official religion, just as there is in all countries which possess an organised faith. And if it is difficult to understand fully the religion of the uneducated cla.s.ses in Western Europe to-day, or to realise their point of view, it must be much more difficult to do so in the case of ancient Egypt. Here our materials are scanty, and the very fact that we know as much as we do about the religion of the upper cla.s.s makes it additionally harder to estimate them aright.

A considerable portion of the fellahin were descended from the earlier neolithic population of Egypt, whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found already settled in the country. In a former lecture I have endeavoured to show that they were fetish-wors.h.i.+ppers, and that among their fetishes animals were especially prominent. They had no priests, for fetis.h.i.+sm is incompatible with a priesthood in the proper sense of the term. Neither did they embalm their dead; all those beliefs and ideas, therefore, which were connected with a priesthood and the practice of embalming must have come to them from without; the G.o.ds and sacerdotal colleges of the State religion, the Osirian creed, and the belief in the resurrection, must have been for them of foreign origin. And of foreign origin they doubtless remained to the bulk of the nation down to the last days of paganism.

Amon and Ra and Osiris were indeed familiar names, the temple festivals were duly observed, and the processions in honour of the State G.o.ds duly attended; and after the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the fusion between the different elements in the population was completed, the practice of mummification became general; but the names of the State G.o.ds were names only, to which the peasant attached a very different meaning from that which official orthodoxy demanded. He still wors.h.i.+pped the tree whose shady branches arose on the edge of the desert or at the corner of his field, or brought his offerings to some animal, in which he saw not a symbol or an incarnation of Horus and Sekhet, but an actual hawk and cat.

How deeply rooted this belief in the divinity of animals was in the minds of the people, is shown by the fact that the State religion had to recognise it just as Mohammed had perforce to recognise the sanct.i.ty of the ”Black Stone” of the Kaaba. As we have seen, the second king of the Second Thinite Dynasty is said to have legalised the wors.h.i.+p of the bull Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the ram of Mendes; and though the official explanation was that these animals were but incarnations of Pta? and Ra to whom the wors.h.i.+p was really addressed, it was an explanation about which the people neither knew nor cared. The divine honours they paid to the bulls and ram were paid to the animals themselves, and not to the G.o.ds of the priestly cult.

Here and there a few evidences have been preserved to us that such was the fact. In the tomb of Ra-zeser-ka-seneb, for instance, at Thebes, the artist has introduced a picture of a peasant making his morning prayer to a sycamore which stands at the end of a corn-field, while offerings of fruit and bread and water are placed on the ground beside it.(163) The official religion endeavoured to legalise this old tree wors.h.i.+p much in the same way as Christianity endeavoured to legalise the old wors.h.i.+p of springs, by attaching the tree to the service of a G.o.d, and seeing in it one of the forms in which the deity manifested himself. Thus ”the sycamore of the south” became the body of Hathor, whose head was depicted appearing from its branches, while opposite Siut it was Hor-pes who took the G.o.ddess's place.(164) Like other beliefs and practices which go back to the neolithic population of Egypt, the ancient tree wors.h.i.+p is not yet extinct. On either side of the Nile sacred trees are to be found, under which the offering of bread and water is still set, though the G.o.d of the official cult of Pharaonic Egypt, to whom the wors.h.i.+p was nominally paid, has been succeeded by a Mohammedan saint. By the side of the tree often rises the white dome of the tomb of a ”shekh,” to whom the place is dedicated, reminding us of a picture copied by Wilkinson in a sepulchre at Hu, in which a small chapel, representing the tomb of Osiris, stands by the side of a tree on whose branches is perched the _bennu_ or phnix.(165) The most famous of these trees, however, that of Matariya, is an object of veneration to the Christian rather than to the Mohammedan.

The Holy Family, it is said, once rested under its branches during their flight into Egypt; in reality it represents a sycamore in which the soul of Ra of Heliopolis must have been believed to dwell.

Professor Maspero has drawn attention to certain stelae in the museum of Turin, which show how, even in the lower middle cla.s.s, it was the animal itself and not the official G.o.d incarnated in it that was the object of wors.h.i.+p. On one of them, which belongs to the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, huge figures of a swallow and a cat are painted, with a table of offerings standing before them, as well as two kneeling scribes, while the accompanying inscriptions tell us that it was to ”the good” swallow and the ”good” cat, and not to any of the State G.o.ds who may have hidden themselves under these animal forms, that flowers were being offered and prayers made. On another stela we find two pet cats, who are sitting on a shrine and facing one another, and whom their mistresses-two of the women who wailed at funerals-adore in precisely the same language as that which was used of Osiris or Amon.(166) In the quarries north of Qurna is a similar representation of a cow and a cobra, which stand face to face with a table of offerings between them, while a wors.h.i.+pper kneels at the side, and a half-obliterated inscription contains the usual formulae of adoration.(167) Still more curious is a stela, now in the museum of Cairo, on which an ox is represented inside a shrine, while underneath it is a Greek inscription declaring that the ”Kretan” who had dedicated the monument could interpret dreams, thanks to the commandment of ”the G.o.d.”

The G.o.d, it will be noticed, is not Apis, but an ordinary ox.

But of all the animals who thus continued to be the real G.o.ds of the people in spite of priestly teaching and State endowments, none were so numerous or were so universally feared and venerated as the snakes. The serpent was adored where Amon was but a name, and where Ra was looked upon as belonging, like fine horses and clothes, to the rich and the mighty.

The prominence of the serpent in Egyptian mythology and symbolism indicates how plentiful and dangerous it must have been in the early days of Egypt, and what a lasting impression it made upon the native mind. When the banks of the Nile were an uninhabitable mora.s.s, and the neolithic tribes built their huts in the desert, the snake must indeed have been a formidable danger. The most deadly still frequent the desert; it is only in the cultivated land that they are comparatively rare. In Egypt, as elsewhere, the cultivation of the soil and the habits of civilised life have diminished their number, and driven them into the solitudes of the wilderness. But when the Pharaonic Egyptians first arrived in the valley of the Nile, when the swamps were being drained, the jungle cleared away, and the land sown with the wheat of Babylonia, the serpent was still one of the perils of daily life. A folk-tale which has been appropriated and spoilt by the priestly compilers of the legend of Ra, tells how the sun-G.o.d was bitten by a venomous snake which lay in his path, and how the poison ran through his veins like fire. The symbol of royalty adopted by the earliest Pharaohs was the cobra; it symbolised the irresistible might and deadly power of the conquering chieftain which, like the dreaded cobra of the desert, overcame the inhabitants of the country, and compelled them to regard him with the same awe and terror as the serpent itself.

Down to the last the embalmers and gravediggers and others who had to attend to the funeral arrangements of the dead, and consequently lived in the neighbourhood of the necropolis, were more exposed to the chances of snake-bite than the inhabitants of the cultivated land. The necropolis was invariably in the desert, and the nature of their occupation obliged them to excavate the sand or visit the dark chambers of the dead where the snake glided unseen. It is not surprising, therefore, that the veneration of the snake was especially strong among the population of the cemeteries.

Those who inhabited the necropolis of Thebes have left us prayers and dedications to the G.o.ddess Mert-seger, who is represented as a cobra or some equally deadly serpent, though at times she is decently veiled under the name of an official deity. Once her place is taken by two snakes, at another time by a dozen of them. She was, in fact, the tutelary G.o.ddess of the necropolis, and hence received the t.i.tle of ”the Western Crest”-that is to say, the crest of the western hills, where the earliest tombs of Thebes were situated. Professor Maspero has translated an interesting inscription made in her honour by one of the workmen employed in the cemetery. ”Adoration to the Western Crest,” it begins, ”prostrations before her double! I make my adoration, listen! Ever since I walked on the earth and was an attendant in the Place of Truth (the cemetery), a man, ignorant and foolish, who knew not good from evil, I committed many sins against the G.o.ddess of the Crest, and she punished me. I was under her hand night and day; while I cowered on the bed like a woman with child, I cried for breath, and no breath came to me, for I was pursued by the Western Crest, the mightiest of all the G.o.ds, the G.o.ddess of the place; and behold I will declare to all, great and small, among the workmen of the necropolis: Beware of the Crest, for there is a lion in her, and she strikes like a lion that bewitches, and she is on the track of all who sin against her! So I cried to my mistress, and she came to me as a soft breeze, she united herself with me, causing me to feel her hand; she returned to me in peace, and made me forget my troubles by giving me breath. For the Western Crest is appeased when the cry is made to her;-so says Nefer-ab, the justified. He says: Behold, hear, all ears who live on earth, beware of the Western Crest!”(168)

It is clear that Nefer-ab suffered from asthma, that he believed it had been inflicted upon him by the local G.o.ddess for some sin he had committed against her, and that he further believed his penitence and cry for help to have induced her to come to him and cure him. And this G.o.ddess was a snake. Here, in the necropolis of Thebes, therefore, the snake played the same part as a healer that it did in the wors.h.i.+p of Asklepios. It will be remembered that the first temple raised to aesculapius at Rome was built after a plague, from which the city was supposed to have been delivered by a serpent hidden in the marshes of the Tiber. The serpent that destroys also heals; by the side of Kakodaemon there is also the good snake Agathodaemon.

Mert-seger, the serpent of the necropolis, did not wholly escape the patronage of the State religion. Like the local cults of aboriginal India over which Bra?manism has thrown its mantle, the cult of Mert-seger was not left wholly unnoticed by the organised religion of the State. A chapel was erected to her in the orthodox form, and it is from this chapel that most of the stelae have come which have revealed the existence of the old wors.h.i.+p. In some of them Mert-seger is identified with Mut, or even with Isis; but such an identification was never accepted or understood by her illiterate wors.h.i.+ppers. For them she continued to be what she had been to their forefathers, simply a serpent and nothing more. The old faith has survived centuries of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a modified form.

Professor Maspero discovered that the local Mohammedan saint, whose tomb is not far from the ancient chapel of Mert-seger, is still believed to work miracles of healing. He has taken the place of the serpent G.o.ddess; that is all.(169)

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