Volume I Part 7 (2/2)
[Illustration: FIG 33--Amenhotep or Amenophis III presented by Phre to Amen-Ra; Thebes (Champollion, pl 344)]
If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most learned and refined forhteenth and nineteenth dynasties--we shall dimly perceive that it implies a belief in the unity of the First Cause of all life But this belief is obscured behind the numerous Gods who are, in fact, emanations froable activity It is in the person of these Gods that the divine essence takes forure, and his own special share in the ement of the universe; each of them presides over the production of soularity These Gods are related to each other as fathers, s, superior toto his rank in the series There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are nearest to the ”one God in heaven or earth as not begotten”
These deities are divided into groups of three, each group constituting a fa of father, mother, and son Thus fron powers to all eternity, or, to use an expression dear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, ”he creates his own members, which are themselves Gods”[70]
[70] This formula frequently occurs in the texts To cite but one occasion, we find upon a Theban invocation to Amen, translated by P PIERRET (_Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a l'Archeologie egyptienne et assyrienne_, t i
p 70), at the third line of the inscription: ”Sculptor, thouthyself been begotten”
How should the science of coion class this form of faith? Should it be called polytheisreat importance, and this is hardly the place for its discussion It is certain that, practically, the Egyptians were polytheists The Egyptian priests, indeed, had, by dint of long reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of life--that inexhaustible strea waves was the concrete i journey across time and space But the devotion of the people the above the minor divinities, above those intermediaries in whom the divine principle and attributes becaibility of body necessary to s So, too, was it with artists, and for still more powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the ideas which they had conceived Even in those religions which are most clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity, art has done so of the same kind Aided in secret by one of the most powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite of all resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to those parts of our belief which seem least fitted for such treatment; and it has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us that we see nothing unnatural in the representation under the features of an old man, of the first Person of the Trinity,--of that Jehovah who, in the Old Testaour; who, in the Evangel, described Hiypt, both sculptors and painters couldinto collision with dogrets or censures of its most severe interpreters Doctrine did not condemn these personifications, even when it had been refined and elaborated by the speculative theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis
In the interior of the temples, there was a s ”the 'One' who exists by his own essential power, the only being who substantially exists” Even then men tried, as they have often done since, to define the undefinable, to grasp the incoh the shi+fting and transparent veil of natural phenomena But those refined metaphysics never touched and influenced the crowd, and never will The deity, in order to be perceived by thes, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be admissible, be cut up into morsels for them
By a process of ”abstraction” which is as old as religion itself, the huence is led to consider separately each of the qualities of existence, each of the forces which it perceives to be at work either within man himself or in the exterior world At first it thinks those forces and qualities are distributed impartially to all creation It confounds existence with life Hence the reign of _fetishi+sht, passion, and volition like his own, are to be found in everything he e see facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real condition of things outside it
Certain celestial and terrestrial bodiesimpression upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or beneficial effects upon hiratitude, admiration, or terror Driven by the illusion which possesses hiin of those qualities which seehest and most important, in the bodies which have made so deep an impression upon his senses; to them he attributes the friendly or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire and his fear According to circuht be a ht be those heavenly bodies which exercised much more influence over the life of priht be the ht and diht be the cloud, froht be the sun which returned every ht and warm the world
Differences of cli effect, but everywhere one common characteristic is to be found It was always to some material and visible object that the human intellect referred those forces and qualities which it drew from its own consciousness; forces which, when thus united with soible, constituted the first types of those divine beings whoes in their hope and fear
As the years passed away, man advanced beyond his primitive conceptions He did not entirely renounce them--we may indeed see reminiscences of them all around us--but he superimposed others upon them which were h they were, began to insinuate into his mind a disbelief in the activity of inanimate matter, and those objects which were nearest to him, which he could touch with his hand, were the first victi course of intellectual developes of its progress are difficult to follow at this distance of time It appears certain, however, that star worshi+p formed the transition between _fetishi+ser attributed vital forces and pre-eenerally to bodies hich they themselves were in immediate contact, to stones and trees; but they found no difficulty in continuing to assign thereat luminaries whose distance and beauty placed theradually deprived inaniifted it, they sought for new objects to which they ht attach those properties
These they found in the stars which shone in the fire nor death; and especially in the most brilliant, the most beneficent, and thethey awaited everywith an impatience which must once have been mixed with a certain aence had taken away from the inani in space
They becarouped in reat luminary of day, and a bond of union was found for the differentthe sun with a personality modelled upon that of man This operation was favoured by the constitution of contees and metaphors which, by their frank audacity, surprise and charm us in the works of the early poets It coht, whenlife which he felt in his own veins No effort of intelligence was required for its com hero advancing, full of pride and vigour, upon the path prepared for him by Aurora; a hero who pursued his daily path in spite of all obstacle or hindrance, hen evening calories of an eastern sunset, and amid the confidence of all that after his hours of sleep he would take up his eternal task with renewed vigour He was an invincible warrior He was solance killed and devoured He was above all the untiring benefactor of mankind, the nurse and father of all life Whether as Indra or as Aypt and Hindostan; the prayers which we find in the Vedas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and were addressed to the same God[71]
[71] See the fine hymns quoted and translated by M Maspero in his _Histoire ancienne_, pp 30-37
This solar God and the divinities who resemble him, form the transition from the simple fetish to complete deities, to those Gods who played such an iion, and attained to their highest and y In solobe of the sun with its coory as the material objects which received the first worshi+p of humanity But its brilliance, its tranquil and majestic movement, and the distance which conceals its real substance froination to endoith the purest and noblest characteristics which the finest examples of humanity could shohile the phenomena which depend upon its action are so nu to it qualities and energies of the most various kinds
This type when once established was used for the creation of other deities, which were all, so to speak, cast in the same mould As the intellect became more capable of abstraction and analysis, the personality and radually threw off its astral or physical characteristics, although it never lost all trace of their existence It resulted that, both in Egypt and in Greece, there were deities ere mere entities, the simple embodiment of some power, some quality, or some virtue It requires all the subtle _finesse_ of uish the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the naturalistic beliefs of earlier ages Sometimes absolute certainty is not to be attained, but we may safely say that a race is polytheistic e find these abstract deities a their Gods, such deities as the Ptah, Ayptians, and the Apollo and Athene of the Greeks[72]
[72] Several of the bronzes which we reproduceto the Ptolemaic epoch; but they are repetitions of types and attributes which had been fixed for many centuries by tradition
It is in this capacity chiefly that we reproduce theyptian iination to offer the most satisfactory emblems of their Gods
[Illustration: FIG 34--Aht 2204 inches]
We hest attributes of life between a liive these agents life without at the sa them with essential natural characteristics and with the huard theer, more beautiful and less ephemeral than man The system had said its last word and was co in some divine personality each of those forces whose couarantees its duration
When religious evolution follows its noroes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries It refers, by efforts of conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of causes, which it calls Gods It next perceives that these causes, or Gods, are of unequal importance, and so it constitutes theins to comprehend that , that they forle law Thus by reduction and siic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize and proclaim the unity of all cause And thus monotheism succeeds to polytheism
[Illustration: FIG 35--Ptah, froious speculation arrived on the threshold of this doctrine Its depths were diht by the select class of priests ere the philosophers of those days; but the monotheistic conception never penetrated into the reat mass of the people[73] Moreover, by the very y described it, it was easily adapted to the national polytheism, or even to fetish worshi+p The theory of e The different Gods were but the different qualities of the eternal substance, the various manifestations of one creative force These qualities and energies were revealed by being imported into the world of form They took finite shape and were made comprehensible to the intellect of eneration It was necessary, if the existence of the Gods were to be brought home to mankind, that each of theination therefore did well in couish and define the Gods; artists were piously occupied when they pursued the sahly sketched, and by the established definition which they gave to each divine figure, we ht almost say that they created the Gods
[73] In his work entitled _Des deux Yeux du Disque solaire_, M
GReBAUT seems to have very clearly indicated how far we are justified in saying that Egyptian religious speculation at times approached monotheism (_Recueil de Travaux, etc_, t i p