Volume I Part 8 (1/2)
120)
[Illustration: FIG 36--Osiris, froht 228 inches]
Their task was, in one sense, more difficult than that of the Greek artists When newly born Greek art first began to make representations of Greek deities, the work of intellectual analysis and abstraction had already coypt The divinities were fewer in number and consequently more fixed and decided in their individual characteristics The Egyptian polytheised with fetishi+sm than that of Greece Even in those centuries in which the ideas of the Egyptian people were es, which are always found in the developious life, co-existed in the mind of the nation A fewto for, the priest, and theAmen and Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, Mouth, Osiris and Horus, Sekhet, Isis, Nephtis and many other divinities; allover special phenomena As for the lower orders of the people, they knew the nareat public honours which were paid to thee and their faith were more heartily rendered to such concrete and visible Gods as the sacred anioat of Mendes, the ibis, the hawk, &c None of the peculiarities of Egyptian civilization struck Greek travellers with more amazement than this semiworshi+p of animals[74]
[74] HERODOTUS, ii 75-86
[Illustration: FIG 37--The Goddess Bast (Froy has succeeded in giving more or less subtle and specious explanations of these forned, as syreater deities As for ourselves we have no doubt that these objects of popular devotion were noprehistoric centuries, while the Egyptian race was occupied init into cultivation, iination deified these animals, some for the services which they rendered, others for the terror which they inspired; and it was the saetables
We find traces of this pheno the other races of antiquity, but it is nowhere else sofor three centuries subject to the influence and supreenius, had lost all but the shadow of its fory and intellectual activity which remained to it was concentrated at the Greco-Syrian rather than Egyptian Alexandria, the ancient religion of the race lost all its highest branches[75] The aspirations towards monotheism took a form that was either philosophical and Platonic or Christian; and as for the cultivated spirits ished to continue the personification of the eternal forces of the world and of the lahich govern them, these laws and forces presented theured and described by the sculptors, painters, and writers of Greece They accepted, without hesitation or dispute, the numbers and physical characteristics of the divine types of Greece From end to end of the habitable earth, as the Greeks boasted, the Gods of the hellenic pantheon absorbed and assimilated all those of other nationalities; within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least, its polytheision for civilized huin and language The lower classes alone, who read neither Homer nor Hesiod and were unable to admire the statues of the Greek sculptors, were kept free fro influence of poetry and art
They guarded with obstinacy the ancient foundations of their early faith, and in the void left by the disappearance of the national Gods, their primitive beliefs seem to have put on a new life and to have enjoyed a restored _prestige_ Thus we orous stureat trees which have been felled send out fresh shoots to renew their youth
[75] We do not ion were then altogether lost In Roypt the fetish superstitions were no doubt predoical erudition which it had accuy In an inscription cut in the time of Philip the Arab, we find an antique hylyphs upon the wall of a teyptian books which have come down to us, in a form which betrays the last two centuries of the Eyptian Serapeum by the side of its Greek one Monuyptian in every particular Gnosticisypt, which was predestined to accept it by the whole of its past Certain doctrines of Plotinus are thus best explained More than one purely Egyptian notion may be found interpreted in the works of Alexandrian philosophers and in the phraseology of Greek philosophy The principal sanctuaries did not allow their rites and cere but a heap of ruins, a dead city visited for its relics of the past, the worshi+p of Vulcan, that is of Ptah, at Memphis, was carried on up to the establishment of Christianity That of Isis, at Philae, lasted until the tiotiated a treaty with the Blemmyes, those people of Nubia ere at one tiuaranteed to them the free use of that temple
It was not converted into a church until after the destruction of the Bles of Ethiopia
The old religion and theology of the Egyptians did not expire in a single day It was no more killed by the Roh its rites did not cease, and some of its elaborate doctrines still continued to be transmitted, its vitality had come to an end It exercised so melted down and re-modelled in the crucible of Greek philosophy A little _coterie_ of thinkers set thereat mass of the people returned to simple practices which had been sanctified by thousands of years, and forion
This persistence, this apparent recrudescence of fetishi+sypt alone It a the early centuries of Christianity They mocked at a people who ”hardly dared to bite a leek or an onion; who adored divinities which grew in their own gardens,”[76] and a God which was nothing but a ”beast ing on a purple carpet”[77] Guided by a e of the past, we are now better able to understand the origin of these beliefs and the secret of their long duration We are enabled to account for thements of infancy, in the race as well as in the individual; we see that they are the exaggeration of a natural sentiment, which becomes honourable and worthy of our sympathy when it is addressed to the useful and laborious helpers of man, to doht ox
[76] Porruentes, quibus haec nascuntur in hortis Numina!--JUVENAL, xv 9-11
[77] CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS, quoted by Maspero, _Histoire ancienne_, p 46
It would be interesting to knohy these beliefs were so curiously tenacious of life in Egypt; perhaps the reason is to be found in the prodigious antiquity of Egyptian civilization That civilization was the oldest which the world has seen, the least remote from the day of man's first appearance upon the earth It may therefore be supposed to have received more deeply, and maintained more obstinately, those impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of mankind Add to this, that other races in their efforts to ee from barbarism, were aided and incited by the example of races which had preceded them on the same road The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, on the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries; they had to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the accomplishment of their e that they should have reer than their successors in that fetish worshi+p which we have asserted to be the first stage of religious development[78]
[78] This was perceived by the President de Brosses, a _savant_ with few advantages but a bold and inquiring spirit, to whoe is indebted for the use of the terious conception We can still read with interest the book which he published anonymously in 1760, under the title: _Du Culte des Dieux fetiches; ou, Parallele de l'Ancienne Religion de l'egypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie_ (12ion has been resuyptologist, Herr Pietschmann, in an essay which appeared in 1878 in the _Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie_, which is published in Berlin under the direction of M Virchow It is called _Der aegyptische Fetischdienst und Gotterglaube--Prolegoreat many judicious observations and curious facts are to be found in it; the realistic and yptian conceptions are very well grasped; it is perhaps to be regretted that the author has not endeavoured to ives this name of _fetichiss of the yptian religion, we shall find treated, in the excellent _Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, by Tiele, which M Maurice Vernes has just translated from the Dutch (1 vol 12mo, Ernest Leroux, 1880), views much the same as those which we have just described The author denoious state which we call fetishi+sm _animism_, but he points out the fact that this class of conceptions had a perennial influence over the Egyptian ion,” he says, ”like the Chinese, was nothing to begin with but an organised _animism_” He finds traces of this _animiss, and the adoration of ani a sye in the temple, must be traced to fetishi+se otten, if ish to understand the part which art played in the figuring of the Egyptian Gods In most of the types which it created it mixed up the physical characteristics of man and beast Sometimes the head of an anih ement obtains The Sphinx, and the bird with a human head which symbolizes death, are instances of the latter combination The usual explanation of these foran to embody for the eye of others the ideas which they had formed of the divine powers, they adopted as the foundation for their personifications the noblest living form they knew, that of man In the next place they required sos one froive to each deity some feature which should be peculiar to hi at once identified and called by his own name The required result was obtained in a very si to the constant quantity the hu element in the heads of different aniypt itself afforded In the case of each divinity, the particular animal was selected which had been consecrated to it, which was its symbol or at least its attribute, and the head or body, as the case ht be, was detached in order to for The special characteristics of the animal made use of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion could arise between one deity and another Even a child could not fail to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cat or a lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow
[Illustration: FIG 38--Painted bas-relief Boulak (Drawn by Bourgoin)]
We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we yptians, ere able, even in the days of the ancient es with so usted by the strangeness of such coreeable results which they sometimes produced A certain beauty may be found in such creations as the Sphinx, and a few others, in which the hus of a bird, and the trunk and posterior raceful and powerful of quadrupeds
But could any notion bethe bust of a ly and ponderous head of a crocodile, or with the slender neck and flat head of a snake?
[Illustration: FIG 39--Sekhet Louvre (Granite Height 050 metres)]
Every polytheistic nation attacked this problem in turn, and each solved it in its own ure by itself, and painted or carved their Gods with three heads andtraces are to be found a the Western Asiatics, the Greeks, and even the Latins The Greeks represented all their Gods in hueneral coherence of their characterization, they were enabled to avoid all confusion between them With them, too, costume and attributes helped to mark the difference But even where these are absent, our ht as part of a statue of Zeus, of Apollo, or of Bacchus, and a head of Demeter or Hera would never be confounded with one of Artemis or Pallas
[Illustration: FIG 40--Isis-Hathor Louvre (Bronze Actual size)]
Itin the skill necessary for all this, or that they generalized their forree as to leave no scope for such subtle differences But, in fact, we find in their oldest statues a facility of execution which suggests that, had they chosen, they could have expressed anything which can be expressed by the chisel That they did not do so, we know They contented theh and aard that, perhaps, we should rather seek their explanation in soht and action contracted in the infancy of the race and fortified by long transranite Thirteenth dynasty Louvre Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier]
We have already spoken of that which we believe to be the cause of the peculiar forured their deities, namely, the fetish worshi+p, which was the earliest, and for ion which they possessed That worshi+p had struck its roots so deeply into the souls of the people, that it could not be torn up even when a large part of the nation had gradually educated itself to the coious conceptions Its practices never fell into total neglect, and its influence was so far ain becan observers were led to believe that the Egyptian religion began and ended in the adoration of plants and sacred ani thus educated by i that even theoffensive in the representation of their Gods sometimes under the complete form of an animal (Horus is often symbolized under the likeness of a hawk), sometimes as composite monsters with human bodies and animal heads
[Illustration: FIG 42--Touaris Boulak (Drawn by G Benedite)]