Volume II Part 9 (1/2)

Children were sacrificed in Mexico to this deity. In the rites of a G.o.ddess of harvest, as has been said, torches were borne by the dancers, as in the Eleusinia; and in European and Oriental folk-lore.1 Demeter was the Greek harvest G.o.ddess, in whose rites torches had a place. One of her names is Demeter Erinnys. Mr. Max Muller recognises Erinnys as the dawn. Schwartz connects Demeter Erinnys with the thunderstorm. The torch in the hand of Demeter is the lightning, according to Schwartz. It is interesting, whether the torch be the torch of dawn, or of storm, or neither, to see the prevalence of these torch festivals in rural rites in Mexico, Greece and modern Europe. The idea of the peasants is that the lights scare away evil spirits.** In the Mexican rite, a woman, representing the G.o.ddess and dressed in her ornaments, was sacrificed.

The same horrid ceremony accompanied the feast of the mother of the G.o.ds, Teteo Innan.*** In this rite the man who represented the son of the G.o.ddess wore a mask of the skin from the thigh of the female victim who had personated the G.o.ddess herself. The wearing of the skin established a kins.h.i.+p between the man and the woman, as in the many cla.s.sical, ancient and savage rituals where the celebrants wear the hides of the sacrificed beasts. There was a G.o.d of storm called ”cloudy serpent,” Mixcoatl, whose rites were not more humane. The Mexican Aphrodite was named _Tlacolteotl_,**** ”the impure”.

* Mannhardt, op. cit., ii. 263, i. 501, 502; Schwartz, _Prahistorisch Anthropologische Studien_, p. 79.

** Compare the French _jour des brandons_.

***See Sahagun, ii. 30.

**** Ibid., i. 12.

About her character the Aztecs had no illusions. She listened to the confessions of the most loathsome sinners, whom she perhaps first tempted to err, and then forgave and absolved. Confession was usually put off till people had ceased to be likely to sin. She is said to have been the wife of Tlaloc, carried off by Tezcatlipoca. ”She must have been the aquatic vegetation of marshy lands,” says M. Roville, ”possessed by the G.o.d of waters till the sun dries her up and she disappears.” This is an amusing example of modern ingenuity. It resembles M. Reville's a.s.sertion that Tlaloc, the rain-G.o.d, ”had but one eye, which shows that he must be ultimately identified as an ancient personification of the rainy sky, whose one eye is the sun”. A rainy sky has usually no ”eye” at all, and, when it has, in this respect it does not differ from a cloudless sky.

A less lovely set of Olympians than the Aztec G.o.ds it is difficult to conceive. Yet, making every allowance for Catholic after-thoughts, there can be no doubt that the prayers, penances and confessions described at length by Sahagun indicate a firm Mexican belief that even these strange deities ”made for righteousness,” loved good, and, in this world and the next, punished evil. However it happened, whatever accidents of history or of mixture of the races in the dim past caused it, the Aztecs carried to extremes the religious and the mythical ideas. They were exceedingly pious in their att.i.tude of penitence and prayer; they were more fierce and cruel in ritual, more fantastic in myth, than the wildest of tribes, tameless and homeless, ignorant of agriculture or of any settled and a.s.sured existence. Even the Inquisition of the Spanishof the sixteenth century was an improvement on the unheard-of abominations of Mexican ritual. As in all fully developed polytheisms of civilised races among the Aztecs we lose sight of the moral primal Being of low savage races.

He is obscured by deities of a kind not yet evolved in the lowest culture.

CHAPTER XVI. THE MYTHOLOGY OF EGYPT

Antiquity of Egypt--Guesses at origin of the people-- Chronological views of the religion--Permanence and changes-- Local and syncretic wors.h.i.+p--Elements of pure belief and of totemism--Authorities for facts--Monuments and Greek reports--Contending theories of modern authors--Study of the G.o.ds, their beasts, their alliances and mutations--Evidence of ritual--A study of the Osiris myth and of the development of Osiris-Savage and theological elements in the myth--Moral aspect of the religion--Conclusion.

Even to the ancients Egypt was antiquity, and the Greeks sought in the dateless mysteries of the Egyptian religion for the fountain of all that was most mysterious in their own. Curiosity about the obscure beginnings of human creeds and the first knowledge of the G.o.ds was naturally aroused by that spectacle of the Pantheon of Egypt. Her highest G.o.ds were abstractions, swathed, like the Involuti of the Etrurians, in veils of mystic doctrine; yet in the most secret recess of her temples the pious beheld ”a crocodile, a cat, or a serpent, a beast rolling on a purple couch”.*

* Clem. Alex., _Paedagog_., iii. 2 (93).

In Egypt, the earlier ages and the later times beheld a land dominated by the thought of death, whose shadow falls on the monarch on his crowning day, whose whisper bids him send to far-off sh.o.r.es for the granite and the alabaster of the tomb. As life was ruled by the idea of death; so was fact conquered by dream, and all realities hastened to lose themselves in symbols; all G.o.ds rushed to merge their ident.i.ty in the sun, as moths fly towards the flame of a candle. This spectacle of a race obedient to the dead and bowing down before the beasts, this procession of G.o.ds that were their own fathers and members together in Ra, wakened the interest of the Greeks, who were even more excited by the mystery of extreme age that hid the beginnings of Egypt. Full of their own memories and legends of tribal movements, of migrations, of invasions, the Greeks acknowledged themselves children of yesterday in face of a secular empire with an origin so remote that it was scarcely guessed at in the conjectures of fable. Egypt presented to them, as to us, the spectacle of antique civilisation without a known beginning.

The spade of to-day reveals no more than the traditions of two thousand years ago. The most ancient relics of the earliest dynasty are the ma.s.sive works of an organised society and an accomplished art. There is an unbridged interval between the builders of the mysterious temple hard by the Sphinx and their predecessors, the chippers of palaeolithic flint axes in the river drift. We know not whence the Egyptians came; we only trifle with hypotheses when we conjecture that her people are of an Asiatic or an African stock; we know not whether her G.o.ds arose in the fertile swamps by Nile-side, or whether they were borne in arks, like the Huitzilopochtli of Mexico, from more ancient seats by the piety of their wors.h.i.+ppers. Yet as one great river of mysterious source flows throughout all Egypt, so through the brakes and jungles of her religion flows one great myth from a distant fountain-head, the myth of Osiris.*

* As to the origin of the Egyptians, the prevalent belief among the ancients was that they had descended the Nile from the interior of Africa. Cf. Diodorus Siculus, iii. 8. Modern theorists occasionally lean in this direction. Dumichen, _Geschichte des Alien aegyptiens_, i. 118. Again, an attempt has been made to represent them as successful members of a race whereof the Bushmen of South Africa are the social failures. M. Maspero conceives, once more, that the Egyptians were ”proto-Semitic,” ethnologically related to the people of Eastern Asia, and the grammar of their language has Semitic affinities. But the connection, if it ever existed, is acknowledged to be extremely remote. Maspero, _Hist, de l'Orient_, 4th edit., p. 17. De Rouge writes, ”Tout nous ramene vers la parente primitive de Mitsraim (Egyptains) et de Canaan” (_Recherches sur les Muniments_, p. 11).

The questions which we have to ask in dealing with the mythology of Egypt come under two heads: First, What was the nature of Egyptian religion and myth? Secondly, How did that complex ma.s.s of beliefs and practices come into existence?

The question, _What was the religion of Egypt?_ is far from simple. In a complete treatise on the topic, it would be necessary to ask in reply, At what period, in what place, and among what cla.s.ses of society did the religion exist which you wish to investigate? The ancient Egyptian religion had a lifetime so long that it almost requires to be meted by the vague measures of geological time. It is historically known to us, by the earliest monuments, about the date at which Archbishop Usher fixed the Creation. Even then, be it noticed, the religion of Egypt was old and full-grown; there are no historical traces of its beginnings.

Like the material civilisation, it had been fas.h.i.+oned by the unrecorded _Sheshoa Hor_, ”the servants of Horus,” patriarchs dwelling with the blessed. In the four or five thousand years of its later existence, Egyptian religion endured various modifications.* It was a conservative people, and schooled by the wisdom of the sepulchre. But invaders, Semitic, Ethiopian and Greek, brought in some of their own ideas.

Priestly colleges developed novel dogmas, and insensibly altered ritual The thought of hundreds of generations of men brooded, not fruitlessly, over the problems of the divine nature. Finally, it is likely that in Egypt, as elsewhere, the superst.i.tions of the least educated and most backward cla.s.ses, and of subject peoples on a lower level of civilisation, would again and again break up, and win their way to the surface of religion. Thus a complete study of Egyptian faiths would be chronological--would note the setting and rising of the stars of elder and later deities.

* Professor Lieblein, maintaining this view, opposes the statement of Mr. Le Page Renouf, who writes: ”The earliest monuments which have been discovered present to us the very same fully developed civilisation and the same religion as the later monuments” (_Hib. Lectures_, 1880, p. 81). But it is superfluous to attack a position which Mr. Le Page Renouf does not appear really to hold. He admits the existence of development and evolution in Egyptian religious thought ”I believe, therefore, that, after closely approaching the point at which polytheism might have turned into monotheism, the religious thought of Egypt turned aside into a wrong track” (Op. cit, p. 236).

The method of a systematic history of Egyptian religion would not be regulated by chronology alone. Topographical and social conditions would also claim attention. The favoured G.o.d or G.o.ds of one nome (administrative district), or of one town, or of one sacred metropolis, were not the G.o.ds of another metropolis, or town, or nome, though some deities were common to the whole country. The fundamental character might be much the same in each case, but the t.i.tles, and aspects, and ritual, and accounts of the divine genealogy varied in each locality.

Once more, the ”syncretic” tendency kept fusing into one divine name and form, or into a family triad of G.o.ds (mother, father and son), the deities of different districts, which, beneath their local peculiarities, theologians could recognise as practically the same.

While political events and local circ.u.mstances were thus modifying Egyptian religion, it must never be forgotten that the different cla.s.ses of society were probably by no means at one in their opinions. The monuments show us what the kings believed, or at least what the kings practised, record the prayers they uttered and the sacrifices they offered. The tombs and the papyri which contain the _Book of the Dead_ and other kindred works reveal the nature of belief in a future life, with the changes which it underwent at different times. But the people, the vast majority, unlettered and silent, cannot tell us what _they_ believed, or what were their favourite forms of adoration. We are left to the evidence of amulets, of books of magic, of popular tales, surviving on a papyrus here and there, and to the late testimony of Greek writers--Herodotus, Diodorus, the author of the treatise _De Osiride et hide_, and others. While the clergy of the twentieth dynasty were hymning the perfections of Ammon Ra--”so high that man may not attain unto him, dweller in the hidden place, him whose image no man has beheld”--the peasant may have been wors.h.i.+pping, like a modern Zulu, the serpents in his hovel, or may have been adoring the local sacred cat of his village, or flinging stones at the local sacred crocodile of his neighbours. To the enlightened in the later empire, perhaps to the remotest unknown ancestors also, G.o.d was self-proceeding, self-made, manifest in the deities that were members together in him of G.o.dhead.

But the peasant, if he thinks of the G.o.ds at all, thinks of them walking the earth, like our Lord and the saints in the Norse nursery tales, to amuse themselves with the adventures of men. The peasant spoke of the Seven Hathors, that come like fairy G.o.dmothers to the cradle of each infant, and foretell his lot in life.*

* Compare Maspero, _Hist, de l'Orient_., 4th edit., pp. 279- 288, for the priestly hymns and the wors.h.i.+p of beasts. ”The lofty thoughts remained the property of a small number of priests and instructed people; they did not penetrate the ma.s.s of the population. Far from that, the wors.h.i.+p of animals, goose, swallow, cat, serpent, had many more followers than Amnion Ra could count.” See also Tiele, _Manuel de l'Hist. des Rel._, Paris, 1880, pp. 46, 47. For the folk-lore of wandering G.o.ds see Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, Paris, 1882, p. 17.

It is impossible, of course, to write here a complete history of Egyptian religion, as far as it is to be extracted from the books and essays of learned moderns; but it has probably been made clear that when we speak of the religion and mythology of Egypt, we speak of a very large and complicated subject. Plainly this is a topic which the lay student will find full of pitfalls, and on which even scholars may well arrive at contradictory opinions. To put the matter briefly, where one school finds in the G.o.ds and the holy menagerie of Egyptian creeds the corruption of a primitive monotheism, its opponents see a crowd of survivals from savagery combined with clearer religious ideas, which are the long result of civilised and educated thought.* Both views may be right in part.

* The English leader of the former school, the believer in a primitive purity, corrupted and degraded but not extinguished, is Mr. Le Page Renouf (_Hibbert Lectures_, London, 1879). It is not always very easy to make out what side Mr. Le Page Renouf does take. For example, in his _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 89, he speaks somewhat sympathetically of the ”very many eminent scholars, who, with full knowledge of all that can be said to the contrary, maintain that the Egyptian religion is essentially monotheistic”. He himself says that ”a power without a name or any mythological characteristic is constantly referred to in the singular number, and can only be regarded as the object of that _sensus numinis_, or immediate perception of the Infinite.” which is ”the result of an intuition as irresistible as the impressions of our senses”. If this be not primitive instinctive monotheism, what is it? Yet Mr.

Le Page Renouf says that Egyptian polytheism, after closely approaching the point where it might have become monotheism, went off on a wrong track; so the Egyptians after all were polytheists, not monotheists (op. cit., p. 235). Of similar views are the late ill.u.s.trious Vicomte de Rouge, M.