Volume II Part 9 (2/2)

Mariette, M. Pierret, and Brugsch Pasha (_Rel. und Myth, der Alien Egypter_, vol i., Leipzig, 1884). On the other side, on the whole regarding Egyptian creeds as a complex ma.s.s of early uncivilised and popular ideas, with a later priestly religion tending towards pantheism and monotheism, are M.

Maspero, Professor Tiele, Professor Lieblein (English readers may consult his pamphlet, _Egyptian Religion_, Leipzig, 1884), M. Edward Meyer, (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, Stuttgart, 1884), Herr Pietsch. mann (_Zeitschrtftfur Ethnologic_, Berlin, 1878, art. ”Fetisch Dienst”), and Professor Tiele (_Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, Paris, 1880, and ”_History of Egyptian Religion, English translation_, 1882).

After this preamble let us endeavour to form a general working idea of what Egyptian religion was as a whole. What kind of religion did the Israelites see during the sojourn in Egypt, or what presented itself to the eyes of Herodotus? Unluckily we have no such eye-witnesses of the earlier Egyptian as Bernal Diaz was of the Aztec temples. The Bible says little that is definite about the theological ”wisdom of the Egyptians”.

When confronted with the sacred beasts, Herodotus might have used with double truth the Greek saw: ”A great ox has trod upon my tongue”.* But what Herodotus hinted at or left unsaid is gathered from the evidence of tombs and temple walls and illuminated papyri.

One point is certain. Whatever else the religion of Egypt may at any time have been, it struck every foreign observer as polytheism.**

Moreover, it was a polytheism like another. The Greeks had no difficulty, for example, in recognising amongst these beast-headed monsters G.o.ds a.n.a.logous to their own. This is demonstrated by the fact that to almost every deity of Egypt they readily and unanimously a.s.signed a Greek divine name. Seizing on a certain aspect of Osiris and of his mystery-play, they made him Dionysus; Hor became Apollo; Ptah, Hephaestus: Ammon Ra, Zeus; Thoth, Hermes, and so on with the rest.

The Egyptian deities were recognised as divine beings, with certain (generally ill-defined) departments of Nature and of human activity under their care. Some of them, like Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), were esteemed elemental forces or phenomena, and were identified with the same personal phenomena or forces, Ura.n.u.s and Gaea, in the Greek system, where heaven and earth were also parents of many of the G.o.ds.

* aeschylus, _Agamemnon_, 37, (--------)

** Maspero, Musee de Boulaq, p. 150; Le Page Renouf, Hib.

Led., pp. 85,86.

Thus it is indisputably clear that Egyptian religion had a polytheistic aspect, or rather, as Maspero says, was ”a well-marked polytheism”; that in this regard it coincided with other polytheisms, and that this element must be explained in the Egyptian, as it is explained in the Greek or the Aztec, or the Peruvian or the Maori religion.* Now an explanation has already been offered in the mythologies previously examined. Some G.o.ds have been recognised, like Rangi and Papa, the Maori heaven and earth (Nut and Seb), as representatives of the old personal earth and heaven, which commend themselves to the barbaric fancy. Other G.o.ds are the informing and indwelling spirits of other phenomena, of winds or sea or woods. Others, again, whatever their origin, preside over death, over the dead, over the vital functions, such as love, or over the arts of life, such as agriculture; and these last G.o.ds of departments of human activity were probably in the beginning culture-heroes, real, or more likely ideal, the first teachers of men.

* ”It is certainly erroneous to consider Egyptian religion as a polytheistic corruption of a prehistoric monotheism. It is more correct to say that, while polytheistic in principle, the religion developed in two absolutely opposite directions. On one side, the constant introduction of new G.o.ds, local or foreign; on the other, a groping after a monotheism never absolutely reached. The learned explained the crowd of G.o.ds as so many incarnations of the one hidden uncreated deity.”--Tiele, _Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, p. 46.

In polytheisms of long standing all these attributes and functions have been combined and reallotted, and the result we see in that confusion which is of the very essence of myth. Each G.o.d has many birth-places, one has many sepulchres, all have conflicting genealogies. If these ideas about other polytheisms be correct, then it is probable that they explain to a great extent the first principles of the polytheism of Egypt They explain at least the factors in Egyptian religion, which the Greeks recognised as a.n.a.logous with their own, and which are found among polytheists of every degree of culture, from New Zealand to h.e.l.las. If ever Ptah, or any other name, represented ”Our Father” as he is known to the most backward races, he was buried into the background by G.o.ds evolved from ghosts, by departmental G.o.ds, and by the G.o.ds of races amalgamated in the course of conquest and settlement.

Leaving on one side, then, for the moment, the vast system of ancestor-wors.h.i.+p and of rites undertaken for the benefit of the dead, and leaving aside the divinity of the king, polytheism was the most remarkable feature of Egyptian religion. The foreign traveller in the time of the pyramid-builders, as in the time of Ramses II., or of the Ptolemies, or of the Roman domination, would have found a crowd of G.o.ds in receipt of honour and of sacrifice. He would have learned that one G.o.d was most adored in one locality, another in another, that Ammon Ra was predominant in Thebes; Ra, the sun-G.o.d, in Heliopolis; Osiris in Abydos, and so forth. He would also have observed that certain animals were sacred to certain G.o.ds, and that in places where each beast was revered, his species was not eaten, though it might blamelessly be cooked and devoured in the neighbouring nome or district, where another animal was dominant. Everywhere, in all nomes and towns, the adoration of Osiris, chiefly as the G.o.d and redeemer of the dead, was practised.*

* On the different religions of different nomes, and especially the animal wors.h.i.+p, see Pietschmann, _Der aegyptische Fetischdienst und Gotterglaube, Zeitschrtft fur Ethnologie_, 1878, p. 168.

While these are the general characteristics of Egyptian religion, there were inevitably many modifications in the course of five thousand years.

If one might imagine a traveller endowed, like the Wandering Jew, with endless life, and visiting Egypt every thousand, or every five hundred years, we can fancy some of the changes in religion which he would observe. On the whole, from the first dynasty and the earliest monuments to the time when Hor came to wear a dress like that of a Roman centurion, the traveller would find the chief figures of the Pantheon recognisably the same. But there would be novelties in the manner of wors.h.i.+pping and of naming or representing them. ”In the oldest tombs, where the oldest writings are found, there are not many G.o.ds mentioned--there are Osiris, Horus, Thot, Seb, Nut, Hathor, Anubis, Apheru, and a couple more.”* Here was a stock of G.o.ds who remained in credit till ”the dog Anubis” fled from the Star of Bethlehem. Most of these deities bore birth-marks of the sky and of the tomb. If Osiris was ”the sun-G.o.d of Abydos,” he was also the murdered and mutilated culture-hero. If Hor or Horus was the sun at his height, he too had suffered despiteful usage from his enemies. Seb and Nut (named on the coffin of Mycerinus of the fourth dynasty in the British Museum) were our old friends the personal heaven and earth. Anubis, the jackal, was ”the lord of the grave,” and dead kings are wors.h.i.+pped no less than G.o.ds who were thought to have been dead kings. While certain G.o.ds, who retained permanent power, appear in the oldest monuments, sacred animals are also present from the first.

* Lieblein, _Egyptian Religion_, p. 7.

The G.o.ds, in fact, of the earliest monuments were beasts. Here is one of the points in which a great alteration developed itself in the midst of Egyptian religion. Till the twelfth dynasty, when a G.o.d is mentioned (and in those very ancient remains G.o.ds are not mentioned often), ”he is represented by his animal, or with the name spelled out in hieroglyphs, often beside the bird or beast”.* ”The jackal stands for Anup (Anubis), the frog for Hekt, the baboon for Tahuti (Thoth). It is not till after Semitic influence had begun to work in the country that any figures of G.o.ds are found.” By ”figures of G.o.ds” are meant the later man-shaped or semi-man-shaped images, the hawk-headed, jackal-headed, and similar representations with which we are familiar in the museums. The change begins with the twelfth dynasty, but becomes most marked under the eighteenth. ”During the ancient empire,” says M. Maspero, ”I only find monuments at four points--at Memphis, at Abydos, in some parts of Middle Egypt, at Sinai, and in the valley of Hammamat. The divine names appear but occasionally, in certain unvaried formulae. Under the eleventh and twelfth dynasties Lower Egypt comes on the scene. The formulae are more explicit, but the religious monuments rare. From the eighteenth dynasty onwards, we have _representations_ of all the deities, accompanied by legends more or less developed, and we begin to discover books of ritual, hymns, amulets, and other objects.”** There are also sacred texts in the Pyramids.

* Flinders Petrie, _Arts of Ancient Egypt_, p. 8.

** _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, i. 124.

Other changes, less important than that which turned the beast-G.o.d into a divine man or woman, often beast-headed, are traced in the very earliest ages. The ritual of the holy bulls (Hapi, Apis) makes its official appearance under the fourth king of the first, and the first king of the second dynasties.* Mr. Le Page Renouf, admitting this, thinks the great development of bull-wors.h.i.+p later.** In the third dynasty the name of Ra, sun, comes to be added to the royal names of kings, as Nebkara, Noferkara, and so forth.*** Osiris becomes more important than the jackal-G.o.d as the guardian of the dead. Sokar, another G.o.d of death, shows a tendency to merge himself in Osiris.

With the successes of the eighteenth dynasty in Thebes, the process of _syncretism_, by which various G.o.d-names and G.o.d-natures are mingled, so as to unite the creeds of different nomes and provinces, and blend all in the wors.h.i.+p of the Theban Ammon Ra, is most notable. Now arise schools of theology; pantheism and an approach to monotheism in the Theban G.o.d become probable results of religious speculations and imperial success. These tendencies are baffled by the break-up of the Theban supremacy, but the monotheistic idea remains in the esoteric dogmas of priesthoods, and survives into Neo-Platonism. Special changes are introduced--now, as in the case of wors.h.i.+p of the solar disk by a heretic king; earlier, as in the prevalence of Set-wors.h.i.+p, perhaps by Semitic invaders.****

* Brugsch, _History of Egypt_, English transl., i. 59, 60.

** Hib. Lect., pp. 237, 238.

*** Op. cit. i. p. 56.

**** For Khunaten, and his heresy of the disk in Thebes, see Brugsch, op. cit., i. 442. It had little or no effect on myth. Tiele says (_Hist. Egypt. Rel._, p. 49), ”From the most remote antiquity Set is one of the Osirian circle, and is thus a genuine Egyptian deity”.

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