Part 8 (2/2)
Ptah is the G.o.d of Memphis, and adjoining his temple is the chapel of the bull Apis, who is called the ”second life of Ptah.” If these two resided side by side, some theory of their relations.h.i.+p was needed, and the bull became the earthly representative of the unseen deity.
Each had a wors.h.i.+p of prehistoric antiquity, and it is vain to theorise on their original relation to each other. As for Ptah, his name means ”he who forms,” and the Greeks called him by the name of their own Hephaistos, the artificer. In later times he came to be identified with the sun, and was called the ”honourable,” ”golden,”
”beautiful,” and ”of comely face”; but earlier he seems rather to have to do with the hidden source of the world's heat, the elemental warmth which is at the beginning of all life. He also is, like Ra and Osiris, a G.o.d of the under-world to which men go after death. He is said to open the mouth of the dead--that is to say, that he hears them and judges them. But in the upper-world too he has to do with justice; he is called the ”Lord of the Ell,” a t.i.tle connecting him with measurements and boundaries, matters of the greatest importance in Egypt. His son is Imhotep, he who comes in peace; the Greeks regarded this G.o.d as a physician, and called him Asclepios. The G.o.ddess of the triad is Sechet, who was also wors.h.i.+pped at Bubastis under the name of Bast, and whose symbol is a cat. Ptah, it will be seen, is a less distinct figure than either Osiris or Ra, and he very readily pa.s.ses into combinations with other G.o.ds. Ptah-Sokari and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris are found much more frequently than Ptah alone.
These are the chief G.o.ds of the old kingdom--that is to say, of the first six dynasties. When we come to the great twelfth dynasty, after the gap in the monuments which extends from 2500-2000 B.C., we find that these G.o.ds have become faint and new G.o.ds have become supreme, namely, the local G.o.ds of Thebes, and of the adjoining nomes. Of these, Amon, G.o.d of Thebes, has the most distinguished history, though Chem, the agricultural G.o.d of Coptos, and Munt of Hermonthis were originally as important. Amon, the hidden, _i.e._ the hidden force of nature, like Ptah, is seldom found alone; he is generally combined with some other G.o.d, especially with Ra. The G.o.ds of agriculture bow their heads by degrees before the sun-G.o.ds who tend to draw to themselves all Egyptian wors.h.i.+p; rude country representations connected with the idea of fertility being discredited before the religion of the royal temples which was directed mainly to the G.o.d of light.
Was the Earliest Religion Monotheistic?--We have mentioned only some of the chief G.o.ds of Egypt, out of a countless number. These are the G.o.ds favoured by kings and city priesthoods, who, we cannot doubt, desired the religious elevation of the people. The G.o.ds they praised were of a nature to promote that end. It will be granted that the wors.h.i.+p of the light-G.o.ds of Egyptian religion was fitted to lead the minds of the Egyptians to theism. In ill.u.s.tration of this statement extracts may be here given from hymns, which date as we have them from the eighteenth dynasty 1590 B.C., but which are probably much older.
TO HORUS
The G.o.ds recognise the universal lord.... He judges the world according to his will; heaven and earth are in subjection to him. He giveth his commands to men, to the generations present, past, and future; to Egyptians and to strangers. The circuit of the solar orb is under his direction; the winds, the waters, the wood of the plants, and all vegetables. A G.o.d of seeds, he giveth all herbs and the abundance of the soil. He affordeth plentifulness, and giveth it to all the earth. All men are in ecstasy, all hearts in sweetness, all bosoms in joy, every one in adoration. Every one glorifieth his goodness, his tenderness encircles our hearts, great is his love in all bosoms.
TO TEHUTI OR PTAH
To him is due the work of the hands, the walking of the feet, the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the breathing of the nostrils, the courage of the heart, the vigour of the hand, activity in body and in mouth of all the G.o.ds and men, and of all living animals; intelligence and speech, whatever is in the heart and whatever is on the tongue.
TO PTAH-TANEN
O let us give glory to the G.o.d who hath raised up the sky and who causeth his disk to float over the bosom of Nut, who hath made the G.o.ds and men and all their generations, who hath made all lands and countries and the great sea, in his name of ”Let-the-earth-be.”
TO AMON-RA
Hail to thee, maker of all beings, lord of law, father of the G.o.ds; maker of men, creator of beasts; lord of grains, making food for the beast of the field.... The one without a second.... King alone, single among the G.o.ds; of many names, unknown is their number.
There is a beautiful hymn addressed to the Nile, who is also conceived as the chief deity and the ruler, nourisher, and comforter of all creatures. From these hymns and others like them, important conclusions have been drawn as to the nature of the earliest Egyptian religion; namely, that those who wrote such pieces must have been acquainted with the one true G.o.d and addressed him under these various names, so that the true origin of Egyptian religion would be a primitive monotheism.
There are some texts indeed which seem to point even more strongly than those cited to the conclusion that Egyptian religion started from the belief in one supreme deity. Mr. Le Page Renouf quotes along with the pa.s.sages above, one from a Turin papyrus, in which words are put into the mouth of the Almighty G.o.d, the self-existent, who made heaven and earth, the waters, the breaths of life, fire, the G.o.ds, men, animals, cattle, reptiles, birds, etc. This being speaks as follows:--
I am the maker of the heaven and the earth.... It is I who have given to all the G.o.ds the soul which is within them. When I open my eyes there is light, when I close them there is darkness. I am Chepera in the morning, Ra at noon, Tum in the evening.
M. de la Rouge maintains that Egyptian religion, monotheistic at first, with a n.o.ble belief in the unity of the Supreme G.o.d and in His attributes as the Creator and Law-giver of man, fell away from that position and grew more and more polytheistic. ”It is more than 5000 years since in the valley of the Nile the hymn began to the unity of G.o.d and the immortality of the soul, and we find Egypt arrived in the last ages at the most unbridled Polytheism.”
The sublimer part of Egyptian religion is demonstrably ancient, as Mr. Le Page Renouf says; yet we are not shut up to the conclusion that Egyptian religion as a whole is nothing but a backsliding and a failure. If we were obliged to regard that monotheism which Egypt had at first but failed to maintain, as a gift conferred from above, which human powers proved unequal to conserve, then the opening of the history of this religion would be indeed most melancholy. But though monotheism appeared in Egypt so early, there is no necessity to think that it was not attained by human powers. For all we know, it was not an early but a mature product of thought, and was reached after a long development. It is not impossible for the human mind, starting from the works of G.o.d, to rise by its own efforts to the belief in His invisible power and G.o.dhead. The beginnings of this rise of thought may be witnessed among savages, and the Egyptians in their secluded valley had an opportunity such as no other nation had, to work out, as their civilisation grew up from rude beginnings to its unequalled splendour, a n.o.ble view of the Deity whose works they adored. The G.o.d ruling from his heaven of light over the great empire of a monarch who knew no equal in the world, possessing for his earthly abode a temple of unsurpa.s.sed magnificence, uniting perhaps under his sway districts long at war and extending his influence over remote continents as the armies of Egypt prospered, such a being drew to himself from his wors.h.i.+pping retinue of priests and n.o.bles, the highest praise and adoration, was exalted far above all other powers in heaven and earth, and extolled even as the Creator and Ruler of all.
Monotheism is thus approached in thought, but only in a prophetic and antic.i.p.atory way; the circ.u.mstances of the country forbade its realisation as a general belief or as a working system. Even in the highest flights of those early thinkers, when they seem to be speaking of a G.o.d quite universal and supreme, it is a local deity that lies at the basis of their speculations, a being who has his temple in a certain place, who is symbolised in a certain animal, who has a local legend and a limited popular wors.h.i.+p. These are the facts that clog the wings of Egyptian monotheistic speculation and bring it to the earth again. Pure monotheism accordingly, the belief in a G.o.d beside whom no other G.o.d exists, it might be hard to find in Egypt at all. The last extract given above comes nearest to it; but the last line of that extract cannot be called monotheistic.
An attempted religious reformation at the end of the eighteenth dynasty may be mentioned here, as it appears to have aimed at concentrating all the wors.h.i.+p of Egypt on a single object. The object chosen, however, was a material one,--the sun's disk, Aten,--and though all Egyptian G.o.ds tended to become sun-G.o.ds, some sun-G.o.ds, no doubt, were better than others, and Aten was not the finest of them.
King Chut-en-Aten, or Glory of the Sun-disk, the royal fanatic who made this attempt at unity, went great lengths to accomplish his object, but the attempt was a failure, and was abandoned after his death even by the members of his own family. What Chut-en-Aten tried to introduce perhaps came nearer true monotheism than anything that ever existed in Egypt. He made war on other G.o.ds and wished to establish one only G.o.d in the land, but this exclusiveness the Egyptians could not understand. The Egyptian believed in many G.o.ds, and while wors.h.i.+pping one G.o.d with fervour, by no means denied the existence or the power of others in other places. Even foreign deities were in his eyes real and potent beings, each in his own territory. It is henotheism, not monotheism, that we see in this most religious land; the wors.h.i.+p of one G.o.d at a time while other G.o.ds are also believed to exist and act. The one G.o.d who is before the mind of the wors.h.i.+pper is exalted above the rest, and spoken of as if no other G.o.d required to be considered; but the wors.h.i.+pper does not dream as yet of questioning the existence of other G.o.ds, or feel himself debarred from wors.h.i.+pping them if he should visit their country.
Syncretism.--The hymns contain several other speculative positions about the G.o.ds (chapter iv.), and we may briefly mention these.
Syncretism, as we saw, is very largely represented in Egyptian thought, and enters, indeed, into its very bone and marrow. In the ennead of a city the great G.o.ds may be arranged together after the fas.h.i.+on of a court where one or two rule over the rest; but in numberless pa.s.sages we find the relations of G.o.ds adjusted in another way, by making them one. Ra ”comes as” Tum, the G.o.d is known here under one name or aspect and there under another. The names of two deities being added together, a new deity is produced; and in later times these G.o.ds with double, treble, or multiple names are among the most important. Raharmachis and Amonra are national G.o.ds, and have left much evidence of themselves.
It is a little step from syncretism to pantheism. Let the G.o.ds once lose the individual character that keeps them separate from each other, and it is possible for one G.o.d, who grows strong and great enough, to swallow up all the rest, till they appear only as his forms. In the position which they occupied in Egypt the various G.o.ds could not disappear, their local connections kept them alive; but they were so like one another that one of them could be regarded as a form of another, and a mult.i.tude of them as forms of one. The G.o.d who did most in the way of swallowing up the rest was Ra, the great sun-G.o.d of Thebes. The Litany of Ra[7] represents that G.o.d as eternal and self-begotten, and sings in seventy-five successive verses seventy-five forms which he a.s.sumes; they are the forms of the G.o.ds and of all the great elements and parts of the world. The separate G.o.ds are reduced from the rank of independent potentates to shapes of Ra, and thus a kind of unity is set up in the populous Egyptian Pantheon. But Ra is not strong enough to get the better of these shapes, and to rule a sole monarch by his own right, in his own way.
He is the G.o.d, but he is not an independent G.o.d; it is pantheism, not theism, to which he owes his exaltation. The one in Egypt cannot govern the many; the pure exaltation of Ra as a supreme and absolute G.o.d does not prevent the wors.h.i.+p of a different being in each different town. The one sole G.o.d is for the priests alone, not for the people; and this belief in him does not even lead to attempts to root out the wors.h.i.+p of animals, or to concentrate the service of the temples on him alone. And in the absence of such attempts we read the sentence condemning a religion which produced most n.o.ble fruits of thought, to grow worse and not better as time went on, and to pa.s.s away without bringing any permanent contribution to the development of the religion of the world.
[Footnote 7: _Records of the Past_, viii. 105.]
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