Chapter III: Part I: The Religion of Ancient Egypt (2)

At the same time this open-air life is by no means one of leisure. The peculiar conditions of the valley of the Nile demand incessant labour on the part of its population. Fruitful as the soil is when once it is watered, without water it remains a barren desert or an unwholesome marsh. And the only source of water is the river Nile. The Nile has to be kept within its banks, to be diverted into canals, or distributed over the fields by irrigating machines, before a single blade of wheat can grow or a single crop be gathered in. Day after day must the Egyptian labour, repairing the dykes and canals, ploughing the ground, planting the seed, and incessantly watering it; the Nile is ready to take advantage of any relaxation of vigilance and toil, to submerge or sweep away the cultivated land, or to deny to it the water that it needs. Of all people the Egyptian is the most industrious; the conditions under which he has to till the soil oblige him to be so, and to spend his existence in constant agricultural work.

But, as I have already pointed out, this work is monotonously regular. There are no unexpected breaks in it; no moments when a sudden demand is made for exceptional labour. The farmer’s year is all mapped out for him beforehand: what his forefathers have done for unnumbered centuries before him, he too has to do almost to a day. It is steady toil, day after day, from dawn to night, during the larger portion of the year.

This steady toil in the open air gives no opportunity for philosophic meditation or introspective theorising. On the contrary, life for the Egyptian _fellah_ is a very real and practical thing: he knows beforehand what he has to do in order to gain his bread, and he has no time in which to theorise about it. It is, moreover, his sense of sight which is constantly being exercised. The things which he knows and remembers are the things which he sees, and he sees them clearly in the clear sunshine of his fields.

We need not wonder, therefore, that the ancient Egyptian should have shown on the one hand an incapacity for abstract thought, and on the other hand a love of visible symbols. The two, in fact, were but the reverse sides of the same mental tendency. Symbolism, indeed, is always necessary before we can apprehend the abstract: it is only through the sensuous symbol that we can express the abstract thought. But the Egyptian did not care to penetrate beyond the expression. He was satisfied with the symbol which he could see and remember, and the result was that his religious ideas were material rather than spiritual. The material husk, as it were, sufficed for him, and he did not trouble to inquire too closely about the kernel within. The soul was for him a human-headed bird, which ascended on its wings to the heavens above; and the future world itself was but a duplicate of the Egypt which his eyes gazed upon below.

The hieroglyphic writing was at once an illustration and an encouragement of this characteristic of his mind. All abstract ideas were expressed in it by symbols which he could see and understand. The act of eating was denoted by the picture of a man with his hand to his mouth, the idea of wickedness by the picture of a sparrow. And these symbolic pictures were usually attached to the words they represented, even when the latter had come to be syllabically and alphabetically spelt. Even in reading and writing, therefore, the Egyptian was not required to concern himself overmuch with abstract thought. The concrete symbols were ever before his eyes, and it was their mental pictures which took the place for him of abstract ideas.

It must, of course, be remembered that the foregoing generalisations apply to the Egyptian people as a whole. There were individual exceptions; there was even a class the lives of whose members were not devoted to agricultural or other labour, and whose religious conceptions were often spiritual and sublime. This was the class of priests, whose power and influence increased with the lapse of time, and who eventually moulded the official theology of Egypt. Priestly colleges arose in the great sanctuaries of the country, and gradually absorbed a considerable part of its land and revenues. At first the priests do not seem to have been a numerous body, and up to the last the higher members of the hierarchy were comparatively few. But in their hands the religious beliefs of the people underwent modification, and even a rudimentary systematisation; the different independent cults of the kingdom were organised and combined together, and with this organisation came philosophic speculation and theorising. If Professor Maspero is right, the two chief schools of religious thought and systematising in early Egypt were at Heliopolis, near the apex of the Delta, and Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên, in Central Egypt. In Hermopolis the conception of creation, not by voice merely, but even by the mere sound of the voice, was first formed and worked out while Heliopolis was the source of that arrangement of the deities into groups of nine which led to the identification of the gods one with another, and so prepared the way for monotheism.(7) If Heliopolis were indeed, as seems probable, the first home of this religious theory, its influence upon the rest of Egypt was profound. Already in the early part of the historical period, in the age of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the religious texts of the Pyramids were compiled, the scheme which placed the Ennead or group of nine at the head of the Pantheon had been accepted throughout the country. It was the beginning of an inevitable process of thought, which ended by resolving the deities of the official cult into forms or manifestations one of the other, and by landing its adherents in pantheism.

To a certain extent, therefore, the general incapacity for abstract thought which distinguished the Egyptians did not hold good of the priestly colleges. But even among the priests the abstract was never entirely dissociated from the symbol. Symbolism still dominates the profoundest thoughts and expressions of the later inscriptions; the writer cannot free himself from the sensuous image, except perhaps in a few individual cases. At the most, Egyptian thought cannot rise further than the conception of “the god who has no form”—a confession in itself of inability to conceive of what is formless. It is true that after the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty the deity is addressed as _Kheper zes-ef_, “that which is self-grown,” “the self-existent”; but when we find the same epithet applied also to plants like the balsam and minerals like saltpetre, it is clear that it does not possess the abstract significance we should read into it to-day. It simply expresses the conviction that the god to whom the prayer is offered is a god who was never born in human fashion, but who grew up of himself, like the mineral which effloresces from the ground, or the plant which is not grown from seed. Similarly, when it is said of him that he is “existent from the beginning,”—_kheper em ḥat_,—or, as it is otherwise expressed, that he is “the father of the beginning,” the phrase is less abstract than it seems at first sight to be. The very word _kheper_ or “existent” denotes the visible universe, while _ḥat_ or “beginning” is the hinder extremity. The phrase can be pressed just as little as the epithet “lord of eternity,” applied to deities whose birth and death are nevertheless asserted in the same breath. Perhaps the most abstract conception of the divine to which the Egyptian attained was that of “the nameless one,” since the name was regarded as something very real and concrete, as, in fact, the essence of that to which it belonged. To say, therefore, that a thing was nameless, was equivalent to either denying its existence or to lifting it out of the world of the concrete altogether.

There was a moment in the history of Egypt when an attempt was made to put a real signification into the apparently abstract terms and phrases addressed to the gods. The Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten, towards the close of the Eighteenth Dynasty, appears suddenly on the scene as a royal reformer, determined to give life and meaning to the language which had described the supreme deity as “the sole and only god,” the absolute ruler of the universe, who was from all eternity, and whose form was hidden from men. But the impulse to the reform came from Asia. Khu-n-Aten’s mother was a foreigner, and his attempt to engraft Asiatic ideas upon Egyptian religion, or rather to substitute an Asiatic form of faith for that of his fathers, proved a failure. The worship of the one supreme deity, whose visible symbol was the solar disc, though enforced by persecution and by all the power of the Pharaoh himself, hardly survived his death. Amon of Thebes and his priesthood came victorious out of the struggle, and the pantheistic monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was never revived. Symbolism remained, while the abstract thought, to which that symbolism should have been a stepping-stone, failed to penetrate into Egyptian religion. The Egyptian continued to be content with the symbol, as his father had been before him. But in the priestly colleges and among the higher circles of culture it became less materialistic; while the mass of the people still saw nothing but the symbol itself, the priests and scribes looked as it were beyond it, and saw in the symbol the picture of some divine truth, the outward garment in which the deity had clothed himself. What constituted, however, the peculiarity of the Egyptian point of view was, that this outward garment was never separated from that which it covered; it was regarded as an integral part of the divine essence, which could no more be dissociated from it than the surface of a statue can be dissociated from the stone of which it is made. The educated Egyptian came to see in the multitudinous gods of the public worship merely varying manifestations or forms of one divine substance; but still they were manifestations or forms visible to the senses, and apart from such forms the divine substance had no existence. It is characteristic that the old belief was never disavowed, that images were actually animated by the gods or human personalities whose likeness they bore, and whom they were expressively said to have “devoured”; indeed, the king still received the _Sa_ or principle of immortality from contact with the statue of the god he served; and wonder-working images, which inclined the head towards those who asked them questions, continued to be consulted in the temples.(8) At Dendera the soul of the goddess Hathor was believed to descend from heaven in the form of a hawk of lapis-lazuli in order to vivify her statue;(9) and the belief is a significant commentary on the mental attitude of her worshippers.

One result of the Egyptian’s inability or disinclination for abstract thought was the necessity not only of representing the gods under special and definite forms, but even of always so thinking of them. The system of writing, with its pictorial characters, favoured the habit; and we can well understand how difficult the most educated scribe must have found it to conceive of Thoth otherwise than as an ibis, or of Hathor otherwise than as a cow. Whatever may have been the origin of the Egyptian worship of animals, or—which is something very different—of the identification of certain individual animals with the principal gods, its continuance was materially assisted by the sacred writing of the scribes and the pictures that adorned the walls of the temples. To the ordinary Egyptian, Thoth was indeed an ibis, and the folk-lore of the great sanctuaries accordingly described him as such.(10) But to the cultured Egyptian, also, the ibis was his symbol; and in Egypt, as we have seen, the symbol and what is symbolised were apt to be confounded together.

The beast-worship of Egypt excited the astonishment and ridicule of the Greeks and Romans, and the unmeasured scorn of the Christian apologists. I shall have to deal with it in a later lecture. For the present it is sufficient to point out how largely it owed its continued existence to the need for symbolism which characterised Egyptian thought, in spite of the fact that there was another and contradictory conception which held sway within Egyptian religion. This was the conception of the divinity of man, which found its supreme expression in the doctrine that the Pharaoh was the incarnation of the sun-god. It was not in the brute beast, but in man himself, that the deity revealed himself on earth.

The origin of the conception must be sought in the early history of the country. Egypt was not at first the united monarchy it afterwards became. It was divided into a number of small principalities, each independent of the other and often hostile. It is probable that in some cases the inhabitants of these principalities did not belong to the same race; that while in one the older population predominated, in another the Pharaonic Egyptians held absolute sway. At all events the manners and customs of their inhabitants were not uniform, any more than the religious beliefs they held and the rites they practised. The god who was honoured in one place was abhorred in another, and a rival deity set over against him.

True to its conservative principles, Egypt never forgot the existence of these early principalities. They continued to survive in a somewhat changed form. They became the nomes of Pharaonic Egypt, separate districts resembling to a certain degree the States of the American Republic, and preserving to the last their independent life and organisation. Each nome had its own capital, its own central sanctuary, and its own prince; above all, it had its own special god or goddess, with their attendant deities, their college of priests, their ceremonies and their festivals. Up to the age of the Hyksos conquest the hereditary princes of the nomes were feudal lords, owning a qualified obedience to the Pharaoh, and furnishing him with tribute and soldiers when called upon to do so. It was not till after the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty that the old feudal nobility was replaced by court officials and a bureaucracy which owed its position to the king; and even then the descendants of the ancient princes were ever on the watch to take advantage of the weakness of the central authority and recover the power they had lost. Up to the last, too, the gods of the several nomes preserved a semblance of their independent character. It was only with the rise of the new kingdom and the accession of the Eighteenth Dynasty that that process of fusion set in to any real purpose which identified the various deities one with another, and transformed them into kaleidoscopic forms of Amon or Ra. The loss of their separate and independent character went along with the suppression of the feudal families with whom their worship had been associated for unnumbered generations. The feudal god and the feudal prince disappeared together: the one became absorbed into the supreme god of the Pharaoh and his priests, the other into a functionary of the court. It was only in the hearts and minds of the people that Thoth remained what he had always been, the lord and master of Hermopolis, and of Hermopolis alone.

The principalities of primitive Egypt gradually became unified into two or three kingdoms, and eventually into two kingdoms only, those of Upper and Lower Egypt. Recent discoveries have thrown unexpected light on this early period of history. At one time the capital of the southern kingdom was Nekhen, called Hierakonpolis in the Greek period, the site of which is now represented by the ruins of Kom el-Ahmar, opposite El-Kab. Here, among the foundations of the ancient temple, Mr. Quibell has found remains which probably go back to an age before that of Menes and the rise of the united Egyptian monarchy. Among them are huge vases of alabaster and granite, which were dedicated by a certain king Besh in the year when he conquered the people of Northern Egypt. On the other hand, on a stela now at Palermo a list is given of kings who seem to have reigned over Northern Egypt while the Pharaohs of Nekhen were reigning in the south.(11)

For how many centuries the two kingdoms existed side by side, sometimes in peaceful intercourse, sometimes in hostile collision, it is impossible to say. The fact that Egypt had once been divided into two kingdoms was never forgotten; down to the last days of the Egyptian monarchs the Pharaoh bore the title of “lord of the two lands,” and on his head was placed the twofold crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Nekhen was under the protection not only of Horus, the god of the Pharaonic Egyptians, but also of Nekheb, the tutelary goddess of the whole of the southern land. From the Cataract northward her dominion extended, but it was at El-Kab opposite Nekhen, where the road from the Red Sea and the mines of the desert reached the Nile, that her special sanctuary stood. Besh calls himself on his vases “the son of Nekheb”; and even as late as the time of the Sixth Dynasty the eldest son of the king was entitled “the royal son of Nekheb.”(12)

Nekheb, the vulture, was the goddess of the south, in contradistinction to Uazit, the serpent, the goddess of the north. But in both the south and the north the same dominant race held rule, the same customs prevailed, and the same language was spoken. The Pharaonic Egyptians, in their northern advance, had carried with them a common legacy of ideas and manners. Their religious conceptions had been the same, and consequently the general form assumed by the religious cult was similar. In spite of local differences and the self-centred character of the numerous independent principalities, there was, nevertheless, a family likeness between them all. Ideas and customs, therefore, which grew up in one place passed readily to another, and the influence of a particular local sanctuary was easily carried beyond the limits of the district in which it stood.

One of the most fundamental of the beliefs which the Pharaonic Egyptians brought with them was that in the divine origin of certain individuals. The prince who led them was not only the son of a god or goddess, he was an incarnation of the god himself. The belief is one of the many facts which link the Pharaonic civilisation with the culture of primitive Babylonia. In Babylonia also the king was divine. One of the early kings of Ur calls himself the son of a goddess, just as Besh does at Nekhen; and the great conquerors of primeval Asia, Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin, give themselves the title of “god” in their inscriptions; while Naram-Sin is even invoked during his lifetime as “the god of the city of Agadê” or Akkad. For many generations the Babylonian kings continued to receive divine honours while they were still alive; and it was not until after the conquest of Babylonia by a tribe of half-civilised foreigners from the mountains of Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the reigning king ceased to be a god. Like the doctrine of the divine right of kings in England, which could not survive the fall of the Stuarts, the doctrine of the divine nature of the monarch did not survive in Babylonia the fall of the native dynasties.

In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to be invoked as a god after his death. Chapels and priests were consecrated to his memory, and stated sacrifices and offerings made to him. It was not necessary that the deified prince should be the supreme sovereign, it was sufficient if he were the head of a feudal principality. Thus, while Dungi, the supreme sovereign of Babylonia, receives in his inscriptions the title of “god,” his vassal Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city of Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult lasted for many centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in race, but most of the Babylonian kings who were thus deified were Semites. It is therefore possible that the deification of the ruler was of Semitic origin, and only adopted from them by the older Sumerian population, as in the case of Gudea; it is also possible that it was one of the consequences of that fusion of the two races, Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later population and culture of Babylonia. However this may be, the apotheosis of the Babylonian king during his lifetime can be traced back as far as Sargon and Naram-Sin, 3800 B.C. Sargon incorporated Palestine, “the land of the Amorites,” as it was then called, into his empire, while Naram-Sin extended his conquests to Mâgan or the Sinaitic Peninsula, thus bringing the arms and civilisation of Babylonia to the very doors of Egypt. The precise nature of the connection which existed between the Babylonian and the Egyptian belief in the divinity of the ruler must be left to future research.

In the Egyptian mind, at all events, it was a belief that was deeply implanted. The Pharaoh was a god upon earth. Like the Incas of Peru, he belonged to the solar race, and the blood which flowed in his veins was the ichor of the gods. The existence of a similar belief in Peru shows how easy it was for such a belief to grow up in regard to the leader of a conquering people who brought with them a higher culture and the arts of life. But it presupposes religious conceptions which, though characteristic of Babylonia, are directly contrary to those which seem to underlie the religion of Egypt. Among the Babylonians the gods assumed human forms; man had been made in the likeness of the gods, and the gods therefore were of human shape. The converse, however, was the case in Egypt. Here the gods, with few exceptions, were conceived of as brute beasts. Horus was the hawk, Nekheb the vulture, Uazit of Buto the deadly uræus snake.

There is only one way of explaining the anomaly. The conception of the gods which made them men must have come from outside, and been imposed upon a people whose gods were the brute beasts. It must have been the Pharaonic invaders from Asia to whom the leader they followed was an incarnate god. Hence it was just this leader and no other who was clothed with divinity. Hence, too, it was that the older worship of animals was never really harmonised with the worship of the Pharaoh. The inner contradiction which existed between the new religious conceptions remained to the end, in spite of all the efforts of the priestly colleges to make them agree. Religious art might represent the god with the head of a beast or bird and the body of a man, the sacred books might teach that the deity is unconfined by form, and so could pass at will from the body of a man into that of a beast; but all such makeshifts could not hide the actual fact. Between the deity who is human and the deity who is bestial no true reconciliation is possible.

We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh back to Asia, and the Asiatic element in the Egyptian population. The Pharaonic conquerors of the valley of the Nile were those “followers of Horus” who worshipped their leader as a god. It was a god in human form who had led them to victory, and Horus accordingly continued to be represented as a man, even though the symbolism of the hieroglyphs united with the creed of the prehistoric races of Egypt in giving him the head of a hawk.

At first the ruler of each of the small kingdoms into which prehistoric Egypt was divided, was honoured as a god, like Gudea in Babylonia. When the kingdoms became, first, vassal principalities under a paramount lord, and then nomes, the old tradition was still maintained. Divine titles were given to the nomarchs even in the later times of the united monarchy, and after their death worship continued to be paid to them.(13) Christian writers tell us how at Anabê particular individuals were regarded as gods, to whom offerings were accordingly brought; and Ptah, the tutelary deity of Memphis, was pictured as a man in the wrappings of a mummy, while to Anhur of This the human figure was assigned.

With the coalescence of the smaller principalities into two kingdoms, the deification of the ruler was confined within narrower bounds. But for that very reason it became more absolute and intense. The supreme sovereign, the Pharaoh as we may henceforth call him, was a veritable god on earth. To his subjects he was the source, not only of material benefits, but of spiritual blessings as well. He was “the good god,” the beneficent dispenser of all good things.(14) The power of life and death was in his hand, and rebellion against him was rebellion against the gods. The blood that flowed in his veins was the same as that which flowed in the veins of the gods; it was even communicated to him from time to time by his divine brethren; and the bas-reliefs of a later age, when the traditional belief had become little more than a symbolical allegory, still depict him with his back towards the statue of the god, who is transfusing the ichor of heaven through his veins.(15)

Menes, the king of Upper Egypt, first united under one sceptre the two kingdoms of the Nile. The divinity which had hitherto been shared between the Pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt now passed in all it fulness to him. He became the visible god of Egypt, just as Sargon or Naram-Sin was the visible god of Akkad. All the attributes of divinity belonged to him, as they were conceived of by his subjects, and from him they passed to his successors. Legitimacy of birth was reckoned through the mother, and through the mother accordingly the divine nature of the Pharaoh was handed on. Only those who had been born of a princess of the royal family could be considered to possess it in all its purity; and where this title was wanting, it was necessary to assume the direct intervention of a god. The mother of Amon-hotep III. was of Asiatic origin; we read, therefore, on the walls of the temple of Luxor, that he was born of a virgin and the god of Thebes. Alexander, the conqueror of Egypt, was a Macedonian; it was needful, accordingly, that he should be acknowledged as a son by the god of the oasis of Ammon.(16)

But such consequences of the old Egyptian belief in the incarnation of the deity in man are leading us away into a field of investigation which will have to be traversed in a future lecture. For the present, it is sufficient to keep two facts steadily before the mind: on the one side, the old Egyptian belief in the divinity of the brute beast; on the other, the equally old belief in the divinity of man. The two beliefs are not really to be harmonised one with the other; they were, in fact, derived from different elements in the Egyptian population; but, with his usual conservative instinct and avoidance of abstract thought, the Egyptian of later days co-ordinated them together, and closed his eyes to their actual incompatibility.

Lecture III. The Imperishable Part Of Man And The Other World.

It has sometimes been asserted by travellers and ethnologists, that tribes exist who are absolutely without any idea of God. It will usually be found that such assertions mean little more than that they are without any idea of what we mean by God: even the Zulus, who saw in a reed the creator of the world,(17) nevertheless believed that the world had been created by a power outside themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race of man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in a power of the kind, or in a world which is separate from the visible world around us; statements to the contrary generally rest on ignorance or misconception. The very fact that the savage dreams, and gives to his dreams the reality of his waking moments, brings with it a belief in what, for the want of a better term, I will call “another world.”

This other world, it must be remembered, is material, as material as the “heavenly Jerusalem” to which so many good Christians have looked forward even in our own day. The savage has no experience of anything else than material existence, and he cannot, therefore, rise to the conception of what we mean by the spiritual, even if he were capable of forming so abstract an idea. His spiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not only to be interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols, but identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The Latin _anima_ meant “breath” before it meant “the soul.”

This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual has lingered long in the human mind; indeed, it is questionable whether, as long as we are human, we shall ever shake ourselves wholly free from it. The greater is naturally its dominance the further we recede in history. There is “another world,” but it is a world strangely like our own.

Closely connected with this conception of “another world” is the conception which man forms concerning his own nature. There are few races of mankind among whom we do not find in one shape or another the belief in a second self. Sometimes this second self is in all respects a reflection and image of the living self, like the images of those we see in our dreams; and it is more than probable that dreams first suggested it. Sometimes it is a mere speck of grey vapour, which may owe its origin to the breath which issues from the mouth and seems to forsake it at death, or to the misty forms seen after nightfall by the savage in the gloom of the forest and by the edge of the morass. At times it is conceived of as a sort of luminous gas or a phosphorescent flash of light, such as is emitted by decaying vegetation in a damp soil. Or, again, it may be likened to the bird that flies to heaven, to the butterfly which hovers from flower to flower, or even to insects like the grasshopper which hop along the ground. But however it may be envisaged, it is at once impalpable and material, something that can be perceived by the senses and yet eludes the grasp.

The Egyptian theory of the nature of man in the historical age of the nation was very complicated. Man was made up of many parts, each of which was capable of living eternally. The belief in his composite character was due to the composite character of the people as described in the last lecture, added to that conservative tendency which prevented them from discarding or even altering any part of the heritage of the past. Some at least of the elements which went “to the making of man” were derived from different elements in the population. They had been absorbed, or rather co-ordinated, in the State religion, with little regard to their mutual compatibility and with little effort to reconcile them. Hence it is somewhat difficult to distinguish them all one from another; indeed, it is a task which no Egyptian theologian even attempted; and when we find the list of them given in full, it is doubtless to secure that no component part of the individual should be omitted, the name of which had been handed down from the generations of old.

There were, however, certain component parts which were clearly defined, and which occupied an important place in the religious ideas of Egypt. Foremost amongst these was the _Ka_ or “Double.” Underneath the conception of the Ka lay a crude philosophy of the universe. The Ka corresponded with the shadow in the visible world. Like the shadow which cannot be detached from the object, so, too, the Ka or Double is the reflection of the object as it is conceived of in the mind. But the Egyptian did not realise that it was only a product of the mind. For him it was as real and material as the shadow itself; indeed, it was much more material, for it had an independent existence of its own. It could be separated from the object of which it was the facsimile and presentment, and represent it elsewhere. Nay, more than this, it was what gave life and form to the object of which it was the image; it constituted, in fact, its essence and personality. Hence it was sometimes interchanged with the “Name” which, in the eyes of the Egyptian, was the essence of the thing itself, without which the thing could not exist. In a sense the Ka was the spiritual reflection of an object, but it was a spiritual reflection which had a concrete form.

The “ideas” of Plato were the last development of the Egyptian doctrine of the Ka. They were the archetypes after which all things have been made, and they are archetypes which are at once abstract and concrete. Modern philosophers have transformed them into the thoughts of God, which realise themselves in concrete shape. But to the ancient Egyptian the concrete side of his conception was alone apparent. That the Ka was a creation of his own mind never once occurred to him. It had a real and substantial existence in the world of gods and men, even though it was not visible to the outward senses. Everything that he knew or thought of had its double, and he never suspected that it was his own act of thought which brought it into being.

It was symbolism again that was to blame. Once more the symbol was confused with that for which it stood, and the abstract was translated into the concrete. The abstract idea of personality became a substantial thing, to which all the attributes of substantial objects were attached. Like the “Name,” which was a force with a concrete individuality of its own, the Ka was as much an individual entity as the angels of Christian belief.

Between it and the object or person to which it belonged, there was the same relation as exists between the conception and the word. The one presupposed the other. Until the person was born, his Ka had no existence; while, on the other hand, it was the Ka to which his existence was owed. But once it had come into being the Ka was immortal, like the word which, once formed, can exist independently of the thought which gave it birth. As soon as it left the body, the body ceased to live, and did not recover life and consciousness until it was reunited with its Ka. But while the body remained thus lifeless and unconscious, the Ka led an independent existence, conscious and alive.

This existence, however, was, in a sense, quite as material as that of the body had been upon earth. The Ka needed to be sustained by food and drink. Hence came the offerings which were made to the dead as well as to the gods, each of whom had his Ka, which, like the human Ka, was dependent on the food that was supplied to it. But it was the Ka of the food and the Ka of the drink upon which the Ka of man or god was necessarily fed. Though at first, therefore, the actual food and drink were furnished by the faithful, the Egyptians were eventually led by the force of logic to hold that models of the food and drink in stone or terra-cotta or wood were as efficacious as the food and drink themselves. Such models were cheaper and more easily procurable, and had, moreover, the advantage of being practically imperishable. Gradually, therefore, they took the place of the meat and bread, the beer and wine, which had once been piled up in the dead man’s tomb, and from the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty onwards we find terra-cotta cakes, inscribed with the name and titles of the deceased, substituted for the funerary bread.

The same idea as that which led to the manufacture of these sham offerings had introduced statues and images into the tomb at an early date. In the tombs of the Third and Fourth and following Dynasties, statues have been found of a very high order of art. No effort has been spared to make them speaking likenesses of the men and women in whose tombs they were placed; even the eyes have been made lifelike with inlaid ivory and obsidian. Usually, too, the statues are carved out of the hardest, and therefore the most enduring, of stone, so that, when the corpse of the dead was shrivelled beyond recognition, his counterpart in stone still represented him just as he was in life. But the statue had its Ka like the man it represented, and if the likeness were exact, the Ka of the statue and the Ka of the man would be one and the same. Hence the Ka could find a fitting form in which to clothe itself whenever it wished to revisit the tomb and there nourish itself on the offerings made to the dead by the piety of his descendants. And even if the mummy perished, the statue would remain for the homeless Ka.(18)

It was probably on this account that we so often find more than one statue of the dead man in the same tomb. The more numerous the statues, the greater chance there was that one at least of them would survive down to the day when the Ka should at last be again united to its body and soul. And the priests of Heliopolis discovered yet a further reason for the practice. From time immemorial Ra the sun-god had been invoked there under the form of his seven birdlike “souls” or spirits, and double this number of Kas was now ascribed to him, each corresponding with a quality or attribute which he could bestow upon his worshippers.(19) Symbols already existed in the hieroglyphics for these various qualities, so that it was easy to regard each of them as having a separate and concrete existence, and so being practically a Ka.

The funerary statue and the ideas connected with it seem to have been characteristic of Memphis and the school of theology which existed there. At all events, no similar statues have been discovered at Abydos in the tombs of the first two (Thinite) dynasties; they make their appearance with the rise of Memphite influence under the Third Dynasty. And with the disappearance of the old Memphite empire, they too tend to disappear. The disturbed condition of Egypt after the fall of the Sixth Dynasty was not favourable to art, and it was probably difficult to find artists any longer who could imitate with even approximate accuracy the features of the dead.

But under the Theban dynasties another kind of image becomes prominent. This was the Ushebti or “Respondent,” hundreds of which may be seen in most museums. They are usually small figures of blue or green porcelain, with a mattock painted under each arm, and a basket on the back. The name and titles of the deceased are generally inscribed upon them, and not unfrequently the 6th chapter of the Egyptian funerary ritual or Book of the Dead. The chapter reads as follows: “O these _ushebtis_, whatever be the work it is decreed the Osirified one must do in the other world, let all hindrances to it there be smitten down for him, even as he desires! Behold me when ye call! See that ye work diligently every moment there, sowing the fields, filling the canals with water, carrying sand from the West to the East. Behold me when ye call!”

The chapter explained what the _ushebti_-figures were intended for. Before the dead man, justified though he had been by faith in Osiris and his own good deeds, could be admitted to the full enjoyment of the fields of paradise, it was necessary that he should show that he was worthy of them by the performance of some work. He was therefore called upon to cultivate that portion of them which had been allotted to him, to till the ground and water it from the heavenly Nile. Had he been a peasant while on earth, the task would have been an easy one; had he, on the contrary, belonged to the wealthier classes, or been unaccustomed to agricultural labour, it would have been hard and irksome. Thanks to the doctrine of the Ka, however, means were found for lightening the obligation. The relatives of the dead buried with him a number of _ushebti_-figures, each of which represented a fellah with mattock and basket, and their Kas, it was believed, would, with the help of the sacred words of the Ritual, assist him in his work. Sometimes, to make assurance doubly sure, the images were broken; thus, as it were, putting an end to their earthly existence, and setting their Kas free.

When once the tomb was closed and the mummy hidden away in the recesses, it was necessary to find a way by which the Ka could enter the abode of the dead, and so eat and drink the food that had been deposited there. For it must be remembered that the Ka from its very nature was subject to the same limitations as the person whom it represented. If there was no door it could not enter. Where it differed from the living person was in its existing in a world in which what are shams and pictures to us were so many concrete realities. Consequently all that was needed in order to allow the Ka free entrance into the tomb was to paint a false door on one of its walls; the Ka could then pass in and out through the Ka of the door, and so rejoin its mummy or its statue when so it wished.

This false door, in front of which the offerings to the dead were originally laid, must go back to a primitive period in Egyptian history. Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that it is presupposed by the so-called Banner name of the Egyptian Pharaohs.(20) Ever since the first days of hieroglyphic decipherment, it has been known that besides the name or names given to the Pharaoh at birth, and commonly borne by him in life, he had another name not enclosed in a cartouche, but in something that resembled a banner, and was surmounted by the hawk of the god Horus. It actually represented, however, not a banner, but the panel above the false door of a tomb, and the name written within it was the name of the Ka of the Pharaoh rather than of the Pharaoh himself. It was accordingly the name by which he was known after death, the name inscribed on the objects buried in his tomb, and also the name under which he was worshipped whether in this life or in the next. As the Horus or deified leader who had subjugated the older inhabitants of Egypt and founded the Pharaonic dynasties, it was right and fitting that he should be known by the name of his Ka. It was not so much the Pharaoh that was adored by his subjects, as the Ka of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was god because the blood of Horus flowed in his veins.

The earliest monuments of the Pharaohs yet discovered give almost invariably only the Ka-name of the king. The fact is doubtless due in great measure to their general character. With few exceptions they consist of tombstones and other sepulchral furniture. But the objects found in the foundations of the temple of Nekhen are also examples of the same fact. The fusion was not yet complete, at all events in the south, between the Pharaoh as man and the Pharaoh as god; it was his Ka that was divine, rather than the bodily husk in which it sojourned for a time.

The Ka accordingly occupies a prominent place in the names of the Pharaohs of the Old Empire, while the sacred art of the temples continued the ancient tradition down to the latest times. Horus and the Nile-gods, for instance, present the Ka of Amon-hotep III. along with the infant prince to the god of Thebes; and at Soleb the same Pharaoh is represented as making offerings to his own double.(21) Indeed, it is not unfrequent to find the king and his Ka thus separated from one another and set side by side; and at times the Ka becomes a mere symbol, planted like a standard at the monarch’s back.

It was the Ka, therefore, which in the early days of Egyptian religious thought was more especially associated with the divine nature of the king. The association of ideas was assisted by the fact that the gods, like men, had each his individual Ka. And in the older period of Egyptian history the Ka of the god and not the god himself was primarily the object of worship. The sacred name of Memphis was Ḥa-ka-Ptaḥ, “the temple of the Ka of Ptaḥ,” which appears as _Khikuptakh_ in the Tel el-Amarna letters, and from which the Greeks derived their _Aiguptos_, “Egypt.” Even in the last centuries of Egyptian independence the prayers addressed to the bull-god Apis are still made for the most part to his Ka.

The Ka, in fact, was conceived of as the living principle which inspired both gods and men. Its separation from the body meant what we call death, and life could return only when the two were reunited. That reunion could take place only in the other world, after long years had passed and strange experiences had been undergone by the disembodied Ka. The 105th chapter of the Book of the Dead contains the words with which on the day of resurrection the Ka was to be greeted. “Hail,” says the dead man, “to thee who wast my Ka during life! Behold, I come unto thee, I arise resplendent, I labour, I am strong, I am hale, I bring grains of incense, I am purified thereby, and I thereby purify that which goeth forth from thee.” Then follow the magical words by which all evil was to be warded off: “I am that amulet of green felspar, the necklace of the god Ra, which is given unto them that are on the horizon. They flourish, I flourish, my Ka flourishes even as they, my duration of life flourishes even as they, my Ka has abundance of food even as they. The scale of the balance rises, Truth rises high unto the nose of the god Ra on the day on which my Ka is where I am (?). My head and my arm are restored to me where I am (?). I am he whose eye seeth, whose ears hear; I am not a beast of sacrifice. The sacrificial formulæ for the higher ones of heaven are recited where I am.”

As might be expected, the Ka is often represented with the symbol of life in its hands. At the same time, it is important to remember that, though under one aspect the Ka was identical with the principle of life, in the mind of the Egyptian it was separate from the latter, just as it was separate from consciousness and from the divine essence. These were each of them independent entities which were possessed by the Ka just as they were possessed by its human counterpart. Life, consciousness, and relationship to the gods were all attributes of the Ka, but they were attributes, each of which had a concrete and independent existence of its own.

At the outset, doubtless, the Ka was practically identical with the vital principle. Primitive man does not distinguish as we do between the animate and the inanimate. He projects his own personality into the things he sees about him, and ascribes to them the same motive forces as those which move himself. He knows of only one source of movement and activity, and that source is life. The stars which travel through the firmament, the arrow that flies through the air, are either alive or else are directed and animated by some living power. Movement, in fact, implies life, and the moving object, whatever it may be, is a living thing.

The old belief or instinct is still strong in the child. He revenges himself upon the ball or stone that has struck him as though it too were a living being. In the Mosaic law it is laid down that “if an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned”; and similar penalties were enforced against animals which had injured man, not only in the Middle Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig was burned at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in 1266, for having devoured a child; and in 1389 a horse was brought to trial at Dijon for the murder of a man, and condemned to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an action was brought against the ants who had burrowed under the foundations of a monastery, and, after counsel had been heard on both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banishment by the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was first scourged for having abetted heresy, then catechised and made to recant, and finally baptized.(22)

The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than the orthodox theologians of La Rochelle. For them, too, action must have implied life, and the distinction between object and subject had not yet been realised. Hence the belief that objects as well as persons had each its Ka, a belief which was strengthened by the fact that they all alike cast shadows before them, as well as the further belief that the nature of the Ka was in either case the same. Hence it was, moreover, that the _ushebti_-figures and other sepulchral furniture were broken in order that their Kas might be released from them, and so accompany the Ka of the dead man in his wanderings in the other world. As life and the power of movement deserted the corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka was separated from it, so too the Ka of the _ushebti_ passed out of it when its form was mutilated by breakage. The life that was in it had departed, as it were, into another world.

It is even possible that the very word _Ka_ had originally a connection with a root signifying “to live.” At any rate, it was identical in spelling with a word which denoted “food”; and that the pronunciation of the two words was the same, may be gathered from the fact that the Egyptian bas-reliefs sometimes represent the offerings of food made to the dead or to the gods inside the arms of the symbol of the Ka(23). When we remember that _vivande_ is nothing more than the Latin _vivenda_, “the things on which we live,” there arises at least the possibility of an etymological connection between the double and the principle of life which it once symbolised.(24)