Chapter IX: Part I: The Religion of Ancient Egypt (8)

Norden, a few years later, has a similar tale to relate. He was told that the serpent-saint “never dies,” and that it “cures and grants favours to all those who implore its aid and offer sacrifices to it.” The cures were effected by the mere presence of the snake, which came in person to those who desired its help. The Christians, he adds, admit the miraculous powers of the Shêkh equally with the Mohammedans, only they explain them as due to a demon who clothes himself in a serpent’s form.(173)

Saint or demon, however, Shêkh Herîdî is really the lineal descendant of a serpent which has been worshipped in its neighbourhood since the prehistoric days of Egypt. A bronze serpent with the head of Zeus Serapis has been found in the mounds of Benâwît, on the western side of the Nile, which face the entrance to the shrine of the Shêkh; and the nome in which the shrine is situated was that of Du-Hefi, “the mountain of the snake.” The serpent of Shêkh Herîdî, with his miraculous powers of healing, must thus have been already famous in the days when the nomes of Upper Egypt first received their names. The old neolithic population of the desert must have already venerated the snake that dwelt in the cleft of the rock above which now rises the sacred “tomb” of Shêkh Herîdî.(174)

The faith of the people dies hard. The gods and goddesses, the theology and speculations of the official religion of Egypt, have passed away, but the old beliefs and superstitions which were already in possession of the land when the Pharaonic Egyptians first entered it, have survived both Christianity and Mohammedanism. The theological systems of Heliopolis or Thebes are like the sacred trees, which, according to Dr. Schweinfurth,(175) were brought from Southern Arabia along with the deities with whose cult they were associated; when the deities themselves ceased to be worshipped, the trees also ceased to be cultivated, and so disappeared from a soil wherein they had been but exotics. But the religion of the great mass of the people remained rooted as it were in the soil, like the palm or the acacia. It flowed like a strong current under the surface of the theology of the State, contemptuously tolerated by the latter, and in its turn but little affected by it. The theology of the State might incorporate and adapt the beliefs of the multitude; to the multitude the State theology was a “tale of little meaning, though the words were strong.”

If we would know what the bulk of the people thought of those deities whom the higher classes regarded as manifestations of a single ineffable and omnipotent divine power, we must turn to the folk-tales which were taken up and disfigured by the rationalising priests of a later period, when they combined together in a connected story all that had been said about the gods of the local sanctuaries. Each sanctuary came to possess its euhemerising legend of the chief divinity to whom it was consecrated; the divinity was transformed into an earthly king, and his history was concocted partly out of popular tales, associated for the most part with particular relics and charms, partly from forced etymologies of proper names. At how early a date these artificial legends first came into existence we do not know, but we already meet with examples of them in the time of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. They belong, however, to the age when the rationalistic process of resolving the gods into human princes had already begun,—the counter side of the process that had turned the Pharaoh into a god,—and their artificial character is betrayed by the attempt to extract history from learned but unscientific explanations of the origin of local and other names.

Here, for instance, is one which was compiled for the temple of the sun-god at Heliopolis, and is contained in a Turin papyrus of the age of the Twentieth Dynasty: “Account of the god who created himself, the creator of heaven, of earth, of the gods, of men, of wild beasts, of cattle, of reptiles, of fowls, and of fish; the king of men and gods, to whom centuries are but as years; who possesses numberless names which no man knoweth, no, not even the gods.

“Isis was a woman, more knowing in her malice than millions of men, clever among millions of the gods, equal to millions of spirits, to whom as unto Ra nothing was unknown either in heaven or upon earth.

“The god Ra came each day to sit upon his throne; he had grown old, his mouth trembled, his slaver trickled down to the earth, and his saliva dropped upon the ground. Isis kneaded it with her hand along with the dust that had adhered to it; she moulded therefrom a sacred serpent, to which she gave the form of a spear-shaft. She wound it not about her face, but flung it on the road along which the great god walked, as often as he wished, in his twofold kingdom.

“The venerable god went forth, the (other) gods accompanied him, he walked along as on other days. Then the sacred serpent bit him. The divine god opened his mouth, and his cry rang to heaven. His Ennead of gods called: ‘What is it?’ and the gods cried, ‘Look there!’ He could make no answer, his jaws chattered, his limbs shook, the venom took hold of his flesh as the Nile covers its banks (with water).

“When the heart of the great god was quieted, he called to his followers: ‘Come to me, ye children of my limbs, ye gods who have emanated from me! Something painful hath hurt me; my heart perceiveth it, yet my eyes see it not; my hand hath not wrought it, nothing that I have made knoweth what it is, yet have I never tasted suffering like unto it, and there is no pain which is worse.... I went forth to see what I had created, I was walking in the two lands which I have made, when something stung me which I knew not. Was it fire, was it water? My heart is in flames, my limbs tremble, all my members shiver. Let there be brought unto me the children of the gods of beneficent words, who have understanding mouths, and whose power reaches unto heaven.’

“The children of the gods came, full of woe; Isis came with her magic; with her mouth full of the breath of life, whose recipes destroy pain, whose word gives life to the dead. She said: ‘What is it, what is it, O father of the gods? A serpent hath wrought this suffering in thee, one of thy creatures hath lifted up his head against thee. Surely he shall be overthrown by beneficent incantations; I will make him retreat at the sight of thy rays.’

“The holy god opened his mouth: ‘I walked along the road, travelling through the two lands of the earth, after the desire of my heart, that I might see what I had created; then was I bitten by a serpent that I saw not. Is it fire, is it water? I am colder than water, I am hotter than fire, all my limbs sweat, I tremble, my eye is unsteady, I see not the sky, drops roll from my face as in the season of summer.’

“Isis replied to Ra: ‘O tell me thy name, father of the gods, then shall he live who is released (from pain) by thy name.’ But Ra answers: ‘I have created heaven and earth, I have set the hills in order, and made all beings that are thereon. I am he who created the water, and caused the primeval ocean to issue forth. I created the spouse of his (divine) mother. I created the heavens and the secrets of the two horizons, and have ordered the souls of the gods. I am he who illuminates all things at the opening of his eyes; if he closes his eyes, all is dark. The water of the Nile rises when he bids it; the gods know not his name. I make the hours and create the days, I send the year and create the inundation, I make the fire that lives, I purify the house. I am Khepera in the morning, Ra at noon, and Tum at evening.’

“The venom departed not, it advanced further, the great god became no better. Then Isis said to Ra: ‘Thy name was not pronounced in the words thou hast repeated. Tell it to me and the poison will depart; then shall he live whose name is (thus) named.’

“The poison glowed like fire; it was hotter than the flame of fire. The majesty of Ra said: ‘I grant thee leave that thou shouldest search within me, O mother Isis! and that my name pass from my bosom into thine.’

“So the god hid himself from the (other) gods; his everlasting bark was empty. When the moment arrived for extracting the heart (whereon the name was written), Isis said to her son Horus: ‘He must yield up unto thee his two eyes (the sun and moon).’

“So the name of the great god was taken from him, and Isis, the great enchantress, said: ‘Depart, O poison, leave Ra: let the eye of Horus go forth from the god and shine out of his mouth. I, I have done it; I throw on the earth the victorious poison, for the name of the great god is extracted from him. Let Ra live and the poison die!’ So spake Isis, the great one, the regent of the gods, who knows Ra and his true name.”

The writer of the papyrus adds that the recital of this legend is an excellent charm against the poison of a snake, especially if it is written and dissolved in water, which is then drunk by the patient; or if it is inscribed on a piece of linen, and hung around his neck.(176)

The contrast is striking between the introduction to the legend and the euhemeristic spirit that elsewhere prevails in it, and can be explained, even in the case of such disregarders of consistency as the Egyptians, only on the supposition that the Ra of folk-lore and the Ra of theology were held to be the same merely in name. Not even a pretence is made of regarding Isis as a goddess; she is simply a common witch, who resorts to magic in order to force Ra to hand over his name and therewith his powers to her son Horus. The virtue of the name, and the power conferred by a knowledge of it, are features common to the folk-lore of most countries. They take us back to that primitive phase of thought which not only identifies the name with the person or thing it represents, but makes it a separate entity with an existence of its own.

The legend of the sun-god of Edfu is equally instructive, though in its present form it is not earlier than the Ptolemaic age. This begins as follows: “In the three hundred and sixty-third year of the reign of Ra-Harmakhis, the ever-living, Ra was in Nubia with his soldiers. Enemies, however, conspired (_uu_) against him; hence the country has ever since borne the name of the land of Conspirators (_Uaua_). Then the god Ra went his way in his bark along with his followers, and landed in the nome of Edfu. Here the god Hor-Beḥudet (the winged disc) entered the bark of Ra and said to his father: ‘O Harmakhis, I see how the enemy have conspired against their lord.’ Then said the Majesty of Ra-Harmakhis to the person of Hor-Beḥudet: ‘O son of Ra, exalted one, who hast emanated from me, smite the enemy before thee forthwith.’ Hor-Beḥudet flew up to the sun in the form of a great winged disc; on that account he is ever since called the great god, the lord of heaven. He espied the enemy from the sky, he followed them in the form of a great winged disc. Through the attack which he made upon them in front, their eyes saw no longer, their ears heard no longer, each slew his neighbour forthwith, there remained not one alive. Then Hor-Beḥudet came in a many-coloured form as a great winged disc into the bark of Ra-Harmakhis. And Thoth said to Ra: ‘Lord of the gods, the god of Beḥudet (Edfu) has come in the form of a great winged disc: from this day forth he shall be called Hor-Beḥudet (Horus of Edfu).’ And he said (again): ‘From this day forth the city of Edfu shall be called the city of Hor-Beḥudet.’ Then Ra embraced the form of Hor, and said to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘Thou makest the water of Edfu (red with blood like) grapes, and thy heart is rejoiced thereat.’ Hence this water of Edfu is called (the water of grapes).

“And Hor-Beḥudet said: ‘March on, O Ra, and behold thine enemies under thy feet in this land.’ When the Majesty of Ra had turned back, and the goddess Astartê with him, he saw the enemy lying on the ground, each extended like a prisoner. Then said Ra to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘That is a suitable life.’ Hence the seat of Hor-Beḥudet has ever since been called the place of the Suitable Life. And Thoth said: ‘It was a piercing (_deb_) of my enemies.’ So the nome of Edfu (_Deb_) has been called ever since by that name. And Thoth said to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘Thou art a great protection’ (_mâk âa_). Great in Protection (_âa mâk_) accordingly has the sacred bark of Horus been ever since called.

“Then Ra spake to the gods who were with him: ‘Let us voyage (_khen_) in our bark on the Nile; we are rejoiced, for our enemies lie on the ground.’ The (canal) in which the great god was has ever since been called the Water of Voyaging (_Pe-khen_).

“Then the enemies of Ra entered the water: they changed themselves into crocodiles and hippopotamuses. But Harmakhis voyaged on the water in his bark. When the crocodiles and hippopotamuses came up to him, they opened their jaws in order to destroy the Majesty of Harmakhis. Then came Hor-Beḥudet with his followers the blacksmiths (_mesniu_); each held an iron lance and chain in his hand, wherewith he smote the crocodiles and the hippopotamuses. Then three hundred and eighty-one of the enemy were brought to the spot, who had been killed in sight of the city of Edfu.

“And Harmakhis said to Hor-Beḥudet: ‘Let my image be in Southern Egypt, since there it is that the victory was gained’ (_nekht âḥ_). So the dwelling-place of Hor-Beḥudet (at Edfu) has ever since been called the Victorious (_Nekht-âḥ_). And Thoth said, when he had seen the enemy lying on the ground: ‘Glad are your hearts, O gods of heaven; glad are your hearts, O gods of earth! Horus the younger is come in peace; he has wrought wonders in his journey which he undertook in accordance with the Book of the Slaying of the Hippopotamus.’ Ever since was there (at Edfu) a forge (_mesen_) of Horus.(177)

“Hor-Beḥudet changed his form into that of a winged solar disc, which remained there above the prow of the bark of Ea. He took with him Nekheb, the goddess of the south, and Uazit, the goddess of the north, in the form of two serpents, in order to annihilate the enemy in their crocodile and hippopotamus bodies in every place to which he came, both in Southern and in Northern Egypt.

“Then the enemy fled before him, they turned their faces towards the south, their hearts sank within them from fear. But Hor-Beḥudet was behind them in the bark of Ra, with an iron lance and chain in his hand. With him were his followers, armed with weapons and chains. Then beheld he the enemy towards the south-east of Thebes in a plain two schœni in size.”

Here follows an account of the several battles which drove the enemies of Horus from place to place until eventually all Egypt passed under his sway. The first battle, that which took place south-east of Thebes, was at Aa-Zadmi, so called from the “wounds” inflicted on the foe, which henceforth bore the sacred name of Hât-Ra, “the House of Ra.” The second was at Neter-khadu, “the divine carnage,” to the north-east of Dendera; the third at Hebnu, near Minia, in the nome of the Gazelle; and others followed at Oxyrrhynchus or Beḥnesa, and Herakleopolis or Aḥnas, where a twofold Mesen or “Forge” was established. Then the foe were driven through the Delta and defeated at Zaru on its eastern frontier, whence they fled in ships down the Red Sea, but were finally overthrown at Shas-ḥer, near the later Berenikê, at the end of the road that led across the desert from the Nile.

Meanwhile, on the 7th of Tybi, their leader “Set had come forward and cried horribly, uttering curses upon the deed of Hor-Beḥudet in slaying the enemy. And Ra said to Thoth: ‘The horrible one cries loudly on account of what Hor-Beḥudet has done against him.’ Thoth replied to Ra: ‘Let the cries be called horrible from this day forward.’ Hor-Beḥudet fought long with Set; he flung his iron at him, he smote him to the ground in the city which henceforward was called Pa-Reḥeḥui (the House of the Twins).(178) When Hor-Beḥudet returned, he brought Set with him; his spear stuck in his neck, his chain was on his hand; the mace of Horus had smitten him, and closed his mouth. He brought him before his father Ra.

“Then Ra said to Thoth: ‘Let the companions of Set be given to Isis and Horus her son, that they may deal with them as they will.’... So Horus the son of Isis cut off the head of Set and his confederates before his father Ra and all the great Ennead. He carried him under his feet through the land, with the axe on his head and in his back.”

Set, however, was not slain. He transformed himself into a serpent, and the battles succeeded which ended with the victory at Shas-ḥer in the land of Uaua. After this “Harmakhis came in his bark and landed at Thes-Hor (the Throne of Horus or Edfu). And Thoth said: ‘The dispenser of rays who cometh forth from Ra has conquered the enemy in his form (of a winged disc); let him be named henceforward the dispenser of rays who cometh forth from the horizon.’ And Ra said to Thoth: ‘Bring this sun (the winged disk) to every place where I am, to the seats of the gods in Southern Egypt, to the seats of the gods in Northern Egypt, (to the seats of the gods) in the other world, that it may drive all evil from its neighbourhood.’ Thoth brought it accordingly to all places, as many as exist where there are gods and goddesses. It is the winged solar disc which is placed over the sanctuaries of all gods and goddesses in Egypt, since these sanctuaries are also that of Hor-Beḥudet.”(179)

The legend is a curious combination of the traditions relative to the conquest of the neolithic population by the Pharaonic Egyptians, of the myth of Osiris, of etymological speculations about the meaning of certain proper names, and of an attempt to explain the origin of the winged solar disc. We may gather from it that the disc was first used as an ornament at Edfu, and that it was believed, like the winged bulls of Assyria, to have the power of preventing the demons of evil from passing the door over which it was placed. Whether, however, this was one of the superstitions of the older people, or whether it was brought by the conquerors from their Babylonian home, is doubtful; perhaps the fact that the disc was a symbolic and architectural ornament, and was confined, so far as we know, to the temples of the official gods, points in the latter direction. It is otherwise with the temple relics mentioned in a legend which has been preserved on a granite shrine of the Ptolemaic epoch, that long served as a water-trough by the side of the well at El-Arîsh. The temple from which it originally came was that of At-Nebes, the sacred name of the city of Qesem or Goshen, now Saft el-Henna. The legend begins by describing the reign of Shu, who fortified At-Nebes against “the children of Apophis,” the Semites of “the red desert,” who came from the East “at nightfall upon the road of At-Nebes” to invade Egypt. Here he dwelt in his palace, and from hence he “ascended into heaven,” when he had grown old and the time had come for him to die. He was succeeded by his son Seb, who “discussed the history of the city with the gods who attended him, (and they told him) all that happened when the Majesty of Ra was in At-Nebes, the conflicts of the king Tum in this locality, the valour of the Majesty of Shu in this city ... (and the wonders that) the serpent-goddess Ankhet had done for Ra when he was with her; the victories of the Majesty of Shu, smiting the evil ones, when he placed her upon his brow. Then said the Majesty of Seb: ‘I also (will place) her upon my head, even as my father Shu did.’ Seb entered the temple of Aart (Lock of Hair) together with the gods that were with him; then he stretched forth his hand to take the casket in which (Ankhet) was; the serpent came forth and breathed its vapour on the Majesty of Seb, confounding him greatly; those who followed him fell dead, and his Majesty himself was burned in that day. When his Majesty had fled to the north of At-Nebes, with the fire of the cobra upon him, behold, when he came to the fields of henna, the pain of his burn was not yet assuaged, and the gods who followed him said unto him: ‘Come, let them take the lock (_aart_) of Ra which is there, when thy Majesty shall go to see it and its mystery, and his Majesty shall be healed (as soon as it is placed) upon thee.’ So the Majesty of Seb caused the magic lock of hair to be brought to Pa-Aart (the House of the Lock), for which was made that reliquary of hard stone which is hidden in the secret place of Pa-Aart, in the district of the divine lock of the god Ra; and behold the fire departed from the limbs of the Majesty of Seb. And many years afterwards, when this lock of hair was brought back to Pa-Aart in At-Nebes, and cast into the great lake of Pa-Aart, whose name is the Dwelling of Waves, in order that it might be purified, behold the lock became a crocodile; it flew to the water and became Sebek, the divine crocodile of At-Nebes.”(180)

Inside the shrine is a picture of the two relics, the cobra which adorned the head-dress of the Pharaoh, and the _aart_ or lock of hair which was supposed to give its name to the temple. They were doubtless preserved at At-Nebes, and shown to the faithful as the veritable objects which had proved the bane and the antidote of the god Seb. They introduce us to a side of Egyptian religion which, though essentially characteristic of the popular faith, had also received the sanction of the official creed. The belief in amulets and charms was too deeply engrained in the popular mind to be ignored; they were consequently taken under the patronage of the gods, and a theory was invented to explain their efficacy. Already the later chapters of the Book of the Dead are concerned with the various amulets which were necessary to the preservation or resuscitation of the body; and even if the latter were regarded as symbolic, they were concrete symbols—symbols, that is to say, which actually possessed the virtues ascribed to them. Just as the name was a concrete entity, expressive of the very essence of the thing to which it was applied, so too the symbol was an entity with a concrete existence of its own. The materialistic tendency of Egyptian thought, added to the fetishism of the earlier stratum of native religion, produced this result. The doctrine of the Ka furnished a theory by which the educated classes could explain the efficacy of the amulet and the active virtues of the symbol. It was the Ka, the spiritual and yet materialised double, of the amulet that worked the charm—that made the scarab, for instance, a substitute for the living heart, or the _dad_—the symbol of stability—a passport to the other world.(181)

The amulets buried with the dead, the relics preserved in the temples, had originally been the fetishes of the earlier population of Egypt. They hardly changed their character when they became symbols endowed with mysterious properties, or relics of the State gods which still possessed miraculous powers. The peasant might be told in the ritual of Amon: in “the sanctuary of the god clamour is an abomination to him: pray for thyself with a loving heart, in which the words remain hidden; that he may supply thy need, hear thy words and accept thine offering”;(182) but it was a teaching that was far above him. When he entered the sanctuary it was to see the processions of the priests and the relics preserved in it, and it was in these relics that he still put his trust. It was not only in Ethiopia that there were moving and speaking statues which elected the king by taking him by the hand; in Thebes itself, under the priestly kings of the Twentieth Dynasty, we find wonder-working statues whose reality was guaranteed by the priesthood. One of them, it was said, was sent to Asia, where it delivered a king’s daughter from the demon that possessed her, and afterwards returned in a moment to Thebes of its own accord; while others answered the questions addressed to them by nodding the head, or even pronounced prophecies regarding the future.(183) Indeed, as we have seen, the old theory of the ka implied that the statue of the dead man could be reanimated in a sense by his spirit; and a text at Dendera speaks of the soul of Hathor descending from heaven as a human-headed hawk of lapis-lazuli, and uniting itself with her image. The peasant, therefore, might be excused if he remained true to the superstitions and traditions of his ancestors, and left the official religion, with its one ineffable god, to those who were cultured enough to understand it. Like the peasant of modern Italy, he was content with a divinity that he could see and handle, and about whose wonder-working powers he had no doubt. Materialism is the basis of primitive religion; the horizon of primitive man is limited, and he has not yet learnt to separate thought from the senses through which alone his narrow world is known to him. The simple faith of a child often wears a very materialistic form.

Lecture X. The Place Of Egyptian Religion In The History Of Theology.

In the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to bring before you the more salient points in the religion of the ancient Egyptians, in so far as they illustrate their conception of the divine. But we must remember that all such descriptions of ancient belief must be approximate only. We cannot put ourselves in the position of those who held it; our inherited experiences, our racial tendencies, our education and religious ideas, all alike forbid it. If the Egyptians of the Theban period found it difficult to understand the ritual of their own earlier history, and misinterpreted the expressions and allusions in it, how much more difficult must it be for us to do so. The most ordinary religious terms do not bear for us the same meaning that they bore for the Egyptians. The name of God calls up other associations and ideas; the very word “divine” has a different signification in the ancient and the modern world among Eastern and Western peoples. In fact, the more literal is our translation of an old religious text, the more likely we are to misunderstand it.

And yet in one sense we are the religious heirs of the builders and founders of the Egyptian temples. Many of the theories of Egyptian religion, modified and transformed no doubt, have penetrated into the theology of Christian Europe, and form, as it were, part of the woof in the web of modern religious thought. Christian theology was largely organised and nurtured in the schools of Alexandria, and Alexandria was not only the meeting-place of East and West, it was also the place where the decrepit theology of Egypt was revivified by contact with the speculative philosophy of Greece. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Jew met there on equal terms, and the result was a theological system in which each had his share. In Philo, we are told, we find Moses Platonising; but the atmosphere in which he did so was that of the old Egyptian faith. And what was true of the philosophy of Philo was still more true of the philosophy of Alexandrine Christianity.

You cannot but have been struck by the similarity of the ancient Egyptian theory of the spiritual part of man to that which underlies so much Christian speculation on the subject, and which still pervades the popular theology of to-day. There is the same distinction between soul and spirit, the same belief in the resurrection of a material body, and in a heaven which is but a glorified counterpart of our own earth. Perhaps, however, the indebtedness of Christian theological theory to ancient Egyptian dogma is nowhere more striking than in the doctrine of the Trinity. The very terms used of it by Christian theologians meet us again in the inscriptions and papyri of Egypt.

Professor Maspero has attempted to show that the Egyptian doctrine of the Trinity was posterior to that of the Ennead.(184) Whether this were so or not, it makes its appearance at an early date in Egyptian theology, and was already recognised in the Pyramid texts. Originally the trinity was a triad like those we find in Babylonian mythology. Here and there the primitive triads survived into historical times, like that of Khnum and the two goddesses of the Cataract. But more frequently the trinity was an artificial creation, the formation of which can still be traced. Thus at Thebes the female element in it was found in Mut, “the mother” goddess, a title of the supreme goddess of Upper Egypt; while Khonsu, the moon-god, or Mentu, the old god of the nome, became the divine son, and so took a place subordinate to that of the local god Amon. Sometimes recourse was had to grammar, and the second person in the trinity was obtained by attaching the feminine suffix to the name of the chief god. In this way Amon-t was grammatically evolved from Amon, and even Ra-t from Ra. Elsewhere an epithet of the god was transformed into his son; at Memphis, for example, Imhotep, “he who comes in peace,” a title of Ptaḥ, became his son and the second person in the trinity. Other members of the trinity were fetched from neighbouring cities and nomes; Nit of Sais had Osiris as a husband, and Sekhet of Letopolis and Bast of Bubastis were successively regarded as the wives of Ptaḥ.

The triad consisted of a divine father, wife, and son. It was thus a counterpart of the human family, and belonged to the same order of ideas as that which explained the creation of the world by a process of generation. This was the cosmology of Heliopolis, and it is probable that to Heliopolis also we must ascribe the doctrine of the Trinity. At any rate the doctrine seems to have been solar in its origin. As Tum, the god of sunset, was identical with Khepera, the sun of the morning, and Ra, the sun of the noonday,—all three being but one god under diverse forms,—so the divine father was believed to engender himself in the person of the divine son, and the divine mother to be one with the divine father and son. The divine essence remained necessarily the same, whatever might be the forms or names under which it displayed itself; and the name, it must be remembered, had for the Egyptian a separate and real existence. The father became the son and the son the father through all time, and of both alike the mother was but another form. It was eternal fatherhood, eternal motherhood, and eternal generation. The development of the doctrine was assisted by that identification of the Egyptian deities with the sun-god which ended in solar pantheism, as well as by the old theory of the ka, of a personality distinguishable from that to which it belonged, identical with that of which it was the double, and yet at the same time enjoying an independent existence of its own.

With the spread of the Osirian form of faith the doctrine of the Trinity became universal throughout Egypt. The organisation of the faith had included the reduction of the cycle of divinities connected with Osiris into a trinity. Thoth and Anubis, Nebhât and Set, were separated from him, and henceforth he was made the head of a triad, in which Isis was the second person, and Horus, the avenger of his father, was the third. How completely the father and son were merged together may be seen from a hymn to Horus which has been translated by Chabas(185)—

“The gods are joyous at the arrival of Osiris,
the son of Horus, the intrepid,
the truth-speaking, the son of Isis, the heir of Osiris. The
divine chiefs join him,
the gods recognise the omnipotent child himself ...
the reign of justice belongs to him.
Horus has found his justification, to him is given the title of
his father;
he appears with the _atef_-crown by order of Seb. He takes the
royalty of the two worlds,
the crown of Upper Egypt is placed upon his head.
He judges the world as he likes,
heaven and earth are beneath his eye,
he commands mankind—the intellectual beings, the race of the
Egyptians and the northern barbarians.
The circuit of the solar disc is under his control;
the winds, the waters, the wood of the plants, and all
vegetables....
Sanctifying, beneficent is his name ...
evil flies afar off, and the earth brings forth abundantly under
her lord.
Justice is confirmed by its lord, who chases away iniquity.
Mild is thy heart, O (Osiris) Un-nefer, son of Isis;
he has taken the crown of Upper Egypt; for him is acknowleged the
authority of his father in the great dwelling of Seb;
he is Ra when speaking, Thoth when writing; the divine chiefs are
at rest.”

Here Osiris is identified with Horus, and so becomes the son of his own wife.

The Egyptian trinity has thus grown out of the triad under the influence of the solar theology, and of the old conception of a personality which possessed a concrete form. Once introduced into the Osirian creed, it spread with it throughout Egypt, and became a distinguishing feature of Egyptian theology. Along with the doctrines of the resurrection of the body and of a judgment to come, it passed into the schools of Alexandria, and was there thrown into the crucible of Greek philosophy. The Platonic doctrine of ideas was adapted to the Egyptian doctrine of personality, and the three persons of the trinity became Unity, Mind, and Soul—absolute thought, absolute reason, and absolute energy.(186)

But while, on the one hand, there is continuity between the religious thought of ancient Egypt and the religious thought of the world of to-day, there is also continuity, on the other hand, between the religion of Egypt and that of primitive Babylonia. In the course of these lectures I have more than once pointed to the fact: the Pharaonic Egyptians were of Asiatic origin and they necessarily brought with them the religious ideas of their Eastern home. As we come to know more both of early Babylonian civilisation and of the beginnings of Egyptian history, we shall doubtless discover that the links between them are closer than we at present imagine, and much that is now obscure will become clear and distinct. Meanwhile there is one link which I cannot pass over. Astro-theology once played a considerable part in the religion of the Egyptians. In the historical age it has lost its importance; the stars have been identified with the official deities, who have accordingly absorbed their individual attributes; but echoes of the worship formerly paid to them are still heard in the Pyramid texts. Saḥu or Orion is still remembered as a mighty hunter, whose hunting-ground was the plain of heaven, and whose prey were the gods themselves. When he rises, it is said in the Pyramid of Unas, “the stars fight together, and the archers patrol” the sky which drops with rain; the smaller stars which form his constellation pursue and lasso the gods as the human hunter lassoes the wild bull; they slay and disembowel their booty, and boil the flesh in glowing caldrons. The “greater gods” are hunted “in the morning,” those of less account at mid-day, the “lesser gods” “at evening, and Saḥu refreshes himself with the divine banquet,” feeding on their bodies and absorbing “their magic virtues.” “The great ones of the sky” launch “the flames against the caldrons wherein are the haunches of the followers” of the gods; the pole-star, “who causes the dwellers in the sky to march in procession round” Orion, “throws into the caldron the legs of their wives.”(187) We are transported to the cannibal’s kitchen of some African chieftain, such as that represented on a curious stela found in Darfûr, and now in the museum of Constantinople. The whole description takes us back to a period in the history of Egypt long anterior to that of the Pyramids, when the Pharaonic invaders were first beginning to mingle with the older population of the land and become acquainted with its practices. In the days of Unas the real meaning of the expressions handed down by theological conservatism had been forgotten, or was interpreted metaphorically; but they remained to prove that the age when Orion was still an object of worship superior to the gods of heaven was one which went back to the very dawn of Pharaonic history. The cult of the stars must have been brought by “the followers of Horus” from their Asiatic home.(188)

The fame of Orion was eclipsed in later days by that of Sopd or Sirius. But this had its reason in the physio-graphical peculiarities of Egypt. The heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, that is to say, its first appearance along with the sun, corresponded with the rise of the Nile in Upper Egypt, and accordingly became a mark of time, and the starting-point of the solar year. Its importance therefore was great, not only for the calendar, but also for those agricultural operations upon which the very existence of Egypt depended. We need not wonder, accordingly, if with the settlement of the Pharaonic Egyptians in the valley of the Nile the worship and name of Orion fell more and more into the background, while that of Sirius became pre-eminent. How far back the pre-eminence of Sirius reaches may be gathered from the fact that the twentieth nome of Northern Egypt—that of Goshen—derived its name from a combination of the mummified hawk of Horus and the cone which, as Brugsch first showed,(189) represents the shaft of zodiacal light that accompanies the rising of Sirius before the dawn of day. Sopd or Sirius is thus identified with the dead Horus who presided over Nekhen in Upper Egypt, and preceded Osiris as the god of the dead.(190)

Of the other stars and constellations we do not know much. The Great Bear was called “the haunch of beef,” and was at times identified with Set, and made the abode of the souls of the wicked. Not far off was the hippopotamus, which Brugsch would identify with Draco; while among other constellations were to be found the Lion and the Horus-hawk, as well as a warrior armed with a spear.

All over the world the more prominent stars and constellations have received names. But it is only the more prominent and brilliant among them of which this is true. So far as we know, the only people who have ever systematically mapped out the heavens, dividing the stars into groups, and giving to each group a name of its own, were the Babylonians; and it was from the Babylonians that the constellations as known to Greeks and Romans, to Hindus, or to Chinese, were ultimately derived. The inference, therefore, is near at hand, that the primitive Egyptians also were indebted for their map of the sky to the same source. And the inference is supported by more than one fact.

On the one side, the names of several of the constellations were the same among both Babylonians and Egyptians. Of this the Twins, Aquarius, or the Family, are examples, while it can hardly be an accident that Orion in both systems of astronomy is a giant and a hunter. “The Bull of heaven” was a Babylonian star, and Jupiter bore the Sumerian name of Gudi-bir, “the Bull of light”; in the Pyramid texts also we have a “Bull of heaven,” the planet Saturn according to Brugsch, Jupiter according to Lepsius. Still more striking are the thirty-six Egyptian decans, the stars who watched for ten days each over the 360 days of the ancient Egyptian year, and were divided into two classes or hemispheres, those of the day and those of the night.(191) Not only did the early Chaldæan year similarly consist of 360 days; it too was presided over by thirty-six “councillor” stars, half of which were above the earth, while the other half were below it.(192) Such a coincidence cannot have been accidental; the Babylonian and Egyptian decans must have had the same origin.

But there was yet a further parallelism between the stellar theology of Egypt and that of Babylonia. In both countries the worship of the stars passed into an astro-theology. The official gods were identified with the planets and fixed stars, and the stellar cult of the people was thus absorbed into the State religion. But whereas this astro-theology was characteristic of Babylonia, it has done little more than leave its traces on the historical religion of Egypt. Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were identified with Horus under different forms, and Mercury with Set, while Venus became “the bark (_za_)(193) of the phœnix” or soul “of Osiris.” Sirius was made the star of Isis, Orion the star of Osiris. But, like the cult of the stars itself, this astro-theology belongs to a far-off age in Egyptian history. It is the last faint reflection of a phase of religious thought which had passed away when the monumental records first begin.

It is the same with a curious echo of ancient Babylonian cosmology, to which Prof. Hommel has drawn our attention. The old Babylonian Epic of the Creation begins with the words—

“At that time the heaven above was not known by name,
the earth beneath was not named,
in the beginning the deep was their generator,
the chaos of the sea was the mother of them all.”

The lines are the introduction to a story of the Creation of which they form an integral part. On the walls of the Pyramid of Pepi I. we read again almost the same words. Pepi, it is said, “was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not, the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was no death.”(194) But here the words have been introduced without connection with the context; they cohere neither with what precedes nor with what follows them, and are evidently nothing but an old formula torn from the cosmogony to which they once belonged, and repeated without a clear understanding of what they really meant. The phrases are found again in the later religious literature of Egypt, embedded in it like flies in amber or the fossils in an old sea-beach.(195) To recover their original meaning we must betake ourselves to the clay tablets of Assyria and Babylonia, and the cosmological theories of early Chaldæa. They presuppose that story of a creation out of the chaos of the deep which was indigenous in Babylonia alone.

This deep, which lay at the foundation of Babylonian cosmology, was symbolised in the temples by a “sea” across which the images of the gods were carried in “ships” on their days of festival. In Babylonia such “seas” had a reason for their existence. The Persian Gulf, it was believed, was the cradle of Babylonian culture; it was also the source of that cosmogony which saw in the deep the “mother” of all things. That it should have its mimic representatives in the temples of the country was but natural; it was from the “deep” that the gods had come, and the deep was still the home of the culture-god Ea.(196)

In Egypt, on the other hand, the sea was out of place nay more, it was altogether unnatural. If water were needed, the sacred Nile flowed at the foot of the temple or else there were canals which conducted the waters of the river through the temple lands. There was no primeval deep to be symbolised, no Persian Gulf out of which the culture-god had risen with the gifts of civilisation. If the gods desired to sail in their barks, it was reasonable to suppose that they would do so on the Nile or its tributary canals. And yet the supposition would be wrong. The gods had indeed their sacred “ships” as in Babylonia; but, as in Babylonia, it was on an artificially-constructed lake that they floated, and not, as a rule, on the river Nile. Could anything indicate more clearly the origin of the religious beliefs and practices of the Pharaonic Egyptians? Like the brick tombs of the Old Empire, with their recessed panels and pilasters, it points to Babylonia and the cosmological theories which had their birth in the Babylonian plain.(197)

The religion of ancient Egypt is thus no isolated fact. It links itself, on the one hand, with the beliefs and religious conceptions of the present, and, on the other hand, with those of a yet older past. But it is a linking only; Egyptian religion is no more the religion of ancient Babylonia than it is modern Christianity. In Egypt it assumed a form peculiar to itself, adapting itself to the superstitions and habits of the earlier inhabitants of the land, and developing the ideas which lay latent within it. It was characterised by the inexorable logic with which each of these ideas was followed to its minutest conclusions, and at the same time by the want of any attempt to harmonise these conclusions one with the other, however inconsistent they might be. It was also characterised by a spirit of creativeness; the Egyptian created new religious conceptions because he was not afraid to follow his premisses to their end.

But he was intensely practical. Abstractions as such had little attraction for him, and he translated them into material form. The symbolism of his system of writing favoured the process: even such an abstract idea as that of “becoming” became for him a “transformation” or “change of outward shape.” In spite, therefore, of the spirituality and profundity of much of his theology, his religion remained essentially materialistic. The gods might indeed pass one into the other and be but the manifold forms under which the ever-changing divine essence manifested itself, but this was because it was one with nature and the infinite variety which nature displays. Even the supreme god of Khu-n-Aten incorporated himself at it were in the visible orb of the sun.

The incarnation of the deity accordingly presented no difficulty to the Egyptian mind. It followed necessarily from the fundamental principles of his creed. The divinity which permeated the whole of nature revealed itself more clearly than elsewhere in that which possessed life. Egyptian religious thought never quite shook itself free from the influences of the primitive belief that life and motion were the same. Whatever moves possesses life, whatever lives must move;—such was, and still is, one of the axioms of primitive man. And since the deity manifested itself in movement, it could be recognised in whatever was alive. Man on the one side became a god in the person of the Pharaoh, the gods on the other side became men who had lived and died like Osiris, or had ruled over Egypt in the days of old. Even the ordinary man contained within him a particle or effluence of the divine essence which could never die; and the bodily husk in which it was incarnated could, under certain conditions, acquire the properties of that divinity to which it had afforded a home. That the divine essence could thus assume an individual form, was part of the doctrine which saw, in the manifold varieties of nature, the manifestations of a “single god.” The belief in the incarnation of the deity was a necessary consequence of a materialistic pantheism. And it mattered little whether the incarnation took place under a human or under an animal shape; the human and the animal god had alike been a heritage from elements which, diverse though they may have been in origin, combined to form the Egyptian people, and both the man and the beast were alike living and therefore divine. The beast was more mysterious than the man, that was all; the workings of its mind were more difficult to comprehend, and the language it spoke was more unintelligible. But on that very account it was better adapted for the symbolism which literature and education encouraged, and which became an essential part of the texture of Egyptian thought.

If, then, we would understand the conception of the divine formed by the educated Egyptian of the historical age, we must remember the characteristics of Egyptian thought which lay behind it. Materialism and symbolism constituted the background of Egyptian religion. The one presupposed the other, for the symbol presented the abstract idea in a material and visible shape, while the materialism of the Egyptian mind demanded something concrete which the senses could apprehend. The conception of the ka, with which Egyptian religion begins, is characteristic of Egyptian religious thought up to the last. It is like the “materialised spirits” of modern spiritualism, spirits which are merely matter in an etherialised form. The Egyptian gave not only shape but substance to his mental and spiritual creations; like the “ideas” of Plato, they became sensuous realities like the written symbols which expressed them. Not only were the name and the thing never dissociated from one another, the name was looked on as the essence of the thing, and the name included its expression in both sound and writing. The bird which represented the idea of “soul” became in time the soul itself.

This very fact assisted in spiritualising Egyptian religion. Ideas and their symbols interchange one with the other; the ideas, moreover, develop and pass out of one form into another. The identification, therefore, of the abstract and the concrete, of ideas and substantial existence, made a pantheistic conception of the universe easy. The divinity clothed itself in as many forms as there were symbols to express it, and these forms passed one into the other like phases of thought. The Egyptian was the first discoverer of the term “becoming,” and the keynote of his creed was the doctrine of transformation.

Transformation, it must be remembered, is not transmigration. There was no passage of an individual soul from body to body, from form to form; the divine essence permeated all bodies and forms alike, though it manifested itself at a given moment only under certain ones. It was in this power of manifestation that the transformation consisted. Had the Egyptian not been fettered by his materialistic symbolism, he would doubtless have gone further and concluded that the various manifestations of the divinity were subjective only—existing, that is to say, only in the mind of the observer; as it was, he held them to be objective, and to possess the same substantial reality as the symbolic pictures by which they were denoted.

With all this, however, there was no severe literalism in the interpretation of the symbol. Whatever may have been the case at the outset, the symbol was as much a metaphor in the historical ages of Egyptian history as are the metaphors of our own language. When the Egyptian spoke of “eating” his god, he meant no more than we do when we speak of “absorbing” a subject.(198) The Pyramid texts are full of such faded and forgotten metaphors; the Egyptian was conservative above all other men, and the language of religion is conservative above all others. Doubtless, in some cases, he was the victim of the symbols and metaphors he used; but in this respect he does not stand alone. Where he has no rival is in the magnitude of the part played in his religion by the symbol and its logical development.