Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge

“ He visits all the great shrines of Osiris and Rā, holds converse with the gods of every portion of heaven, makes himself acquainted with all their mysteries, and day by day becomes more and more like them. To establish and maintain communication with the spirits of the dead was the heart’s desire of pious Egyptians in all ages, and they thought that there was no more certain way of bringing this about than by making offerings to them. ”

“ In all the known literature of pagan Egypt, no parallel to the following passage can be found: “Fasting is the subjugation of the body, prayer is converse with God, vigil is a war against Satan, abstinence is the being weaned from meats, humility is the state of the great man, kneeling is the inclining of the body before the Judge, tears are the remembrance of sins, nakedness is our captivity which is caused by the transgression of the command, and service is constant supplication to and praise of God” (Vol. II, p. 263) . ”

“ Then the old man cried out, ‘I believe, O Lord, that the bread is Thy Body, and that the cup is Thy Blood,’ and straightway the flesh which was in his hand became bread like unto that of the mystery.” In the pagan ceremony the flesh of the bull, the bread-cakes and the wine or beer, represented the material forms of Osiris, and the god was in all three; but in the Christian ceremony the two monks believed that the Body was turned into bread and the Blood into wine, because “God knew the nature of men, and it is unable to eat living flesh.” ”

“ In primitive times it is tolerably certain that when the living made offerings to the dead, their sole idea was to provide the spirits with nourishment sufficient to enable them to reach the place where the spirits dwelt in the Other World. As time went on, however, it was thought that the giving of food, and drink, and apparel to the dead, would benefit those who gave them when it was their turn to depart from this world, and proof of this is found in a text cut on the alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I., a king of the XIXth Dynasty. ”

“ To Palladius we owe the oldest and best history of the lives, and words, and deeds of the solitaries and coenobites of Egypt, and every student of the history of religious thought should be grateful to him for a work which describes truly and impartially a great Christian movement, the effects of which exist even in our own days. ”

“ The material elements of the offerings were eaten by the priests and the relatives of the dead, and the act of eating brought them into communion with the blessed dead, and with the gods. The age of the belief in the transmutation of offerings cannot be stated, but it is certain that it was well known to the Egyptians under the Vth Dynasty, and there is reason to think that it was not unknown to their ancestors in the latter part of the Neolithic Period, and that it is coeval with the indigenous African belief in the immortality of the soul, and in a life beyond the grave. ”

“ Later, when men like Anthony, and Paul, and Ammon lived in the desert, the man who would be a monk joined their followers, and learned from them the fundamental principles of the ascetic life. Those who, for various reasons, felt themselves unequal to the labours of the solitary life, remained in the company of their fellow-monks, and usually lived blameless lives until they died. The solitary dweller, having chosen his place of abode, at once began to eat sparingly with the view of reducing the strength of the passions of his body, and he drank nothing but water. ”

“ Some of the liquid is kept in order to injure enemies. The object of drinking the liquid is, clearly, to obtain the qualities of the dead man, his strength, and, perhaps, his vital power, and it is possible also that those who indulged in such practices did so with the idea of avoiding injury from the departed spirit. What the Egyptians did with the humours of the dead is unknown, but in the case of great and holy men, that which drained from their bodies was certainly turned to some good account by the living. ”

“ On the other hand, it must be confessed that few young men of gentle bringing up could emulate successfully Dorotheos, who lived on dry bread and wandered about in the sun all day on the seashore collecting stones for building, or could endure the hardship of walking for days at a time, to say nothing of the heat by day, the chills by night, rough lodgings, and rough food which could only be obtained at irregular intervals. ”

“ The effect of the sprinkling of water over the statue, or the washing of it with water, was to remove the sins of the deceased from him, and to cleanse his body and Ka. There can be no doubt that the Egyptians in all periods attached very great importance to the use of water ceremonially, and there is good reason for believing that they regarded it as one of the principal sources of life, since the gods were created from water, and Nu, the great god of the celestial deeps, was the father of the gods. ”

“ Moderate men thought it best for a man to eat a very little bread each day. A limited number of monks never ate bread at all, for they agreed with Theodotus, who said, “Abstinence from bread quieteth the body of a monk” (Vol. II, p. 21) . And Poemen said, “The soul can be humbled by nothing except thou make it feeble by eating bread” (Vol. II, p. 22) . Some monks never ate bread at all, others ate nothing else, and the former lived upon vegetables and fruit, and, when they could find it, wild honey. ”

“ The effluxes of Osiris here referred to are undoubtedly the humours which were believed to have drained out of the body of Osiris when Horus and his "sons" were embalming it. From the above passages it is clear that the Egyptians regarded these humours as pure or holy, for they represented the very essence of the god. Now the Egyptians were not the only people in the world who attached mystic power and importance to the fluid which ran out from the dead, but though the texts make it certain that they did, we cannot learn from them exactly why they should do so. ”

“ The heaven of the Christians was filled with saints and martyrs, who awaited the arrival of the blessed from the earth and welcomed them with gladness and songs of joy; and, similarly, the kingdom of Osiris in the Other World was filled with his loyal followers, and with those who had served and worshipped him upon earth. Both the pagan and Christian Egyptians believed in an individual existence in heaven, and each class thought that the blessed would be able to recognize each other and to enjoy each other’s society. ”

“ The consistent, persistent, ineradicable and unalterable belief in immortality is the chief fundamental of the Egyptian Religion, and the attainment of everlasting life was the end to which every religious ceremony was performed, and every funerary text written. ”

“ To guess at the origin of their friendship is useless, and whatever his motive may have been in urging Palladius to compile his histories, the thanks of every student of religion is due to Lausus as being the immediate cause of the production of a work which gives a true account of the origin and development of one of the most remarkable phases of Christianity which the world has ever seen. ”

“ The Egyptians attached great importance to spoken words, and they regarded the power of speech and the gift of the voice as mighty weapons, both for the living and the dead. The Kau, or Doubles, of the dead who had learned to utter words correctly, and who knew the proper tones to employ in uttering them, were in a position to go where they pleased and to do what they liked, for no god, spirit, fiend, or devil, and no inanimate object, could help obeying the commands which they uttered. ”

“ Taking all the probabilities of the case into consideration, we are justified in stating that by the year 300 there were in all the mountains and deserts of Egypt a large number of Christian monks and solitary ascetics. It is doubtful if brotherhoods existed at this time; indeed, the histories of the ascetics which come first in the book Paradise indicate that they did not, for from these we learn that each recluse did what seemed right in his own eyes. Each man was entirely devoted to the saving of his own soul, and apparently cared for nothing and no one else. ”

“ When an important Luba chief expires, every one, great and small, must mourn in a subdued tone; the members of all the brotherhoods come before the house where the body lies to perform dances; the women violently strike their hatchet and hoe against each other. ”

“ FROM the Histories related by Palladius and by the author of The History of the Monks we can gain a very clear idea of the manner of the lives of the solitary dwellers in the desert and of those who dwelt in monasteries. The first thing to be done by the man who determined to become an ascetic was to flee from the world, that is to say, to forsake the habitation of men, and to avoid all intercourse with men, and especially with women. At first the strong-willed man left his town or village, and seeking out a lonely spot in the desert or mountains took up his abode there. ”

“ As in the Book of Opening the Mouth the words spoken by the Kher-ḥeb, or chief officiating priest, were believed to change the meat, and bread, and wine into divine substances, so in the Liturgy also the formula which was said over each element was supposed to change it into a divine and spiritual food, which was partaken of by the souls of the gods and of the dead. ”

“ Palladius was, no doubt, credulous in respect of miracles and supernatural occurrences in general, but, in my opinion, the evidence that he was so is a proof that he lived at a time when the Christian world believed in the things which he describes, and the details given by him convince me that his knowledge of the particular events which he records was acquired at first hand. Those who are familiar with the magic of the Dynastic Egyptians find few miraculous occurences in the histories of the monks of which parallels do not exist in the pagan literature of Egypt. ”

“ The Egyptians were an eminently practical people, and, however great and powerful they thought their kings, they must have perceived that it was impossible for them to send funerary gifts to the tombs of each and all their subjects. It may be argued that the king was held to be god as well as man, and that he was therefore able to supply every dead person with offerings, like Seb, or Ȧnpu, or Osiris, or Khenti Ȧmenti, but there seems to me to be no evidence in the texts which would support this view. ”

“ Each tried to lead a more austere life than that of his neighbour, believing that through the multitude of his fastings, vigils, and prayers he could make himself acceptable to God. Some, no doubt, repented of their evil deeds and thoughts with absolute sincerity, and their repentance lasted for years at a time, but repentance had never been a characteristic of the Egyptian, as we may see from the older literature of Egypt. ”

“ As Palladius had lived for a whole year with the gentle Possidonius, and he speaks of him with the warmth of a true friend, it seems justifiable to assume that he was himself a man of amiable and sympathetic nature, and one to whom the pathos of the ascetic life appealed more than its grim majesty. ”

“ Throughout Egypt the monks believed, like their pagan ancestors, that pains, and sicknesses, and diseases were caused by devils, but they knew that death would come to all of them, and that nothing could prevent it. ”