Peter le Page Renouf

“ Hail to thee, Amon Rā, Lord of the thrones of the earth, ... the ancient of heaven, the oldest of the earth, Lord of all existences, the support of things, the support of all things. The One in his works, single among the gods; the beautiful bull of the cycle of the gods; chief of all the gods; Lord of truth, father of the gods; maker of men, creator of beasts, maker of herbs, feeder of cattle, good power begotten of Ptah, ... to whom the gods give honour. Maker of things below and above, enlightener of the earth, sailing in heaven in tranquillity; king Rā, triumphant one, chief of the earth. ”

“ He is the creator of every animal under his names of Ram of the sheep, god of the goats. Bull of the cows. ... He loves the scorpion in his hole; he is the god of the crocodiles who plunge in the water ... he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmu is an image, Chepera is an image, Rā is an image; he alone maketh himself in millions of ways. He is a great architect, who was from the beginning, who fashioned his body with his own hands, in all forms according to his will. ”

“ Heaven and earth obey the commands which thou hast given; they travel by the road which thou hast laid down for them; they transgress not the path which thou hast prescribed to them, and which thou hast opened to them. ... Thou restest, and it is night; when thine eyes shine forth, we are illuminated. ... O let us give glory to the God who hath raised up the sky, and who causeth his disk to float over the bosom of Nut, who hath made the gods and men and all their generations, who hath made all lands and countries, and the great sea, in his name of 'Let-the-earth-be!' ... ”

“ Thou shalt make adorations in His name. It is He who granteth genius with endless aptitudes; who magnifieth him who becometh great. The God of the world is in the light above the firmament; His emblems are upon earth; it is to them that worship is rendered daily. ”

“ Thou drivest away the darkness by the beams of thine eyes. Thou ascendest into the zenith of heaven, and thou comest down even as thou hast risen. When thou art a dweller in the infernal world, thy knees are above the earth, and thine head is in the upper sky. Thou sustainest the substances which thou hast made. It is by thine own strength that thou movest; thou art raised up by the might of thine own arms. ”

“ Gods and men turn their faces towards thee, weeping together for thee, whenever they behold me. I call thee in my lamentations even to the heights of heaven, and thou hearest not my voice. I am thy sister who loveth thee upon earth; no one else hath loved thee more than I, thy sister, thy sister!"
Then Nephthys takes up the strain:
"O gracious Sovereign, come to thine abode! Rejoice; all thine enemies are annihilated. Thy two sisters are near thee, protecting thy funeral bed; calling thee in weeping, thee who art prostrate on thy funeral bed. ”

“ O Rā, in thine egg, radiant in thy disk shining forth from the horizon, swimming over the steel firmament, sailing over the pillars of Shu, thou who hast no second among the gods, who producest the winds by the flames of thy mouth, and who enlightenest the worlds with thy splendours, save the departed from that god whose nature is a mystery and whose eyebrows are as the arms of the balance on the night when Aauit was weighed. ”

“ Most glorious one. Lord of terror, chief maker of the earth after his image, how great are his thoughts above every god! Hail to thee, Rā, Lord of law, whose shrine is hidden, Lord of the gods; Chepra in his boat, at whose command the gods were made. Atmu, maker of men, ... giving them life, ... listening to the poor who is in distress, gentle of heart when one cries to him. Deliverer of the timid man from the violent, judging the poor, the poor and the oppressed. ”

“ There can be no doubt that, from the earliest days, symbolism had played a great part in the religion of Egypt. We are ourselves so familiar with certain symbols in Hebrew or Christian writings, or with the poetic figures which classical literature has brought home to us, that when we meet with symbols of another kind, we are far more shocked than we really have a right to be. We think it natural enough to speak of a hero we venerate as a lion or an eagle, while quite other associations are connected with a fox or a dog. ”

“ If the judgment in the Hall of Law is favourable, the departed comes forth triumphantly as a god whom nothing can harm; he is identified with Osiris and with every other divinity. The nether world, and indeed the universe at large, is full of terrible and hostile forces; but through his identification with the great gods and his uttering words of power in their name, he passes unhurt in any direction that he pleases. ”

“ There can, I trust, be no doubt who that Power is which, in our translations, we do not hesitate to call God. It is unquestionably the true and only God, who "is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being," whose "eternal power and Godhead" and government of the world were made known through "that Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world." In the extracts which I have quoted, and in many similar passages, we recognize the elements of true religion, free from all admixture of mythology. ”

“ But if you enter the penetralia of the enclosure and, in haste to behold something better, seek the image that is the inhabitant of the temple, and if any priest of those that offer sacrifice there, looking grave and singing a paean in the Egyptian tongue, remove a little of the veil to show the god, he will furnish you with a hearty laugh at the object of worship. For the deity that is sought, to whom you have rushed, will not be found within, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent, or some such beast, unworthy of the temple, but quite worthy of a den, a hole or the dirt. ”

“ The hawk was among birds what the bull was among quadrupeds, and they admired his rapid, lofty and unerring flight, the piercing sight which nothing can escape, and the irresistible grasp of his talons. All this with us is mere poetry, but all early language is poetry. There is nothing more certainly established by the science of language than "the fact that all words expressive of immaterial conceptions are derived by metaphor from words expressive of sensible ideas." ”

“ If any one thinks proper to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres, and chooses rather to misuse the name of Bacchus than to utter the term that belongs to that liquor, let us allow him to declare that the earth is mother of the gods, if he only forbear in earnest to stain his mind with foul religion. ”

“ O Osiris ... thou art the Youth at the horizon of heaven daily, and thine old age is the beginning of all seasons. The Nile cometh at the bidding of thy mouth, giving life to men by the emanations which proceed from thy limbs, who by thy coming causest all plants to grow up. ... O Osiris, thou art the Lord of millions, raising up all wild animals and all cattle; the creation of all that is proceedeth from thee. To thee belongeth all that is upon earth; to thee all that is in heaven ”

“ The gods of Heliopolis themselves bring the divine offerings. He eats the bread which the goddess Taït herself has cooked, and he breathes the sweet odour of flowers. He washes his feet in silver basins which the god Ptah of Memphis, the inventor of all arts, has himself sculptured. ”

“ The inscriptions of the temple of Dendera give a long list of the names of the goddess Hathor. She is identified not only with Isis, but with Sechet at Memphis, Neith at Sais, Saosis at Heliopolis, Nehemauit at Hermopolis, Bast at Bubastis, Sothis at Elephantine, and many other goddesses. These authorities alone are sufficient, almost at a glance, to convince us that not only are some inferior deities mere aspects of the greater gods, but that several at least of the greater gods themselves are but different aspects of one and the same. ”

“ It is no doubt extremely natural, when phenomena are discovered which bear close resemblance to each other, to look out for some historical connection between them. But in the history of human thought, the supposition of such a connection frequently proves to be an illusion. No historical connection can possibly be admitted between the Egyptian and the Indo-European doctrines of the necessity of marriage, and all the doctrines in favour of religious celibacy may very probably turn out to be historically independent of each other. ”

“ There is no allusion to the necessity of a good life; no recommendation to be just and hate iniquity; no assurance that he who loveth what is just shall triumph. The tablet on which this strange inscription is found has upon it the figures of several of the Egyptian gods, in whom it professes faith, but the religion must have been already at its end when such a text could be inscribed on a funereal tablet. ”

“ Every man had his own genius, which was to be propitiated by sacrificial offerings, and so had every god and even every locality. The genius was a sort of spiritual double of each individual. Men swore by their own genius, by the genius of Rome, of the gods, or of the emperor. Very similar facts are to be found in the Greek and in the Persian religions. The Fravishis in the religion of Zoroaster were heavenly types of created things, whether gods, men, mountains, streams or other objects, and formed a divine society, the guardian angels, as it were, of the good creation. ”

“ Herbert Spencer's hypothesis, that the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors. If the Egyptians passed through such a rudimentary form of religion, they had already got beyond it in the age of the Pyramids, for their most ancient propitiation of ancestors is made through prayer to Anubis, Osiris, or some other gods. The deceased is already described in the funereal inscription as "faithful to the great God." And in no case can it be proved that the propitiation of departed ancestors preceded a belief in divinity of some other kind. ”

“ I have no doubt whatever that some of the chapters of the Book of the Dead were as obscure to Egyptians living under the eleventh dynasty as they are to ourselves. The Book of the Dead is mythological throughout, and the true sense of a mythology dies away with the stage of culture which has produced it. A critical collation of a sufficient number of copies of each chapter will in time restore the text to as accurate a standard as could be attained in the most flourishing days of the Egyptian empire. ”

“ Man had formerly been led to associate the earth and sun and sky with the notion of infinite power behind those phenomena; he now retraced his steps and recognized in the universe nothing but the mere phenomena. The heathen Plutarch and the Christian Origen equally give evidence of this atheistical interpretation put upon the myths of Osiris and Isis. Plutarch protests against the habit of explaining away the very nature of the gods by resolving it, as it were, into mere blasts of wind, or streams of rivers, and the like, such as making Dionysos to be wine and Hephaistos fire. ”

“ Besides the crimes of violence and theft, different sins against chastity are mentioned; not only evil-speaking and lying, but exaggeration, chattering and idle words are condemned; he who reviles the king, his father or his god, the evil listener and he who turns a deaf ear to the words of truth or justice, he who causes pain of mind to another, or who in his heart thinks meanly of God—all these fail to satisfy the conditions of admission into the ranks of the triumphant dead. ”

“ A sense of the Eternal and Infinite, Holy and Good, governing the world, and upon which we are dependent, of Right and Wrong, of Holiness and Virtue, of Immortality and Retribution—such are the elements of Egyptian religion. But where are these grand elements of a religion found in their simple purity?
Mythology, we know, is the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture, and is in its first stage as harmless as it is inevitable. ”

“ Everywhere the king is conquering, worshipping, ruling. The palace is the Temple, the king is Priest. But everywhere the same colossal proportions are preserved. He and his horses are ten times the size of the rest of the army. Alike in battle and in worship, he is of the same stature as the gods themselves. ”

“ It is remarkable that a religious reformation at the end of the 18th dynasty in behalf of one god, spent its special wrath upon the name of Amon. The king whose title would under ordinary circumstances have been Amenhotep IV., set up the worship of a single god whose symbol was the sun-disk; he caused the names of other gods, particularly that of Amon, to be hammered out of inscriptions even when it only occurred in proper names, as in his own, which he changed into Chut en Aten, "Glory of the Sun-disk." ”

“ Hathor, like the mother of the Aeneadae, is "sole mistress of the nature of things, and without her nothing rises up into the divine borders of light, nothing grows to be glad or lovely;" "through her every kind of living thing is conceived, rises up and beholds the light of the sun." ”