Ancient Egyptian religion

“ He seems to have acknowledged the religion of the Hebrews as well as those of Persia and Greece, but his fundamental doctrines appear to have been Egyptian; indeed, there is little doubt that he was a priest or magician of Egypt and that he lived during the second century of the Christian era, or at no great distance of time from that period. His work is among the oldest of its kind and connects the Gnostic heresy with the ancient Egyptian religion, while it affords us some insight into what must have been the magic of the days of the Pharaohs. ”

“ While this may mean only that the sun disk was the abode of deity, it suggests the possibility that the Aton (sun disk) might itself become an object of worship.
Ancient Egyptian Religion
The Egyptian religion of historical times represents a fusion of previously independent local gods. Each town was devoted to a particular deity, many of whom were represented in the form of animals. The cat goddess Bast was honored at Bubastis; the cobra-headed Edjo, at Buto; the ibis Thoth, at Hermopolis Magna; and the jackal god Wepwawet, at Lycopolis. ”

“ It is to be observed also that the religion of ancient Egypt seems to be of native growth. No trace is to be found, either in record or tradition, of any importation from a foreign source, such as may be seen in the Chaldæan legend of Oannes and other religions of antiquity. On the contrary, all the Egyptian myths and traditions ascribe the invention of religion, arts, and literature, to Thoth, Osiris, Horus, and other native Egyptian gods. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The religion of ancient Egypt is one of which we know much, yet little—much of its temples, rites, names of deities, liturgical formulas, but little of the esoteric religious ideas which lay hidden within these outer manifestations. Yet it is clear that central solar conceptions as it 295were radiate through the Egyptian theology. Ra, who traverses in his boat the upper and lower regions of the universe, is the Sun himself in plain cosmic personality. ”

“ There are many very eminent scholars who, with full knowledge of all that can be said to the contrary, maintain that the Egyptian religion is essentially monotheistic, and that the multiplicity of gods is only due to the personification of "the attributes, characters and offices of the supreme God." ”

“ It was just this symbolism which enabled him to retain, on the one hand, all the old formulæ with their gross materialism and childlike views of the universe, and, on the other hand, to attain to a conception of the divine being which was at once spiritual and sublime. For Egyptian religion, as we find it in the monuments of the educated classes before the decay of the monarchy, was, in spite of its outward show of symbols and amulets, full of high thoughts and deep emotions. ”

“ The Egyptian religion of the Middle and Late Kingdoms was as much a thing of philosophic invention as later Greek myth, only, so far as we have the means of judging, it was not nearly so artistic or successful. For, whereas we find numerous allusions in the texts to definite myths, we seldom find in Egyptian literature the myths themselves. Indeed, our chief repository of Egyptian religious tales is the De Iside et Osiride of the Greek Plutarch—an uncertain authority. ”

“ Truly it might have been said in ancient Egypt: of the making of gods there is no end!
For such order as can be discerned in the mythological conceptions of the Egyptians the priesthood was largely responsible. At a very early date the theological school of Heliopolis undertook the task of systematizing the gods and the Theological combinations. myths, and it is mainly to them that is due the Egyptian religion as we find it in the Pyramid texts. ”

“ That this view of the literary monuments of ancient Egypt is correct, can be shown from two concrete instances. On the one side, there is the curious attempt made by Amon-hotep iv., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, to revolutionise Egyptian religion, and to replace the old religion of the State by a sort of monotheistic pantheism. The hymns addressed to the solar disk—the visible symbol of the new God—breathe an exalted spirituality, and remind us of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures. “O God,” we read in one of them. “O God, who in truth art the living one, who standest before our eyes ”

“ It is hard to tear up by the roots an ancient religion, the ramifications of which have solidly insinuated themselves among a populace. That of Egypt had already been the growth of more than three thousand years. The question for the intrusive Greek sovereigns to solve was how to co-ordinate this hoary system with the philosophical scepticism They co-ordinate Egyptian idolatry and Greek scepticism. ”

“ But unfortunately we have no graphic or connected view of their private devotions. At the present day a few natives will scrupulously follow the daily ritual of Islam; many keep up some convenient portion, such as the religious aspect of an evening bath after the day's work; but most of the peasantry have little or no religious observances. Perhaps the average of mankind does not differ very greatly, in various countries, in its extent of religious observance: and most likely the ancient Egyptian varied in usages much like the modern. ”

“ It is impossible here to do more than indicate the kind of modification which Egyptian religion underwent. Throughout it remained constant in certain features, namely, the local character of its gods, their usefulness to the dead (their Chthonian aspect) , their tendency to be merged into the sun, Ra, the great type and symbol and source of life, and, finally, their inability to shake off the fur and feathers of the beasts, the earliest form of their own development. Thus life, death, sky, sun, bird, beast and man are all blended in the religious conceptions of Egypt. ”

“ We hear much about the absurd and corrupt side of the Egyptian religion, but few have taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with its brighter side. Our ideas on the subject have been determined largely by the writings of the Greeks and Romans who knew only the last decadent period of Egyptian history. The decipherment of the hieroglyphs has enabled us to study the contemporary documents and inscriptions, and as a result the religious ideas developed by the Egyptians have not only aroused our deepest interest, but are commanding our admiration. ”

“ 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
[pg 215] 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. ”

“ In a Babylonian myth the royal ornaments lay before the supreme god awaiting the monarch; in Egypt the king is the god's ka, his first-born; chosen, created and crowned by the divine father. The kings stood in the closest relationship to the gods; they were not only the heads of the state, they were also (in early Assyria) priest-kings, and in Egypt theoretically all offerings for the living and the dead were made by the Pharaoh. ”

“ Such contradictions and variants of doctrine and myth must naturally arise, for thousands of years passed over that which to-day is called Egyptian religion, and men in all classes of the population, from the king and scholar down to the artisan and husbandman contributed their share and left in the mirror of faith a reflection of their thought and sentiment. ”

“ These animal forms, in which a later myth saw the shapes assumed by the affrighted gods during the great war between Horus and Typhon, take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt was still totemism. They are survivals from a long-forgotten past, and prove that Egyptian civilisation was of slow and independent growth, the latest stage only of which is revealed to us by the monuments. Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and Pachis of Hermonthis are all links that bind together the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Egypt of the stone age. ”

“ The attitude of the Egyptians as a nation toward 'other gods' seems to have been singularly free from any bigotry for their native deities, though of course the priesthood, of necessity, were more jealous and conservative in this respect. But the middle and lower classes adopted foreign gods freely, and in time the widespread belief in certain of these compelled official recognition and consequent inclusion in the Egyptian pantheon. ”

“ In spite of all difficulties, both textual and grammatical, sufficient is now known of the Egyptian religion to prove, with certainty, that the Egyptians possessed, some six thousand years ago, a religion and a system of morality which, when stripped of all corrupt accretions, stand second to none among those which have been developed by the greatest nations of the world. ”

“ It has been observed of the Egyptians that they were wont to ridicule the Greeks for regarding their gods as actual beings, while in reality "they were only the representations of the attributes and principles of Nature." Unlike the religions which succeeded it, Egyptian mythology, as understood by the learned, was essentially philosophical, and dealt with abstractions and principles rather than with personalities. ”

“ Others affirm that the absence of gods is due to the fact that the Egyptian people were so near to the first creation of mankind that they had not yet forgotten those religious truths which were revealed to the fathers of our race. They believe that Egypt began with monotheism, and that its polytheistic system was due to the gradual degradation of pure doctrine which took place among all but the chosen people. ”

“ Careful investigations have proved that these priests were of a different race to the aborigines; their mythological analogies point to immigrated Brahmans, who brought some religious notions with them from the Ganges, and transferred them to the Nile.
Egyptian art reflects in every form the gorgeous influences of religion. The whole life of every Egyptian was placed, in seven phases, under the protection of seven divinities. The first period of man’s life was under the influence of Isis, the moon (Luna, Selene) . ”

“ As a result, the religious traditions of Egypt present themselves to the student to-day in a chaotic condition, and it requires some courage to enter the maze of this labyrinth. But having once taken this step and having laid aside the à priori desire to find a united, consistent system of Egyptian religion such as never existed, one follows the different individual thoughts and thus the texts gain new interest every day. ”

“ The Egyptian religion was the worship of the powers of Nature,--the sun, the moon, the planets, the air, the storm, light, fire, the clouds, the rivers, the lightning, all of which were supposed to exercise a mysterious influence over human destiny. There was doubtless an indefinite sense of awe in view of the wonders of the material universe, extending to a vague fear of some almighty supremacy over all that could be seen or known. To these powers of Nature the Egyptians gave names, and made them divinities. ”

“ Once more, though the Egyptian gods are buried here and are immortal in heaven, they have also, like the heroes of Eskimos and Australians and Indians of the Amazon, been transformed into stars, and the priests could tell which star was Osiris, which was Isis, and which was Typhon.* Such are the wild inconsistencies which Egyptian religion shares with the fables of the lowest races. ”

“ But the ancient system both of society and of religion had undergone far more change in these countries than in Egypt, where to the last the main outlines of the old structure could be traced in the national institutions to which the Egyptians clung with a passionate, a fanatical devotion. Mother-kin, the divinity of kings and queens, a sense of the original connexion of the gods with nature—these things outlived the Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman conquest, and only perished under the more powerful solvent of Christianity. ”

“ So with the animal-worship of Egypt, so opposite in character to the worship of Osiris and Ra. It is best explainable as a remnant of the religion of the inferior people who inhabited the land of the Nile in far remote ages, and who were subdued by the emigrants from Asia, who brought higher knowledge and a more spiritual faith with them and founded the wonderful civilization that in ancient times distinguished that land. The new faith, unfortunately, could not wean the common people altogether from their grosser faith, but was forced to receive much of it into itself. ”

“ The old tradition had survived in Egypt with less apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of religious belief and teaching was more apparent than real, external rather than internal; and though the [pg 003] Ptolemies and early Roman emperors rebuilt the temples on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names they could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit and life had fled. ”