Egyptian religion

“ The remarkable peculiarity of the Egyptian religion is that the primitive idea of the god of the city is always cropping up in it, and that is the reason why we find semi-savage ideas of God side by side with some of the most sublime conceptions, and it of course underlies all the legends of the gods wherein they possess all the attributes of men and women. ”

“ Egyptian religion. The races of Central Asia had at a very early time attained to the psychical stage of monotheism. Africa is only now emerging from the basest fetichism; the negro priest is still a sorcerer and rain-maker. The Egyptian religion, as is well known, provided for the vulgar a suitable worship of complex idolatry, but for those emancipated from superstition it offered true and even noble conceptions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The desire for immortality was very strong in the Egyptian mind, and the religious life of Egypt turned on that desire. The Egyptian religion was an immortality religion as no other religion had ever been. As Egypt went down under foreign conquerors and the Egyptian gods ceased to have any satisfactory political significance, this craving for a life of compensations here-after, intensified.
ISIS AND HORUS
After the Greek conquest, the new city of Alexandria became the centre of Egyptian religious life, and indeed of the religious life of the whole Hellenic world. ”

“ The attempts to show that ancient Egyptian religion was a sublime monotheism, or an enlightened pantheism which disguised itself in allegories and metaphors, have their origin in a confusion between the aspirations of individual thinkers and the actual religion of their time. There are indeed literary monuments rescued from the wreck of ancient Egyptian culture which embody the highest and most spiritual conceptions of the Godhead, and use the language of the purest monotheism. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even the doctrine of the future life, and the resurrection of the body, which plays so prominent a part in Egyptian religion, is carefully avoided, and the Ten Commandments have little in common with the ethical code of Egypt. ”

“ The early monuments of Egyptian history, found in the neolithic graves and among the remains of the first dynasties, have shown that the animal worship of Egypt was only part of a larger system. Slate plaques, on which are represented the actions of Pharaohs who preceded Menes or were his immediate successors, prove that the prevailing system of religion must have been one closely akin to African fetishism. The gods appear frequently, but they always appear under the form of what in later times were regarded as their symbols. ”

“ 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 priests, who had been proud of the superiority of their own doctrines over the paganism of their neighbours, mourned the overthrow of their national religion. “Our land,” says the author of Hermes Trismegistus, “is the temple of the world; but, as wise men should foresee all things, you should know that a time is coming when it will seem that the Egyptians have by an unfailing piety served God in vain. For when strangers shall possess this kingdom religion will be neglected, and laws made against piety and divine worship, with punishment on those who favour it. ”

“ The progress made by the Egyptians in the development of a purer conception of religion will be discussed at length in the body of this volume, especially on pages 131 and following. The Egyptians were not far from monotheism.
But the Egyptian culture must be studied as a whole. Time was when the study of the civilization of Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, together with that of the Hebrews, was regarded as a sort of introduction to the study of history, which began with the Greeks and Romans. Much was said of the immovable East. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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) . ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Whether the emperor’s conversion arose from education, from conviction, or from state policy, we have no means of knowing; but Christianity did not reach the throne before it was the religion of a most important class of his subjects, and the Egyptian Christians soon found themselves numerous enough to call the Greek Christians heretics, as the Greek Christians had already begun to designate the Jewish.
The Greeks of Alexandria had formed rather a school of philosophy than a religious sect. ”

“ Development is but another name for the continuity which binds the past to the present with stronger fetters than those of destiny. It is not only the philosophy of Christianity, or the wider and more general doctrines of its creed, which find an echo in the religion of ancient Egypt; in details also Egypt is linked with the modern world. Long before the Hebrew prophets pictured the kingdom of the Messiah, an Egyptian poet, in the reign of Thothmes iii., had said: “A king shall come from the south, Ameni, the truth-declaring, by name. ”

“ Priestly colleges developed novel dogmas, and insensibly altered ritual. The thought of hundreds of generations of men brooded, not fruitlessly, over the problems of the divine nature. Finally, it is likely that in Egypt, as elsewhere, the superstitions of the least educated and most backward classes, and of subject peoples on a lower level of civilisation, would again and again break up, and win their way to the surface of religion. Thus a complete study of Egyptian faiths would be chronological,—would note the setting and rising of the stars of elder and later deities. ”

“ 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 Egyptian regarded them benignantly, then went on, saying, "Religion is merely the law which binds man to his Creator: in purity it has but these elements—God, the Soul, and their Mutual Recognition; out of which, when put in practice, spring Worship, Love, and Reward. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence it is that monotheistic religions alone furnish the spectacle of religious wars, religious persecutions, heretical tribunals, that breaking of idols and destruction of images of the gods, that razing of Indian temples, and Egyptian colossi, which had looked on the sun three thousand years, just because a jealous god had said, Thou shalt make no graven image. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Out of the thick and threatening clouds of the foregoing prophecy the sun of comfort here breaks forth, and it is the sun of righteousness. Still God has mercy in store for Egypt, and he will show it, not so much by reviving their trade and replenishing their river again as by bringing the true religion among them, calling them to, and accepting them in, the worship of the one only living and true God; and these blessings of grace were much more valuable than all the blessings of nature wherewith Egypt was enriched. ”