Part 2

Very often certain worshipful objects, as trees and animals inhabited by spirits, were developed into local deities. In this way the fetichism of the black aboriginal people got entry into the more cultured religion of the light-complexioned conquerors, and had a very powerful influence on it. Few were the indigenous animals that were not worshiped in one place or in many as the wrappages of deities. That worship was paid to animals not for their own sake, is best seen from the way in which the gods are portrayed, namely, for the most part with a human body and the head of the animal sacred to them, though in some cases entirely in human form. Thus Amon, god of Thebes, has the head of a ram, Hathor of Anut the head of a cow, Anubis that of a jackal, Bast that of a cat, Sechet of a lioness, Sebak of a crocodile, and so on. And inasmuch as it was believed that gods dwelt in them, such animals were themselves made objects of worship; for example, the ox Hapi (Gr. Apis) at Memphis, the goat at Mendes, and so forth. This honor belonged to the entire species, and as representing the species, certain individual animals were maintained in the temples by the contributions of the faithful, and had servitors to wait upon them. Any harm done to these fetiches was sternly punished: to kill one of them was death. Not so when a god did not grant the prayers of the faithful, e.g., for rain: in that case the priests made the fetich pay the penalty. First, they threatened the animal, but when menaces were vain, they killed the sacred beast, though in secret; the people must not know of it.

4. THE HIGHER DEVELOPMENT OF EGYPTIAN RELIGION.

As Egypt advanced in civilization and the government became more concentrated, the local deities and zoolatry were less regarded, while the light-gods, the sun-gods, Re and Horos, with their associate deities, became more prominent. The lives and fortunes of these light-gods, and in particular their wars with the powers of darkness, became the subject of myths. The inhabitants of the Nile valley imagined to themselves the sun’s course not as the progress of a chariot like that in which the Mithra of the Persians and the Helios of the Greeks were borne, but as the voyage of a Nile bark on which Re navigates the ocean of the heavens. In the battle with dark Set he falls and drops into the netherworld in the West, but the youthful Horos, sun-god of the coming day, takes his place and begins his career across the sky. This ever-rejuvenescent sun-god, who through all transformations remained still the same deity, so that the self-same goddess was now his mother, anon his consort, was so truly the supreme god, nay, the sole god of Egypt, that his hieroglyph, the sparrowhawk, came to be the sign of the idea “god,” and in writing that sign was attached to the names of gods to indicate that they were such. On the other hand, the names of the mothers and consorts of the sun-gods had appended to them the sign for a cow.

From this it is seen that the religion of Nileland—that is to say, the religion of the priests—was slowly progressing toward monotheism. Unlike the beliefs of the commonalty, the secret teachings or mysteries of the priests, as gradually developed, regarded not simply the existence of the gods, but, above all, what the gods stood for. For a while this development halted at the sun-god, and reached its first stage in the city Anu (in lower Egypt), called by the Greeks Heliopolis (city of the sun), where they incorporated the god of the place, Tum, in the sun-god Re. This took place under the fourth dynasty, whose monarchs built the great pyramids of Ghizeh at Memphis. But one of the greatest of these transformations was in giving the name of Osiris, god of the city Abdu (Gr. Abydos) in upper Egypt, to the god of the sunset, ruler of the netherworld and of the kingdom of death. Isis became his sister and consort, Set at once his brother and his slayer, Horos his son, who, as a new sun, takes his place after sunset, and also his avenger on Set. Horos gives Set battle, but as he cannot destroy him utterly, leaves to him the desert as a kingdom, while Horos himself holds the Nile valley. This story of gods was represented scenically on public holidays, but only the Initiated, i. e., the priests and their followers who had been let into the secret, knew the meaning of the representation. Even the name of Osiris and his abode in the realm of the dead were kept secret, and outsiders heard only of the “great god” dwelling in “the West.” Besides the mysteries of Osiris, the most famous of all, there were other mysteries of local Egyptian gods transformed into sun-gods; and so the sun mythos was further developed. Thus Thot, god of Hermopolis, whose sacred animal was the bird Ibis, became Horos’s auxiliary in the war with Set, and also became the moon-god, the god of chronometry and of order, inventor of writing, revealer of the sacred books. Memphis alone, capital of the ancient kingdom, held her god Ptah too exalted a being to share in the transformation of the rest; for Ptah was regarded by his worshipers as father of all gods, creator of the world and of men, and more ancient than Re; besides, he was the god of the royal court. Nevertheless, he did not escape the fate of becoming a sun-god. The most celebrated object of Egyptian zoolatry was sacred to Ptah, namely, Apis (Hapi), the sacred bull of Memphis, symbol of the sun and also of the fructifying Nile. This bull must be black with a white spot on the forehead, and with a growth under the tongue having the form of the sacred beetle. The bull was kept in the temple at Memphis from calfhood till death; the body was then mummified, laid out in state, and honored with inscriptions as a god. The behavior of Apis in various conjunctures and circumstances was reputed to be oracular.

Another form of the sun-god was the Sphinx, a half-human, half-brute figure in stone, repeated a thousand times in the Nile valley. The most famous sphinx of all is seen at the great pyramids of Ghizeh. Regular avenues flanked by sphinxes formed the approaches of the great temples. In Egypt the sphinx was thought of as male; the head was that of some king, and the whole figure represented the sun-god Harmachis, a name compounded of Re and Horos (Ra-Harmchuti). In later times the sphinx was introduced in Asia and Greece; the Grecian sphinx is always female.

When the local deities of Egypt were reduced to system, Re was still supreme, but now Re had a father, Nunu, god of Chaos, source of all being—clearly a product of priestly meditation, quite alien to the popular mind. Re was the first divine ruler of the earth. The stars were his companions. He was succeeded by his son Shu (represented with a lion’s head), god of air, who made the props that sustain the sky. Shu was followed by the god Keb and the goddess Nut, parents of Osiris and Isis, who then became the earth’s rulers. To them, after Set’s usurpation, succeeded Horos the avenger and the goddess Hathor. A second class comprises the inferior gods, as Thot, Anubis, etc.; and in a third class are the local deities. The number of gods and of daemons subordinate to them was enormous. But in their gods the Egyptians looked not at all for the perfection of goodness, nor did they regard right behavior as essential for gaining heavenly favor; they rather looked on the practices of religion frankly as a means of advancing their individual interests with the gods.

Now, the greater the number of gods the less was the difference between them, and the easier became the transition to the belief in the sun-god as supreme and only true deity—a belief entertained by the priesthood, not by the people. Re became for the priests the one god, creator of the universe; and this was due to the fact that the priests of the foremost cities, following the example of those of Heliopolis, praised the local god as supreme over all, and at the same time made him identical with Re, whose name was appended to the original name, thus, Tum-Re, Amon-Re. When Thebes became the capital of the kingdom its god Amon naturally took the foremost place, and while Thebes flourished, in the beginning of the so-called new empire, it was known to all Initiates that the sun-god was the one true god, self-created, sole object of the worship paid to the innumerable host of other gods. Nay, the evil deity Set came to pass for a form of Re, and was allowed a place in the Sun’s bark. Self-creation was also attributed to the moon-god. The king, as lord of the whole country, prayed in identical words in every place to the local deity as lord of heaven and earth.

5. A REFORMATION IN THE LAND OF NILE.

But now the secret doctrine of the priests was to be published to the people. The pharao Amenhotep IV., of the 18th dynasty (about 1460 B. C.), saw in the power of the priesthood a menace to the dignity of the crown. He therefore proclaimed as the sole god the sun, not under any human form, as had been the custom, but in its own proper shape of a disk (in Egyptian, aten), as had been the usage at Heliopolis. Amenhotep ordered all images of other gods associated with the sun to be destroyed, assumed for himself the name Chuenaten, “Splendor of the Sundisk,” quit Thebes, and built in middle Egypt, east of the Nile, a new royal seat, Chutaten, “abode of the Sundisk.” The priests of the deposed gods in Thebes and in certain other cities (not in all) lost their places, and the great estates of the priestly corporations were confiscated. Of course the court officers and civil functionaries loyally followed the example of their master; but only a very small fraction of the priesthood gave up their convictions for the sake of livelihood.

Hardly was Chuenaten gathered to his fathers after a reign of twelve years, when his reform was undone. His sons-in-law, who succeeded him, returned step by step to the religion of Amon, and again fixed the royal seat at Thebes; nevertheless, they were held to be heretics by the priests, now reinstated in their ancient power. The temples erected to the Sundisk were leveled with the ground, the half-completed city of the sun was obliterated, the confiscation of the estates of priestly corporations reversed, and the temples, images, and priesthood of Amon reinstated. The intellectual life of Egypt was thenceforth paralyzed, and the ancient mystic teachings of the priests were never again disturbed by any wave of movement or progress. The people went back to stupid formalism, and sank even deeper into daemonism and sorcery. To draw them away from the true god the priests taught them to worship deceased kings and queens, at the same time amusing them with gorgeous sacrifices, processions, and festivals. The distance separating the priesthood from the people—and the Pharaos were, though not of the priestly class, reckoned as compeers of the priests—was signalized by the temples with their various compartments in the inmost of which, the holy of holies (adyton), were guarded the mysteries of the priests, while the people were admitted only to the temple proper and its forecourt. In all probability the famed Labyrinth near Lake Moeris, at Crocodilopolis, was designed for priestly ends. The labyrinth was an underground maze of chambers. Herodotus tells that there were 1,500 chambers above ground and as many under the surface, and that the underground chambers were not shown to the profane, for they contained the remains of Pharaos and of sacred crocodiles. Not Herodotus only, but Diodorus, Strabo, and Pliny celebrate the glory of this vast palace, in whose hidden compartments, no doubt, fit quarters were found for the mysteries.

6. THE EGYPTIAN REALM OF THE DEAD

Finally, the secret teaching of the priests played a part in the people’s ideas regarding death and the other life. According to the Egyptian teaching, man is made up of three constituent parts, viz., besides the body, the soul (ba), conceived to be of purely material essence, which at death quitted the body in the form of a bird; and the immaterial spirit (ka), which held to the man the same relation a god held to the animal in which he dwelt: at death the spirit departed from the body like the image of a dream. The gods, too, had their ka and their ba. The continued existence of both soul and spirit was contingent on the care the corpse received; if the ka and the ba were to live on, the body must be embalmed and laid in a chamber hollowed in a rock, or in a sepulchral edifice (of such buildings the pyramids were the most notable), and the relatives must supply to the dead meat and drink and clothing. The spirit of the deceased went to Osiris, lord of the other world—a luxuriant plain (Aaru) in the West, where the earth’s products required no toil, but grew spontaneous. By means of the magic formula with which Horos recalled to life the slain Osiris, the dead is not only in like manner revivified, but is even made one with Osiris; and hence in the formulas of funeral service which constitute the so-called “Book of the Dead,” the deceased is addressed as Osiris with addition of his own name. Therefore, he may now sail in the sun-bark, and lead a glorious life in the other world, and walk amid the stars like other gods. The pictures on the walls of the sepulchral chambers show that the Egyptians conceived the other life to be much like the present, only pleasanter and fuller. The deceased is portrayed surrounded by such enjoyments as were attainable in Nileland—banquets, property, the chase, voyaging, music, and the like. But from the texts of the “Book of the Dead,” which used to be laid with the dead in the sepulchre, we see that these representations had a more spiritual import in the “middle” than in the “old” empire. In these texts the deceased himself speaks, identifying himself with some god, or with one god after another; no longer with Osiris only, for according to the developed teaching of that time all the gods are one god. The route of the dead toward the other world is the sun’s track from East to West; but on his journey he needs the help of the sorcerer’s art against the host of daemons and monsters that threaten him. Arrived there, he acquires the power of revisiting the earth at will in the form of god, man, or animal, or even, should he so choose, in his own former body. At this period puppets made of wood or of clay, and sundry tools and utensils, were laid in the grave with the dead for their service. Under the “new empire” the representations of the other life and of the way thither are more detailed and more fanciful. Here, too, we find representations of the famous “judgment of the dead,” an event belonging to the life beyond, and not, as the Greeks mistakenly supposed, to the present state and to the time immediately before burial. Osiris presides over the tribunal with two-and-forty assessors, in whose presence the newcomer has to prove himself guiltless of any one of two-and-forty sins, thus, for example: “Never have I done an injustice, never have I stolen, never have I craftily compassed the death of any man, never have I killed any sacred animal,” etc. Yet all this was rather a magic formula for attaining blessedness according to Egyptian notions than a truthful protestation of guiltlessness in order to establish the postulant’s moral purity. Nevertheless, in a picture of the Judgment of the Dead in the “Book of the Dead” the deceased is brought by the goddess of truth and righteousness (Ma) into the palace of Osiris, and his sins and his good deeds are weighed in a balance. The hippopotamus is present as accuser and the god Thot as defender.

7. THE SECRET TEACHING OF THE PRIESTS OF NILELAND.

Though from the foregoing we get a general notion of the relation between the priests and the people, still we are not clear as to the nature of the secret teaching and the mode of its organization. Here we have to depend almost entirely on the accounts given by Greek writers, not always trustworthy, and on conjecture or inference.

Unquestionably the secret doctrine necessitated a species of secret society which presumably consisted of the higher orders of priests, and which comprised subdivisions only loosely held together. It is stated positively that the pharao for the time being was always admitted to membership. Hence the king was the only Egyptian outside of the priestly order that was acquainted with the secret doctrine, and thus was all danger of betrayal at home most effectually averted. But as the priests had less to fear in this regard from foreigners, because foreigners went away again; and as in the indoctrination of foreigners the priests saw an opportunity for cultivating their own reputation for erudition, therefore they often willingly admitted to initiation men of distinction from abroad, and especially Greeks. Among the fabulous personages who were believed to have been impelled by thirst for knowledge to visit Egypt, there to learn the secret wisdom of the priests, were the bards Orpheus, Musaeus, and Homer; among the historic characters were the lawgivers Lycurgus and Solon, the historian Herodotus, the philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus, the mathematician Archimedes, and very many more.

But it was not always easy for these to lift the veil that hid the mysteries. Pythagoras, for example, though recommended by King Aahmes (Amasis), applied in vain to the priests of Heliopolis and Memphis, and only after he had submitted to the circumcision prescribed for postulants did he receive from the priests of Diospolis instruction in their recondite sciences.

In the form of admission to this secret doctrine were long and tedious but significant ceremonies, and the Initiates had at certain intervals to ascend a number of degrees, or stages of knowledge, till they mastered the sum of the wisdom taught by the priests. But with regard to the mode of this progression and the difference between the degrees we have unfortunately no reliable testimony.

Of the contents of the Egyptian secret teaching we know little more than we do of its forms, for all Initiates were pledged to strictest silence regarding the subject matter of instruction. Yet we are not without scattered hints from competent authorities, and in the light of these we cannot go seriously astray. According to the Greek historian Diodorus, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus, and who had himself been initiated in Egypt, Orpheus, or rather the Orphic mystae named after him, owed the Grecian mysteries to the priests of Egypt; and to the same source were Lycurgus and Solon beholden for their legislation, Pythagoras and Plato for their philosophical systems, and Pythagoras furthermore for his mathematical knowledge, and Democritus for his astronomical doctrine. Now, as for the exact sciences here mentioned, the Egyptian secret teaching could not have comprised anything thereanent which was not attainable by anybody with the scientific helps of the time; nor anything in the way of astronomic knowledge not relating to the calculation of time; and if with regard to this knowledge nothing fundamental was taught to the people, then that was a base huckstering of mysteries and not a secret teaching. As for legislation, the systems of Lycurgus and Solon differ so much from each other, and are so pronouncedly Spartan and Athenian, respectively, in spirit, that from them we cannot infer what the teaching was in that department. The probability is that the two Grecian lawgivers merely used the Egyptian laws as a basis, and for the rest adapted their ideas to the needs of their respective countries. Nor is it to be assumed that because the Egyptian priests were also judges, therefore their ideas on legislation, which assuredly they must have applied freely and above board, belonged to their mysteries.

From the hieroglyphic remains, however, it appears that there existed in Egypt high-grade schools conducted by the priests, and hence we may infer that in these institutions the Greek searchers after knowledge obtained instruction in lawgiving and in the exact sciences of the Egyptians.

It is true that the hieroglyphs, a species of Egyptian writing which consisted of figures of actual objects, were known only to the priests; but in early times that was so only because the rest of the people could not read and write. Afterward there was a special popular form of writing (demotic) derived from the hieroglyphs and resembling an earlier abbreviated form of hieroglyphic writing, the hieratic or writing of the priests.

It is different with philosophical and religious speculation, in which positive, unimpeachable conclusions such as may be had in the exact sciences, are out of the question, and which has no practical application as in jurisprudence and diplomatics; which, in fact, gives play rather to hypothesis and arbitrary opinion, to mysticism and symbolism. This, therefore, was the subject matter of the teaching conveyed to Initiates in the Egyptian mysteries, but for good reasons then withheld from the vulgar, because here the very existence of the priestly class was at stake: the priesthood would lose all its importance once the people were aware that the priests had no regard for the received religion.

Hence there is no doubt that the secret doctrine of the Egyptian priests was at once philosophic and religious; that is, that it tested the traditional belief, analyzed it, and accepted what it found to be reasonable and rejected what appeared irrational; and it was sharply distinguished from the popular belief, which took tradition for absolute and indubitable truth.