The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

Such, then, is the conclusion to which we are led by the newly-found monuments of early Egypt. On the Pharaonic monuments of that remote age the gods are not yet human; they are still represented by animals and other fetishes. And these fetishes have been borrowed from the older population of the valley of the Nile, along with the so-called standard on the top of which they were placed.

The standard with the emblem upon it denoted a nome in the historical days of Egypt. The emblem represented the god of the nome, or rather of the chief sanctuary in the nome. Where the god of the nome was Horus, the hawk appeared upon the standard; where two Horus-gods were worshipped, there were two hawks. As the prehistoric boat had been placed under the protection [pg 106] of the deity whose fetish or symbol was planted at its prow, so the nome was under the protection of the god whose emblem was erected on its standard. The standards borne before the Pharaoh on the plaque of Kom el-Aḥmar were the standards of the nomes over which he claimed rule.

It would seem, then, that the god of a nome was in most instances the god of the aboriginal tribe which originally inhabited it, and that the symbols by which these gods were known were primitively the gods themselves. On the plaque of Abydos it is not Selk or Sekhet who is the protecting deity of the city, but the scorpion and the lion. And by the side of animals and birds, as we have seen, we find also inanimate objects which are on exactly the same footing as the animals and birds. The primitive religion of Egypt must have been a form of fetishism.

But in passing from the older population to the Asiatic immigrants it underwent a change. The same slate plaques which portray Horus as a hawk and Anubis as a jackal, represent the king under the likeness of a bull. It is a literal pictorial rendering of the phrase so often met with in the inscriptions, in which the Pharaoh is described as a bull trampling on his enemies. The animal has ceased to represent the actual reality, and has become a symbol.

And this symbolism, it will be noticed, accompanies the introduction of symbolic writing. The figure of the bull which denotes the Pharaoh, is as much a symbol as the fish which forms part of his name. It is therefore fair to conclude that the hawk which brings the captured enemy to the king is also a symbol. The fetish has become symbolic; the hawk is no longer a god in and for itself, but because it is the embodiment of the divine Horus.

It was but a step further to unite the symbol with the human form. The process involved the disuse of inanimate objects; only the living could be fitly joined together. Horus could be depicted as a man with a hawk's head; it was less easy to combine the symbol of Min with a man's limbs. Such anthropomorphising followed necessarily from the deification of the Pharaoh. The race which turned its human leader into a god was bound to represent its gods under human form. In Egypt, however, the older element in the population, with its religious ideas, was too strong to be wholly disregarded by the ruling caste. The compromise, which had transformed the fetish into a symbol, ended by retaining the animal forms of the gods, but in subordination to the form of man. Henceforth, for the State religion, Horus wore merely the mask of a hawk.[72]

That the official figures of the gods were thus a compromise between two antagonistic currents of religious thought, appears very clearly when we compare Egypt with Babylonia. In Babylonia, also, there were symbols attached to the gods, some of them representing animals and birds, others inanimate objects. In Babylonia, moreover, the king was a god, both in his lifetime and after [pg 108] his death. But in Babylonia the figures of the gods of the State religion were all human; it was only the demons of the popular cult who were allowed to retain the bodies of beasts and birds. The gods themselves were all depicted in human form. The reason of this is simple: in Babylonia the Semitic conception of the deity was predominant; there was no fetishism to be conciliated, no animal worship to be reconciled with a higher faith. The emblems of the gods remained emblems, and the gods of heaven clothed themselves with the same form as the human god on earth.

In the retention of the primitive animal worship, therefore, we must see an evidence not only of the strength of that portion of the population to whom it originally belonged, but also of the conservative spirit which characterised the Egyptians. In this case, however, the conservative spirit was the result of the influence of the conquered race; art continued to represent Horus with the head of a hawk, just because those who believed him to be a bird continued to form an important part of the population. The popular cult and the popular superstitions were too widely spread to be disregarded.

Egyptian orthodoxy found a ready way in which to explain the animal forms of its gods. The soul, once freed from its earthly body, could assume whatever shape it chose, or rather, could inhabit as long as it would whatever body it chose to enter. And what was true of the human soul was equally true of the gods. They too were like men, differing indeed from men only in so far as they were already in the other world, and thus freed from the trammels and limitations of our present existence. The soul of Ra, which was practically Ra himself, could appear under the form of a bird, if so he willed. Transmigration from one body to another, indeed, [pg 109] never presented any difficulty to the Egyptian mind. It could be effected by the magician by means of his spells; and there were stories, like the folk-tales of modern Europe, which told how the life and individuality of a man could pass into the bodies of animals, and even into seeds and trees. The belief is common to most primitive peoples, and is doubtless due to the dreams in which the sleeper imagines himself possessed of some bodily form that is not his own.

We must then regard the animal worship of Egypt as the survival of an early fetishism. But it is a survival which has had to accommodate itself to the antagonistic conceptions of an anthropomorphic faith. By the side of the deified king the deified animal was allowed to remain, and man and beast were mixed together in religious art. It was parallel to the juxtaposition of pictorial ideographs and phonetically-spelt words in the writing of a later day. And just as it was only the cultivated classes to whom the written characters were symbols with a meaning other than that which they bore to the eye, so too it was only these same cultivated classes to whom the sacred animals were symbols and embodiments of the deity, rather than the deity itself. The masses continued to be fetish-worshippers like the earlier inhabitants of the country from whom most of them drew their descent.