Inside the shrine is a picture of the two relics, the cobra which adorned the head-dress of the Pharaoh, and the aart or lock of hair which was supposed to give its name to the temple. They were doubtless preserved at At-Nebes, and shown to the faithful as the veritable objects which had proved the bane and the antidote of the god Seb. They introduce us to a side of Egyptian religion which, though essentially characteristic of the popular faith, had also received the sanction of the official creed. The belief in amulets and charms was too deeply engrained in the popular mind to be ignored; they were consequently taken under the patronage of the gods, and a theory was invented to explain their efficacy. Already the later chapters of the Book of the Dead are concerned with the various amulets which were necessary [pg 227] to the preservation or resuscitation of the body; and even if the latter were regarded as symbolic, they were concrete symbols—symbols, that is to say, which actually possessed the virtues ascribed to them. Just as the name was a concrete entity, expressive of the very essence of the thing to which it was applied, so too the symbol was an entity with a concrete existence of its own. The materialistic tendency of Egyptian thought, added to the fetishism of the earlier stratum of native religion, produced this result. The doctrine of the Ka furnished a theory by which the educated classes could explain the efficacy of the amulet and the active virtues of the symbol. It was the Ka, the spiritual and yet materialised double, of the amulet that worked the charm—that made the scarab, for instance, a substitute for the living heart, or the dad—the symbol of stability—a passport to the other world.[181]
The amulets buried with the dead, the relics preserved in the temples, had originally been the fetishes of the earlier population of Egypt. They hardly changed their character when they became symbols endowed with mysterious properties, or relics of the State gods which still possessed miraculous powers. The peasant might be told in the ritual of Amon: in “the sanctuary of the god clamour is an abomination to him: pray for thyself with a loving heart, in which the words remain hidden; that he may supply thy need, hear thy words and accept thine offering”;[182] but it was a teaching that was far [pg 228] above him. When he entered the sanctuary it was to see the processions of the priests and the relics preserved in it, and it was in these relics that he still put his trust. It was not only in Ethiopia that there were moving and speaking statues which elected the king by taking him by the hand; in Thebes itself, under the priestly kings of the Twentieth Dynasty, we find wonder-working statues whose reality was guaranteed by the priesthood. One of them, it was said, was sent to Asia, where it delivered a king's daughter from the demon that possessed her, and afterwards returned in a moment to Thebes of its own accord; while others answered the questions addressed to them by nodding the head, or even pronounced prophecies regarding the future.[183] Indeed, as we have seen, the old theory of the ka implied that the statue of the dead man could be reanimated in a sense by his spirit; and a text at Dendera speaks of the soul of Hathor descending from heaven as a human-headed hawk of lapis-lazuli, and uniting itself with her image. The peasant, therefore, might be excused if he remained true to the superstitions and traditions of his ancestors, and left the official religion, with its one ineffable god, to those who were cultured enough to understand it. Like the peasant of modern Italy, he was content with a divinity that he could see and handle, and about whose wonder-working powers he had no doubt. Materialism is the basis of primitive religion; the horizon of primitive man is limited, and he has not yet learnt to separate thought from the senses through which alone his narrow world is known to him. The simple faith of a child often wears a very materialistic form.
Lecture X. The Place Of Egyptian Religion In The History Of Theology.
In the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to bring before you the more salient points in the religion of the ancient Egyptians, in so far as they illustrate their conception of the divine. But we must remember that all such descriptions of ancient belief must be approximate only. We cannot put ourselves in the position of those who held it; our inherited experiences, our racial tendencies, our education and religious ideas, all alike forbid it. If the Egyptians of the Theban period found it difficult to understand the ritual of their own earlier history, and misinterpreted the expressions and allusions in it, how much more difficult must it be for us to do so. The most ordinary religious terms do not bear for us the same meaning that they bore for the Egyptians. The name of God calls up other associations and ideas; the very word “divine” has a different signification in the ancient and the modern world among Eastern and Western peoples. In fact, the more literal is our translation of an old religious text, the more likely we are to misunderstand it.
And yet in one sense we are the religious heirs of the builders and founders of the Egyptian temples. Many of the theories of Egyptian religion, modified and transformed no doubt, have penetrated into the theology of Christian Europe, and form, as it were, part of the woof in [pg 230] the web of modern religious thought. Christian theology was largely organised and nurtured in the schools of Alexandria, and Alexandria was not only the meeting-place of East and West, it was also the place where the decrepit theology of Egypt was revivified by contact with the speculative philosophy of Greece. The Egyptian, the Greek, and the Jew met there on equal terms, and the result was a theological system in which each had his share. In Philo, we are told, we find Moses Platonising; but the atmosphere in which he did so was that of the old Egyptian faith. And what was true of the philosophy of Philo was still more true of the philosophy of Alexandrine Christianity.
You cannot but have been struck by the similarity of the ancient Egyptian theory of the spiritual part of man to that which underlies so much Christian speculation on the subject, and which still pervades the popular theology of to-day. There is the same distinction between soul and spirit, the same belief in the resurrection of a material body, and in a heaven which is but a glorified counterpart of our own earth. Perhaps, however, the indebtedness of Christian theological theory to ancient Egyptian dogma is nowhere more striking than in the doctrine of the Trinity. The very terms used of it by Christian theologians meet us again in the inscriptions and papyri of Egypt.
Professor Maspero has attempted to show that the Egyptian doctrine of the Trinity was posterior to that of the Ennead.[184] Whether this were so or not, it makes its appearance at an early date in Egyptian theology, and was already recognised in the Pyramid texts. Originally the trinity was a triad like those we find in Babylonian mythology. Here and there the primitive triads survived into historical times, like that of Khnum and the two [pg 231] goddesses of the Cataract. But more frequently the trinity was an artificial creation, the formation of which can still be traced. Thus at Thebes the female element in it was found in Mut, “the mother” goddess, a title of the supreme goddess of Upper Egypt; while Khonsu, the moon-god, or Mentu, the old god of the nome, became the divine son, and so took a place subordinate to that of the local god Amon. Sometimes recourse was had to grammar, and the second person in the trinity was obtained by attaching the feminine suffix to the name of the chief god. In this way Amon-t was grammatically evolved from Amon, and even Ra-t from Ra. Elsewhere an epithet of the god was transformed into his son; at Memphis, for example, Imhotep, “he who comes in peace,” a title of Ptaḥ, became his son and the second person in the trinity. Other members of the trinity were fetched from neighbouring cities and nomes; Nit of Sais had Osiris as a husband, and Sekhet of Letopolis and Bast of Bubastis were successively regarded as the wives of Ptaḥ.
The triad consisted of a divine father, wife, and son. It was thus a counterpart of the human family, and belonged to the same order of ideas as that which explained the creation of the world by a process of generation. This was the cosmology of Heliopolis, and it is probable that to Heliopolis also we must ascribe the doctrine of the Trinity. At any rate the doctrine seems to have been solar in its origin. As Tum, the god of sunset, was identical with Khepera, the sun of the morning, and Ra, the sun of the noonday,—all three being but one god under diverse forms,—so the divine father was believed to engender himself in the person of the divine son, and the divine mother to be one with the divine father and son. The divine essence remained necessarily the same, whatever might be the forms or names under which it displayed itself; and the name, it [pg 232] must be remembered, had for the Egyptian a separate and real existence. The father became the son and the son the father through all time, and of both alike the mother was but another form. It was eternal fatherhood, eternal motherhood, and eternal generation. The development of the doctrine was assisted by that identification of the Egyptian deities with the sun-god which ended in solar pantheism, as well as by the old theory of the ka, of a personality distinguishable from that to which it belonged, identical with that of which it was the double, and yet at the same time enjoying an independent existence of its own.