The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

This very fact assisted in spiritualising Egyptian religion. Ideas and their symbols interchange one with the other; the ideas, moreover, develop and pass out of one form into another. The identification, therefore, of the abstract and the concrete, of ideas and substantial existence, made a pantheistic conception of the universe easy. The divinity clothed itself in as many forms as there were symbols to express it, and these forms passed one into the other like phases of thought. The Egyptian was the first discoverer of the term “becoming,” and the keynote of his creed was the doctrine of transformation.

Transformation, it must be remembered, is not transmigration. There was no passage of an individual soul from body to body, from form to form; the divine essence permeated all bodies and forms alike, though it manifested itself at a given moment only under certain ones. It was in this power of manifestation that the transformation consisted. Had the Egyptian not been fettered by his materialistic symbolism, he would doubtless have gone further and concluded that the various manifestations of the divinity were subjective only—existing, that is to say, only in the mind of the observer; as it was, he held them to be objective, and to possess the same substantial reality as the symbolic pictures by which they were denoted.

With all this, however, there was no severe literalism in the interpretation of the symbol. Whatever may have been the case at the outset, the symbol was as much a metaphor in the historical ages of Egyptian history as are the metaphors of our own language. When the Egyptian [pg 244] spoke of “eating” his god, he meant no more than we do when we speak of “absorbing” a subject.[198] The Pyramid texts are full of such faded and forgotten metaphors; the Egyptian was conservative above all other men, and the language of religion is conservative above all others. Doubtless, in some cases, he was the victim of the symbols and metaphors he used; but in this respect he does not stand alone. Where he has no rival is in the magnitude of the part played in his religion by the symbol and its logical development.

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. I cannot do better than quote the words in which it is described by one of its least prejudiced students, Professor Maspero:[199] “When we put aside the popular superstitions and endeavour solely to ascertain its fundamental doctrines, we soon recognise that few religions have been so exalted in their principles. The Egyptians adored a being who was unique, perfect, endowed with absolute knowledge and intelligence, and incomprehensible to such an extent that it passes man's powers to state in what he is incomprehensible. He is ‘the one of one, he who exists essentially, the only one who lives substantially, the sole generator in heaven and earth, who is not himself generated.’ Always the same, always immutable in his immutable perfection, always [pg 245] present in the past as in the future, he fills the universe without any form in the world being able to give even a feeble idea of his immensity; he is felt everywhere, he is perceived nowhere.

“Unique in essence, he is not unique in person. He is father because he exists, and the force of his nature is such that he is eternally begetting, without ever growing weak or exhausted. He has no need to go outside himself for this act of generation; he finds in his own bosom the material of his perpetual fatherhood. Alone in the plenitude of his being he conceives his offspring; and as in him there can be no distinction between conception and birth, from all eternity ‘he produces in himself another self.’ He is at once the divine father, mother, and son. Conceived of God, born of God, without separating from God, these three persons are God in God, and, far from dividing the primitive unity of the divine nature, they all three combine to constitute his infinite perfection.

“Doubtless the mind of the uneducated classes could neither understand nor rise to such lofty heights. Human intelligence supports with difficulty so pure an idea of an absolute being. All the attributes of divinity—his immensity, his eternity, his independence—place him at an infinite distance from ourselves; to comprehend and participate in them, we must make him think as we think, we must lend him our passions and subject him to our laws. God must take upon him, with human nature, all the weaknesses that accompany it, all the infirmities under which it labours; in a word, the Word must become flesh. The immaterial god must incarnate himself, must come to the land of Egypt and people it with the gods, his children. Each of the persons of the primitive trinity thus became independent and formed a new type, from which, in their turn, other [pg 246] lower types emanated. From trinity to trinity, from personification to personification, that truly incredible number of divinities was soon reached, with forms sometimes grotesque and often monstrous, who descended by almost insensible degrees from the highest to the lowest ranks of nature. The scribes, the priests, the officials, all the educated world, in fact, of Egyptian society, never professed that gross paganism which caused Egypt to be called with justice ‘the mother of superstitions.’ The various names and innumerable forms attributed by the multitude to as many distinct and independent divinities, were for them merely names and forms of one and the same being. ‘God, when he comes as a generator, and brings to light the latent forces of the hidden causes, is called Ammon; when he is the spirit who embodies all that is intelligent, he is Imhotep; when he is he who accomplishes all things with art and verity, he is Phthah; when he is God good and beneficent, he is Osiris.’ What the scribe means by these words is the mysterious infinite which animates the universe, the eternal, impenetrable to eyes of flesh, but perceived vaguely by the eyes of the spirit. Behind the sensuous appearance, behind the manifestation of the divine nature wherein the popular imagination fancied it saw that nature itself, he beheld confusedly a being obscure and sublime, a full comprehension of whom is denied him, and the feeling of this incomprehensible presence lends to his prayer a deep and thrilling accent, a sincerity of thought and emotion, a thousand times more touching than that medley of amorous puerilities, of mystic languors and morbid contrition, which is so often the substitute for religious poetry.”

There were two deep-rooted conceptions in the Egyptian mind which had much to do with the purity and sublimity of his religious ideas. One of these was [pg 247] the conception of a divine law which governed the universe, and to which the gods themselves had to submit. The other was that of a moral God, of a “good being” who rewarded—not piety but—uprightness, and punished iniquity. The world was ordered and controlled, not by chance or caprice, but by a fixed law, which was, characteristically enough, impersonated in the goddess Mât. And this law, unlike the blind destiny of the Greek or Roman, was at once divine and moral; it not only represented the order of the universe, against which there was no appeal, but it also represented an order which was in accordance with justice and truth. The law which all must obey under penalty of being cast into outer darkness, was an intelligent and moral law; it commended itself necessarily and instinctively to all intelligent beings whose thoughts, words, and deeds were alike righteous. Only those who had conformed to it could be admitted after death into the paradise of Osiris or into the company of the gods, and the seal of justification was the pronouncement that the dead man had “spoken the truth,” and that his confession in the judgment-hall of Osiris had been in agreement with the truth and with the eternal order of the universe.

Of the moral character of the Osirian creed I have already spoken. It is the first official recognition by religion that what God requires is uprightness of conduct and not ceremonial orthodoxy, the first identification of religion with morality. And the god who required this uprightness of conduct was not a “lord of hosts,” who compelled adoration by the display of his power, but Un-nefer, “the good being,” who existed in order to do good to men. In the conflict with evil he had apparently been worsted; but though he had died a shameful death, his disciples believed that it had been endured on their behalf, and that for those who followed [pg 248] in his footsteps, and whose lives resembled his, he had provided a better and a happier Egypt in another world, into which sin and pain and death could not enter, and where he ruled eternally over the cities and fields of the blest.

In the Osirian creed, writer after writer has discovered “fore-gleams” of Christianity more striking even than the doctrine of the Trinity, which belongs to the philosophy of faith. But there is nothing wonderful in the continuity of religious thought. One of the chief lessons impressed upon us by the science of the century which has just passed away, is that of continuity; throughout the world of nature there is no break, no isolated link in the long chain of antecedent and consequent, and still less is there any in the world of thought. 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. He shall be the son of a woman of Nubia, and will be born in [the south].... He shall assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and lift up the red crown of the north. He shall unite the double crown.... The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They shall be removed far from evil, and the wicked shall humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics shall fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his flame. The wicked shall wait on his judgments, the [pg 249] rebels on his power. The royal serpent on his brow shall pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built, even that of the prince, that the Asiatics may no more enter into Egypt.”[200]

Yet more striking is the belief in the virgin-birth of the god Pharaoh, which goes back at least to the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty. On the western wall of one of the chambers in the southern portion of the temple of Luxor, Champollion first noticed that the birth of Amon-hotep iii. is portrayed. The inscriptions and scenes which describe it have since been copied, and we learn from them that he had no human father; Amon himself descended from heaven and became the father of the future king. His mother was still a virgin when the god of Thebes “incarnated himself,” so that she might “behold him in his divine form.” And then the hieroglyphic record continues with words that are put into the mouth of the god. “Amon-hotep,” he is made to say, “is the name of the son who is in thy womb. He shall grow up according to the words that proceed out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and righteousness in this land unto its very end. My soul is in him, (and) he shall wear the twofold crown of royalty, ruling the two worlds like the sun for ever.”[201]