About her character the Aztecs had no illusions. She listened to the confessions of the most loathsome sinners, whom she perhaps first tempted to err, and then forgave and absolved. Confession was usually put off till people had ceased to be likely to sin. She is said to have been the wife of Tlaloc, carried off by Tezcatlipoca. "She must have been the aquatic vegetation of marshy lands," says M. Roville, "possessed by the god of waters till the sun dries her up and she disappears." This is an amusing example of modern ingenuity. It resembles M. Reville's assertion that Tlaloc, the rain-god, "had but one eye, which shows that he must be ultimately identified as an ancient personification of the rainy sky, whose one eye is the sun". A rainy sky has usually no "eye" at all, and, when it has, in this respect it does not differ from a cloudless sky.
A less lovely set of Olympians than the Aztec gods it is difficult to conceive. Yet, making every allowance for Catholic after-thoughts, there can be no doubt that the prayers, penances and confessions described at length by Sahagun indicate a firm Mexican belief that even these strange deities "made for righteousness," loved good, and, in this world and the next, punished evil. However it happened, whatever accidents of history or of mixture of the races in the dim past caused it, the Aztecs carried to extremes the religious and the mythical ideas. They were exceedingly pious in their attitude of penitence and prayer; they were more fierce and cruel in ritual, more fantastic in myth, than the wildest of tribes, tameless and homeless, ignorant of agriculture or of any settled and assured existence. Even the Inquisition of the Spanishof the sixteenth century was an improvement on the unheard-of abominations of Mexican ritual. As in all fully developed polytheisms of civilised races among the Aztecs we lose sight of the moral primal Being of low savage races. He is obscured by deities of a kind not yet evolved in the lowest culture.
CHAPTER XVI. THE MYTHOLOGY OF EGYPT
Antiquity of Egypt—Guesses at origin of the people—
Chronological views of the religion—Permanence and changes—
Local and syncretic worship—Elements of pure belief and of
totemism—Authorities for facts—Monuments and Greek
reports—Contending theories of modern authors—Study of the
gods, their beasts, their alliances and mutations—Evidence
of ritual—A study of the Osiris myth and of the development
of Osiris-Savage and theological elements in the myth—Moral
aspect of the religion—Conclusion.
Even to the ancients Egypt was antiquity, and the Greeks sought in the dateless mysteries of the Egyptian religion for the fountain of all that was most mysterious in their own. Curiosity about the obscure beginnings of human creeds and the first knowledge of the gods was naturally aroused by that spectacle of the Pantheon of Egypt. Her highest gods were abstractions, swathed, like the Involuti of the Etrurians, in veils of mystic doctrine; yet in the most secret recess of her temples the pious beheld "a crocodile, a cat, or a serpent, a beast rolling on a purple couch".*
* Clem. Alex., Pædagog., iii. 2 (93).
In Egypt, the earlier ages and the later times beheld a land dominated by the thought of death, whose shadow falls on the monarch on his crowning day, whose whisper bids him send to far-off shores for the granite and the alabaster of the tomb. As life was ruled by the idea of death; so was fact conquered by dream, and all realities hastened to lose themselves in symbols; all gods rushed to merge their identity in the sun, as moths fly towards the flame of a candle. This spectacle of a race obedient to the dead and bowing down before the beasts, this procession of gods that were their own fathers and members together in Ra, wakened the interest of the Greeks, who were even more excited by the mystery of extreme age that hid the beginnings of Egypt. Full of their own memories and legends of tribal movements, of migrations, of invasions, the Greeks acknowledged themselves children of yesterday in face of a secular empire with an origin so remote that it was scarcely guessed at in the conjectures of fable. Egypt presented to them, as to us, the spectacle of antique civilisation without a known beginning. The spade of to-day reveals no more than the traditions of two thousand years ago. The most ancient relics of the earliest dynasty are the massive works of an organised society and an accomplished art. There is an unbridged interval between the builders of the mysterious temple hard by the Sphinx and their predecessors, the chippers of palaeolithic flint axes in the river drift. We know not whence the Egyptians came; we only trifle with hypotheses when we conjecture that her people are of an Asiatic or an African stock; we know not whether her gods arose in the fertile swamps by Nile-side, or whether they were borne in arks, like the Huitzilopochtli of Mexico, from more ancient seats by the piety of their worshippers. Yet as one great river of mysterious source flows throughout all Egypt, so through the brakes and jungles of her religion flows one great myth from a distant fountain-head, the myth of Osiris.*
* As to the origin of the Egyptians, the prevalent belief
among the ancients was that they had descended the Nile from
the interior of Africa. Cf. Diodorus Siculus, iii. 8. Modern
theorists occasionally lean in this direction. Dumichen,
Geschichte des Alien Ægyptiens, i. 118. Again, an attempt
has been made to represent them as successful members of a
race whereof the Bushmen of South Africa are the social
failures. M. Maspero conceives, once more, that the
Egyptians were "proto-Semitic," ethnologically related to the
people of Eastern Asia, and the grammar of their language
has Semitic affinities. But the connection, if it ever
existed, is acknowledged to be extremely remote. Maspero,
Hist, de l'Orient, 4th edit., p. 17. De Rouge writes,
"Tout nous ramène vers la parenté primitive de Mitsraim
(Egyptains) et de Canaan" (Recherches sur les Muniments,
p. 11).
The questions which we have to ask in dealing with the mythology of Egypt come under two heads: First, What was the nature of Egyptian religion and myth? Secondly, How did that complex mass of beliefs and practices come into existence?