The question, What was the religion of Egypt? is far from simple. In a complete treatise on the topic, it would be necessary to ask in reply, At what period, in what place, and among what classes of society did the religion exist which you wish to investigate? The ancient Egyptian religion had a lifetime so long that it almost requires to be meted by the vague measures of geological time. It is historically known to us, by the earliest monuments, about the date at which Archbishop Usher fixed the Creation. Even then, be it noticed, the religion of Egypt was old and full-grown; there are no historical traces of its beginnings. Like the material civilisation, it had been fashioned by the unrecorded Sheshoa Hor, "the servants of Horus," patriarchs dwelling with the blessed. In the four or five thousand years of its later existence, Egyptian religion endured various modifications.* It was a conservative people, and schooled by the wisdom of the sepulchre. But invaders, Semitic, Ethiopian and Greek, brought in some of their own ideas. Priestly colleges developed novel dogmas, and insensibly altered ritual The thought of hundreds of generations of men brooded, not fruitlessly, over the problems of the divine nature. Finally, it is likely that in Egypt, as elsewhere, the superstitions of the least educated and most backward classes, and of subject peoples on a lower level of civilisation, would again and again break up, and win their way to the surface of religion. Thus a complete study of Egyptian faiths would be chronological—would note the setting and rising of the stars of elder and later deities.
* Professor Lieblein, maintaining this view, opposes the
statement of Mr. Le Page Renouf, who writes: "The earliest
monuments which have been discovered present to us the very
same fully developed civilisation and the same religion as
the later monuments" (Hib. Lectures, 1880, p. 81). But it
is superfluous to attack a position which Mr. Le Page Renouf
does not appear really to hold. He admits the existence of
development and evolution in Egyptian religious thought "I
believe, therefore, that, after closely approaching the
point at which polytheism might have turned into monotheism,
the religious thought of Egypt turned aside into a wrong
track" (Op. cit, p. 236).
The method of a systematic history of Egyptian religion would not be regulated by chronology alone. Topographical and social conditions would also claim attention. The favoured god or gods of one nome (administrative district), or of one town, or of one sacred metropolis, were not the gods of another metropolis, or town, or nome, though some deities were common to the whole country. The fundamental character might be much the same in each case, but the titles, and aspects, and ritual, and accounts of the divine genealogy varied in each locality. Once more, the "syncretic" tendency kept fusing into one divine name and form, or into a family triad of gods (mother, father and son), the deities of different districts, which, beneath their local peculiarities, theologians could recognise as practically the same.
While political events and local circumstances were thus modifying Egyptian religion, it must never be forgotten that the different classes of society were probably by no means at one in their opinions. The monuments show us what the kings believed, or at least what the kings practised, record the prayers they uttered and the sacrifices they offered. The tombs and the papyri which contain the Book of the Dead and other kindred works reveal the nature of belief in a future life, with the changes which it underwent at different times. But the people, the vast majority, unlettered and silent, cannot tell us what they believed, or what were their favourite forms of adoration. We are left to the evidence of amulets, of books of magic, of popular tales, surviving on a papyrus here and there, and to the late testimony of Greek writers—Herodotus, Diodorus, the author of the treatise De Osiride et hide, and others. While the clergy of the twentieth dynasty were hymning the perfections of Ammon Ra—"so high that man may not attain unto him, dweller in the hidden place, him whose image no man has beheld"—the peasant may have been worshipping, like a modern Zulu, the serpents in his hovel, or may have been adoring the local sacred cat of his village, or flinging stones at the local sacred crocodile of his neighbours. To the enlightened in the later empire, perhaps to the remotest unknown ancestors also, God was self-proceeding, self-made, manifest in the deities that were members together in him of godhead. But the peasant, if he thinks of the gods at all, thinks of them walking the earth, like our Lord and the saints in the Norse nursery tales, to amuse themselves with the adventures of men. The peasant spoke of the Seven Hathors, that come like fairy godmothers to the cradle of each infant, and foretell his lot in life.*
* Compare Maspero, Hist, de l'Orient., 4th edit., pp. 279-
288, for the priestly hymns and the worship of beasts. "The
lofty thoughts remained the property of a small number of
priests and instructed people; they did not penetrate the
mass of the population. Far from that, the worship of
animals, goose, swallow, cat, serpent, had many more
followers than Amnion Ra could count." See also Tiele,
Manuel de l'Hist. des Rel., Paris, 1880, pp. 46, 47. For
the folk-lore of wandering gods see Maspero, Contes
Egyptiens, Paris, 1882, p. 17.
It is impossible, of course, to write here a complete history of Egyptian religion, as far as it is to be extracted from the books and essays of learned moderns; but it has probably been made clear that when we speak of the religion and mythology of Egypt, we speak of a very large and complicated subject. Plainly this is a topic which the lay student will find full of pitfalls, and on which even scholars may well arrive at contradictory opinions. To put the matter briefly, where one school finds in the gods and the holy menagerie of Egyptian creeds the corruption of a primitive monotheism, its opponents see a crowd of survivals from savagery combined with clearer religious ideas, which are the long result of civilised and educated thought.* Both views may be right in part.
* The English leader of the former school, the believer in a
primitive purity, corrupted and degraded but not
extinguished, is Mr. Le Page Renouf (Hibbert Lectures,
London, 1879). It is not always very easy to make out what
side Mr. Le Page Renouf does take. For example, in his
Hibbert Lectures, p. 89, he speaks somewhat
sympathetically of the "very many eminent scholars, who,
with full knowledge of all that can be said to the contrary,
maintain that the Egyptian religion is essentially
monotheistic". He himself says that "a power without a name
or any mythological characteristic is constantly referred to
in the singular number, and can only be regarded as the
object of that sensus numinis, or immediate perception of
the Infinite." which is "the result of an intuition as
irresistible as the impressions of our senses". If this be
not primitive instinctive monotheism, what is it? Yet Mr.
Le Page Renouf says that Egyptian polytheism, after closely
approaching the point where it might have become monotheism,
went off on a wrong track; so the Egyptians after all were
polytheists, not monotheists (op. cit., p. 235). Of similar
views are the late illustrious Vicomte de Rouge, M.
Mariette, M. Pierret, and Brugsch Pasha (Rel. und Myth, der
Alien Egypter, vol i., Leipzig, 1884). On the other side,
on the whole regarding Egyptian creeds as a complex mass of
early uncivilised and popular ideas, with a later priestly
religion tending towards pantheism and monotheism, are M.
Maspero, Professor Tiele, Professor Lieblein (English
readers may consult his pamphlet, Egyptian Religion,
Leipzig, 1884), M. Edward Meyer, (Geschichte des
Alterthums, Stuttgart, 1884), Herr Pietsch. mann
(Zeitschrtftfur Ethnologic, Berlin, 1878, art. "Fetisch
Dienst"), and Professor Tiele (Manuel de l'Histoire des
Religions, Paris, 1880, and "History of Egyptian Religion,
English translation, 1882).
After this preamble let us endeavour to form a general working idea of what Egyptian religion was as a whole. What kind of religion did the Israelites see during the sojourn in Egypt, or what presented itself to the eyes of Herodotus? Unluckily we have no such eye-witnesses of the earlier Egyptian as Bernal Diaz was of the Aztec temples. The Bible says little that is definite about the theological "wisdom of the Egyptians". When confronted with the sacred beasts, Herodotus might have used with double truth the Greek saw: "A great ox has trod upon my tongue".* But what Herodotus hinted at or left unsaid is gathered from the evidence of tombs and temple walls and illuminated papyri.
One point is certain. Whatever else the religion of Egypt may at any time have been, it struck every foreign observer as polytheism.** Moreover, it was a polytheism like another. The Greeks had no difficulty, for example, in recognising amongst these beast-headed monsters gods analogous to their own. This is demonstrated by the fact that to almost every deity of Egypt they readily and unanimously assigned a Greek divine name. Seizing on a certain aspect of Osiris and of his mystery-play, they made him Dionysus; Hor became Apollo; Ptah, Hephaestus: Ammon Ra, Zeus; Thoth, Hermes, and so on with the rest. The Egyptian deities were recognised as divine beings, with certain (generally ill-defined) departments of Nature and of human activity under their care. Some of them, like Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), were esteemed elemental forces or phenomena, and were identified with the same personal phenomena or forces, Uranus and Gæa, in the Greek system, where heaven and earth were also parents of many of the gods.
* Æschylus, Agamemnon, 37, (————)
** Maspero, Musée de Boulaq, p. 150; Le Page Renouf, Hib.
Led., pp. 85,86.