The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

Two other aspects of the sky were considered worthy of personification and worship. The morning sky, or perhaps the eastern half of the morning sky, which awaited the sun’s earliest beams, and which was called Saté, and honoured as the goddess of vigilance and endeavour, and the beautiful western sky at even, more lovely in Egypt than anywhere else, to the exaltation of which the Egyptians applied their prettiest titles and symbols. Hathor, the ‘Queen of Love,’ was the name they gave to their personification of the evening sky, speaking of her at once as the loving and loyal wife of the sun, who received the weary traveller, the battered conqueror, to rest on her bosom after his work was done, and the gentle household lady whose influence called men to their homes when labour was finished, and collected scattered families to enjoy the loveliest spectacle of the day, the sunset, in company. Hathor is represented as a figure with horns, bearing the sun’s disk between them, or sometimes carrying a little house or shrine upon her head.

Kneph.

The sky, however, with the ancient Egyptians, did not include the air; that again was personified in a masculine form, and regarded as a very great god, some of whose attributes appear to trench on those of Osiris, and Ptah; Kneph was the name given to the god who embodied the air, the living breath or spirit; and he was one of the divinities to whom a share in the work of creation was attributed. He is represented in a boat, moving over the face of the waters, and breathing life into the newly created world. He was no doubt connected in the minds of pious Egyptians with thoughts of that breath of God by whose inspiration man became a living soul; but in his nature-aspect he perhaps especially personified the wind blowing over the Nile valley after the inundation, and seeming to bring back life to the world by drying up the water under which the new vegetation was hidden.

Isis.

The soil of the country thus breathed upon, which responded to the rays of Osiris and the breath of Kneph by pouring forth a continual supply of food for men, was naturally enough personified into a deity who claimed a large share of devotion, and was worshipped under many titles. Isis, the sister-wife of Osiris, was the name given to her, and so much was said of Isis, and so many stories told of her, that it appears at times as if, under that single name, the attributes of all the other goddesses were gathered up. Isis, was a personification, not of the receptive earth only, but of the feminine principle in nature wherever perceived, whether in the tender west that received the sun, or in the brooding midnight sky that invited to repose, or in the cherishing soil that drew in the sun’s warmth, and the breath of the wind, only to give them forth again changed into flowers and fruit and corn. Isis of ‘the ten thousand names’ the Greeks called her; and if we consider her as the embodiment of all that can be said of the feminine principle, we shall not be surprised at her many names, or at the difficulty of comprehending her nature. She was, above all else, however, the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus, which certainly points to her being, or at all events to her having been originally, a sky-goddess; but then again she is spoken of as dressed in robes of many hues, which points to the changing and parti-coloured earth. Some of her attributes

Nephthys.

seem to connect her with the dark moon, especially the fact that her most important offices are towards the dead in the under-world, whose government she is spoken of as sharing with her husband Osiris. In pictures of the funeral procession she is drawn as standing at the head of the mummied body during its passage over the river that bounds the under-world, and in that position she represents the beginning; her younger sister, Nephthys, the end, stands at the foot of the still sleeping soul; the two goddesses thus summing up, with divinity at each end, the little span of mortal life. In the judgment-hall, Isis stands behind the throne of Osiris, drooping great protecting wings over him and it. This quality of protecting, of cherishing and defending, appears to be the spiritual conception worshipped under the form of the many-named goddess. Isis is constantly spoken of as the protector of her brother Osiris, and is drawn on the tomb with long drooping wings. She is also frequently represented as nursing Horus, the son who avenged his father, and in that character she wears the cow’s head, the cow being sacred to Isis, as was the bull to Osiris.

But when we have made this summary there is one thing which should also be borne in mind with regard to the religion of Egypt. Ancient Egypt, which appears at first sight such a single and united empire, was in reality (and in this respect it was something like the Chinese empire) deeply infected with a sort of feudalism, in virtue of which the different divisions (nomes) of the country did in reality constitute something like different states. And each state tried to preserve its sense of independence by having some special divinity or group of divinities which it held in peculiar honour. So that the Egyptian pantheon itself is infected by this republican spirit. Almost each single god is supreme somewhere; elsewhere he may be almost overlooked.

Animal-gods.

The origin of the strangely intimate connection between these Egyptian gods, and certain animals held to be sacred to them, and in some cases to be incarnations of them, is a very difficult question to determine. Two explanations are given by different writers. One is that the animal-worship was a remnant of the religion of an inferior race who inhabited Egypt in times far back, and who were conquered but not exterminated by immigrants from Asia, who brought a higher civilization and a more spiritual religion with them, which, however, did not actually supersede the old, but incorporated some of its baser elements into itself. Other writers look upon the animal-worship as but another form of the unending parable from nature, which, as we have seen, pervades the whole Egyptian mythology. The animals, according to this view, being not less than the nature-gods worshipped as revelations of a divine order, manifesting itself through the many appearances of the outside world; their obedient following of the laws imposed on their natures through instinct making them better witnesses to the Divine Will than self-willed, disobedient man was found to be.