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

by C. F. Keary

This is one of the problems which must be left to be determined by further researches into unwritten history, or perhaps by a fuller understanding of Egyptian symbols. That a great deal of symbolical teaching was wrapped up in the Egyptians’ worship of animals may be gathered by the lesson which they drew from the natural history of the sacred beetle, whose habit of burying in the sand of the desert a ball of clay, full of eggs, which in due course of time changed into chrysalises and then into winged beetles, furnished them with their favourite emblem of the resurrection of the body and the continued life of the soul through the apparent death-sleep—an emblem which was wanting to no temple, and without which no body was ever buried. Thinking of this, we must allow that their eyes were not shut to the teaching of the ‘visible things’ which in the ages of darkness yet spoke a message from God.

We have now gone over the most important of the Egyptian gods, connecting them with the natural appearances which seem to have inspired them, so as to give the clue to a comparison with the nature-gods of the Aryans, of which we shall speak in the next chapter. There were, of course, other objects of worship, not so easily classed, among which we ought to mention Hapi, the personification of the river Nile; Sothis, the dog-star, connected with Isis; and two more of the funeral gods—Anubis, who in his nature-aspect may be possibly another personification of air and wind, and who is always spoken of as the friend and guardian of pure souls, and represented at the death-bed sometimes in the shape of a human-headed bird as helping the new-born soul to escape from the body; and Thmei, the goddess of Truth and Justice, who introduces the soul into the hall of judgment. The evil powers recognized among the ancient Egyptians were principally embodiments of darkness and of the waste of the desert, and do not appear to have had any distinct conception of moral evil associated with them. They are, however, spoken of in the book of the dead as enemies of the soul, who endeavour to delude it and lead it out of its way on its journey across the desert to the abode of the gods. Amenti was no doubt the desert, but not only the sunlit desert the Egyptians could overlook from their western hills—it included the unknown world beyond and underneath, to which they supposed the sun to go when he sank below the horizon, and where, following in his track, the shades trooped when they had left their bodies. The story of the trials and combats of the soul on its journey through Amenti to the judgment-hall, and its reception by the gods, is written in the most ancient and sacred of Egyptian books, the Ritual, or Book of the Dead, which has been translated into French by M. de Rougé, and later by M. Pierret, and into English by Dr. Birch. The English translation is to be found in the Appendix to the fifth volume of Bunsen’s Egypt’s Place in History.

Chaldæan
religion.

The mythologies of the other uninspired Semitic nations resemble the Egyptian in the main element of being personifications of the powers of nature. The Chaldæans directed their worship chiefly towards the heavenly bodies as did the ancient Egyptians, but not exclusively. Their principal deities were arranged in triads of greater and less dignity; nearly all the members of these were personifications of the heavens or the heavenly bodies. The first triad comprised Ana, the heavens or the hidden sun, Father of the gods, Lord of Darkness, Ruler of a far-off city, Lord of Spirits. By these titles, suggestive of some of the attributes and offices towards the dead, attributed by the Egyptians to Atum and Osiris, was the first member of their first order of gods addressed by the Chaldæans. Next in order came Bil, also a sun-god: the Ruler, the Lord, the Source of kingly power, and the patron and image of the earthly king. His name has the same signification as Baal, and he personifies the same aspect of nature, the sun ruling in the heavens, whose worship was so widely diffused among all the people with whom the Israelites came in contact. The third member of the first triad was Hoa or Ea, who personified apparently the earth: Lord of the abyss, Lord of the great deep, the intelligent Guide, the intelligent Fish, the Lord of the Understanding, are some of his titles, and appear to reveal a conception somewhat answering to that of Thoth. His symbol was a serpent, and he was represented with a fish’s head, which connects him with the Philistine’s god Dagon. The second triad comprised Sin, or Urki, a moon-god, worshipped at Ur, Abraham’s city—his second name Urki, means ‘the watcher,’ and has the same root as the Hebrew name for ‘angel’—San, the disk of the sun; and Vul, the air. Beneath these deities in dignity, or rather perhaps in distance, came the five planets, each representing some attribute or aspect of the deity, or rather being itself a portion of deity endowed with a special characteristic, and regarded as likely to be propitious to men from being less perfect and less remote than the greater gods. These planetary gods were called—Nebo (Mercury), the lover of light; Ishtar (Venus), the mother of the gods; Nergal (Mars), the great hero; Bel Merodach (Jupiter), the ruler, the judge; Nin (Saturn), the god of strength. To these gods the chief worship of the Assyrians was paid, and it was their majesty and strength, typifying that of the earthly king, which Assyrian architects personified in the winged, man-headed bulls and lions with examples of which we are familiar. The gods of the Canaanite nations, Moloch, Baal, Chemosh, Baal-Zebub, and Thammuz, were all of them personifications of the sun or of the sun’s rays, considered under one aspect or another; the cruel gods, to whom human sacrifices were offered, representing the strong, fierce summer sun, and the gentle Thammuz being typical of the softer light of morning and of early spring, which is killed by the fierce heat of midday and midsummer, and mourned for by the earth till his return in the evening and in autumn. Ashtoreth, the horned queen, symbolized by trees and worshipped in groves, is the moon and also the evening star; but, like Isis, she seems to gather up in herself the worship of the feminine principle in nature. The Canaanites represented their gods in the temples by symbols instead of by sculptured figures. An upright stone, either an aerolite or a precious stone (as in the case of the great emerald kept in the shrine of the Temple of Baal-Melcarth at Tyre), symbolized the sun and the masculine element in nature; while the feminine element was figured under the semblance of a grove of trees, the Ashara, sometimes apparently a grove outside the temple, and sometimes a mimic grove kept within.

There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another and perhaps a more ancient and more metaphysical conception of God worshipped by all the Semitic peoples of Asia. His name, Il or El, appears to have been for Chaldæans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes of the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, the generic name for God; and his worship was limited to a distant awful recognition, unprofaned by the rites and sacrifices wherein the nature-gods were approached. Il became a concealed, distant deity, too far off for worship, and too great to be touched by the concerns of men, among those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew to be concealers instead of revealers of the Divine; while to the chosen people the name acquired ever new significance, as the voice of inspiration unfolded the attributes of the Eternal Father to His children.

This sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites is, it must be owned, very barren in incident and character. It presents, indeed, no more than a shadowy hierarchy of gods and heroes, through whose thin personalities the shapes of natural objects loom with obtrusive clearness. They may serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way through the mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also be remembered that we have not touched upon the later more ornamented stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy Typhon, and the recovery of his body, and his return to life through the instrumentality of Isis and Horus.

CHAPTER IX.
ARYAN RELIGIONS.

Nature-worship.

That morning speech of Belarius (in Cymbeline) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature-religion in its simplest garb:

‘Stoop, boys: this gate
Instructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows you
To morning’s holy office: the gates of monarchs
Are arched so high, that giants may jet through
And keep their impious turbans on, without
Good-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!
We house i’ the rock, yet use thee not so hardly
As prouder livers do.’