[719]. Along with the deities described above there is a class of higher gods with well-defined personalities, standing quite outside physical nature and man, with definite characters, and humanized in the higher sense. In contrast with the bizarre or barbarous anthropomorphic forms of the earlier deities these have the shape of refined humanity, capable of taking part in the life of the best men; they are the embodiment of a reflective conception of the relations between men and the great world. Inchoate divine forms of this sort may be recognized among certain half-civilized communities, but in their full form they are found only among civilized peoples, being indeed the product of civilization; and among such peoples they exist in varying degrees of approach to completeness.
[720]. The process of growth from the clan deities and the nature gods up to these higher forms may be traced with some definiteness in the great civilized nations of antiquity. We can see that there has been a scientific movement of separation of gods from phenomena. There is the distinct recognition not only of the difference between man and physical nature, but also of the difference between phenomena and the powers that control them.[1243] At the same time there is an increasing belief in the predominance of reason in the government of the world, and along with this a larger conception of the greatness of the world and finally of its unity. Artistic feeling coöperates in the change of the character of divine beings—the necessity of giving symmetry and clearness to their persons, whereby they more and more assume the form of the highest human ideals. Necessarily the ethical element advances hand in hand with the intellectual and artistic; it becomes more and more difficult to conceive of gods as controlled by motives lower than those recognized by the best men.
[721]. This general progress of thought is in some cases embodied in the conception of a succession of dynasties—one set of gods is overthrown or succeeded by another set; the most extreme form of the overthrow appears in the conception of the death of a whole community of gods, but this occurs not in the form of natural development, but only when one stadium or phase of religion is overmastered and expelled by another.
[722]. In Babylonia the earliest pair of deities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, vague forms, were succeeded by a second pair, Anshar and Kishar, somewhat less vague, and these in their turn yielded to the more definite group represented by Ea, Bel, and Marduk—deities who became the embodiments of the highest Babylonian culture; in Assyria Ashur and Ishtar occupied a similar position. In the long religious history of the Hindus many of the gods prominent in the Veda disappear or sink into subordinate positions, and deities at first unimportant become supreme. The Greek succession of dynasties resembles the Babylonian. The ancient Heaven and Earth are followed by Kronos,[1244] and he is dethroned by Zeus, who represents governmental order and a higher ethical scheme of society. The Romans appear to have borrowed their chronology of the gods from the Greeks: the combination of Saturnus with Ops (who belongs rather with Consus), the identification of these two respectively with Kronos and Rhea, and the dynastic succession Cælus,[1245] Saturnus, Jupiter, seem not to be earlier than the Hellenizing period in Rome.
[723]. These changes, when original, may have been due partly to the shifting of political power—the gods of a particular dominant region may have come into prominence and reigned for a time, giving place then to deities of some other region which had secured the hegemony; the history of the earliest gods lies far back in a dim region without historical records and therefore is not to be reconstructed definitely now. But such light as we get from literary records of later times rather suggests that the dynastic changes are the product of changes in the conception of the world, and these are as a rule in the direction of sounder and more humane thought.
[724]. There is a general similarity between the great deities that have been created by the various civilized peoples, since civilization has been practically the same everywhere. But the gods differ among themselves according to the special characters, needs, and endowments of the various peoples, so that no deity can be profitably studied without a knowledge of the physical and mental conditions of the community in which he arose. But everywhere we find that any one god may become practically supreme. Here again the political element sometimes comes in—a dominant city or state will impose its special god on a large district. There is also the natural tendency among men to concentrate on an individual figure. As legendary material has always gathered around particular men, so the great attributes of divinity gather about the person of a particular god who, for whatever reason, is the most prominent divine figure in a given community. Such a god becomes for the moment supreme, to the exclusion of other deities who under different circumstances might have had similar claims to precedence; and under favorable conditions a deity thus raised to the highest position may maintain himself and end by becoming the sole deity of his people and of the world. In any case such a divine figure becomes an ideal, and thus influences more or less the life of his worshipers.
[725]. In Oriental polytheistic systems the desire to secure completeness in the representation of divine activity shows itself in the combination of two or more forms into a unity of action. On the lower level we have the composite figures of Egypt and Babylonia, congeries of bodies, heads, and limbs, human and nonhuman—the result partly of the survival of ancient (sometimes outgrown) forms or the fusion of local deities, partly of the imaginative collocation of attributes. Many compound names may be explained in this way; in some cases they seem to arise from accidental local relations of cults.
As illustrations of lines of growth in divine figures we may take brief biographies of some of the greater gods. It is in comparatively few cases that the development of a god's character can be satisfactorily traced. There are no records of beginnings—we can only make what may be judged to be probable inferences from names, cults, and functions. The difficulty of the subject is increased by the fact that mythologians and theologians have obscured early conceptions by new combinations and interpretations, often employing familiar divine figures simply as vehicles of late philosophical ideas or some other sort of local dogmas.
[726]. Egypt.[1246] The cult of the sun in Egypt issued in the creation of a group of solar divinities, the most important of whom are Horus (Har or Hor) and Ra (or Rê).
Horus appears to have been the great god of united Egypt in the earliest times about which we have information. The kings of the predynastic and early dynastic periods are called "worshipers of Horus," a title that was adopted by succeeding monarchs, who had each his "Horus name."[1247] He was also the special patron of some small communities—a fact that has been variously interpreted as indicating that the god's movement was from local to general patron,[1248] or that it was in the opposite direction[1249]; the former of these hypotheses is favored by what appears elsewhere in such changes in the positions of deities. As Horus is always connected with light he may have been originally a local sun-god; it is possible, however, that he was a clan god with general functions, who was brought into association with the sun by the natural progress of thought. In any case he became a great sun-god, but yielded his position of eminence to Ra. The myth of his conflict with Set, the representative of darkness, is probably a priestly dualistic construction, resting, perhaps, on a political situation (the struggle between the North and the South of the Egyptian territory).[1250]