Among the ancient Peruvians morality obtained a religious sanction through the divinity ascribed to their rulers. “They considered every mere order of the king to be a divine decree,” says Garcilasso de la Vega; “how much more would they venerate the special laws instituted for the common good. They said that the sun had ordered these laws to be made, and had revealed them to his child the Ynca; and hence a man who broke them was held to be guilty of sacrilege.”[5] According to the beliefs of the higher classes the Incas were after death transported to the mansion of the Sun, their father, where they still lived together as his family. The nobles would either follow them there or would live beneath the earth under the sceptre of Supay, the god of the dead. There was no idea of positive suffering inflicted on the wicked under his direction, but the subterranean abode was gloomy and dismal. Exceptional considerations of birth, rank, or valour in war determined the passage of chosen souls to heaven, where their lot would be far happier than that of the souls who remained in the regions below. The common people, on the other hand, thought of the future life as a continuation, pure and simple, of the present existence.[6]
[5] Garcilasso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, i. 148.
[6] Réville, op. cit. p. 236 sqq.
The great gods of ancient Egypt were mostly conceived as friendly beings.[7] Amon Râ, “the king of the gods,” was, in his character of the sun god, the creator, preserver, and supporter of all living things. He it is who makes pasture for the herds and fruit trees for men, on his account the Nile comes and mankind lives. He is verily of kindly heart: “when men call to him he delivers the fearful from the insolent.” He is “the vizier of the poor, who takes no bribes,” and who does not corrupt witnesses; and to him officials pray for promotion.[8] Thoth, the moon god, was also the god of all wisdom and learning, who gave men “speech and writing,” who discovered the written characters, and by his arithmetic enabled gods and men to keep account of their possessions.[9] Osiris ruled over the whole of Egypt as king, and instructed its inhabitants in all that was good—in agriculture as well as in the true religion—and gave them laws.[10] After a long and blessed reign, however, he fell a prey to the machinations of his brother Set, and, having been slain, was constrained to descend into the Underworld, where he evermore lived and reigned as judge and king of the dead. But the wicked god Set was also an object of worship; for he was strong and mighty, a terror to gods and men, and kings were anxious to secure his favour.[11] We have noticed above that certain Egyptian gods were believed to be guardians of truth;[12] and closely connected with this function was their love of justice. Thoth, who was called to witness by him who wished to give assurance of his honesty and good faith,[13] was styled “the judge in heaven”;[14] while his wife Maā, or Maat, was the goddess of both truth and justice, and her priests were the supreme judges.[15] But it seems that the Egyptian gods after all chiefly took notice of such acts as concerned their own wellbeing. This is true even of Osiris, “the great god, the lord of justice,”[16] in whose presence the judgment of the dead was given which decided upon their admission into his kingdom. In thousands upon thousands of funerary inscriptions we read words like these:—“May a royal offering be given to Osiris, that he may grant all manner of good things, food and drink to the soul of the deceased.”[17] And whilst the living paid him his dues in sacrifices repeated from year to year at regular intervals, the dead were not allowed to receive directly the sepulchral meals or offerings of kindred on feast-days, but all that was addressed to them must first pass through the hands of the god.[18] In the “Negative Confession,” which the worshippers of Osiris taught to their dead, great importance was attached to religious offences, such as to snare the birds of the gods, to catch the fish in their lakes, to injure the herds in the temple domains, to diminish the food in the temples, to revile the god. At the same time the list of offences which excluded the dead from Osiris’ kingdom contained very many of a social character—murder, oppression, stealing, robbing minors, fraud, lying, slander, reviling, adultery.[19] But the meaning of this seems to have been not so much that the god was animated by a righteous desire to punish the wicked and reward the good, as, rather, that he did not like to have any rascals among his vassals. As to the fate of the non-justified dead very little is said, and the punishment devised for them seems to have been a comparatively modern invention.[20] Nay, the virtuous dead themselves depended for their welfare upon their knowledge of magic words and formulas, upon amulets laid in their tombs, and upon the offerings made to them by their kindred. Ignorant souls, or those ill prepared for the struggle, were overcome by hunger and thirst, were attacked by demons and poisonous animals in traversing the regions of the Underworld, and, when in Osiris’ kingdom, had to work and till the land and earn their own living if the offerings ceased.[21] The Book of the Dead is itself essentially a collection of spells intended to secure to the dead victory over evil demons and protection from the gods; and the “Negative Confession” is a later addition, which shows that originally the conduct of earthly life was not considered at all.[22] So also in the book of Am Dûat the whole doctrine of a future life is based upon a belief in the power of magic, with the single exception that nobody can look forward to possessing fields in Dûat who in life has been an enemy of the god Râ.[23]
[7] On Egyptian gods as guardians of morality see, generally, Gardiner, ‘Egyptian Ethics and Morality,’ in Hastings, Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, v. 479 sq.
[8] Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, pp. 58-60, 83. Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 114.
[9] Erman, op. cit. p. 11. Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, p. 220.
[10] Erman, op. cit. p. 32. Idem, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 270. Maspero, op. cit. p. 174. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 13. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, i. 14, 15, 25. Kaibel, Epigrammata Græca, p. xxi.
[11] It is probable that Set originally was the divine protector of the kings of Upper Egypt, while Osiris’ son Horus, who defeated him, was the protector of the kings of Lower Egypt (Erman, Egyptian Religion, p. 19 sq.).