Passers-by drank of the water, and requited the unexpected benefit with a short prayer. There were several such trees in the Memphite nome, and in the Letopolite nome from Dashûr to Gîzeh, inhabited, as every one knew, by detached doubles of Nûît and Hâthor. These combined districts were known as the "Land of the Sycamore," a name afterwards extended to the city of Memphis; and their sacred trees are worshipped at the present day both by Mussulman and Christian fellahîn.[*]
* The tree at Matarîeh, commonly called the Tree of the
Virgin, seems to me to be the successor of a sacred tree of
Heliopolis in which a goddess, perhaps Hâthor, was
worshipped.
The most famous among them all, the Sycamore of the South—nûhît rîsit—was regarded as the living body of Hâthor on earth. Side by side with its human gods and prophetic statues, each nome proudly advanced one or more sacred animals, one or more magic trees. Each family, and almost every individual, also possessed gods and fetishes, which had been pointed out for their worship by some fortuitous meeting with an animal or an object; by a dream, or by sudden intuition. They had a place in some corner of the house, or a niche in its walls; lamps were continually kept burning before them, and small daily offerings were made to them, over and above what fell to their share on solemn feast-days. In return, they became the protectors of the household, its guardians and its counsellors. Appeal was made to them in every exigency of daily life, and their decisions were no less scrupulously carried out by their little circle of worshippers, than was the will of the feudal god by the inhabitants of his principality.
1 Bas-relief from the temple of Seti I. at Abydos; drawn by
Boudier, from a photograph by M. Daniel Héron. Seti I.,
second king of the XIXth dynasty, is throwing the lasso; his
son, Ramses II., who is still the crown prince, holds the
bull by the tail to prevent its escaping from the slipknot.
The prince was the great high priest. The whole religion of the nome rested upon him, and originally he himself performed its ceremonies. Of these, the chief was sacrifice,—that is to say, a banquet which it was his duty to prepare and lay before the god with his own hands. He went out into the fields to lasso the half-wild bull; bound it, cut its throat, skinned it, burnt part of the carcase in front of his idol and distributed the rest among his assistants, together with plenty of cakes, fruits, vegetables, and wine.[*] On the occasion, the god was present both in body and double, suffering himself to be clothed and perfumed, eating and drinking of the best that was set on the table before him, and putting aside some of the provisions for future use. This was the time to prefer requests to him, while he was gladdened and disposed to benevolence by good cheer. He was not without suspicion as to the reason why he was so feasted, but he had laid down his conditions beforehand, and if they were faithfully observed he willingly yielded to the means of seduction brought to bear upon him. Moreover, he himself had arranged the ceremonial in a kind of contract formerly made with his worshippers and gradually perfected from age to age by the piety of new generations.[**] Above all things, he insisted on physical cleanliness. The officiating priest must carefully wash—ûâbû—his face, mouth, hands, and body; and so necessary was this preliminary purification considered, that from it the professional priest derived his name of ûîbû, the washed, the clean.[***]
* This appears from the sacrificial ritual employed in the
temples up to the last days of Egyptian paganism; cf., for
instance, the illustration on p. 173, where the king is
represented as lassoing the bull. That which in historic
times was but an image, had originally been a reality.
** The most striking example of the divine institution of
religious services is furnished by the inscription relating
the history of the destruction of men in the reign of Râ,
where the god, as he is about to make his final ascension
into heaven, substitutes animal for human sacrifices.
*** The idea of physical cleanliness comes out in such
variants as ûîbû totûi, "clean of both hands," found on
stelae instead of the simple title ûîbû. We also know, on
the evidence of ancient writers, the scrupulous daily care
which Egyptian priests took of their bodies. It was only as
a secondary matter that the idea of moral purity entered
into the conception of a priest.
His costume was the archaic dress, modified according to circumstances. During certain services, or at certain points in the sacrifices, it was incumbent upon him to wear sandals, the panther-skin over his shoulder, and the thick lock of hair falling over his right ear; at other times he must gird himself with the loin-cloth having a jackal's tail, and take the shoes from off his feet before proceeding with his office, or attach a false beard to his chin. The species, hair, and age of the victim, the way in which it was to be brought and bound, the manner and details of its slaughter, the order to be followed in opening its body and cutting it up, were all minutely and unchangeably decreed. And these were but the least of the divine exactions, and those most easily satisfied. The formulas accompanying each act of the sacrificial priest contained a certain number of words whose due sequence and harmonies might not suffer the slightest modification whatever, even from the god himself, under penalty of losing their efficacy.[*]
* The Purification Ritual for officiating priests is
contained in a papyrus of the Berlin Museum, whose analysis
and table of chapters has been published by Herr Oscar von
Lemm, Das Bitualbuch des Ammonsdienstes, p. 4, et seq.