CHAPTER VIII.—THE GODS OF EGYPT.
WE have now completed our preliminary survey of the nature and origin of Gods in general. We have seen how men first came to believe in the objective existence of these powerful and invisible beings, how they learnt to invest them with majestic attributes, and how they grew to worship them under the various forms of mummies or boulders, stone or wooden idols, trees or stumps, wells, rivers, and fountains. In short, we have briefly arrived at the origin of Polytheism. We have now to go on to our second question—How from the belief in many gods did men progress to the belief in one single God, the creator and upholder of all things? Our task is now to reconstruct the origin of Monotheism.
But Monotheism bases itself entirely upon the great God of the Hebrews. To him, therefore, we must next address ourselves. Is he too resoluble, as I hinted before, into a Sacred Stone, the monument and representative of some prehistoric chieftain? Can we trace the origin of the Deity of Christendom till we find him at last in a forgotten Semitic ghost of the earliest period?
The chief Hebrew god Jahweh, when we first catch a passing glimpse of his primitive worship by his own people, was but one among a number of competing deities, mostly, it would appear, embodied by their votaries in the visible form of stone or wooden pillars, and adored by a small group of loosely-connected tribes among the mountain region in the southwest of Syria. The confederacy among whom he dwelt knew themselves as the Sons of Israel; they regarded Jahweh as their principal god, much as the Greeks did Zeus, or the early Teutons their national hero Woden. But a universal tradition among them bore witness to the fact that they had once lived in a subject condition in Egypt, the house of bondage, and that their god Jahweh had been instrumental in leading them thence into the rugged land they inhabited throughout the whole historical period, between the valley of Jordan and the Mediterranean coast. So consistent and so definite was this traditional belief that we can hardly regard it otherwise than as enclosing a kernel of truth; and not only do Kuenen and other Semitic scholars of the present day admit it as genuine, but the Egyptologists also seem generally to allow its substantial accuracy and full accord with hieroglyphic literature. This sojourn in Egypt cannot have failed to influence to some extent the Semitic strangers: therefore I shall begin my quest of the Hebrew god among the Egyptian monuments. Admitting that he was essentially in all respects a deity of the true Semitic pattern, I think it will do us good to learn a little beforehand about the people among whom his votaries dwelt so long, especially as the history of the Egyptian cults affords us perhaps the best historical example of the growth and development of a great national religion.
A peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind to the evolution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else in the world can we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism and philosophic theology. There are savage cults, it is true, which show us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds which show us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single supreme Ruler of the Cosmos. But there is no other religious system known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break, the whole evolutionary movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually expanded and etherealised into the later. The origin of the other great historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable: in Egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate goal of pure monotheism.
I would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history by saying, once for all, that while I make no pretensions to special Egyptological knowledge, I must nevertheless dissent on general anthropological grounds from the attitude taken up by Mr. Le Page Renouf in his Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt. That learned writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century behind its time. It is written as though the doctrine of evolution had never been promulgated; and every page contains glaring contradictions of the most elementary principles of human development. Mr. Renouf still adheres to the discredited ideas that polytheism grew out of an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of adoration are “symbolical” in origin; and that “the sublimer portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of development or elimination from the grosser.” Such theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which Mr. Renouf brings forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. A plain survey of the Egyptian monuments in the Nile valley, and of the known facts about Egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from the warping influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide anthropological enquiry, to precisely opposite and more probable conclusions. For it must be carefully borne in mind that on these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be implicitly and unhesitatingly accepted. The religion of Egypt, like the religion of Judæa or the religion of Hawaii, must be judged, not in isolation, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been found so disastrous in the case of the Semitic and the Aryan cults, must be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless error. The key to the origin of the Egyptian faith is to be found, not in the late philosophising glosses quoted by M. de Rougé and his English disciple, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of existing African savages.
Looked at from this point of view, then—the evolutionary point of view—nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early Egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations, ancestor-worship and totemism.
I will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to consider by far the earliest, and infinitely the most important. And I may add that it is also, to judge by the Egyptian evidence alone, both the element which underlies the whole religious conceptions of the Nile valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon, including Osiris, Ptah, Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as many of their correlative goddesses. There is not, in fact, any great ethnical religion on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in which the basal importance of the Dead Man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient cult of Pharaohnic Egypt.
The Egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. It is impossible for a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty shade of the desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent the streets of Thebes and Memphis. The commonest object of worship on all the monuments of Nile is beyond doubt the Mummy: sometimes the private mummy of an ancestor or kinsman, sometimes the greater deified mummies of immemorial antiquity, blended in the later syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities, but represented to the very last in all ages of art—on the shattered Rameseum at Thebes or the Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken Denderah—as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. If ever there was a country where the Worship of the Dead was pushed to an extreme, that country was distinctly and decisively Egypt.