Nevertheless, whatever be the true origin of the totem-gods, I do not think totemism militates in any way against the general principle of the evolution of the idea of a god from the ghost, the Dead Man, or the deified ancestor. For only after the concept of a god had been formed from ancestor-cult, and only after worship had been evolved from the customary offerings to the mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any other object by any possibility be elevated to the godhead. Nor, on the other hand, as I have before remarked, do I feel inclined wholly to agree with Mr. Spencer that every individual god was necessarily once a particular Dead Man. It seems to me indubitable that after the idea of godhead had become fully fixed in the human mind, some gods at least began to be recognised who were directly framed either from abstract conceptions, from natural objects, or from pure outbursts of the mythopoeic faculty. I do not think, therefore, that the existence of a certain (relatively unimportant) class of totem-gods in Egypt or elsewhere is necessarily inconsistent in any way with our main theory of the origin of godhead.
Be this as it may, it is at any rate clear that totemism itself was a very ancient and widespread institution in early Egypt. Totems are defined by Mr. Frazer as “a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation.” “Observation of existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere,” says Sir Martin Conway, “shows us that one or more representatives of the totem are often fed or even kept alive in captivity by the tribe.” Mr. Frazer tells us that “amongst the Nar-rinyeri in South Australia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up their mouths, and keep them as pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was carefully kept and fed. Amongst the Kalong in Java, whose totem is a red dog, each family as a rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on no account allow to be struck or ill-used by any one.” In the same way, no doubt, certain Egyptian clans kept sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks, jackals, cobras, lizards, ibises, asps, and beetles. Mummies of most of these sacred animals, and little images of others, are common in the neighbourhood of certain places where they were specially worshipped.
Whether the animal-headed gods represent a later stage of the same totem-worship, or whether they stand merely for real ancestor-gods belonging to a particular totem-clan, and therefore represented by its totem, is not a question easily settled. But at any rate it is clear that many gods are the equivalents of such totem-animals, as is the case with the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the cow-headed Athor, the ram-headed Knum, the cat-headed Pasht, the lion-headed Sekhet, the ibis-headed Thoth, and the kestrel-headed Khons. These gods appear on the earlier monuments as beasts alone, not as human forms with bestial heads. Till the Twelfth Dynasty, when a totem-god is mentioned (which is not often), “he is represented,” says Mr. Flinders Petrie, “by his animal.” Anubis, for example, at this stage, is merely a jackal; and as M. Maspero puts it, “Whatever may have been the object of worship in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, not a hieroglyph, that the earliest ibis-worshippers adored.” There were other totems, however, which were less fruitful in deities, but which entered largely in artistic forms into the later religious symbolism. Such were especially the asp and the sacred scarabæus, which almost rival the sun-disk in the large part they play in the developed religious art-language of the great temple-building dynasties. I may add that among the other symbols of this curious emblematical picture-writing are the Tau or crux ansata, by origin apparently a combined linga and yoni; the lotus, the sceptre, the leek, and the crescent.
There is, however, yet a third class of divine or quasidivine beings in the newer Egyptian Pantheon to which Mr. Andrew Lang, in his able introduction to the Euterpe of Herodotus, still allows that great importance may be attached. These are the elemental or seemingly elemental deities, the Nature-Gods who play so large a part in all rationalistic or mystical mythologies. Such are no doubt Nut and Seb, the personal heaven and earth, named as early as the inscription on the coffin of Menkaoura of the Fourth Dynasty in the British Museum: such perhaps (though far less certainly) are Khons, identified with the rising sun, and Tum, regarded as the impersonation of his nightly setting. But none of the quite obviously elemental gods, except Ra, play any large part in the actual and practical worship of the people: to adopt the broad distinction I have ventured to draw in our second chapter, they are gods to talk about, not gods to adore—mythological conceptions rather than religious beings. Their names occur much in the sacred texts, but their images are rare and their temples unknown. It is not Nut or Seb whose figures we see carved abundantly in relief on the grey sandstone pillars of Karnak and Luxor, painted in endless file on the gesso-covered walls of the Tombs of the Kings, or represented by dozens in the great collection of little bronze idols that fill so many cabinets at the Boulak Museum. The actual objects of the highest worship are far other than these abstract elemental conceptions: they are Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis, Khem, Pasht, and Athor. The quaint or grotesque incised figures of Nut, represented as a female form with arms and legs extended like a living canopy over the earth, as at Denderah, belong, I believe, almost if not quite exclusively to the Ptolemaic period, when zodiacal and astrological conceptions had been freely borrowed by the Egyptians from Greece and Asia. Nut and Seb, as gods, not myths, are in short quite recent ideas in Egypt. Even sun-disk Ra, himself, important as he becomes in the later developed creed, is hardly so much in his origin a separate god as an adjunct or symbol of divinity united syncretically with the various other deities. To call a king the sun is a common piece of courtier flattery. It is as Amen-Ra or as Osiris that the sun receives most actual worship. His name is joined to the names of gods as to the names of kings: he is almost as much a symbol as the Tau or the Asp; he obtains little if any adoration in his simple form, but plenty when conjoined in a compound conception with some more practical deity of strictly human origin. Even at the great “Temple of the Sun” at Heliopolis, it was as the bull Men or Mnevis that the luminary was adored: and that cult, according to Manetho, went back as far as the totemistic times of the Second Dynasty.
To put it briefly, then, I hold that the element of nature-worship is a late gloss or superadded factor in the Egyptian religion; that it is always rather mythological or explanatory than religious in the strict sense; and that it does not in the least interfere with our general inference that the real Egyptian gods as a whole were either ancestral or totemistic in origin.
From the evidence before us, broadly considered, we may fairly conclude, then, that the earliest cult of Egypt consisted of pure ancestor-worship, complicated by a doubtfully religious element of totemism, which afterwards by one means or another interwove itself closely with the whole ghostly worship of the country. The later gods were probably deified ancestors of the early tribal kings, sometimes directly worshipped as mummies, and sometimes perhaps represented by their totem-animals or later still by human figures with animal heads. Almost every one of these great gods is localised to a particular place—“Lord of Abydos,” “Mistress of Senem,” “President of Thebes,” “Dweller at Hermopolis,” as would naturally be the case if they were locally-deified princes, admitted at last into a national pantheon. In the earliest period of which any monuments remain to us, the ancestor-worship was purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism or from the cult of the great gods than at any later time. With the gradual evolution of the creed and the pantheon, however, legends and myths increased, the syncretic tendency manifested itself everywhere, identifications multiplied, mysticism grew rife, and an esoteric faith, with leanings towards a vague pantheistic monotheism, endeavoured to rationalise and to explain away the more gross and foolish portions of the original belief. It is the refinements and glosses of this final philosophical stage that pass current for the most part in systematic works as the true doctrines of Egyptian religion, and that so many modern enquirers have erroneously treated as equivalent to the earliest product of native thought. The ideas as to the unity of God, and the sun-myths of Horus, Isis, and Osiris, are clearly late developments or excrescences on the original creed, and betray throughout the esoteric spirit of priestly interpretation. To the very last, the Worship of the Dead, and the crude polytheism based upon it, were the true religion of the ancient Egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the monuments.
Such was the religious world into which, if we may believe the oldest Semitic traditions, the Sons of Israel brought their God Jahweh and their other deities from beyond the Euphrates at a very remote period of their national history. And such, in its fuller and more mystical form, was the religion practised and taught in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, at the moment when the Christian faith was just beginning to evolve itself round the historical nucleus of the man Christ Jesus, and him crucified.