Dead Men Tell Tales

by Harry Rimmer

First of all to consider, there was the incomparable Thoth who had worked out the system of placing all the stars, the sun and the moon in the heavens. He had arranged also the seasons, as they had been decreed by Ra. Although inferior to Ra and to Horus, nevertheless Thoth gave light by night, and on those days that the sun was not visible. He also gave Isis the power needed to raise the dead, and to offend him was to suffer eternal loss. Remembering that the Hebrews had lived under this culture and psychology for generations, and considering that they all must have been tinctured somewhat with these beliefs, many of them must have trembled indeed when Jehovah calmly engaged in battle with Thoth! So the Lord God not only smote the god of Egypt in this part of the conflict, but He also established His personal superiority in the minds of His own despairing people. Certainly, when this plague ended, the Hebrews hastened to follow His next commands without hesitancy, even though those commands laid them in danger of the death penalty under Egyptian law.

Sekhmet

A lesser deity, but also a powerful one who suffered grievously in loss of prestige while the darkness reigned, was the fire-goddess Sekhmet. She was the divinity of fire, and thus also of artificial light. This darkness that covered the land during this plague was called “thick” darkness, and it was so impenetrable that for three days and nights, the Egyptians stayed in bed! They saw the face of no man in those dark days and dense nights, and it is evident that artificial light was useless. Only in the houses of Israel did any light shine, but in each dwelling in Goshen the light was undimmed. So it was demonstrated in the case of Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess of artificial light, that she was powerless when Jehovah invaded her realm.

With what delight did Moses remember all this, when later he wrote the words of the First Chapter of Genesis. How his heart must have thrilled as he spoke of God commanding the light to shine on the first day of creation, and recorded the obedience of the light to the spoken word of Israel’s God. He had seen that when God commanded darkness all the gods of Egypt were powerless before Jehovah, and that it was therefore simple for God to reverse the process, and bring light to alleviate the darkness of the chaos.

The section of the pantheon that crumbled in the regard of the devoted Egyptians that hour was a broad and numerous company. No divinity of all the polytheistic company was very much more reverenced than Horus, the hawk-headed. He was called “the eye of Ra,” and was the god of the noontime sun. When the flaming heat of Ra was just overhead at the hour of midday, and when its light and heat were the most intense, Horus was in the ascendancy. When the deep darkness of the ninth plague hit the land, the hearts of the people were sick with fright. Believing that the sun was born anew every morning, and having an intense and well-thought-out system of deities connected with this rite, they must have thought that there had been wholesale slaughter and failure among the heavenly beings. But there still would smoulder in their deepest thinking, the dim hope that at noon the incomparable Horus would glow, as Ra was the omnipotent, and his eye could not be dimmed. But not only did the noon pass in the same awful darkness, but two more noons followed each other in slow succession, and the feebleness of the once-revered Horus could no longer be doubted. So when they said, “Who is mightier than Horus?” the children of Israel could reply with grateful hearts, “Jehovah is; see, we have light in our dwellings!”

But like many other heathen and idolatrous people, the chief object of Egyptian worship was the sun itself. The natural mind can comprehend this, and there is a little of the Parsee in most modern men. So to the ancients the sun was a personification of beneficence and providence. The worship of the sun took many forms in Egypt, but the oldest and most general form of that worship was in the person of the god Ra, who appears in ancient records in many guises, and under many names. Perhaps the most common of these names is Amon-Ra. He was unquestionably the chief form of deity to the Egypt of Moses’ generation.

Taueret

As far as it can be said that the Egyptians conceived of a god-principle, this was expressed in the person of Ra. He was the creator of earth and of heaven, and of all things therein. All other gods were parts of his person, and members of his body and substance. The pantheon was headed by Ra, and after him came the gods and goddesses who were parts of his body. One was his eye, another his ear, while still another was his foot. This quaint conception was carried out for every known section of the anatomy, which the Egyptians seemed to have known fairly well.