These were the most famous of all the old Egyptian mysteries, though to them were added many others, including that of Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, who served also as the symbol of the Sun and of the fructifying Nile; beneath his tongue was to be seen the sacred beetle, and the behavior of the great animal was supposed to be prophetic and his actions to mean oracular sayings. The Sphinx again was a sun-God, his image being repeated throughout the Nile region, and was always thought of as a male; the head was represented as that of some king, while the whole figure stood for the Sun-God Harmachis; although the sphinx later introduced into Greece was always female.
While the Egyptians did not attribute to their numerous Gods divine perfection, they nevertheless regarded religious practices as a means of currying favor with their divinities, a custom apparently still in favor. The priests believed in a Sun-God as the only true deity, but not so the people; thus the priests in the various cities praised their local and tutelary God as supreme and made him identical with Re, whose name they appended to the original, as for instance Amon-Re. The king, no matter where he was, prayed always to the local deity as lord of heaven and earth, yet in words always the same.
At last during the eighteenth dynasty, about 1460 B. C., Amenhotep IV realized that the power of the priesthood was a menace to the crown and therefore proclaimed the Sun as the sole God, not in human shape, but in that of a disk. He ordered all other images of other Gods associated with the sun to be destroyed; the priests of these deposed Gods lost their places and estates, which latter were confiscated. But his sons-in-law who succeeded him restored the deposed monarchs. Nevertheless they were marked as heretics by those priests who were reinstated in their former power. In consequence of this conflict, which was violent and prolonged, the intellectual life of Egypt was paralyzed and the mystic teachings of the priests were henceforth not disturbed by any wave of progress or advance.
The people again sank into a stupid and unredeemable formalism, demonism and sorcery. With the purpose of amusing them the priests furnished gorgeous sacrificial processions and festivals, while at the same time drawing them away from the true God by teaching them a worship of deceased kings and queens. They also built temples, to only the outer portion of which were the people generally admitted, while the innermost portions were guarded by these priests lest the mysteries thus protected be such no longer. They also procured the building of the ancient Labyrinth, near Lake Moeris, of which Herodotus tells us that there were fifteen hundred chambers above ground and as many more under ground, which latter were never shown except to the initiated, and which contained the remains of sacred crocodiles and of the Pharaohs.
The Egyptian priests taught that man was made up of body, a material essence or the soul, which in the shape of a bird left the body at death, and an immaterial spirit which held to the man the same relation which a God held to the animal in which he dwelt, and which at death departed from the body like the image of a dream. They taught also that, if the soul and spirit were to live on, the body should be embalmed and laid in a rock chamber, and that then the relatives must supply meat, drink, and clothing for its use. The spirit took its way to Osiris and by means of a magic formula the dead would be made one with Osiris; hence in the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" the deceased was addressed as Osiris with his own name added, and could now lead a happy life in the other world, which life was portrayed on the walls of the Sepulchres in pictures which are still to be seen, showing how the creature comforts of this world were to be enhanced in the next. Having reached the outer world, and having escaped the host of demons that threatened him on his passage, he could then revisit this earth at will in any form.
The Egyptian priests also taught that there was a judgment of the dead, and that new comers had to appear before Osiris, with his forty-two Assessors, and disclaim the commission of each one of forty-two sins; all of which was a magic formula for obtaining bliss according to their notion rather than anything intended as a true statement. The hippopotamus figured as an active agent in the Book of the Dead, appearing always as the accuser, when the sins and the good deeds were being weighed in the balance, while the God Thot was the "attorney for the defense."
All these secret doctrines of a priestcraft necessitated secret associations, at least of the higher priests, to which the king was always admitted, the only Egyptian outside of the priesthood to be thus taught their secrets. This was purely for protection; having less fear of foreigners these priests often initiated distinguished men from foreign lands, Greeks especially. Thus Orpheus, Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, and many others, received the secret doctrine. The ritual was a long and tedious but significant ceremony, taught by degrees like the Masonry of to-day, and necessitated in some cases the right of circumcision; all who passed it were pledged to the most strict silence. According to Diodorus the Orphic Mysteries were in large degree a repetition of the Egyptian, while the Greek legislators, philosophers and mathematicians whom I have named drew their knowledge from the same source; all of which is probably a very gross exaggeration. Nevertheless it would appear from the hieroglyphic remains that high grade schools were conducted by the Egyptian priests, and that foreign scholars could obtain for themselves instruction in the exact sciences of the day. Only the priests, however, were able to write the hieroglyphics, at least in the earlier centuries of Egyptian history.
There can be no doubt but that the secret doctrine of the Egyptian priests was both philosophic and religious, and was sharply distinguished from the popular belief which mistook tradition for truth; that it was monotheistic, that it rejected polytheism and zoölatry, and that the true signification of Egyptian mythology was expounded in private. Moreover an essential part of this mystery concerned the interpretation of myths as allegorical accounts of personified natural phenomena. For instance Plutarch ("Isis and Osiris") writes—"When we hear of the Egyptian myths of the Gods, their wanderings, their dismemberment and other like incidents, we must recall the remarks already made, so as to understand that the stories told are not to be taken literally as recounting actual occurrences."
Without now going into the subject of the relative age of the Egyptian and Chaldean cults, I will remind you that the secret wisdom of one race was not excelled by that of the other. The Chaldean races are undoubtedly of Turanian origin, and their form of religion was peculiar to the Ural-Altaic stock and the Turkic races, who originated the Cuneiform writing. Their most ancient writings represented evil spirits as coming from the desert in groups of seven, and contained formulas for exorcising them; they were presided over by the heavens, while from the higher spirits evolved Gods and Goddesses in countless number. Upon the original ground work of Chaldean ideas a Semitic race built a superstructure, and the first traces of the Babylonians and Assyrians appeared some four thousand years B. C. Their highest God was an individual whom they named Baal, while the sun and moon were his images. As in Egypt the priests were held in great reverence, standing next after the king, who was ex officio high priest; they too had a secret doctrine withheld from the vulgar. Although the Chaldeans were astrologers rather than astronomers, they were yet familiar enough with the heavens to estimate astral phenomena for what they really were, instead of holding them to be Gods, though they may have represented them as such to the common people. Their literature contained numerous mythological poems, so obscure that to understand them a key was required, which key was only in the possession of the priests. Inasmuch as Abraham came from Ur in Chaldea, with him crept into biblical literature much of the Chaldean tradition and folklore. The Chaldeans had also their Noah, and their deluge, in which the dove figured as in the biblical account. When the proprietor of the Ark finally freed the animals he erected an altar and offered sacrifice, to which the Gods gathered "like masses of flies." This story contributes but one section of the great Chaldean epic in which are recounted the exploits of a hero corresponding with the Nimrod of the Hebrew Bible, dating from the twenty-third century B. C., and reminding one forcibly of the Herculean and many other myths recounted in other ancient languages.
An off-shoot of the Chaldean culture was that of Persia, whose priestly class were far removed above the warriors and farmers that constituted the other two classes. Priests married only among their own race, possessed all the knowledge, made their king ex officio one of themselves, and practised itinerant teaching, but solely among their own caste. In the holy city, Ragha, the priests alone held rule and no secular power prevailed; Zoroaster was their founder; they were the physicians, astrologers, interpreters of dreams, scribes and officers of justice, while they impressed upon the minds of the people their exclusive duties;—to reverence the holy fire, which was their greatest mystery, to listen to the teaching of passages from the sacred book, and to perform numerous ceremonies of purification. Only the initiated were taught the meaning of the strife between the good Ormuzd and the evil Ahriman, which was probably the alternation of day and night, and of summer and winter.