Cat Mummies
(Now in the British Museum)
CHAPTER X. THE EGYPTIAN RELIGION
This country is so thickly peopled with divinities that it is easier to find a god than a man.—Petronius.
Few things are so hard to understand as the religion of an alien race. Indeed, we have but too many illustrations before us constantly that even among the same people, and where ideas are based upon the same authorities, a great divergence of opinion is possible. It is little to be expected, then, that any people should fully understand the religious faith of another people. To add to the difficulty, all the great religions are of Oriental origin and date from a pre-scientific era. Now the essential characteristic both of Oriental and of non-scientific thinking is its vagueness. The Arabic historian, even of the present day, loves to indulge in absurd flights of rhetoric. He sprinkles his pages with grotesque metaphors; he uses the most hyperbolic exaggerations; nor is he particular to avoid the most glaring contradictions; and over it all he throws the veil of hazy mysticism.
If this be true of the Oriental style of composition when applied to staid matter-of-fact recitals, certainly one could expect nothing more definite when the theme is religion. It is no matter for surprise, then, that the sacred books of all great religions are couched in phraseology well calculated to befog the mind of any one who approaches them in any other spirit than that of preconceived faith. This applies no more and no less to the Egyptian than to all other Oriental religions. On the other hand, the data supplied us for the interpretation of the Egyptian faith are far more abundant than are accessible in the case of most other of the great religions of antiquity.
Despite the confusion and vagueness and seeming contradiction that pertain to the Egyptian records, it is probably true that a reasonably correct idea may be formed, at least in general terms, of the evolution and development, no less than of the final status, of the faith which was dominant with the people of the Nile for at least three thousand years. Certainly at least a rough outline of the development of that faith is accessible, and it is the more worthy of presentation because it may be taken at the same time as illustrative of the probable evolution of the faith of other peoples.
The most obvious and striking fact that appeals to the investigator of the Egyptian religion is that enormous numbers of gods hold sway: Ra, Horus, Osiris, Isis, Tmu, Amen, Set,—the list extends itself almost endlessly. Moreover, there is no little confusion as to the precise status of the various gods thus named. To casual inspection it would seem as if the Egyptian of the later time had no very clear idea himself as to how many gods were really included in the hierarchy, or as to the precise identity of the more important ones. And, indeed, such was probably the fact.