Before proceeding, special mention must be made of one important point which throws a flood of light upon the extent of the development of separate cults of sun and moon and the institution of solar and lunar calendars which respectively governed the activities of the male and female populations. As this matter will be fully treated in my calendar monograph I shall merely note here that Brugsch cites texts proving the existence and simultaneous use of the two calendars, and the supreme importance accorded to the new moon of the month Epiphi on whose appearance the “goddess Isis-Hathor of Denderah embarked on her sacred barge and proceeded up the river, from her city to Edfu (Apollinopolis magna) where she joined his majesty ..., her father, ... the incomparable sun-god Ra, the first of Apollinopolis, the golden disk, whose children are numerous....” It is further stated that the god and goddess became inseparable like sun and moon. Brugsch states that the appearance of the said new moon, which was also associated with the heliacal rising of Sirius, would range from Aug. 18 to Sept. 16, Jul. Cal. (see op. cit. ii, pp. 282-1). The appearance of the goddess was the signal for the opening of a season of general “feasting and drinking, rejoicing, singing and dancing” throughout the land, to which the name Tekhu is given in some texts. This is translated by Brugsch as “the intoxication of gladness or joy;” it “coincided with the highest level attained by the overflow of the Nile,” and its modern survival is the annual “marriage of the Nile” which takes place on the 23d of August.
It is curious to note how the original carrying out of primitive and naïve rites by the queen and high-priestess gradually caused [pg 439] her presence to be regarded as essential for the “drawing out of the Nile from its source” and her person to be surrounded with utmost veneration and sanctity. As Prof. Flinders Petrie states, speaking of as far back as B.C. 1383-1365: “The marriage to a royal high priestess of Amen was, of course, purely a political necessity to legitimate the king's position.”
“It would seem that Hor-em-heb was not married to Nezem-mut until his accession, when he legalized his position by becoming husband of the high-priestess of Amen, as in the arrangement of the later dynasties. This marriage was an affair of politics solely, considering the age of the parties; Horemheb was probably between fifty and sixty at the time and if the queen was the same as Nefertiti's sister Nezem-mut, she must have been about the same age as Horemheb” (op. cit. pp. 183, 250). How long the female Egyptian ruler maintained her sway may, perhaps, best be seen by the following texts describing the political homage paid to the living goddess of the Egyptians under Ptolemaic and Roman rules.
One inscription clearly shows that, at the time of Ptolemy IX, Euergetes II, the living Isis was acknowledged as the sole ruler of the land of the south by the king and his wife, queen Cleopatra III, who jointly occupied the throne of northern Egypt. Jointly the latter dedicated a beautiful hall to the goddess Isis, as a place in which to celebrate the Tekhu feast and in which she might linger at this season (Brugsch, op. cit. ii, p. 284). I have found indications in other works that, in other localities, the goddess entered a secret chamber in the earth or pyramid or celebrated her sacred mysteries and festival on the sacred boat of the sun, in the sacred sea or lake belonging to the temple. In these cases it is obvious that the dominant idea was the performance of the sacred rites in the sacred centre or middle.
At a later period Cleopatra VII ascended the female throne at the age of seventeen and became high-priestess of Amen, the living image of Isis. It was understood that as soon as her brother Ptolemy XIV, then aged twelve, should come of age, she was to marry him. Partly for political reasons, akin to those which had caused king Horemheb, on his accession, to marry the high priestess of Amen, Julius Cæsar and Mark Antony become in succession the consorts of Cleopatra, after whose death Egypt became a Roman province. But the “land of the south,” and traditional, [pg 440] divine, feminine rulership, lingered on. Under the third prefect, Ælius Gallus, Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, invades Egypt at the head of her army. She was defeated, but the position of the high-priestess of Amen, the living Isis, continued to be such as to exact the homage and an act of propitiation from the Roman Emperor.
An inscription, from the time of Augustus, records that a beautiful monument, or “house,” had been erected by the “lord of the land, the autocrator, the son of the sun, Cæsar,” and was presented, at the time of the Isis festival, to its possessor, the great Isis, the mother of the god, the mistress of the lying-in-house, the splendid and mighty queen of Philæ, the benevolent princess of Abaton, the daughter of the sun. She is likewise named “she who is great or whose greatness extends towards the four quarters” and is designated as “the royal wife of the majesty of Osiris and the royal mother of Horus, the victorious bull,” i. e. the ka. It is stated that “she found the house of birth brilliantly adorned and well arranged in every way” and she installed herself in its interior on a given day, so as to bring forth her son in these surroundings. One of the rewards promised to Cæsar for the delicate attention and gift bestowed upon the goddess is “eternal and permanent occupation of the throne of Horus, the first of the living ones.” According to the Esne calendar a “divine birth” actually took place on a given date. Brugsch, referring to Plutarch and calendar texts, shows that the commencement of the Isis festival dated from the time when Isis assumed a phylactery, or amulet, to indicate that she had conceived.
Another inscription shows that Tiberius Claudius had caused the house to be renovated for “the mighty goddess Isis, the life giving mistress of Abaton, the good Hathor, the queen of the land of Nubia, the divine mother of the golden (Nub) Horus, the benevolent sister of Osiris, the great protectress who guards his son.” As Tiberius Claudius, in this text named himself her loving son, it is obvious that the day had passed away when solely her own divine son Horus would be the one legitimate and divine heir to the Egyptian throne. It is interesting to surmise what became of the children whose “divine births” continued to be celebrated as a sacred occurrence to which even a Roman Emperor yielded homage. The natural sequence would have been that, accompanied by a band of devoted followers, the sons of the sun, the young bulls, [pg 441] i. e. the ka, or divine twain, and their sisters, would seek distant lands in which jointly to establish new kingdoms on the ancient, familiar plan.
Collectively, the preceding evidence has afforded a realization of some of the curious but natural results of the prolonged cult of the dual principles of nature in Egypt, the most remarkable being, perhaps, the creation of a distinct, “divine” caste of individuals, from the naïve adoption of marriage and birth as consecrated religious rites, symbolical of the union of heaven and earth and the production of new life. While at one time, and in certain localities, this mode of symbolism obviously took the upper hand and fostered the growth of the artificial idea of the “divine rights of royalty,” there are evidences that, simultaneously, the union of the dual principles of nature was symbolized in one or more different archaic and primitive ways. These appear to have been separately adopted in various centres of thought where the disastrous and debasing consequences of the association of the idea of sex with the cult of heaven and earth, light and darkness, etc., were realized with disapproval.
We thus find that, even at Edfu, the ceremonial rite of lighting new sacred fire by means of a wooden instrument and friction was performed on the great Isis festival which was marked by the “divine birth.” According to the calendar of Canopus this fell on the first day of Payni, and a prescribed illumination of the temples and palace was kept up until the 30th or last day of the month. In the most ancient Egyptian calendars the “lighting of light” at the same period is also recorded (Brugsch, op. cit. ii, p. 470) and, according to Herodotus, the festival was named “the lighting of lamps” and was observed throughout all Egypt. He adds that “a religious reason is given why this night is illuminated and so honored” (ii, 61 and 62).
The influence of increasing astronomical knowledge likewise shows itself in the joint observation of the movements of sun, moon and stars and the determination of the relative positions of the latter to the sun at the periods of the equinoxes and solstices. Without taking period or sequence into consideration for the present, I merely note that we find evidence that, at one time, images of sun and moon, of the right and left eyes of Ra, or statues of Hathor-Isis and Osiris, replaced their living images in religious ceremonies.