Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 9

Children were sacrificed in Mexico to this deity. In the rites of a G.o.ddess of harvest, as has been said, torches were borne by the dancers, as in the Eleusinia; and in European and Oriental folk-lore.1 Demeter was the Greek harvest G.o.ddess, in whose rites torches had a place. One of her names is Demeter Erinnys. Mr. Max Muller recognises Erinnys as the dawn. Schwartz connects Demeter Erinnys with the thunderstorm. The torch in the hand of Demeter is the lightning, according to Schwartz. It is interesting, whether the torch be the torch of dawn, or of storm, or neither, to see the prevalence of these torch festivals in rural rites in Mexico, Greece and modern Europe. The idea of the peasants is that the lights scare away evil spirits.** In the Mexican rite, a woman, representing the G.o.ddess and dressed in her ornaments, was sacrificed.

The same horrid ceremony accompanied the feast of the mother of the G.o.ds, Teteo Innan.*** In this rite the man who represented the son of the G.o.ddess wore a mask of the skin from the thigh of the female victim who had personated the G.o.ddess herself. The wearing of the skin established a kinship between the man and the woman, as in the many cla.s.sical, ancient and savage rituals where the celebrants wear the hides of the sacrificed beasts. There was a G.o.d of storm called "cloudy serpent," Mixcoatl, whose rites were not more humane. The Mexican Aphrodite was named _Tlacolteotl_,**** "the impure".

* Mannhardt, op. cit., ii. 263, i. 501, 502; Schwartz, _Prahistorisch Anthropologische Studien_, p. 79.

** Compare the French _jour des brandons_.

***See Sahagun, ii. 30.

**** Ibid., i. 12.

About her character the Aztecs had no illusions. She listened to the confessions of the most loathsome sinners, whom she perhaps first tempted to err, and then forgave and absolved. Confession was usually put off till people had ceased to be likely to sin. She is said to have been the wife of Tlaloc, carried off by Tezcatlipoca. "She must have been the aquatic vegetation of marshy lands," says M. Roville, "possessed by the G.o.d of waters till the sun dries her up and she disappears." This is an amusing example of modern ingenuity. It resembles M. Reville's a.s.sertion that Tlaloc, the rain-G.o.d, "had but one eye, which shows that he must be ultimately identified as an ancient personification of the rainy sky, whose one eye is the sun". A rainy sky has usually no "eye" at all, and, when it has, in this respect it does not differ from a cloudless sky.

A less lovely set of Olympians than the Aztec G.o.ds it is difficult to conceive. Yet, making every allowance for Catholic after-thoughts, there can be no doubt that the prayers, penances and confessions described at length by Sahagun indicate a firm Mexican belief that even these strange deities "made for righteousness," loved good, and, in this world and the next, punished evil. However it happened, whatever accidents of history or of mixture of the races in the dim past caused it, the Aztecs carried to extremes the religious and the mythical ideas. They were exceedingly pious in their att.i.tude of penitence and prayer; they were more fierce and cruel in ritual, more fantastic in myth, than the wildest of tribes, tameless and homeless, ignorant of agriculture or of any settled and a.s.sured existence. Even the Inquisition of the Spanishof the sixteenth century was an improvement on the unheard-of abominations of Mexican ritual. As in all fully developed polytheisms of civilised races among the Aztecs we lose sight of the moral primal Being of low savage races.

He is obscured by deities of a kind not yet evolved in the lowest culture.

CHAPTER XVI. THE MYTHOLOGY OF EGYPT

Antiquity of Egypt--Guesses at origin of the people-- Chronological views of the religion--Permanence and changes-- Local and syncretic worship--Elements of pure belief and of totemism--Authorities for facts--Monuments and Greek reports--Contending theories of modern authors--Study of the G.o.ds, their beasts, their alliances and mutations--Evidence of ritual--A study of the Osiris myth and of the development of Osiris-Savage and theological elements in the myth--Moral aspect of the religion--Conclusion.

Even to the ancients Egypt was antiquity, and the Greeks sought in the dateless mysteries of the Egyptian religion for the fountain of all that was most mysterious in their own. Curiosity about the obscure beginnings of human creeds and the first knowledge of the G.o.ds was naturally aroused by that spectacle of the Pantheon of Egypt. Her highest G.o.ds were abstractions, swathed, like the Involuti of the Etrurians, in veils of mystic doctrine; yet in the most secret recess of her temples the pious beheld "a crocodile, a cat, or a serpent, a beast rolling on a purple couch".*

* Clem. Alex., _Paedagog_., iii. 2 (93).

In Egypt, the earlier ages and the later times beheld a land dominated by the thought of death, whose shadow falls on the monarch on his crowning day, whose whisper bids him send to far-off sh.o.r.es for the granite and the alabaster of the tomb. As life was ruled by the idea of death; so was fact conquered by dream, and all realities hastened to lose themselves in symbols; all G.o.ds rushed to merge their ident.i.ty in the sun, as moths fly towards the flame of a candle. This spectacle of a race obedient to the dead and bowing down before the beasts, this procession of G.o.ds that were their own fathers and members together in Ra, wakened the interest of the Greeks, who were even more excited by the mystery of extreme age that hid the beginnings of Egypt. Full of their own memories and legends of tribal movements, of migrations, of invasions, the Greeks acknowledged themselves children of yesterday in face of a secular empire with an origin so remote that it was scarcely guessed at in the conjectures of fable. Egypt presented to them, as to us, the spectacle of antique civilisation without a known beginning.

The spade of to-day reveals no more than the traditions of two thousand years ago. The most ancient relics of the earliest dynasty are the ma.s.sive works of an organised society and an accomplished art. There is an unbridged interval between the builders of the mysterious temple hard by the Sphinx and their predecessors, the chippers of palaeolithic flint axes in the river drift. We know not whence the Egyptians came; we only trifle with hypotheses when we conjecture that her people are of an Asiatic or an African stock; we know not whether her G.o.ds arose in the fertile swamps by Nile-side, or whether they were borne in arks, like the Huitzilopochtli of Mexico, from more ancient seats by the piety of their worshippers. Yet as one great river of mysterious source flows throughout all Egypt, so through the brakes and jungles of her religion flows one great myth from a distant fountain-head, the myth of Osiris.*

* As to the origin of the Egyptians, the prevalent belief among the ancients was that they had descended the Nile from the interior of Africa. Cf. Diodorus Siculus, iii. 8. Modern theorists occasionally lean in this direction. Dumichen, _Geschichte des Alien aegyptiens_, i. 118. Again, an attempt has been made to represent them as successful members of a race whereof the Bushmen of South Africa are the social failures. M. Maspero conceives, once more, that the Egyptians were "proto-Semitic," ethnologically related to the people of Eastern Asia, and the grammar of their language has Semitic affinities. But the connection, if it ever existed, is acknowledged to be extremely remote. Maspero, _Hist, de l'Orient_, 4th edit., p. 17. De Rouge writes, "Tout nous ramene vers la parente primitive de Mitsraim (Egyptains) et de Canaan" (_Recherches sur les Muniments_, p. 11).

The questions which we have to ask in dealing with the mythology of Egypt come under two heads: First, What was the nature of Egyptian religion and myth? Secondly, How did that complex ma.s.s of beliefs and practices come into existence?

The question, _What was the religion of Egypt?_ is far from simple. In a complete treatise on the topic, it would be necessary to ask in reply, At what period, in what place, and among what cla.s.ses of society did the religion exist which you wish to investigate? The ancient Egyptian religion had a lifetime so long that it almost requires to be meted by the vague measures of geological time. It is historically known to us, by the earliest monuments, about the date at which Archbishop Usher fixed the Creation. Even then, be it noticed, the religion of Egypt was old and full-grown; there are no historical traces of its beginnings.

Like the material civilisation, it had been fashioned by the unrecorded _Sheshoa Hor_, "the servants of Horus," patriarchs dwelling with the blessed. In the four or five thousand years of its later existence, Egyptian religion endured various modifications.* It was a conservative people, and schooled by the wisdom of the sepulchre. But invaders, Semitic, Ethiopian and Greek, brought in some of their own ideas.

Priestly colleges developed novel dogmas, and insensibly altered ritual The thought of hundreds of generations of men brooded, not fruitlessly, over the problems of the divine nature. Finally, it is likely that in Egypt, as elsewhere, the superst.i.tions of the least educated and most backward cla.s.ses, and of subject peoples on a lower level of civilisation, would again and again break up, and win their way to the surface of religion. Thus a complete study of Egyptian faiths would be chronological--would note the setting and rising of the stars of elder and later deities.

* Professor Lieblein, maintaining this view, opposes the statement of Mr. Le Page Renouf, who writes: "The earliest monuments which have been discovered present to us the very same fully developed civilisation and the same religion as the later monuments" (_Hib. Lectures_, 1880, p. 81). But it is superfluous to attack a position which Mr. Le Page Renouf does not appear really to hold. He admits the existence of development and evolution in Egyptian religious thought "I believe, therefore, that, after closely approaching the point at which polytheism might have turned into monotheism, the religious thought of Egypt turned aside into a wrong track" (Op. cit, p. 236).

The method of a systematic history of Egyptian religion would not be regulated by chronology alone. Topographical and social conditions would also claim attention. The favoured G.o.d or G.o.ds of one nome (administrative district), or of one town, or of one sacred metropolis, were not the G.o.ds of another metropolis, or town, or nome, though some deities were common to the whole country. The fundamental character might be much the same in each case, but the t.i.tles, and aspects, and ritual, and accounts of the divine genealogy varied in each locality.

Once more, the "syncretic" tendency kept fusing into one divine name and form, or into a family triad of G.o.ds (mother, father and son), the deities of different districts, which, beneath their local peculiarities, theologians could recognise as practically the same.

While political events and local circ.u.mstances were thus modifying Egyptian religion, it must never be forgotten that the different cla.s.ses of society were probably by no means at one in their opinions. The monuments show us what the kings believed, or at least what the kings practised, record the prayers they uttered and the sacrifices they offered. The tombs and the papyri which contain the _Book of the Dead_ and other kindred works reveal the nature of belief in a future life, with the changes which it underwent at different times. But the people, the vast majority, unlettered and silent, cannot tell us what _they_ believed, or what were their favourite forms of adoration. We are left to the evidence of amulets, of books of magic, of popular tales, surviving on a papyrus here and there, and to the late testimony of Greek writers--Herodotus, Diodorus, the author of the treatise _De Osiride et hide_, and others. While the clergy of the twentieth dynasty were hymning the perfections of Ammon Ra--"so high that man may not attain unto him, dweller in the hidden place, him whose image no man has beheld"--the peasant may have been worshipping, like a modern Zulu, the serpents in his hovel, or may have been adoring the local sacred cat of his village, or flinging stones at the local sacred crocodile of his neighbours. To the enlightened in the later empire, perhaps to the remotest unknown ancestors also, G.o.d was self-proceeding, self-made, manifest in the deities that were members together in him of G.o.dhead.

But the peasant, if he thinks of the G.o.ds at all, thinks of them walking the earth, like our Lord and the saints in the Norse nursery tales, to amuse themselves with the adventures of men. The peasant spoke of the Seven Hathors, that come like fairy G.o.dmothers to the cradle of each infant, and foretell his lot in life.*

* Compare Maspero, _Hist, de l'Orient_., 4th edit., pp. 279- 288, for the priestly hymns and the worship of beasts. "The lofty thoughts remained the property of a small number of priests and instructed people; they did not penetrate the ma.s.s of the population. Far from that, the worship of animals, goose, swallow, cat, serpent, had many more followers than Amnion Ra could count." See also Tiele, _Manuel de l'Hist. des Rel._, Paris, 1880, pp. 46, 47. For the folk-lore of wandering G.o.ds see Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, Paris, 1882, p. 17.

It is impossible, of course, to write here a complete history of Egyptian religion, as far as it is to be extracted from the books and essays of learned moderns; but it has probably been made clear that when we speak of the religion and mythology of Egypt, we speak of a very large and complicated subject. Plainly this is a topic which the lay student will find full of pitfalls, and on which even scholars may well arrive at contradictory opinions. To put the matter briefly, where one school finds in the G.o.ds and the holy menagerie of Egyptian creeds the corruption of a primitive monotheism, its opponents see a crowd of survivals from savagery combined with clearer religious ideas, which are the long result of civilised and educated thought.* Both views may be right in part.

* The English leader of the former school, the believer in a primitive purity, corrupted and degraded but not extinguished, is Mr. Le Page Renouf (_Hibbert Lectures_, London, 1879). It is not always very easy to make out what side Mr. Le Page Renouf does take. For example, in his _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 89, he speaks somewhat sympathetically of the "very many eminent scholars, who, with full knowledge of all that can be said to the contrary, maintain that the Egyptian religion is essentially monotheistic". He himself says that "a power without a name or any mythological characteristic is constantly referred to in the singular number, and can only be regarded as the object of that _sensus numinis_, or immediate perception of the Infinite." which is "the result of an intuition as irresistible as the impressions of our senses". If this be not primitive instinctive monotheism, what is it? Yet Mr.

Le Page Renouf says that Egyptian polytheism, after closely approaching the point where it might have become monotheism, went off on a wrong track; so the Egyptians after all were polytheists, not monotheists (op. cit., p. 235). Of similar views are the late ill.u.s.trious Vicomte de Rouge, M.

Mariette, M. Pierret, and Brugsch Pasha (_Rel. und Myth, der Alien Egypter_, vol i., Leipzig, 1884). On the other side, on the whole regarding Egyptian creeds as a complex ma.s.s of early uncivilised and popular ideas, with a later priestly religion tending towards pantheism and monotheism, are M.

Maspero, Professor Tiele, Professor Lieblein (English readers may consult his pamphlet, _Egyptian Religion_, Leipzig, 1884), M. Edward Meyer, (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, Stuttgart, 1884), Herr Pietsch. mann (_Zeitschrtftfur Ethnologic_, Berlin, 1878, art. "Fetisch Dienst"), and Professor Tiele (_Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, Paris, 1880, and "_History of Egyptian Religion, English translation_, 1882).

After this preamble let us endeavour to form a general working idea of what Egyptian religion was as a whole. What kind of religion did the Israelites see during the sojourn in Egypt, or what presented itself to the eyes of Herodotus? Unluckily we have no such eye-witnesses of the earlier Egyptian as Bernal Diaz was of the Aztec temples. The Bible says little that is definite about the theological "wisdom of the Egyptians".

When confronted with the sacred beasts, Herodotus might have used with double truth the Greek saw: "A great ox has trod upon my tongue".* But what Herodotus hinted at or left unsaid is gathered from the evidence of tombs and temple walls and illuminated papyri.

One point is certain. Whatever else the religion of Egypt may at any time have been, it struck every foreign observer as polytheism.**

Moreover, it was a polytheism like another. The Greeks had no difficulty, for example, in recognising amongst these beast-headed monsters G.o.ds a.n.a.logous to their own. This is demonstrated by the fact that to almost every deity of Egypt they readily and unanimously a.s.signed a Greek divine name. Seizing on a certain aspect of Osiris and of his mystery-play, they made him Dionysus; Hor became Apollo; Ptah, Hephaestus: Ammon Ra, Zeus; Thoth, Hermes, and so on with the rest.

The Egyptian deities were recognised as divine beings, with certain (generally ill-defined) departments of Nature and of human activity under their care. Some of them, like Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), were esteemed elemental forces or phenomena, and were identified with the same personal phenomena or forces, Ura.n.u.s and Gaea, in the Greek system, where heaven and earth were also parents of many of the G.o.ds.

* aeschylus, _Agamemnon_, 37, (--------)

** Maspero, Musee de Boulaq, p. 150; Le Page Renouf, Hib.

Led., pp. 85,86.

Thus it is indisputably clear that Egyptian religion had a polytheistic aspect, or rather, as Maspero says, was "a well-marked polytheism"; that in this regard it coincided with other polytheisms, and that this element must be explained in the Egyptian, as it is explained in the Greek or the Aztec, or the Peruvian or the Maori religion.* Now an explanation has already been offered in the mythologies previously examined. Some G.o.ds have been recognised, like Rangi and Papa, the Maori heaven and earth (Nut and Seb), as representatives of the old personal earth and heaven, which commend themselves to the barbaric fancy. Other G.o.ds are the informing and indwelling spirits of other phenomena, of winds or sea or woods. Others, again, whatever their origin, preside over death, over the dead, over the vital functions, such as love, or over the arts of life, such as agriculture; and these last G.o.ds of departments of human activity were probably in the beginning culture-heroes, real, or more likely ideal, the first teachers of men.

* "It is certainly erroneous to consider Egyptian religion as a polytheistic corruption of a prehistoric monotheism. It is more correct to say that, while polytheistic in principle, the religion developed in two absolutely opposite directions. On one side, the constant introduction of new G.o.ds, local or foreign; on the other, a groping after a monotheism never absolutely reached. The learned explained the crowd of G.o.ds as so many incarnations of the one hidden uncreated deity."--Tiele, _Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions_, p. 46.

In polytheisms of long standing all these attributes and functions have been combined and reallotted, and the result we see in that confusion which is of the very essence of myth. Each G.o.d has many birth-places, one has many sepulchres, all have conflicting genealogies. If these ideas about other polytheisms be correct, then it is probable that they explain to a great extent the first principles of the polytheism of Egypt They explain at least the factors in Egyptian religion, which the Greeks recognised as a.n.a.logous with their own, and which are found among polytheists of every degree of culture, from New Zealand to h.e.l.las. If ever Ptah, or any other name, represented "Our Father" as he is known to the most backward races, he was buried into the background by G.o.ds evolved from ghosts, by departmental G.o.ds, and by the G.o.ds of races amalgamated in the course of conquest and settlement.

Leaving on one side, then, for the moment, the vast system of ancestor-worship and of rites undertaken for the benefit of the dead, and leaving aside the divinity of the king, polytheism was the most remarkable feature of Egyptian religion. The foreign traveller in the time of the pyramid-builders, as in the time of Ramses II., or of the Ptolemies, or of the Roman domination, would have found a crowd of G.o.ds in receipt of honour and of sacrifice. He would have learned that one G.o.d was most adored in one locality, another in another, that Ammon Ra was predominant in Thebes; Ra, the sun-G.o.d, in Heliopolis; Osiris in Abydos, and so forth. He would also have observed that certain animals were sacred to certain G.o.ds, and that in places where each beast was revered, his species was not eaten, though it might blamelessly be cooked and devoured in the neighbouring nome or district, where another animal was dominant. Everywhere, in all nomes and towns, the adoration of Osiris, chiefly as the G.o.d and redeemer of the dead, was practised.*

* On the different religions of different nomes, and especially the animal worship, see Pietschmann, _Der aegyptische Fetischdienst und Gotterglaube, Zeitschrtft fur Ethnologie_, 1878, p. 168.

While these are the general characteristics of Egyptian religion, there were inevitably many modifications in the course of five thousand years.

If one might imagine a traveller endowed, like the Wandering Jew, with endless life, and visiting Egypt every thousand, or every five hundred years, we can fancy some of the changes in religion which he would observe. On the whole, from the first dynasty and the earliest monuments to the time when Hor came to wear a dress like that of a Roman centurion, the traveller would find the chief figures of the Pantheon recognisably the same. But there would be novelties in the manner of worshipping and of naming or representing them. "In the oldest tombs, where the oldest writings are found, there are not many G.o.ds mentioned--there are Osiris, Horus, Thot, Seb, Nut, Hathor, Anubis, Apheru, and a couple more."* Here was a stock of G.o.ds who remained in credit till "the dog Anubis" fled from the Star of Bethlehem. Most of these deities bore birth-marks of the sky and of the tomb. If Osiris was "the sun-G.o.d of Abydos," he was also the murdered and mutilated culture-hero. If Hor or Horus was the sun at his height, he too had suffered despiteful usage from his enemies. Seb and Nut (named on the coffin of Mycerinus of the fourth dynasty in the British Museum) were our old friends the personal heaven and earth. Anubis, the jackal, was "the lord of the grave," and dead kings are worshipped no less than G.o.ds who were thought to have been dead kings. While certain G.o.ds, who retained permanent power, appear in the oldest monuments, sacred animals are also present from the first.

* Lieblein, _Egyptian Religion_, p. 7.

The G.o.ds, in fact, of the earliest monuments were beasts. Here is one of the points in which a great alteration developed itself in the midst of Egyptian religion. Till the twelfth dynasty, when a G.o.d is mentioned (and in those very ancient remains G.o.ds are not mentioned often), "he is represented by his animal, or with the name spelled out in hieroglyphs, often beside the bird or beast".* "The jackal stands for Anup (Anubis), the frog for Hekt, the baboon for Tahuti (Thoth). It is not till after Semitic influence had begun to work in the country that any figures of G.o.ds are found." By "figures of G.o.ds" are meant the later man-shaped or semi-man-shaped images, the hawk-headed, jackal-headed, and similar representations with which we are familiar in the museums. The change begins with the twelfth dynasty, but becomes most marked under the eighteenth. "During the ancient empire," says M. Maspero, "I only find monuments at four points--at Memphis, at Abydos, in some parts of Middle Egypt, at Sinai, and in the valley of Hammamat. The divine names appear but occasionally, in certain unvaried formulae. Under the eleventh and twelfth dynasties Lower Egypt comes on the scene. The formulae are more explicit, but the religious monuments rare. From the eighteenth dynasty onwards, we have _representations_ of all the deities, accompanied by legends more or less developed, and we begin to discover books of ritual, hymns, amulets, and other objects."** There are also sacred texts in the Pyramids.

* Flinders Petrie, _Arts of Ancient Egypt_, p. 8.

** _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, i. 124.

Other changes, less important than that which turned the beast-G.o.d into a divine man or woman, often beast-headed, are traced in the very earliest ages. The ritual of the holy bulls (Hapi, Apis) makes its official appearance under the fourth king of the first, and the first king of the second dynasties.* Mr. Le Page Renouf, admitting this, thinks the great development of bull-worship later.** In the third dynasty the name of Ra, sun, comes to be added to the royal names of kings, as Nebkara, Noferkara, and so forth.*** Osiris becomes more important than the jackal-G.o.d as the guardian of the dead. Sokar, another G.o.d of death, shows a tendency to merge himself in Osiris.

With the successes of the eighteenth dynasty in Thebes, the process of _syncretism_, by which various G.o.d-names and G.o.d-natures are mingled, so as to unite the creeds of different nomes and provinces, and blend all in the worship of the Theban Ammon Ra, is most notable. Now arise schools of theology; pantheism and an approach to monotheism in the Theban G.o.d become probable results of religious speculations and imperial success. These tendencies are baffled by the break-up of the Theban supremacy, but the monotheistic idea remains in the esoteric dogmas of priesthoods, and survives into Neo-Platonism. Special changes are introduced--now, as in the case of worship of the solar disk by a heretic king; earlier, as in the prevalence of Set-worship, perhaps by Semitic invaders.****

* Brugsch, _History of Egypt_, English transl., i. 59, 60.

** Hib. Lect., pp. 237, 238.

*** Op. cit. i. p. 56.

**** For Khunaten, and his heresy of the disk in Thebes, see Brugsch, op. cit., i. 442. It had little or no effect on myth. Tiele says (_Hist. Egypt. Rel._, p. 49), "From the most remote antiquity Set is one of the Osirian circle, and is thus a genuine Egyptian deity".