The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 10

From this point onwards the Book of the Dead is purely Osirian in character. But beliefs derived from the solar cult have been allowed to mingle with the Osirian elements; thus the bark of the sun-G.o.d has been identified with the bark which carried the Osirian dead to the fields of Alu, and Osiris is even permitted to a.s.sign a place to his faithful servants in the boat of Ra instead of in the paradise over which he himself rules. And the Osirian elements themselves belong to two different periods or two different schools of thought. In the earlier chapters the paradise of Osiris is gained like the paradise of Ra, by the magical power of the words of the ritual and the offerings made by the friends of the dead; from the 125th chapter onwards the test of righteousness is a moral one; the dead man has to be acquitted by his conscience and the tribunal of Osiris before he can enter into everlasting bliss.

The bark which carried the followers of Osiris has been explained by the Pyramid texts. When the dead man had ascended to heaven, either by the ladder which rose from the earth at Hermopolis or in some other way, he found his path barred by a deep lake or ca.n.a.l. According to one myth, he was carried across it on the wings of the ibis Thoth, but the more general belief provided for him the boat of the ferryman Nu-Urru,(158) the prototype of the Greek Charon. The fusion of the Osirian creed with the solar cult, however, caused the boat of Nu-Urru and the bark of the sun-G.o.d to be confounded together, and accordingly three chapters (c.-cii.) have been added to that in which the boat of the Egyptian Charon is referred to, "in order to teach the luminous spirit (_khu_) how to enter the bark among the servants of Ra." In the next chapter, Hathor, "the lady of the west," is the object of prayer.

Two chapters (cv. and cvi.) are now interpolated from the ritual of Pta?.

They take us back to the age when offerings were made to the _ka_ of the dead and not to the G.o.ds, and declare that abundant food should be given it "each day in Memphis." They have little to do with the destinies of the Osirian in the paradise of Alu. These are once more resumed in the 107th chapter: the fields of Alu are described, and the life led by those who enjoy them.

With the 125th chapter we enter the "Hall of the Two Truths," where Osiris sits on his throne of judgment, and the soul is justified or condemned for the deeds it had done in the flesh. It is no longer ceremonial, but moral purity that is required: the follower of Osiris is to be saved not by the words and prayers of the ritual, however correctly they may be p.r.o.nounced, but by his acts and conduct in this lower world. We are transported into a new atmosphere, in which religion and morality for the first time are united in one: the teaching of the prophet has taken the place of the teaching of the priest.

All the blessings promised to the disciples of other creeds than the Osirian are now granted to the soul who has pa.s.sed unscathed through the hall of judgment. Not only the fields of Alu are his, but the solar bark as well, to which the school of Heliopolis looked forward; even the old belief which confined the Ka to the narrow precincts of the tomb was not forgotten, and the 132nd chapter instructs the Osirian how to "wander at will to see his house." Like Osiris himself, he can take part in the festival of the dead, and share in the offerings that are presented at it.

Free access is allowed him to all parts of the other world: whatever heaven or h.e.l.l had been imagined in the local sanctuaries of Egypt was open to him to visit as he would.

The later chapters of the Book of the Dead take us back to the earth. They are concerned with the mummy and its resting-place, with the charms and amulets which preserved the body from decay, or enabled the soul to inspire it once more with life. They form a sort of appendix, dealing rather with the beliefs and superst.i.tions of the people, than with the ideas of the theologians, about the G.o.ds and the future life.(159)

The order in which I have referred to the chapters of the book are those of the Theban texts as edited by Dr. Naville. But it must not be supposed that it const.i.tutes an integral part of the original work. As a matter of fact there are very few copies of the book, even among those which belong to the Theban period, in which anything like all the chapters is to be found. Indeed, it is difficult to say how many chapters a complete edition of it ought to contain. Pierret made them one hundred and sixty-five; the latest editors raise them to over two hundred. The reason of this is easy to explain. The separate chapters are for the most part intended for special purposes or special occasions, and each, therefore, has had a separate origin. They have been collected from all sides, and thrown together with very little attempt at arrangement or order. They belong to different periods of composition and different schools of religious thought: some of them mount back to the remotest antiquity, others are probably even later than the foundation of the united monarchy. Hence, as a rule, only a selection of them was inscribed on the rolls of papyrus that were buried with the dead, or on the coffin and sepulchral objects deposited in the tomb; it was only the most important of them that the Osirian was likely to need in the other world. Indeed, in some cases only the semblance of a text seems to have been thought necessary. The copies made for the dead usually abound with errors, and some have actually been found in which the text is represented by a number of unmeaning signs. The Book of the Dead, moreover, was continually growing. The oldest texts are the shortest and most simple, the latest are the longest and most crowded with chapters. As fresh prayers and formulae for protecting the dead in the other world, or directing them on their journey, were discovered in the local sanctuaries, they were added in the form of chapters; no precaution, it was felt, should be omitted which might secure the safety of those who had pa.s.sed beyond the grave.

The Book of the Dead was thus a growth, and a growth it remained. It never underwent the systematic revision which has been the lot of most other sacred books. We look in it in vain for traces of an individual editor.

And on this account its form and even its language were never fixed. The prayers and formulae it contained were, it is true, stereotyped, for their success depended on their correct recitation; but beyond this the utmost lat.i.tude was allowed in the way of addition or change. A Masoretic counting of words and syllables would have been inconceivable to the Egyptian.

In later days, more especially in the Greek period, the Book of the Dead served as a basis for other religious compositions which claimed divine authorship, and the authority due to such an origin. Of these the most popular was the Book of Respirations (_Sha-n-Sensenu_), which derives its inspiration from chapters liv. to lxiii. of the Book of the Dead, and is ascribed to the G.o.d Thoth. In antic.i.p.ation of the apocalyptic literature of the Jews, the writer describes the condition of the soul in the next world, following closely the indications of the old ritual, and declaring how the "Respirations" it contains were first "made by Isis for her brother Osiris to give life to his soul, to give life to his body, to rejuvenate all his members anew." The soul of the Osirian is said to "live" by means of the book that is thus provided for him, for he "has received the Book of Respirations, that he may breathe with his soul ...

that he may make any transformation at his will ... that his soul may go wherever it desireth."(160) We are reminded in these words of the last chapter of the Book of Revelation (xxii. 7, 18, 19).

The Book of the Dead was the oldest of the sacred books of Egypt. It was also in universal use. Whatever other articles of belief he may have held, the Egyptian of the historical age was before all things else a follower of Osiris. It was as an Osirian that he hoped to traverse the regions that lay beyond the tomb, and whose geography and inhabitants were revealed to him in the Osirian ritual. From this point of view, accordingly, the Book of the Dead may be termed the Bible of the Egyptians. But it was not without rivals. We have seen that even in the Book of the Dead the heaven of Osiris is not the only heaven to which the dead may look forward.

Osiris has a rival in the sun-G.o.d, and a place in the solar bark seems almost as much coveted as a place in the fields of Alu. The solar cult of Heliopolis had indeed to yield to the more popular cult of Osiris, but it was on condition that the cult of Osiris recognised and admitted it. To be a follower of Osiris did not prevent the believing Egyptian from being also a follower of the G.o.d Ra.

In the latter part of the Theban period the solar cult received a fresh impulse and developed a new life. The attempt of Khu-n-Aten to establish a new faith, the outward symbol of which was the solar disc, was but an indication of the general trend of religious thought, and the Asiatic conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty introduced into Egypt the worship and creed of the sun-G.o.d Baal. One by one the G.o.ds were identified with Ra; Amon himself became Amon-Ra, and the local deity of Thebes pa.s.sed into a pantheistic sun-G.o.d. It was under these conditions that a new ritual was compiled for the educated cla.s.ses of Egypt, or at all events was adopted by the religion of the State. This was the Book _Am Duat_, the Book of the Other World.

Copies of it are written on the walls of the dark chambers in the rock-cut labyrinths wherein the kings of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties were laid to rest. In the tomb of Seti I. we find two versions, one in which the text is given in full, another in which the usual plan is followed of giving only the last five sections completely, while extracts alone are taken from the first seven. The text is profusely ill.u.s.trated by pictures, in order that the dead might have no difficulty in understanding the words of the ritual, or in recognising the friends and enemies he would meet in the other world.

Unlike the Book of the Dead, the Book Am Duat is a systematic treatise, which bears the stamp of individual authorship. It is an apocalypse resting on an astronomical foundation, and is, in fact, a minute and detailed account of the pa.s.sage of the sun-G.o.d along the heavenly river Ur-nes during the twelve hours of the night. Each hour is represented by a separate locality in the world of darkness, enclosed within gates, and guarded by fire-breathing serpents and similar monsters. As the bark of the sun-G.o.d glides along, the gates are successively opened by the magical power of the words he utters, and their guardians receive him in peace.

Immediately he has pa.s.sed the gates close behind him, and the region he has left is once more enveloped in darkness.

But though he is thus able to illuminate for the brief s.p.a.ce of an hour the several regions of the other world, it is not as the living sun-G.o.d of day that he voyages along the infernal river, but as "the flesh of Ra"-that is to say, as that mortal part of his nature which alone could die and enter the realm of the dead. The river is a duplicate of the Nile, with its strip of bank on either side, its fields and cities, even its nomes, wherein the G.o.d, like the Pharaoh, a.s.signs land and duties to his followers. For the followers of Ra have a very different lot before them from that which awaited the followers of Osiris. There was no land of everlasting light and happiness to which they could look forward, nor was their destiny hereafter dependent on their conduct in this life. Their supreme end was to accompany the sun-G.o.d in his bark as he pa.s.sed each night through the twelve regions of the dead, and this could be attained only by a knowledge of the ritual of Am Duat and the mystic formulae it contained. Few, however, of those who started with the sun-G.o.d on his nocturnal voyage remained with him to the last; most of them were stopped in the regions through which he pa.s.sed, where fields were granted them whose produce they might enjoy, and where each night for a single hour they formed as it were a bodyguard around the G.o.d and lived once more in the light. Even the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt were condemned to dwell for ever in this gloomy Hades, along with Osiris and the Khu or luminous souls of an earlier faith. Those who were happy enough by virtue of their knowledge and spells to emerge with Ra into the dawn of a new day, henceforth had their home in the solar bark, and were absorbed into the person of the G.o.d.

But it was not only the friends and followers of Ra who thus accompanied him in his journey through the other world; his enemies were there also, and the horrible punishments they had to endure, as depicted on the walls of the royal tombs, were worthy of the imagination of a Dante. The banks of the infernal river were lined with strange and terrible monsters, some of them the older deities and spirits of the popular creed, others mere creations of symbolism, others creatures of composite form to whose invention the older mythology contributed. Fire-breathing serpents are prominent among them, lighting up the darkness for the friends of Ra, and burning his foes with their poisonous flames.(161)

The artificial character of this picture of the other world is clear at the first glance. With the pedantic attention to details which characterised the Egyptian, every part of it has been carefully elaborated. The names and forms of the personages who stand on the banks of the infernal river or enter the boat of Ra, as with each successive hour he pa.s.ses into a new region, are all given; even the exact area of each region is stated, though the measurements do not agree in all the versions of the book. But the best proof of its artificial nature is to be found in a fact first pointed out by Professor Maspero. Two of the older conceptions of the other world and the life beyond the grave, which differed essentially from the solar doctrine, are embedded in it, but embedded as it were perforce. In the fourth and fifth hours or regions we have a picture of the future life as it was conceived by the worshippers of Sokaris in the primitive days of Memphis; in the sixth and seventh, the tribunal and paradise of Osiris.

The kingdom of Sokaris represented that dreary conception of an after-existence which was a.s.sociated with the ka. Like the mummy, the ka was condemned to live in the dark chamber of the tomb, whence it crept forth at night to consume the food that had been offered to it, and without which it was doomed to perish. Long before the age when the Book of Am Duat was written, this primitive belief had pa.s.sed away from the minds of men; but the tradition of it still lingered, and had secured a permanent place in the theological lore of Egypt. It has accordingly been annexed as it were by the author of the book, and transformed into two of the regions of the night through which the solar bark has to pa.s.s. But the terms in which the kingdom of Sokaris had been described were too stereotyped to be ignored or altered, and the solar bark is accordingly made to pa.s.s above the primitive Hades, the voices of whose inhabitants are heard rising up in an indistinct murmur though their forms are concealed from view. A memory is preserved even of the sandy desert of Giza and Saqqara, where the inhabitants of Memphis were buried, and over which Sokaris ruled as lord of the dead. The realm of Sokaris is pictured as an enclosure of sand, flanked on either side by a half-buried sphinx.

The author of the Book of Am Duat has dealt with the heaven of Osiris as he has done with the Hades of Sokaris. Osiris and his paradise have been transported bodily to the nocturnal path of the sun-G.o.d, and condemned to receive what little light is henceforth allowed them from the nightly pa.s.sage of the solar bark. Thoth guides the bark to the city which contains the tomb of Osiris, that mysterious house wherein are the four human forms of the G.o.d. On the way the serpent Neha-hir has to be overcome; he is but another form of the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ra, who thus takes the place of Set, the enemy of Osiris. When the sixth region is pa.s.sed, which is a sort of vestibule to the "retreat" of Osiris in the seventh, other enemies of Osiris-of whom, however, the Osirian doctrine knew but little-are being put to death in true solar fashion.

Perhaps the most noteworthy fact in this description of the kingdom of Osiris is, that not only all the G.o.ds of the Osirian cycle are relegated to it, including the hawk Horus, but also the Khu or luminous manes and the ancient kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. The fact points unmistakably to the great antiquity of the Osirian creed. It went back to a time when as yet the Egyptian monarchy was not united, and when the _khu_ or luminous soul held the same place in Egyptian thought as had been held at an earlier time by the _ka_ and later by the soul or _ba_. So undoubted was the fact that the old Pharaohs of primeval Egypt had died in the Osirian faith, that the author of the Book of Am Duat could not disregard it; he was forced to place the predecessors of a Seti or a Ramses, for whom the book was copied, in one of the murky regions of the other world instead of in the solar bark. They had been followers of Osiris and not of Ra, and there was accordingly no place for them in the boat of the sun-G.o.d.

Osiris is thus subordinated to the sun. The G.o.d of the dead is not allowed to rule even in his own domains. Such light and life as are graciously permitted to him come from the pa.s.sing of the solar bark once in each twenty-four hours. He has lost the bright and happy fields of Alu, he has had to quit even the judgment-hall where he decided the lot of man. Osiris and his creed are deposed to make way for another G.o.d with another and a lower form of doctrine.

The fact was so patent, that a second solar apocalypse was written in order to smooth it away. This was the Book of the Gates or of Hades, a copy of which is also inscribed in the tomb of Seti. It differs only in details from the Book Am Duat; the main outlines of the latter, with the pa.s.sage of the solar bark through the twelve hours or regions of the night, remain unaltered. But the details vary considerably. The gates which shut the hours off one from the other become fortified pylons, guarded by serpents breathing fire. The Hades of Sokaris is suppressed, and the judgment-hall of Osiris is introduced between the fifth and sixth hours. The object of the judgment, however, seems merely the punishment of the enemies of the G.o.d, who are tied to stakes and finally burned or otherwise put to death in the eighth hour. Among them appears Set in the form of a swine, who is driven out of the hall of judgment by a cynocephalous ape. As for the righteous, they are still allowed to cultivate the fields of the kingdom of Osiris; but it is a kingdom which is plunged in darkness except during the brief s.p.a.ce of time when the bark of the sun-G.o.d floats through it. Osiris, nevertheless, is acknowledged as lord of the world of the dead, in contradistinction to the Book Am Duat, which a.s.signs him only a portion of it; and when the sun-G.o.d emerges into the world of light at the end of the twelfth hour, it is by pa.s.sing through the hands of Nut, the sky, who stands on the body of Osiris, "which encircles the other world." Nor is the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ra, confounded with Set; his overthrow by Tum takes place in the first hour, before the tribunal of Osiris is reached.

The theology of the two books resembles the Taoism of China in its identification of religion with the knowledge of magical formulae. The moral element which distinguished the Osirian faith has disappeared, and salvation is made to depend on the knowledge of a mystical apocalypse.

Only the rich and cultivated have henceforth a chance of obtaining it. And even for them the prospect was dreary enough. A few-the innermost circle of disciples-might look forward to absorption into the sun-G.o.d, which practically meant a loss of individuality; for the rest there was only a world of darkness and inaction, where all that made life enjoyable to the Egyptian was absent. The author of the Book of the Gates gives expression to the fact when he tells us that as the last gate of the other world closes behind the sun-G.o.d, the souls who are left in darkness groan heavily. To such an end had the learned theology of Egypt brought both the people and their G.o.ds!

We need not wonder that under the influence of such teaching the intellectual cla.s.ses fell more and more into a hopeless scepticism, which saw in death the loss of all that we most prize here below. On the one side, we have sceptical treatises like the dialogue between the jackal and the Ethiopian cat, where the cat, who represents the old-fashioned orthodoxy, has by far the worst of the argument;(162) on the other side, the dirge on the death of the wife of the high priest of Memphis, which I have quoted in an earlier lecture-

"The underworld is a land of thick darkness, A sorrowful place for the dead.

They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken."

It was better, indeed, that it should be so than that they should awaken only to lead the existence which the Book of Am Duat describes.

How far the doctrines of the solar theology extended beyond the narrow circle in which they originated, it is difficult to say. In the nature of the case they could not become popular, as they started from an a.s.sumption of esoteric knowledge. We know that the majority of the Egyptians continued to hold to the Osirian creed up to the last days of paganism-or at all events they professed to do so-and as long as the Osirian creed was retained the moral element in religion was recognised. In one respect, however, the solar theology triumphed. The G.o.ds of Egypt, including Osiris himself, were identified with the sun-G.o.d, and became forms or manifestations of Ra. Egyptian religion became pantheistic; the divinity was discovered everywhere, and the shadowy and impersonal forms of the ancient deities were mingled together in hopeless confusion. It seemed hardly to matter which was invoked, for each was all and all were each.

Gnosticism was the natural daughter of the solar theology. The doctrine that knowledge is salvation and that the G.o.ds of the popular cult are manifestations of the sun-G.o.d, was applied to explain the origin of evil.

Evil became the result of imperfection and ignorance, necessarily inherent in matter, and arising from the fact that the creation is due to the last of a long series of aeons or emanations from the supreme G.o.d. The aeons are the legitimate descendants of the manifold deities whom the Egyptian priests had resolved into forms of Ra, while the identification of evil with the necessary imperfection of matter deprives it of a moral element, and finds a remedy for it in the _gnosis_ or "knowledge" of the real nature of things. Even the strange monsters and symbolic figures which play so large a part in the solar revelation are reproduced in Gnosticism.

Abraxas and the other curiously composite creatures engraved on Gnostic gems have all sprung from the Books of Am Duat and the Gates, along with the allegorical meanings that were read into them. However much the solar school of theology may have been for the old religion of Egypt a teaching of death, in the Gnosticism of the first Christian centuries it was born anew.

Lecture IX. The Popular Religion Of Egypt.

Thus far I have dealt with the official religion of ancient Egypt, with the religion of the priests and princes, the scribes and educated cla.s.ses.

This is naturally the religion of which we know most. The monuments that have come down to us are for the most part literary and architectural, and enshrine the ideas and beliefs of the cultivated part of the community.

The papyri were written for those who could read and write, the temples were erected at the expense of the State, and the texts and figures with which they were adorned were engraved or painted on their walls under priestly direction. The sculptured and decorated tomb, the painted mummy-case, the costly sarcophagus, the roll of papyrus that was buried with the dead, were all alike the privilege of the wealthy and the educated. The grave that contained the body of the poor contained little else than the coa.r.s.e cere-cloths in which it was wrapped. Our knowledge, therefore, of the religion of the people, of the popular religion as distinguished from the religion of official orthodoxy, is, and must be, imperfect. We have to gather it from the traces it has left in the religion of the State, from stray references to it in literature, from a few rare monuments which have come down to us, from its survivals in the modern folk-lore and superst.i.tions of Egypt, or from its influence on the decaying faith of the cla.s.sical age.

There was, however, a popular religion by the side of the official religion, just as there is in all countries which possess an organised faith. And if it is difficult to understand fully the religion of the uneducated cla.s.ses in Western Europe to-day, or to realise their point of view, it must be much more difficult to do so in the case of ancient Egypt. Here our materials are scanty, and the very fact that we know as much as we do about the religion of the upper cla.s.s makes it additionally harder to estimate them aright.

A considerable portion of the fellahin were descended from the earlier neolithic population of Egypt, whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found already settled in the country. In a former lecture I have endeavoured to show that they were fetish-worshippers, and that among their fetishes animals were especially prominent. They had no priests, for fetishism is incompatible with a priesthood in the proper sense of the term. Neither did they embalm their dead; all those beliefs and ideas, therefore, which were connected with a priesthood and the practice of embalming must have come to them from without; the G.o.ds and sacerdotal colleges of the State religion, the Osirian creed, and the belief in the resurrection, must have been for them of foreign origin. And of foreign origin they doubtless remained to the bulk of the nation down to the last days of paganism.

Amon and Ra and Osiris were indeed familiar names, the temple festivals were duly observed, and the processions in honour of the State G.o.ds duly attended; and after the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the fusion between the different elements in the population was completed, the practice of mummification became general; but the names of the State G.o.ds were names only, to which the peasant attached a very different meaning from that which official orthodoxy demanded. He still worshipped the tree whose shady branches arose on the edge of the desert or at the corner of his field, or brought his offerings to some animal, in which he saw not a symbol or an incarnation of Horus and Sekhet, but an actual hawk and cat.

How deeply rooted this belief in the divinity of animals was in the minds of the people, is shown by the fact that the State religion had to recognise it just as Mohammed had perforce to recognise the sanct.i.ty of the "Black Stone" of the Kaaba. As we have seen, the second king of the Second Thinite Dynasty is said to have legalised the worship of the bull Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the ram of Mendes; and though the official explanation was that these animals were but incarnations of Pta? and Ra to whom the worship was really addressed, it was an explanation about which the people neither knew nor cared. The divine honours they paid to the bulls and ram were paid to the animals themselves, and not to the G.o.ds of the priestly cult.

Here and there a few evidences have been preserved to us that such was the fact. In the tomb of Ra-zeser-ka-seneb, for instance, at Thebes, the artist has introduced a picture of a peasant making his morning prayer to a sycamore which stands at the end of a corn-field, while offerings of fruit and bread and water are placed on the ground beside it.(163) The official religion endeavoured to legalise this old tree worship much in the same way as Christianity endeavoured to legalise the old worship of springs, by attaching the tree to the service of a G.o.d, and seeing in it one of the forms in which the deity manifested himself. Thus "the sycamore of the south" became the body of Hathor, whose head was depicted appearing from its branches, while opposite Siut it was Hor-pes who took the G.o.ddess's place.(164) Like other beliefs and practices which go back to the neolithic population of Egypt, the ancient tree worship is not yet extinct. On either side of the Nile sacred trees are to be found, under which the offering of bread and water is still set, though the G.o.d of the official cult of Pharaonic Egypt, to whom the worship was nominally paid, has been succeeded by a Mohammedan saint. By the side of the tree often rises the white dome of the tomb of a "shekh," to whom the place is dedicated, reminding us of a picture copied by Wilkinson in a sepulchre at Hu, in which a small chapel, representing the tomb of Osiris, stands by the side of a tree on whose branches is perched the _bennu_ or phnix.(165) The most famous of these trees, however, that of Matariya, is an object of veneration to the Christian rather than to the Mohammedan.

The Holy Family, it is said, once rested under its branches during their flight into Egypt; in reality it represents a sycamore in which the soul of Ra of Heliopolis must have been believed to dwell.

Professor Maspero has drawn attention to certain stelae in the museum of Turin, which show how, even in the lower middle cla.s.s, it was the animal itself and not the official G.o.d incarnated in it that was the object of worship. On one of them, which belongs to the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, huge figures of a swallow and a cat are painted, with a table of offerings standing before them, as well as two kneeling scribes, while the accompanying inscriptions tell us that it was to "the good" swallow and the "good" cat, and not to any of the State G.o.ds who may have hidden themselves under these animal forms, that flowers were being offered and prayers made. On another stela we find two pet cats, who are sitting on a shrine and facing one another, and whom their mistresses-two of the women who wailed at funerals-adore in precisely the same language as that which was used of Osiris or Amon.(166) In the quarries north of Qurna is a similar representation of a cow and a cobra, which stand face to face with a table of offerings between them, while a worshipper kneels at the side, and a half-obliterated inscription contains the usual formulae of adoration.(167) Still more curious is a stela, now in the museum of Cairo, on which an ox is represented inside a shrine, while underneath it is a Greek inscription declaring that the "Kretan" who had dedicated the monument could interpret dreams, thanks to the commandment of "the G.o.d."

The G.o.d, it will be noticed, is not Apis, but an ordinary ox.

But of all the animals who thus continued to be the real G.o.ds of the people in spite of priestly teaching and State endowments, none were so numerous or were so universally feared and venerated as the snakes. The serpent was adored where Amon was but a name, and where Ra was looked upon as belonging, like fine horses and clothes, to the rich and the mighty.

The prominence of the serpent in Egyptian mythology and symbolism indicates how plentiful and dangerous it must have been in the early days of Egypt, and what a lasting impression it made upon the native mind. When the banks of the Nile were an uninhabitable mora.s.s, and the neolithic tribes built their huts in the desert, the snake must indeed have been a formidable danger. The most deadly still frequent the desert; it is only in the cultivated land that they are comparatively rare. In Egypt, as elsewhere, the cultivation of the soil and the habits of civilised life have diminished their number, and driven them into the solitudes of the wilderness. But when the Pharaonic Egyptians first arrived in the valley of the Nile, when the swamps were being drained, the jungle cleared away, and the land sown with the wheat of Babylonia, the serpent was still one of the perils of daily life. A folk-tale which has been appropriated and spoilt by the priestly compilers of the legend of Ra, tells how the sun-G.o.d was bitten by a venomous snake which lay in his path, and how the poison ran through his veins like fire. The symbol of royalty adopted by the earliest Pharaohs was the cobra; it symbolised the irresistible might and deadly power of the conquering chieftain which, like the dreaded cobra of the desert, overcame the inhabitants of the country, and compelled them to regard him with the same awe and terror as the serpent itself.

Down to the last the embalmers and gravediggers and others who had to attend to the funeral arrangements of the dead, and consequently lived in the neighbourhood of the necropolis, were more exposed to the chances of snake-bite than the inhabitants of the cultivated land. The necropolis was invariably in the desert, and the nature of their occupation obliged them to excavate the sand or visit the dark chambers of the dead where the snake glided unseen. It is not surprising, therefore, that the veneration of the snake was especially strong among the population of the cemeteries.

Those who inhabited the necropolis of Thebes have left us prayers and dedications to the G.o.ddess Mert-seger, who is represented as a cobra or some equally deadly serpent, though at times she is decently veiled under the name of an official deity. Once her place is taken by two snakes, at another time by a dozen of them. She was, in fact, the tutelary G.o.ddess of the necropolis, and hence received the t.i.tle of "the Western Crest"-that is to say, the crest of the western hills, where the earliest tombs of Thebes were situated. Professor Maspero has translated an interesting inscription made in her honour by one of the workmen employed in the cemetery. "Adoration to the Western Crest," it begins, "prostrations before her double! I make my adoration, listen! Ever since I walked on the earth and was an attendant in the Place of Truth (the cemetery), a man, ignorant and foolish, who knew not good from evil, I committed many sins against the G.o.ddess of the Crest, and she punished me. I was under her hand night and day; while I cowered on the bed like a woman with child, I cried for breath, and no breath came to me, for I was pursued by the Western Crest, the mightiest of all the G.o.ds, the G.o.ddess of the place; and behold I will declare to all, great and small, among the workmen of the necropolis: Beware of the Crest, for there is a lion in her, and she strikes like a lion that bewitches, and she is on the track of all who sin against her! So I cried to my mistress, and she came to me as a soft breeze, she united herself with me, causing me to feel her hand; she returned to me in peace, and made me forget my troubles by giving me breath. For the Western Crest is appeased when the cry is made to her;-so says Nefer-ab, the justified. He says: Behold, hear, all ears who live on earth, beware of the Western Crest!"(168)

It is clear that Nefer-ab suffered from asthma, that he believed it had been inflicted upon him by the local G.o.ddess for some sin he had committed against her, and that he further believed his penitence and cry for help to have induced her to come to him and cure him. And this G.o.ddess was a snake. Here, in the necropolis of Thebes, therefore, the snake played the same part as a healer that it did in the worship of Asklepios. It will be remembered that the first temple raised to aesculapius at Rome was built after a plague, from which the city was supposed to have been delivered by a serpent hidden in the marshes of the Tiber. The serpent that destroys also heals; by the side of Kakodaemon there is also the good snake Agathodaemon.

Mert-seger, the serpent of the necropolis, did not wholly escape the patronage of the State religion. Like the local cults of aboriginal India over which Bra?manism has thrown its mantle, the cult of Mert-seger was not left wholly unnoticed by the organised religion of the State. A chapel was erected to her in the orthodox form, and it is from this chapel that most of the stelae have come which have revealed the existence of the old worship. In some of them Mert-seger is identified with Mut, or even with Isis; but such an identification was never accepted or understood by her illiterate worshippers. For them she continued to be what she had been to their forefathers, simply a serpent and nothing more. The old faith has survived centuries of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a modified form.

Professor Maspero discovered that the local Mohammedan saint, whose tomb is not far from the ancient chapel of Mert-seger, is still believed to work miracles of healing. He has taken the place of the serpent G.o.ddess; that is all.(169)