History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 (eBook)

THEIR NUMBER AND NATURE—THE FEUDAL GODS, LIVING AND DEAD—TRIADS—— THE TEMPLES AND PRIESTHOOD—THE COSMOGONIES OF THE DELTA——THE ENNEADS OF HELIOPOLIS AND HERMOPOLIS.

Multiplicity of the Egyptian gods: the commonalty of the gods, its varieties, human, animal, and intermediate between man and beast; gods of foreign origin, indigenous gods, and the contradictory forms with which they were invested in accordance with various conceptions of their nature.

The Star-gods—The Sun-god as the Eye of the Shy; as a bird, as a calf, and as a man; its barks, voyages round the world, and encounters with the serpent Apopi—The Moon-god and its enemies—The Star-gods: the Haunch of the Ox, the Hippopotamus, the Lion, the five Horus-planets; Sothis Sirius, and Sahû Orion.

The feudal gods and their classes: the Nile-gods, the earth-gods, the sky-gods and the sun-god, the Horus-gods—The equality of feudal gods and goddesses; their persons, alliances, and marriages: their children—The triads and their various developments.

The nature of the gods: the double, the soul, the body, death of men and gods, and their fate after death—The necessity for preserving the body, mummification—Dead gods the gods of the dead—The living gods, their temples and images—The gods of the people, trees, serpents, family fetiches—The theory of prayer and sacrifice: the servants of the temples, the property of the gods, the sacerdotal colleges.

The cosmogonies of the Delta: Sibu and Naît, Osiris and Isis, SU and Nephthys—Heliopolis and its theological schools: Ra, his identification with Horus, his dual nature, and the conception of Atûmû—The Heliopolitan Enneads: formation of the Great Ennead—Thot and the Hermopolitan Ennead: creation by articulate words and by voice alone—Diffusion of the Enneads: their connection with the local triads, the god One and the god Eight—The one and only gods.

The incredible number of religious scenes to be found among the representations on the ancient monuments of Egypt is at first glance very striking. Nearly every illustration in the works of Egyptologists brings before us the figure of some deity receiving with an impassive countenance the prayers and offerings of a worshipper. One would think that the country had been inhabited for the most part by gods, and contained just sufficient men and animals to satisfy the requirements of their worship.

      1  The goddess Naprît, Napît; bas-relief from the firstchamber of Osiris, on the east side of the great temple ofDenderah. Drawn by Faucher-Gudin.
 

On penetrating into this mysterious world, we are confronted by an actual rabble of gods, each one of whom has always possessed but a limited and almost unconscious existence. They severally represented a function, a moment in the life of man or of the universe; thus Naprît was identified with the ripe ear, or the grain of wheat;[**]

      **  The word naprît means grain, the grain of wheat. Thegrain-god is represented in the tomb of Seti I. as a manwearing two full ears of wheat or barley upon his head. Heis mentioned in the Hymn to the Nile about the same date,and in two or three other texts of different periods. Thegoddess Naprît, or Napît, to whom reference is heremade, was his duplicate; her head-dress is a sheaf of corn,as in the illustration.
*** This goddess, whose name expresses and whose formpersonifies the brick or stone couch, the child-bed or-chair, upon which women in labour bowed themselves, issometimes subdivided into two or four secondary divinities.She is mentioned along with Shaît, destiny, and Raninît,suckling. Her part of fairy godmother at the cradle of thenew-born child is indicated in the passage of the WestcarPapyrus giving a detailed account of the births of threekings of the fifth dynasty. She is represented in humanform, and often wears upon her head two long palm-shoots,curling over at their ends.
 

Maskhonît appeared by the child's cradle at the very moment of its birth;[*] and Raninît presided over the naming and the nurture of the newly born.[*] Neither Raninît, the fairy godmother, nor Maskhonît exercised over nature as a whole that sovereign authority which we are accustomed to consider the primary attribute of deity. Every day of every year was passed by the one in easing the pangs of women in travail; by the other, in choosing for each baby a name of an auspicious sound, and one which would afterwards serve to exorcise the influences of evil fortune. No sooner were their tasks accomplished in one place than they hastened to another, where approaching birth demanded their presence and their care. From child-bed to child-bed they passed, and if they fulfilled the single offices in which they were accounted adepts, the pious asked nothing more of them. Bands of mysterious cynocephali haunting the Eastern and the Western mountains concentrated the whole of their activity on one passing moment of the day. They danced and chattered in the East for half an hour, to salute the sun at his rising, even as others in the West hailed him on his entrance into night.[**]

      *  Raninît presides over the child's suckling, but she alsogives him his name, and hence, his fortune. She is on thewhole the nursing goddess. Sometimes she is represented as ahuman-headed woman, or as lioness-headed, most frequentlywith the head of a serpent; she is also the urseus, clothed,and wearing two long plumes on her head, and a simple urous,as represented in the illustration on p. 169.
**  This is the subject of a vignette in the Book of theDead, ch. xvi., where the cynocephali are placed in echelonupon the slopes of the hill on the horizon, right and leftof the radiant solar disk, to which they offer worship bygesticulations.
 

It was the duty of certain genii to open gates in Hades, or to keep the paths daily traversed by the sun.[*] These genii were always at their posts, never free to leave them, and possessed no other faculty than that of punctually fulfilling their appointed offices. Their existence, generally unperceived, was suddenly revealed at the very moment when the specific acts of their lives were on the point of accomplishment. These being completed, the divinities fell back into their state of inertia, and were, so to speak, reabsorbed by their functions until the next occasion.[***]

      *  Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d'ArchéologieÉgyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 34, 35.
***  The Egyptians employed a still more forcible expressionthan our word "absorption" to express this idea. It was saidof objects wherein these genii concealed themselves, andwhence they issued in order to re-enter them immediately,that these forms ate them, or that they ate their ownforms.
 

      2  Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from Champollion's copies, madefrom the tombs of Beni-Hassan. To the right is the sha,one of the animals of Sit, and an exact image of the godwith his stiff and arrow-like tail. Next comes the safir,the griffin; and, lastly, we have the serpent-headed saza.
 

Scarcely visible even by glimpses, they were not easily depicted; their real forms being often unknown, these were approximately conjectured from their occupations. The character and costume of an archer, or of a spear-man, were ascribed to such as roamed through Hades, to pierce the dead with arrows or with javelins. Those who prowled around souls to cut their throats and hack them to pieces were represented as women armed with knives, carvers—donît—or else as lacerators—nokit. Some appeared in human form; others as animals—bulls or lions, rams or monkeys, serpents, fish, ibises, hawks; others dwelt in inanimate things, such as trees,[*] sistrums, stakes stuck in the ground;[**] and lastly, many betrayed a mixed origin in their combinations of human and animal forms. These latter would be regarded by us as monsters; to the Egyptians, they were beings, rarer perhaps than the rest, but not the less real, and their like might be encountered in the neighbourhood of Egypt.[***]

      *  Thus, the sycamores planted on the edge of the desertwere supposed to be inhabited by Hâthor, Nûît, Selkît, Nît,or some other goddess. In vignettes representing thedeceased as stopping before one of these trees and receivingwater and loaves of bread, the bust of the goddess generallyappears from amid her sheltering foliage. But occasionally,as on the sarcophagus of Petosiris, the transformation iscomplete, and the trunk from which the branches spread isthe actual body of the god or goddess. Finally, the wholebody is often hidden, and only the arm of the goddess to beseen emerging from the midst of the tree, with anoverflowing libation vase in her hand.
**  The trunk of a tree, disbranched, and then set up in theground, seems to me the origin of the Osirian emblem...