The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia. A. H. Sayce

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СКАЧАТЬ when the words (of life) are weighed!37 Let no lies be uttered against me before God. How great art thou!”

      Meanwhile the immaterial heart, the “Ka” of it, which is addressed in the words just quoted, had made its way through the region of the other world, until it finally reached the place known as “the Abode of Hearts.” Here in the judgment-hall of Osiris it met the dead man to whom it had formerly belonged, and here, too, it accused him of all the evil words and thoughts he had harboured in his lifetime, or testified to the good thoughts and words of which he had been the author. For the heart, though the organ through which his thoughts and words had acted, was not the cause of them; in its nature it was essentially pure and divine, and it had been an unwilling witness of the sins it had been forced to know. Eventually it was weighed in the balance against the image of Truth, and only if the [pg 067] scales turned in favour of the dead man could it rejoin its former body and live with it for ever in the islands of the Blest.

      The scales and judgment-hall, however, belong to the religious conceptions which gathered round the name of Osiris, like the Paradise which the risen mummy looked forward to enjoy. It was only after the worship of Osiris had become universal throughout Egypt, and the older or local ideas of the future life had been accommodated to them, that it was possible for an Egyptian to speak of meeting his disembodied heart, or of the testimony it could give for or against him before the judges of the dead. The fact that the use of the scarab does not seem to extend further back than the age of the Memphite or Theban dynasties, may imply that it was only then that the Osirian beliefs were officially fitted on to earlier forms of faith. However this may be, the worship of Osiris and the beliefs attaching to it must be left to another lecture, and for the present we must pass on to the mummy itself, the last part of man which it was hoped would be immortal.

      The mummy or Sâḥu has to be carefully distinguished from the Khat or natural body. The latter was a mere dead shell, seen by the soul but not affording a resting-place for it. The mummy, on the other hand, contained within itself the seeds of growth and resurrection. It could be visited by the soul and inspired by it for a few moments with life, and the Egyptian looked forward to a time when it would once more be reunited with both its heart and its soul, and so rise again from the dead.

      It is impossible to say how far back in the history of the Egyptian religion this belief in the immortality of the mummy may go. It can hardly have originated in the same circle of ideas as the doctrine of the Ka, though the doctrine of the Ka could easily be reconciled [pg 068] with it. On the one hand, it seems connected, as we shall see, with the cult of Osiris; but, on the other hand, there are no traces of mummification in the prehistoric graves, and it is doubtful whether there are any in the royal tombs of Negada and Abydos which belong to the age of the First and Second Dynasties. At all events, the scarab, which accompanied embalmment, first appears at a much later date, and perhaps had a Memphite origin. There are, however, indications that the process of embalming first arose among the pre-Menic rulers of Nekhen, in the neighbourhood of El-Kab. The soil of El-Kab literally effloresces with the natron, which, it was discovered, preserved the bodies buried in it; and even as late as the time of the Pyramid texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the northern sources of natron were known, it was still necessary for ceremonial purposes that the materials used by the embalmer should contain some of the natron of El-Kab.38

      What was difficult to harmonise with the belief in the resurrection of the mummy was the belief which made the risen man an “Osiris,” identified, that is to say, in substance with the god Osiris, and not his old material self. In the days, therefore, when Greek philosophy took it in hand to systematise and interpret the theology of Egypt, the risen mummy drops out of sight. The Khu, as we have seen, becomes the divine intelligence, which for a time is enshrouded in the human soul; and this again needs the envelope of the spirit, which sends the breath of life through the veins before it can tabernacle in the body of man. The Hermetic books tell us [pg 069] that while body, spirit, and soul are common to man and the beasts, the divine intelligence is his alone to possess, stripped, indeed, of its native covering of ethereal fire, but still the veritable spirit of God. Ever is it seeking to raise the human soul to itself, and so purify it from the passions and desires with which it is inspired by the body. But the flesh wages continual war against it, and endeavours to drag the soul down to its own level. If the soul yields, after death the intelligence returns to its original state, while the soul is arraigned before the judgment-seat of heaven, and there being accused by its conscience, the heart, is condemned to the punishment of the lost. First it is scourged for its sins, and then handed over to the buffetings of the tempests, suspended between earth and sky. At times in the form of an evil demon it seeks alleviation of its torments by entering the body of a man or animal, whom it drives to murder and madness. But at last, after ages of suffering, the end comes; it dies the second death, and is annihilated for ever.

      The good soul, on the other hand, which has listened in life to the voice of the divine intelligence, and struggled to overcome the lusts and passions of the flesh, obtains after death its reward. Guided by the intelligence, it traverses space, learning the secrets of the universe, and coming to understand the things that are dark and mysterious to us here. At length its education in the other world is completed, and it is permitted to see God face to face and to lose itself in His ineffable glory.

      I need not point out to you how deeply this Hellenised philosophy of Egypt has affected the religious thought of Christian Alexandria, and through Alexandria of Christian Europe. It may be that traces of it may be detected even in the New Testament. At any rate, [pg 070] much of the psychology of Christian theologians is clearly derived from it. We are still under the influence of ideas whose first home was in Egypt, and whose development has been the work of long ages of time. True or false, they are part of the heritage bequeathed to us by the past.

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Lecture IV. The Sun-God And The Ennead.

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      In my last lecture, when speaking of the form under which the soul of man was pictured by the Egyptians, I mentioned that it was often represented by a hawk, the symbol of the sun-god. Why the hawk should have thus symbolised the sun is a question that has often been asked. The Egyptians did not know themselves; and Porphyry, in the dying days of the old Egyptian faith, gravely declares that it was because the hawk was a compound of blood and breath! One explanation has been that it was because the hawk pounces down from the sky like the rays of the sun, which, like the eagle, he can gaze at without blinking; and a passage in the Odyssey of Homer (xv. 525) has been invoked in favour of this view, where the hawk is called “the swift messenger of Apollo.” But if there is any connection between the Homeric passage and the Egyptian symbol, it would show only that the symbol had been borrowed by the Greek poet. Originally, moreover, it was only the sun-god of Upper Egypt who was represented even by the Egyptians under the form of a hawk.

      This was Horus, often called in the later texts “Horus the elder” (Hor-ur, the Greek Aroêris), in order to distinguish him from a wholly different god, Horus the younger, the son of Isis. His symbol, the hawk, is found on the early Pharaonic monuments which recent excavations have brought to light. Sometimes the hawk stands [pg 072] on the so-called standard, which is really a perch, sometimes on the crenelated circle, which denoted a city in those primitive days. The standard is borne before the Pharaoh, representing at once his own title and the nome or principality over which he held rule; and its resemblance to the stone birds perched on similar supports, which Mr. Bent found in the ruins of Zimbabwe, suggests a connection between the prehistoric gold miners of Central Africa and the early inhabitants of Southern Egypt. On one of the early Egyptian monuments discovered at Abydos, two hawks stand above the wall of a city which seems to bear the name of “the city of the kings,”39 and a slate plaque found by Mr. Quibell at Kom el-Aḥmar shows us on one side the Pharaoh of Nekhen inspecting the decapitated bodies of his enemies with two hawks on standards carried before him, while, on the other side, a hawk leads the bridled “North” to him СКАЧАТЬ