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

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СКАЧАТЬ (i. 12) states that Nit of Sais was at once male and female.

      One result of all this kaleidoscopic interchange was the growth of trinities in which the same god appears under three separate forms. At Heliopolis, for example, Harmakhis became identified with Tum, and the trinity of Tum, Ra, and Harmakhis grew up, in which Harmakhis was the sun of the morning and Tum of the evening, while Ra embodied them both. From one point of view, in fact, Harmakhis and Tum were but different aspects under which Ra could be envisaged; from another point, Ra, Tum, and Harmakhis were three persons in one god.

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      I believe that Professor Maspero is right in holding that the Egyptian trinity is of comparatively late origin and of artificial character.61 He points out that it presupposes the Ennead, and in some cases, at least, can be shown to have been formed by the union of foreign elements. Thus at Memphis the triad was created by borrowing Nefer-Tum from Heliopolis and Sekhet from Latopolis, and making the one the son of the local god Ptaḥ, and the other his wife. The famous trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, which became a pattern for the rest of Egypt, was formed by transferring Nebhât and Anubis, the allies of Osiris, to his enemy Set, and so throwing the whole of the Osirian legend into confusion. The trinity of Thebes is confessedly modern; it owed its origin to the rise of the Theban dynasties, when Thebes became the capital of Egypt, and its god Amon necessarily followed the fortunes of the local prince. Mut, “the mother,” a mere title of the goddess of Southern Egypt, was associated with him, and the triad was completed by embodying in it Ptaḥ of Memphis, who had been the chief god of Egypt when Thebes was still a small provincial town. At a subsequent date, Khonsu, the moon-god, took the place of Ptaḥ.62

      We can thus trace the growth of the Egyptian trinity and the ideas and tendencies which lay behind it. It was the culminating stage in the evolution of the religious system which took its first start among the priests of Heliopolis. First creation by means of generation, then the Ennead, and lastly the triad and the trinity—such were the stages in the gradual process [pg 091] of development. And the doctrine of the trinity itself reached its highest point of perfection in that worship of Osiris of which I shall speak in a future lecture.

      But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine of the trinity. Generation in the case of a god could not be the same as in the case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless proved this. It was inevitable, therefore, that it should come to be conceived of as symbolical like the generation of thought, all the more since the deities who had proceeded from Tum were all of them symbols representing the phenomena of the visible world. Hence the idea of generation passed naturally into that of emanation, one divine being emanating from another as thought emanates from thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of symbolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the expression of an idea meant a concrete form. Seb and Nut were the divine ideas which underlay the earth and the firmament and kept them in existence, but they were at the same time the earth and the firmament themselves. They represented thought in a concrete form, if we may borrow a phrase from the Hegelian philosophy.

      The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon by Greek thinkers in the days when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the old world and the new. It afforded an explanation not only of creation, but also of the origin of evil, and had, moreover, behind it the venerable shadow of Egyptian antiquity. It became the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the Gnostic systems, and through them made its way into Christian thought. From another point of view it may be regarded as an anticipation of the doctrine of evolution.

      The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was [pg 092] accomplished long before the Pyramid texts were written under the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. The Ennead appears in them as a long established doctrine, with all its consequences. The solar faith had laid firm hold of Egyptian religion, and gained a position from which it was never to be dislodged. Henceforward Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and beliefs which flowed from it, and the gods and goddesses of the land assumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not before, a new view of the future life obtained official sanction, which substituted the sun-god for Osiris and the solar bark for the Osirian paradise. But I must leave an account of it to another occasion, and confine myself at present to the last and most noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.

      It is perhaps hardly correct to apply to it the term development. It was rather a break in the religious tradition of Egypt, an interruption in the normal evolution of the Egyptian creed, which accordingly made but little permanent impression on the religious history of the nation. But in the religious history of mankind it is one of the most interesting of episodes. Like Mosaism in Israel, it preached the doctrine of monotheism in Egypt; but unlike Mosaism, its success was only temporary. Unlike Mosaism, moreover, it was a pantheistic monotheism, and it failed accordingly in its struggle with the nebulous polytheism of Egypt.

      One of the last Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty was Amon-hotep iv. Since the conquest of Syria by his ancestor Thothmes iii., and the establishment of an empire which extended to the banks of the Euphrates, Asiatic manners and customs had poured into Egypt in an ever-increasing flood, and with them the ideas and religious beliefs of the Semitic East. Amon-hotep iii., the father of Amon-hotep iv., had maintained the older [pg 093] traditions of the Egyptian court, so far at least as religion was concerned, though his mother and wife had alike been foreigners. But his son appears to have been young at the time of his father's death. He was accordingly brought up under the eye and influence of his mother Teie, and his temperament seems to have seconded the teaching he received from her. His features are those of a philosophic visionary rather than of a man of action, of a religious reformer rather than of a king. He flung himself eagerly into a religious movement of which he was the mainspring and centre, and for the first time in history there was persecution for religion's sake.

      For numberless centuries the Egyptian had applied the title of “the one god” to the divinity he was adoring at the moment, or who presided over the fortunes of his city or nome. But he did not mean to exclude by it the existence of other deities. The “one god” was unique only to the worshipper, and to the worshipper only in so far as his worship for the moment was addressed to this “one god” alone. When with the growth of the solar theory the deities of Egypt began to be resolved into one another, the title came to signify that attribute of divinity which unified all the rest. But to the Egyptian, it must be remembered, the attribute was a concrete thing; and though in one sense Amon and Khnum and Horus denoted the attributes of Ra, in another sense they were distinct personalities with a distinct history behind them. The result was what I have called a nebulous polytheism, in which the individual deities of the Egyptian Pantheon had melted like clouds into one another; they had lost their several individualities, but had not gained a new individuality in return. The conservative spirit, which forbade the Egyptian to break with the traditions of the past and [pg 094] throw aside any part of his heritage, prevented him from taking the final step, and passing out of polytheism into monotheism.

      It was just this step, however, that was taken by Amon-hotep iv. and his followers, and which at once stamps the non-Egyptian character of his religious reformation. Henceforward there was to be but one God in Egypt, a God who was omnipresent and omniscient, existing everywhere and in everything, and who would brook no rival at his side. He was not, indeed, a new god, for he had already revealed himself to the generations of the past under the form of Ra, and his visible symbol was the solar disc. But Ra had been ignorantly worshipped; unworthy language had been used of him, and he had been confounded with gods who were no gods at all. The new and purified conception of the supreme divinity needed a new name under which it could be expressed, and this was found in Aten, “the solar disc,” or Aten-Ra, “the disc of the sun.”

      It was not probable that Amon of Thebes and his worshippers would bow their heads to the new faith without a struggle. It was Amon who had led the fathers of Amon-hotep iv. to victory, who had given them their empire over the world, and upon whose city of Thebes the spoils of Asia had been lavished. A fierce contest broke out between the Theban priesthood and the heretical king. The worship of Amon was proscribed, СКАЧАТЬ