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

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СКАЧАТЬ Even to-day the belief is not extinct in Europe that the spirits of the dead pass into the forms of swallows or doves. But at first it was immaterial what bird was selected to express pictorially the idea of a soul. It was the ostrich when the latter still existed in Southern Egypt; [pg 122] then it became the plover, in consequence, probably, of a similarity in sound between the name of the plover and that of the soul. At other times the favourite symbol was the crested ibis, whose name was identical with a word that signified “light.” Around the conception of the soul there accordingly gathered associations with the light, and more especially with the light of the sun. The sun-god, too, had a double and a soul; what could be more fitting, therefore, than that they should be represented by the crested ibis? It was but a step farther to see in the bird an incarnation of the sun-god himself.

      The subsequent development of the myth was due to the fact that the god of Heliopolis continued to be depicted as a man. His human form was too stereotyped in religious art to be changed, and the phœnix consequently was never actually identified with him. It was his soul, but it was not Ra himself. The combination of the man and the beast could be tolerated only when both were co-ordinate survivals from a distant past. The inner contradiction between the human and the bestial god was then obscured or ignored.

      With the human god was closely connected the ancestor worship, which was quite as much a characteristic of Egypt as the worship of animals. It was due in the first instance, perhaps, to the belief that the Ka of the dead man needed food and nourishment, and that if he did not receive them the hungry double would revenge himself on the living. To this day the Egyptian fellahin, both Moslem and Copt, visit the tombs of their forefathers at certain times in the year, and, after eating and drinking beside them, place a few grains of wheat or some similar offering on a shelf in front of a window-like opening into the tomb. But the belief in the material needs of the Ka would not of itself have sufficed to support the long lines of priests who were [pg 123] attached to the cult of the dead, or the prayers that were addressed to them. It was the deification of the Pharaoh which caused “prophets” of Khufu and Khafra to be still consecrated in the days of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty,85 and prevented the forms of the sacred animals from being pictured on the temple walls. As long as there was a human god on earth, there could also be a human god in heaven; and in the Pyramid texts of the Sixth Dynasty the dead Pepi or Teta is as much a god as any deity in the pantheon.

      When the Osirian faith had spread throughout Egypt, and the pious Egyptian looked forward after death to becoming himself an “Osiris,” there was still greater reason for the divine honours that were paid to the ancestor. In paying them to him the worshipper was paying them to the god of the dead. And the god of the dead was himself one of the ancestors of the Egyptian people. He was a human god who had once ruled on earth, and he still governed as a Pharaoh in the world beyond the grave. As the Pharaoh was a theomorphic man, so Osiris was an anthropomorphic god. In him the cult of the ancestor reached its fullest development.

      It was natural that Pharaonic Egypt should have been, so far as we know, the birthplace of euhemerism. Where the gods had human forms, and the men were gods, it was inevitable that it should arise. The deification of the Pharaoh prevented any line being drawn between the living man and the deity he worshipped. As the man could be a god, so too could the god be a man. The gods of Egypt were accordingly transformed into Pharaohs, who lived and conquered and died like the Pharaohs of history. They differed from the men of to-day [pg 124] only in having lived long ago, and on that account being possessed of powers which are now lost. That they should have died did not make them less divine and immortal. The Pharaoh also died like the ancestors who were worshipped at the tombs, but death meant nothing more than passing into another form of existence. It was merely a re-birth under new conditions. The Ka continued as before; there was no change in outward shape or in the moral and intellectual powers.

      In fact, the death of the god was a necessary accompaniment of an anthropomorphic form of religion. In Babylonia the temples of the gods were also their tombs, and even among the Greeks the sepulchre of Zeus was pointed out in Krete. The same cult was paid to the dead Naram-Sin or the dead Gudea in Chaldæa that was paid to the dead Khufu in Egypt. We have no need to seek in any peculiarly Egyptian beliefs an explanation of the ancestor worship which, along with the deification of the king, it shared with Babylonia.

      The euhemerism of the Egyptian priesthood sounded the knell of the old faith. As the centuries passed, purer and higher ideas of the Godhead had grown up, and between the “formless” and eternal Creator of the world and the man who had become a god, the distance was too great to be spanned. On the one side, the gods of the national creed had been resolved one into another, till no distinctive shape or character was left to any one of them; on the other side, they had been transformed into mere human kings who had ruled over Egypt long ago. The pantheistic Creator and the deified Egyptians of vulgar and prosaic history could not be harmonised together. The multitude might be content with its sacred animals and its amulets, but the thinking portion of the nation turned to Greek metaphysics or a despairing scepticism. Already, in the time of the Eleventh [pg 125] Dynasty, the poet who composed the dirge of king Antef gives pathetic expression to his doubts86—

      “What is fortune? say the wise.

      Vanished are the hearths and homes,

      What he does or thinks, who dies,

      None to tell us comes.

      “Have thy heart's desire, be glad,

      Use the ointment while you live;

      Be in gold and linen clad,

      Take what gods may give.

      “For the day shall come to each

      When earth's voices sound no more;

      Dead men hear no mourners' speech,

      Tears can not restore.

      [pg 126]

      “Eat and drink in peace to-day,

      When you go, your goods remain;

      He who fares the last long way

      Comes not back again.”

      Still more hopeless are the words put into the mouth of the wife of the high priest of Memphis at the close of the first century before our era—

      “O my brother, my spouse, and my friend,

      High priest of Memphis!

      Cease not to drink and to eat,

      To fill thyself with wine, and to make sweet love;

      Enjoy each festive day and follow thy desire,

      Let not care enter thy heart

      All the years that on earth thou remainest.

      The underworld is a land of thick darkness,

      A sorrowful place for the dead.

      They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken

      And behold their comrades.

      Their father and their mother they know not,

      No yearning for their wives and their children do they feel.”87

      [pg 127]

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