we have now completed our preliminary survey of the nature and origin of gods in general. we have seen how men first came to believe in the objective existence of these powerful and invisible beings, how they learnt to invest them with majestic attributes, and how they grew to worship them under the various forms of mummies or boulders, stone or wooden idols, trees or stumps, wells, rivers, and fountains. in short, we have briefly arrived at the origin of polytheism. we have now to go on to our second question—how from the belief in many gods did men progress to the belief in one single god, the creator and upholder of all things? our task is now to reconstruct the origin of monotheism.

but monotheism bases itself entirely upon the great god of the hebrews. to him, therefore, we must next address ourselves. is he too resoluble, as i hinted before, into a sacred stone, the monument and representative of some prehistoric chieftain? can we trace the origin of the deity of christendom till we find him at last in a forgotten semitic ghost of the earliest period?

the chief hebrew god jahweh, when we first catch a passing glimpse of his primitive worship by his own people, was but one among a number of competing deities, mostly, it would appear, embodied by their votaries in the visible form of stone or wooden pillars, and adored by a small group of loosely-connected tribes among the mountain region in the southwest of syria. the confederacy among 155whom he dwelt knew themselves as the sons of israel; they regarded jahweh as their principal god, much as the greeks did zeus, or the early teutons their national hero woden. but a universal tradition among them bore witness to the fact that they had once lived in a subject condition in egypt, the house of bondage, and that their god jahweh had been instrumental in leading them thence into the rugged land they inhabited throughout the whole historical period, between the valley of jordan and the mediterranean coast. so consistent and so definite was this traditional belief that we can hardly regard it otherwise than as enclosing a kernel of truth; and not only do kuenen and other semitic scholars of the present day admit it as genuine, but the egyptologists also seem generally to allow its substantial accuracy and full accord with hieroglyphic literature. this sojourn in egypt cannot have failed to influence to some extent the semitic strangers: therefore i shall begin my quest of the hebrew god among the egyptian monuments. admitting that he was essentially in all respects a deity of the true semitic pattern, i think it will do us good to learn a little beforehand about the people among whom his votaries dwelt so long, especially as the history of the egyptian cults affords us perhaps the best historical example of the growth and development of a great national religion.

a peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind to the evolution of the gods of egypt. nowhere else in the world can we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism and philosophic theology. there are savage cults, it is true, which show us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds which show us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single supreme ruler of the cosmos. but there is no other 156religious system known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break, the whole evolutionary movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually expanded and etherealised into the later. the origin of the other great historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable: in egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate goal of pure monotheism.

i would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history by saying, once for all, that while i make no pretensions to special egyptological knowledge, i must nevertheless dissent on general anthropological grounds from the attitude taken up by mr. le page renouf in his lectures on the religion of ancient egypt. that learned writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century behind its time. it is written as though the doctrine of evolution had never been promulgated; and every page contains glaring contradictions of the most elementary principles of human development. mr. renouf still adheres to the discredited ideas that polytheism grew out of an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of adoration are “symbolical” in origin; and that “the sublimer portions of the egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of development or elimination from the grosser.” such theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which mr. renouf brings forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. a plain survey of the egyptian monuments in the nile valley, and of the known facts about egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from the warping influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide anthropological enquiry, to precisely opposite and more probable conclusions. for it must be carefully borne in mind 157that on these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be implicitly and unhesitatingly accepted. the religion of egypt, like the religion of jud忙a or the religion of hawaii, must be judged, not in isolation, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been found so disastrous in the case of the semitic and the aryan cults, must be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless error. the key to the origin of the egyptian faith is to be found, not in the late philosophising glosses quoted by m. de roug茅 and his english disciple, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of existing african savages.

looked at from this point of view, then—the evolutionary point of view—nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations, ancestor-worship and totemism.

i will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to consider by far the earliest, and infinitely the most important. and i may add that it is also, to judge by the egyptian evidence alone, both the element which underlies the whole religious conceptions of the nile valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon, including osiris, ptah, khem, and amen, as well perhaps as many of their correlative goddesses. there is not, in fact, any great ethnical religion on earth, except possibly the chinese, in which the basal importance of the dead man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient cult of pharaohnic egypt.

the egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. it is impossible for a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty shade of the desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent the streets of thebes and memphis. the commonest object of worship on all the monuments of nile is beyond doubt the mummy: sometimes the private mummy of an ancestor 158or kinsman, sometimes the greater deified mummies of immemorial antiquity, blended in the later syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities, but represented to the very last in all ages of art—on the shattered rameseum at thebes or the ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken denderah—as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. if ever there was a country where the worship of the dead was pushed to an extreme, that country was distinctly and decisively egypt.

“the oldest sculptures show us no acts of adoration or of sacrifice,” says mr. loftie, “except those of worship at the shrine of a deceased ancestor or relative.” this is fully in keeping with what we know of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and with the immense importance always attached to the preservation of the mummy intact throughout the whole long course of egyptian history. the egyptian, in spite of his high civilisation, remained always at the first or corpse-preserving stage of custom as regards the dead. to him, therefore, the life after death was far more serious than the life on earth: he realised it so fully that he made endless preparations for it during his days above, and built himself a tomb as an eternal mansion. the grave was a place of abode, where the mummy was to pass the greater part of his existence; and even in the case of private persons (like that famous tih whose painted sepulchre at sakkarah every tourist to cairo makes a point of visiting) it was sumptuously decorated with painting and sculpture. in the mortuary chambers or chapels attached to the tombs, the relations of the deceased and the priests of the cemetery celebrated on certain fixed dates various ceremonies in honour of the dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the mummy within. “the tables of offerings, which no doubt formed part of the furniture of the chambers, are depicted on the walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits, bread, and wine which had to be presented in kind.” these parentalia undoubtedly formed the main feature of the practical religion 159of early egypt, as exhibited to us on all the monuments except the late tomb-caves of royal personages, devoted to the worship of the equally mummified great gods.

the egyptian tomb was usually a survival of the cave artificially imitated. the outer chamber, in which the ceremonies of the offertory took place, was the only part accessible, after the interment had been completed, to the feet of survivors. the mummy itself, concealed in its sarcophagus, lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by the end of a corridor often containing statues or idols of the deceased. these idols, says m. maspero, were indefinitely multiplied, in case the mummy itself should be accidentally destroyed, in order that the ka (the ghost or double) might find a safe dwelling-place. compare the numerous little images placed upon the grave by the coast negroes. it was the outer chamber, however, that sheltered the stele or pillar which bore the epitaph, as well as the altar or table for offerings, the smoke from which was conveyed to the statues in the corridor through a small aperture in the wall of partition. down the well beyond, the mummy in person reposed, in its eternal dwelling-place, free from all chance of violation or outrage. “the greatest importance,” says mr. renouf, “was attached to the permanence of the tomb, to the continuance of the religious ceremonies, and to the prayers of passers-by.” again, “there is a very common formula stating that the person who raised the tablet ‘made it as a memorial to his fathers who are in the nether world, built up what he found was imperfect, and renewed what was found out of repair.’” in the inscription on one of the great tombs at beni-h芒ssan the founder says: “i made to flourish the name of my father, and i built chapels for his ka [or ghost]. i caused statues to be conveyed to the holy dwelling, and distributed to them their offerings in pure gifts. i instituted the officiating priest, to whom i gave donations in land and presents. i ordered funeral offerings for all the feasts of the nether world [which are then enumerated 160at considerable length]. if it happen that the priest or any other cease to do this, may he not exist, and may his son not sit in his seat.” all this is highly instructive from the point of view of the origin of priesthood.

how long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is shown by mr. renouf himself in one instructive passage. the kings who built the pyramids in the early empire endowed a priestly office for the purpose of celebrating the periodical rites of offering to their ghosts or mummies. now, a tablet in the louvre shows that a certain person who lived under the twenty-sixth dynasty was priest of khufu, the builder of the great pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before his time. we have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors who filled the same office immediately after khufu’s death. so that in this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch continued for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “if in the case of private interments,” says m. maspero, “we find no proof of so persistent a veneration, that is because in ordinary tombs the ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children or descendants of the deceased person. often, at the end of a few generations, either through negligence, removals, ruin, or extinction of the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out altogether.”

for this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense importance was attached by the egyptians to the begetting of a son who should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed by others after him. the duty of undertaking these rites is thoroughly insisted upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while on the other hand, the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the most terrible of all ancient egyptian imprecations. “many centuries after the construction of a tomb, egyptian travellers have left a record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, 161of the abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the funeral formula.” in fact, the whole practical religion of the ordinary egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of the ka—the genii, manes, or lares of the departed.

if even the common herd were thus carefully embalmed—if even the lesser functionaries of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs, daintily painted and exquisitely sculptured—it might readily be believed that the great kings of the mighty conquering dynasties themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special splendour and becoming magnificence. and so they did. in lower egypt, their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in upper egypt they are artificial caves. the dreary desert district west of the nile and south of cairo consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of memphis—a vast and mouldering city of the dead—whose chief memorials are the wonderful series of pyramids, the desecrated tombs piled up for the kings of the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties. there, under stone tumuli of enormous size,—barrows or cairns more carefully constructed,—the pharaohs of the old empire reposed, in peace in sepulchres unmarked by any emblems of the mystic gods or sacred beasts of later imagination. but still more significant and infinitely more beautiful are the rock-hewn tombs of the kings at thebes, belonging to the great monarchs of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development. those magnificent subterranean halls form in the truest and most literal sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions for the officers 162of state, still destined to attend upon their sovereign in the nether world. some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal palaces of medinet-h芒bu or the corridors of luxor.

m. mariette has further shown that the huge theban temples which skirt in long line the edge of the desert near the valley of tombs were really cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and worshipped. thus the rameseum was the mastabah or mortuary chapel for the tomb and ghost of rameses ii.; the temple of medinet-h芒bu fulfilled the same purpose for rameses iii.; the temple of kurneh for rameses i.; and so forth throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins, with their correlated group of subterranean excavations.

at any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial person to examine the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the nile without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central object of worship—that the entire practical religion of the people was based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal offerings to the manes of ancestors. everything in egypt points to this one conclusion. even the great sacred ritual is the book of the dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that they were really enjoying everlasting life. mors janua vitae is the short summing-up of egyptian religious notions. death was the great beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship.

moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of the religious sentiment from corpse-worship 163to god-worship. thus, in the tombs of sakkarah, belonging to the old empire (fifth dynasty), all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. the quotations from (or anticipations of) the book of the dead are few and short. the great gods are rarely alluded to. again, in the grottos of beni-hassan (of the twelfth dynasty) the paintings mostly represent scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities are still absent. the doctrine of rewards and punishments remains as yet comparatively in abeyance. it is only at the tombs of the kings at thebes (of the eighteenth dynasty) that entire chapters of the book of the dead are transcribed at length, and the walls are covered with “a whole army of grotesque and fantastic divinities.”

“but the egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods, distinct from their ancestors—national, or local, or common gods—whose names and figures have come down to us inscribed upon all the monuments.” quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors—gods whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. but it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various ruling families or dominant cities; and in one or two of the most important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.

i will take, to begin with, one typical example. there is no single god in the egyptian pantheon more important or more universally diffused than osiris. in later forms of the national religion, he is elevated into the judge of the departed and king of the nether world: to be “justified by osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “a justified osiris,” is the prayer of every corpse as set forth in his funeral 164inscription; and identification with osiris is looked upon as the reward of all the happy and faithful dead. now osiris, in every one of his representations and modes, is simply—a mummy. his myth, to be sure, assumed at last immense proportions; and his relations with isis and horus form the centre of an endless series of irreconcilable tales, repeated over and over again in art and literature. if we took mythology as our guide, instead of the monuments, we should be tempted to give him far other origins. he is identified often with other gods, especially with amen; and the disentanglement of his personality in the monuments of the newer empire, when ra, the sun-god, got mixed up inextricably with so many other deities, is particularly difficult. but if we neglect these later complications of a very ancient cult, and go back to the simplest origin of egyptian history and religion, we shall, i think, see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental symbolism into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to be—a revered and worshipped mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the town or little district of this by abydos.

i do not deny that in later ages osiris became much more than this. nor do i deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and pious dead. furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was identified in the end with an annual slain corn-god. i will even allow that there may have been more than one original osiris—that the word may even at first have been generic, not specific. but i still maintain that the evidence shows us the great and principal osiris of all as a dead chief of abydos.

we must remember that in egypt alone history goes back to an immense antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced civilisation and a developed picture-writing. therefore the very oldest known state of egypt 165necessarily presupposes a vast anterior era of slow growth in concentration and culture. before ever upper or lower egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the bank of the nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and each worshipping its own local deceased potentates. the sheikh of the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses. each tribe had also its special totem, about which i shall have a little more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later egyptian zoolatry and the animal-headed deities. to the very last, egyptian religion bore marked traces of this original tribal form; the great multiplicity of egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption of so many of them, after the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. the local gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially worshipped in their original sites. thus the ithyphallic amen-khem was specially worshipped at thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency upon every temple; apis was peculiarly sacred at memphis; pasht at bubastis; anubis at sekhem; neith at sais; ra at heliopolis; and osiris himself at abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.

even egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a state of things, for it asserts that before the time of menes, the first king of the first dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. in other words, it was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines which reigned in the various provinces of the nile valley before the unification.

in the case of osiris, the indications which lead us in this direction are almost irresistible. it is all but certain that osiris was originally a local god of this or thinis, a 166village near abydos, where a huge mound of rubbish still marks the site of the great deity’s resting-place. the latter town is described in the harris papyrus as abud, the hand of osiris; and in the monuments which still remain at that site, osiris is everywhere the chief deity represented, to whom kings and priests present appropriate offerings. but it is a significant fact that menes, the founder of the united monarchy, was born at the same place; and this suggests the probability that osiris may have been the most sacred and most venerated of menes’s ancestors. the suggestion derives further weight from the fact that osiris is invariably represented as a mummy, and that he wears a peculiar head-dress or cap of office, the same as that which was used in historical times as the crown of upper egypt. he also holds in his hands the crook and scourge which are the marks of kingly office—the crook to lead his own people like a shepherd, the scourge to punish evil-doers and to ward off enemies. his image is therefore nothing more nor less than the image of a mummied king. sometimes, too, he wears in addition the regal ostrich plumes. surely, naught save the blind infatuation of mythologists could make them overlook the plain inference that osiris was a mummified chief of abydos in the days before the unification of egypt under a single rule, and that he was worshipped by his successors in the petty principality exactly as we know other kingly mummies were worshipped by their family elsewhere—exactly, for example, as on the famous tablet of ancestors found at abydos itself, sethi i. and rameses ii. are seen offering homage to seventy-six historical kings, their predecessors on the throne of united egypt.

not only, however, is osiris represented as a king and a mummy, but we are expressly told by plutarch (or at least by the author of the tract de osiride which bears his name) that the tomb of osiris existed at abydos, and that the richest and most powerful of the egyptians were desirous of being buried in the adjacent cemetery, in order that 167they might lie, as it were, in the same grave with the great god of their country. all this is perfectly comprehensible and natural if we suppose that a thinite dynasty first conquered the whole of egypt; that it extended the worship of its own local ancestor-god over the entire country; and that in time, when this worship had assumed national importance, the local god became the chief figure in the common pantheon.

i had arrived at this opinion independently before i was aware that mr. loftie had anticipated me in it. but in his rare and interesting essay on scarabs i find he has reached the same conclusions.

“the divinity of pharaoh,” says mr. loftie, “was the first article in the creed of the pyramid period, the earliest of which we know anything. as time went on, though the king was still called divine, we see him engaged in the worship of other gods. at last he appears as a priest himself; and when herodotus and the later greek historians visited egypt, there was so little of this part of the old religion left that it is not even mentioned by them as a matter of importance.” this is quite natural, i may remark parenthetically, for as the antiquity and grandeur of the great gods increased, the gulf between them and mere men, even though those men were kings, their offspring, must always have grown ever wider and wider. “i have myself no doubt whatever,” mr. loftie goes on, “that the names of osiris and of horus are those of ancient rulers. i think that, long before authentic history begins, asar and aset his wife reigned in egypt, probably in that wide valley of the upper nile which is now the site of girgeh and berb茅” (exactly where i place the principality of osiris). “their son was hor, or horus, the first king of upper and lower egypt; and the ‘hor seshoo.’ the successors of horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers. i know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject, and much learning and ingenuity have been spent to prove that asar, and aset, and hor, and 168ptah, and anep, are representations of the powers of nature; that they do not point to ancient princes, but to ancient principles; and that horus and his successors are gods and were never men. but in the oldest inscriptions we find none of that mysticism which is shown in the sculptures from the time of the eighteenth dynasty down to the ptolemies and the roman emperors.” in short, mr. loftie goes on to set forth a theory of the origin of the great gods essentially similar to the one i am here defending.

though a little out of place, i cannot help noting here the curious confirmatory fact that a number of ibis mummies have been found at abvdos in close proximity to the mound where m. mariette confidently expected to discover in the rock the actual tomb of osiris himself. hence we may conclude that the ibis was in all probability the totem of abydos or this, as the bull was of memphis, the crocodile of the fayoum, the cat of bubastis, and the baboon of thebes. now, the ibis-god of abydos is thoth; and it is noteworthy that thoth, as recorder, always accompanies osiris, in later legend, as judge of the dead: the local mummy-god, in other words, has as his assessor the local totem-god; and both are commonly to be seen on the monuments of abydos, in company with horus, anubis, isis, and other (probably) local divinities.

it is quite easy to see how, with this origin, osiris would almost inevitably grow with time to be the king of the dead, and supreme judge of the nether regions. for, as the most sacred of the ancestors of the regal line, he would naturally be the one whom the kings, in their turn, would most seek to propitiate, and whom they would look forward to joining in their eternal home. as the myth extended, and as mystical interpretations began to creep in, identifications being made of the gods with the sun or other natural energies, the original meaning of osiris-worship would grow gradually obscured. but to the last, osiris himself, in spite of all corruptions, is represented 169as a mummy: and even when identified with amen, the later intrusive god, he still wears his mummy-bandages, and still bears the crook and scourge and sceptre of his primitive kingship.

it may be objected, however, that there were many forms of orisis, and many local gods who bore the same name. he was buried at abydos, but was also equally buried at memphis, and at phil忙 as well. the pretty little “temple on the roof” at denderah is an exquisitely elaborate chapel to the local osiris of that town, with chambers dedicated to the various other osiris-gods of the forty-two nomes of ancient egypt. well, that fact runs exactly parallel with the local madonnas and the local apollos of other religions: and nobody has suggested doubts as to the human reality of the blessed virgin mary because so many different maries exist in different sacred sites or in different cathedrals. our lady of loretto is the same as our lady of lourdes. jesus of nazareth was nevertheless born at bethlehem: he was the son of joseph, but he was also the son of david, and the son of god. perhaps osiris was a common noun: perhaps a slightly different osiris was worshipped in various towns of later egypt; perhaps a local mummy-god, the ancestor of some extinct native line, often wrongly usurped the name and prerogatives of the great mummy-god of abydos, especially under the influence of late priestly mysticism. moreover, when we come to consider the subject of the manufacture of gods, we shall see that the body of an annual incarnation of osiris may have been divided and distributed among all the nomes of egypt. it is enough for my present purpose if i point out in brief that ancestor-worship amply explains the rise and prevalence of the cult of osiris, the kingly mummy, with the associated cults of horus, isis, thoth, and the other deities of the osirian cycle.

i may add that a gradual growth of osiris-worship is clearly marked on the monuments themselves. the simpler 170stel忙 and memorials of the earliest age seldom contain the names of any god, but display votaries making offerings at the shrine of ancestors. similarly, the scenes represented on the walls of tombs of early date bear no reference to the great gods of later ages, but are merely domestic and agricultural in character, as may be observed at sakkarah and even to some extent also at beni-hassan. under the sixth dynasty, the monuments begin to make more and more frequent mention of osiris, who now comes to be regarded as judge of the dead and lord of the lower world; and on a tablet of this age in the boulak museum occurs for the first time the expression afterwards so common, “justified by osiris.” under the twelfth dynasty, legend becomes more prominent; a solar and lunar character seems to be given by reflex to osiris and isis: and the name of ra, the sun, is added to that of many previously distinct and independent deities. khem, the ithyphallic god of the thebaid, now also assumes greater importance, as is quite natural under a line of theban princes: and khem, a local mummy-god, is always represented in his swathing-clothes, and afterwards confounded, certainly with amen, and probably also with the mummy-god of abydos. but osiris from this time forward rises distinctly into the front rank as a deity. “to him, rather than to the dead, the friends and family offer their sacrifices. a court is formed for him. thoth, the recorder [totem-god of abydos], anubis the watcher, ra the impersonation of truth, and others, assist in judgment on the soul.” the name of the deceased is henceforth constantly accompanied by the formula “justified by osiris.” about the same time the book of the dead in its full form came into existence, with its developed conception of the lower world, and its complicated arrangement of planes of purgatorial progress.

under the eighteenth dynasty, the legend thickens; the identifications of the gods become more and more intricate; amen and ra are sought and found under innumerable 171forms of other deities; and a foundation is laid for the esoteric monotheism or pantheistic nature-worship of the later philosophising priesthood. it was under the nineteenth dynasty that the cult of local triads or trinities took fullest shape, and that the mystical interpretation of the religion of egypt came well into the foreground. the great osirian myth was then more and more minutely and mystically elaborated; and even the bull apis, the totem-god of memphis, was recognised as a special incarnation of osiris, who thus becomes, with amen, the mysterious summing-up of almost all the national pantheon. at last we find the myth going off into pure mysticism, osiris being at once the father, brother, husband, and son of isis, and also the son of his own child horus. * sentences with an almost athanasian mixture of vagueness and definiteness inform us how “the son proceeds from the father, and the father proceeds from his son”; how “ra is the soul of osiris, and osiris the soul of ra and how horus his child, awakened by magical rites from his dead body, is victorious over set, the prince of darkness, and sits as osiris upon the throne of the father whom he has revived and avenged. here as elsewhere the myth, instead of being the explanation of the god, does nothing more than darken counsel.”

* “stories like the osiris myth,” says mr. lang, “spring

from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and

fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human

fancy and human speculation.” this sentence enforces

precisely the same idea that i have previously expressed in

chapter ii. as to the real relations of religion and

mythology. the myth nowhere explains the cult; it casts no

light upon its origin or history; on the contrary, it only

obscures and overshadows the underlying kernel of genuine

fact.

in like manner, i believe, ptah was originally a local mummy-god of memphis, and khem of ap, afterwards known as chemmis.

this gradual growth of a dead and mummified village chief, however, into a pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is not in any way more remarkable than the gradual growth 172of a galilean peasant into the second person of an eternal and omnipotent godhead. nor does the myth of the death and resurrection of osiris (to be considered hereafter in a later chapter) militate against the reality of his human existence any more than the history of the death and resurrection of jesus christ militates against the human existence of jesus of nazareth. “gross and crude euphemerism” may be bad; but airy and fantastic max-mullerism appears to me just as unphilosophical.

the difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is not at all great, if we consider the further fact that even after the concept of godship had been fully developed, the king still remained of like nature with the gods, their son and descendant, a divine personage himself, differing from them only in not having yet received eternal life, the symbol of which they are often shown in sculpture as presenting with gracious expressions to their favoured scion. “the ruling sovereign of egypt,” says mr. le page renouf, “was the living image of and vicegerent of the sun-god. he was invested with the attributes of divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental evidence.” and quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled in egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before menes were significantly known as “the successors of horus.” as late as the times of the ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of menes and other pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. the pyramid kings took the title of the golden horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from chafra onward the reigning monarch was known as the son of ra and the great god. amenophis il, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like ra, the sacred seed of amen, the son whom he begot.” and on all the monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature as the gods themselves: he converses with them on equal terms; they lead him by the hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or present him with the symbols of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family.

the 173former guerdon bestows upon him the same rank they themselves had held on earth; the latter advances him to share with them the glories of the other existence. in the temple of kurneh, rameses i. (then dead) receives the offerings and liturgies of his royal grandson. hard by, rameses ii. offers to amen-ra, khonso, and rameses i., without distinction of divinity. on the side wall, sethi i. receives similar divine honours from the royal hands: while in the centre chamber sethi himself officiates before the statue of his father placed in a shrine. the king is thus but the living god: the god is thus but the dead king.

i conclude, therefore, that a large part of the greater egyptian gods—the national or local gods, as opposed to those worshipped by each family in its own necropolis—were early kings, whose myths were later expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and adorned by priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies. but down to the very latest age of independence, inscriptions of the god euergetes, and the goddess berenice, or representations like that at phil忙, of the god philadelphus suckled by isis, show that to the egyptian mind the gulf between humanity and divinity was very narrow, and that the original manhood of all the deities was an idea quite familiar to priests and people.

there was, however, another class of gods about which we can be somewhat less certain; these are the animal-gods and animal-headed gods which developed out of the totems of the various villages. such bestial types, professor sayce remarks, “take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of egypt,” say rather, the custom of egypt, “was still totemism.” but in what precise relation totemism stood to the main line of the evolution of gods i do not feel quite so sure in my own mind as does mr. herbert spencer. it seems to me possible that the totem may in its origin have been merely the lucky-beast or badge of a particular tribe (like the regimental 174goat or deer); and that from being at first petted, domesticated, and to some extent respected on this account, it may have grown at last, through a confusion of ideas, to share the same sort of divine honours which were paid to the ghosts of ancestors and the gods evolved from them. but mr. frazer has suggested a better origin of totemism from the doctrine of the separable soul, which is, up to date, the best explanation yet offered of this obscure subject. be that as it may, if the totems were only gradually elevated into divinities, we can easily understand mr. renouf’s remark that the long series of tombs of the apis bulls at sakkarah shows “how immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later times than in the former.”

may i add that the worship of totems, as distinct from the mere care implied by mr. frazer’s suggestion, very probably arose from the custom of carving the totem-animal of the deceased on the grave-stake or grave-board? this custom is still universal among the indian tribes of northwestern america.

nevertheless, whatever be the true origin of the totem-gods, i do not think totemism militates in any way against the general principle of the evolution of the idea of a god from the ghost, the dead man, or the deified ancestor. for only after the concept of a god had been formed from ancestor-cult, and only after worship had been evolved from the customary offerings to the mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any other object by any possibility be elevated to the godhead. nor, on the other hand, as i have before remarked, do i feel inclined wholly to agree with mr. spencer that every individual god was necessarily once a particular dead man. it seems to me indubitable that after the idea of godhead had become fully fixed in the human mind, some gods at least began to be recognised who were directly framed either from abstract conceptions, from natural objects, or from pure outbursts of the mythopoeic faculty. i do not think, therefore, that the existence 175of a certain (relatively unimportant) class of totem-gods in egypt or elsewhere is necessarily inconsistent in any way with our main theory of the origin of godhead.

be this as it may, it is at any rate clear that totemism itself was a very ancient and widespread institution in early egypt. totems are defined by mr. frazer as “a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation.” “observation of existing totem tribes in africa, australia, and elsewhere,” says sir martin conway, “shows us that one or more representatives of the totem are often fed or even kept alive in captivity by the tribe.” mr. frazer tells us that “amongst the nar-rinyeri in south australia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up their mouths, and keep them as pets. in a pigeon clan of samoa a pigeon was carefully kept and fed. amongst the kalong in java, whose totem is a red dog, each family as a rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on no account allow to be struck or ill-used by any one.” in the same way, no doubt, certain egyptian clans kept sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks, jackals, cobras, lizards, ibises, asps, and beetles. mummies of most of these sacred animals, and little images of others, are common in the neighbourhood of certain places where they were specially worshipped.

whether the animal-headed gods represent a later stage of the same totem-worship, or whether they stand merely for real ancestor-gods belonging to a particular totem-clan, and therefore represented by its totem, is not a question easily settled. but at any rate it is clear that many gods are the equivalents of such totem-animals, as is the case with the hawk-headed horus, the jackal-headed anubis, the cow-headed athor, the ram-headed knum, the cat-headed pasht, the lion-headed sekhet, the ibis-headed 176thoth, and the kestrel-headed khons. these gods appear on the earlier monuments as beasts alone, not as human forms with bestial heads. till the twelfth dynasty, when a totem-god is mentioned (which is not often), “he is represented,” says mr. flinders petrie, “by his animal.” anubis, for example, at this stage, is merely a jackal; and as m. maspero puts it, “whatever may have been the object of worship in thoth-ibis, it was a bird, not a hieroglyph, that the earliest ibis-worshippers adored.” there were other totems, however, which were less fruitful in deities, but which entered largely in artistic forms into the later religious symbolism. such were especially the asp and the sacred scarab忙us, which almost rival the sun-disk in the large part they play in the developed religious art-language of the great temple-building dynasties. i may add that among the other symbols of this curious emblematical picture-writing are the tau or crux ansata, by origin apparently a combined linga and yoni; the lotus, the sceptre, the leek, and the crescent.

there is, however, yet a third class of divine or quasidivine beings in the newer egyptian pantheon to which mr. andrew lang, in his able introduction to the euterpe of herodotus, still allows that great importance may be attached. these are the elemental or seemingly elemental deities, the nature-gods who play so large a part in all rationalistic or mystical mythologies. such are no doubt nut and seb, the personal heaven and earth, named as early as the inscription on the coffin of menkaoura of the fourth dynasty in the british museum: such perhaps (though far less certainly) are khons, identified with the rising sun, and tum, regarded as the impersonation of his nightly setting. but none of the quite obviously elemental gods, except ra, play any large part in the actual and practical worship of the people: to adopt the broad distinction i have ventured to draw in our second chapter, they are gods to talk about, not gods to adore—mythological conceptions rather than religious beings. their names occur 177much in the sacred texts, but their images are rare and their temples unknown. it is not nut or seb whose figures we see carved abundantly in relief on the grey sandstone pillars of karnak and luxor, painted in endless file on the gesso-covered walls of the tombs of the kings, or represented by dozens in the great collection of little bronze idols that fill so many cabinets at the boulak museum. the actual objects of the highest worship are far other than these abstract elemental conceptions: they are osiris, isis, horus, anubis, khem, pasht, and athor. the quaint or grotesque incised figures of nut, represented as a female form with arms and legs extended like a living canopy over the earth, as at denderah, belong, i believe, almost if not quite exclusively to the ptolemaic period, when zodiacal and astrological conceptions had been freely borrowed by the egyptians from greece and asia. nut and seb, as gods, not myths, are in short quite recent ideas in egypt. even sun-disk ra, himself, important as he becomes in the later developed creed, is hardly so much in his origin a separate god as an adjunct or symbol of divinity united syncretically with the various other deities. to call a king the sun is a common piece of courtier flattery. it is as amen-ra or as osiris that the sun receives most actual worship. his name is joined to the names of gods as to the names of kings: he is almost as much a symbol as the tau or the asp; he obtains little if any adoration in his simple form, but plenty when conjoined in a compound conception with some more practical deity of strictly human origin. even at the great “temple of the sun” at heliopolis, it was as the bull men or mnevis that the luminary was adored: and that cult, according to manetho, went back as far as the totemistic times of the second dynasty.

to put it briefly, then, i hold that the element of nature-worship is a late gloss or superadded factor in the egyptian religion; that it is always rather mythological or explanatory than religious in the strict sense; and that it does 178not in the least interfere with our general inference that the real egyptian gods as a whole were either ancestral or totemistic in origin.

from the evidence before us, broadly considered, we may fairly conclude, then, that the earliest cult of egypt consisted of pure ancestor-worship, complicated by a doubtfully religious element of totemism, which afterwards by one means or another interwove itself closely with the whole ghostly worship of the country. the later gods were probably deified ancestors of the early tribal kings, sometimes directly worshipped as mummies, and sometimes perhaps represented by their totem-animals or later still by human figures with animal heads. almost every one of these great gods is localised to a particular place—“lord of abydos,” “mistress of senem,” “president of thebes,” “dweller at hermopolis,” as would naturally be the case if they were locally-deified princes, admitted at last into a national pantheon. in the earliest period of which any monuments remain to us, the ancestor-worship was purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism or from the cult of the great gods than at any later time. with the gradual evolution of the creed and the pantheon, however, legends and myths increased, the syncretic tendency manifested itself everywhere, identifications multiplied, mysticism grew rife, and an esoteric faith, with leanings towards a vague pantheistic monotheism, endeavoured to rationalise and to explain away the more gross and foolish portions of the original belief. it is the refinements and glosses of this final philosophical stage that pass current for the most part in systematic works as the true doctrines of egyptian religion, and that so many modern enquirers have erroneously treated as equivalent to the earliest product of native thought. the ideas as to the unity of god, and the sun-myths of horus, isis, and osiris, are clearly late developments or excrescences on the original creed, and betray throughout the esoteric spirit of priestly interpretation. to the very last, the worship of the dead, and the 179 crude polytheism based upon it, were the true religion of the ancient egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the monuments.

such was the religious world into which, if we may believe the oldest semitic traditions, the sons of israel brought their god jahweh and their other deities from beyond the euphrates at a very remote period of their national history. and such, in its fuller and more mystical form, was the religion practised and taught in ptolemaic and roman egypt, at the moment when the christian faith was just beginning to evolve itself round the historical nucleus of the man christ jesus, and him crucified.