Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/395

 EGYPT

345

EGYPT

god of its own. We never find him, like the vast ma- jority of the local gods, associated with a sacred ani- mal, nor is he ever represented with a human figure, except as a substitute for Atum, or as identified with Horus or some other god. His only representative among men is the pharaoh, who in the earliest djTias- tic monuments appears as his son. Finally, it is diffi- cult to understand how the kings of the southern kingdom, after having extended their rule to the north, should have given up their own patron god, Horus, for a local deity of the conquered land. It looks as if the worship of Re had been inaugurated some time after the reunion of the two lands, and possibly for political reasons. At all events, the solar religion soon became very popular, and it may be said that to the end it re- mained the state religion of Egj-pt. Re, like the other gods, had his legend — or rather m>^h — excogitated by the theological school of Heliopolis in connexion with the cosmogonic system of the same school. He had created the world and was king over the earth. In course of time the mortals rebelled against him be- cause he was too old, whereupon he ordered their destruction bj' the goddess of war, but on the presen- tation of 7000 jars of human blood he was satisfied and decided to spare men. Tired of living among them, he took his flight to heaven, where, standing in his sacred bark, he sails on the celestial ocean. The fixed stars and the planets are so many gods who play the parts of pilot, steersman, and oarsmen. Re rises in the east, conquers the old foe (darkness), spreads light, life, wealth, and joy on all sides, and receives everywhere the applause of gods and men; but now he comes to the western horizon, where, behind Abydos, through an enormous crevice, the celestial waters rush down to the lower hemisphere. The sacred bark follows the eternal river and, unretarded, the god passes slowly through the kingdom of night, concjuering his foes, solacing his faithful worshippers, only, however, to renew his course over the upper hemisphere, as bright, as vivifying, as beautiful as ever. Soon each phase of the sun's course received a special name and gradually developed into a distinct god; thus we find Harpochrates (Horus's Child) repre- senting morning sun ; Atum, the evening sun ; Re, the noon sun; while Harmakhuti (Horus on the two hori- zons — Harmachis, supposed to be represented by the great Sphinx) is both the rising and the setting sun.

Cosmogony and Enneads. — Different cosmogonic systems were excogitated at a very early date (some of them, possibly, before the dynastic times) by .the various theological schools, principally by the School of Heliopolis. Unfortunately, none of these systems seem to have been handed down in the primitive form. According to one of the versions of the Heliopolitan cosmogony, the principle of all things is the god Nun, the primordial ocean, in which Atum, the god of light, lay hidden and alone until he decided to create the world. He begat all by himself Shu, the atmosphere, and Tefnut, the dew. In their turn Shu and Tefnut begat Qeb, the earth, and Nut, the vault of heaven. These two were lying asleep in mutual embrace in the Niin, when Shu, stealing between them, raised Nut on high. The world was formed, and the sun could begin its daily course across the heavens. Qeb and Nut be- gat Osiris, the cultivable land and the Nile united in one concept. Set the desert, and the two sisters Isis and Nephthys. To this first ennead, of which Turn (later supplanted by Re) appears as the head, two others were added, the first of which began with Horus, as son of Osiris and Isis. The three enneads constituted as many dynasties of gods, or demi-gods, who reigned on the earth in predynastic times. We have seen above that the third of these dynasties, called "the shades" (v^kvcs) by Manetho, represents the predynastic kings mentioned on the Palermo Stone. The Heliopolitan Ennead became very popu- lar, and every religious centre was now ambitious to

have a similar one, the same gods and order being gen- erally retained, except that the local deity invariably appeared at the head of the combination.

It has long been customary to assert that in EgjTDt human life was compared to the cour.se of the sun, and that Osiris was nothing but the sun considered as dead. It is far more correct, however, to say, with Professor Maspero [Revue de I'histoire des religions (1887), XV, .307 sqq.], that the course of the sun was compared to that of human life. Osiris is not a sun that has set, but the sun that has set is an Osiris; this is so true that when the sun reappears on the eastern horizon, he is represented as the youth, Horus, son of Osiris.

The great prominence given to Re and Osiris by the Heliopolitan School of theology not only raised the Egj-ptian belief to a higher plane, but brought about a certain unification of it — a consolidation, so to speak, of the local worships. Naturally, the local gods re- tained their original external appearance, but they were now clothed with the attributions of the new Heliopolitan deity. Re, and were slowly identified with him. Every god became now a sun-god imder some aspect; and in some cases the name of the Helio- politan god was added to the name of the local god, as Sobek-Re, Chnum-Re, Ammon-Re. It was a step towards monotheism, or at any rate towards a na- tional henotheism. This tendency must have been encouraged by the pharaohs in their capacity rather of political than of religious rulers of the nation. There could be no perfect and lasting political unity as long as the various nomes retained their individual gods.

It is significant that in the only two periods when the pharaohs seem to have had absolute political con- trol of Egypt — viz. from the Fourth to the Fifth and from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty — the systems of Re, in the former period, and his Theban form, Ammon-Re, in the latter period, come clearly to the front, while the local religious systems fall into the background. These, however, though they were no more than tolerated, seemed to constitute a menace to political unity. The effort of Amenhotep IV to intro- duce the cult of his only god, Aton( see above, in Dynastic History: Second Period), was perhaps not prompted exclusively by a religious ideal, as is generally be- lieved. A similar attempt in favour of Re and his ennead was perhaps made by the Memphite kings. From Khafre, second king of the fourth dynasty, to the end of the sixth dynasty, the word Re is a part of the name of almost every one of those kings, and the monuments show that during that period ninnerous temples were erected to the chief of the Heliopolitan Ennead in the neighbouring nomes. Such encroach- ments of the official religion on the local forms of worship may have caused the distm-bances which marked the passage from the fifth to the sixth dy- nasty and the end of the latter. That such disturb- ances were not of a merely political nature is clear in the light of the well-known facts that the royal tombs and the temples of that period were violated and pil- laged, if not destroyed, and that the mortuary statues of several kings, those of Khafre in particular, were found, shattered into fragments, at the bottom of a pit near the.se pyramids. Evidently, those devout "sons of Re" were not in the odour of sanctity with some of the Egj-ptian priests, and the imputation of impiety brought against them, as recorded bv Hero- dotus (II, 127, 128; ef. Diodorus Siculus, I, 14), may not have been quite as ba.seless as is assumed by some modern scholars (Maspero, Histoire Ancienne, pp. 76 sq.).

If the foregoing sketch of the Egj^ptian religion is somewhat obscure, or even produces a self-contra- dictory effect, this may perhaps be attributed to the fact that the extremely remote periods considered (mostly, in fact, prehistoric) are known to us from monuments of later date, where they are reflected in