Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/396

 EGYPT

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EGYPT

superimposed outlines, comparable to a series of pic- tures of one person at different stages of life, and in different attitudes and garbs, taken successively on the same photographic plate. The Egyptians were a most conservative people; like other peoples, they were open to new religious concepts, and accepted them, but they never got rid of the older ones, no matter how much the older might conflict with the newer. However, if the writer is not mistaken, two prominent features of their religion are sufficiently clear: first, animal fetishism from beginning to end in a more or less mitigated form; secondly, superpo- sit ion, durintj the early Slemphite dynasties, of the sun- ,, • ., ■ . '■ : I'.iisidered not as creator, but

!, frum an eternally pre-exist-

ing matter, perhaps the forerunner of the demiurge of the Alexandrine School.

(b) The Future Lije. — As early as the predjmastic times the Egj'ptians believed that man was survived in death by a certain principle of life corresponding to our soul. The nature of this principle, and the condi- tions on which its survival depended, are illustrated by the monuments of the early djTiasties. It was called the ka of the departed, and was imagined as a counter- part of the body it had animated, being of the same sex, remaining throughout its existence of the same age as at the time of death, and having the same needs and wants as the departed had in his lifetime. It endured as long as the body, hence the paramount importance the Egj-ptians attached to the preserva- tion of the bodies of their dead. They generally buried them in ordinary graves, but always in the dry sand of the desert, where moisture could not affect them; among the higher classes, to whom the priv- ilege of being embalmed was at first restricted, the mummy was .sealed in a stone coffin and deposited in a carefully concealed rock-excavation over which a tomb was built. Hence, also, the presence in the tombs of lifelike statues of the deceased to which the ka might cling, should the mummy happen to meet destruction. But the ka could also die of hunger or thirst, and for this reason food and drink were left with the body at the time of the burial, fresh supplies being deposited from time to time on the top of the grave, or at the

entrance of the tomb. The ^'O, or "double", as this word is generally interpreted, is confined to the grave or tomb, often called "the house of the ka". There near the body, it now lives alone in darkness as once, in union with the body, it lived in the sunny world. Toilet articles, weapons against possible enemies, amulets against serpents, are also left in the tomb, together with magic texts and a magic wand which enable it to make use of these necessaries.

Along with the ka, the earliest texts mention other surviving principles of a less material nature, the ha and the khu. Like the ka, the ba resides in the body during man's life, but after death it is free to wander where it pleases. It was conceived as a bird, and is often represented as such, with a human head. The khu is luminous; it is a spark of the divine intelligence. According to some Egyptologists, it is a mere trans- formation which the ba undergoes when, in the here- after, it is found to have been pure and just during lifetime; it is then admitted to the society of the gods; according to others, it is a distinct element residing in the ba. Simultaneously with the concepts of the ba and the khu, the Egyptians developed the concept of a common abode for the departed souls, not unlike the Hades of the Greeks. But their views varied very much, both as to the location of that Hades and as to its nature. It is very likely that, (iiiginally, every god of the dead had a Hades of his own; but, as those gods were gradually either identi- fied with Osiris or brought into his cycle as secondary infernal deities, the various local concepts of the region of the dead were ultimately merged into the Osirian concept. According to Professor Maspero, the king- dom of Osiris was first thought to be located in one of the islands of the Northern Delta whither cultivation had not yet extended. But when the sun in its course through the night had become identified with Osiris, the realm of the dead was shifted to the region tra- versed by the sun during the night, wherever that re- gion might be, whether imder the earth, as more com- monly accepted, or in the far west, in the de.sert, on the same plane with the world of the living, or in the north-eastern heavens beyond the great sea that sur- rnunds the earth.

.\s the location, so does the nature of the Osirian Hades seem to have varied with the different schools; and here, unfortunately, as in the case of the Egyptian pantheon, the monuments exhibit different views superimposed on one another. We seem, however, to discern two traditions which we might call the pure Osiris and the Re-Osiris traditions. According to the former tradition the aspiration of all the departed is to be identified with Osiris, and live with him in his kingdom of the Earu, or Yalu, fields — such a paradise as the Egj'ptian peasant could fancj'. There plough- ing and reaping are carried on as upon the earth, but with hardly any labour, and the land is so well irri- gated by the many branches of another Nile that wheat grows seven ells. All men are equal ; all have to answer the call for work without distinction of former rank. Kings and grandees, however, can be spared that light burden by having xishebtix (respond- ents) placed with them in their tombs. These v.thehtis were small statuettes with a magic te.xt which enabled them to impersonate the deceased and answer the call for him.

To procure the admission of the deceased into this realm of happiness his family and friends had to per- form over him the same rites as were performed over Osiris by Isis, Nephthys, Horus, and Anubis. Those rites consisted mostly of magical formula? and incan- tations. The mvmimification of the body was con- sidered an important condition, as Osiris was supposed to have been mummified. It seems, also, that in the beginning at Ica.st, the Osirian doctrine demanded a certain dismemberment of the body previous to all further rites, as the body of Osiris had been dismem-