Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/187

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's Religion of the Ancient Egyptians was published in Germany in 1890, and quickly won its way to esteem and popularity. It was the clearest, most comprehensive, and at the same time most scholarly account of our present knowledge upon the subject that has appeared, and its translation into English must therefore be warmly welcomed. We are beginning to realise what an influence the religious beliefs of ancient Egypt have had upon the thought of the civilised western world, and even upon dogmatic Christianity; a lucid and accurate description of what they were ought consequently to be of interest to others beside Egyptologists.

The arrangement of Dr. Wiedemann's book is admirable. In the official cult of Egypt the worship of the Sun-god held the first place; and it is accordingly with the worship of the Sun-god and the ideas which gathered round it that the volume begins. A special chapter is devoted to that passage of the solar bark through the underground world, which symbolised the passage of the soul through the realms of the dead. Next comes an account of the other chief divinities of Egypt, as well as of the deities whose cult had been imported from abroad. Amongst the latter was the Semitic Baal, who made his way into the valley of the Nile in the age of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties. Then we have chapters on that curious and puzzling feature of Egyptian religion—the worship of the sacred animals; on Osiris and the doctrines of immortality and redemption connected with him; on magic and sorcery, and on the use of amulets. Every department of Egyptian religion is thus treated in detail.

The worship of the Sun-god, and its development in historical times, have a bearing upon the so-called "Solar Theory" of mythology, which both its advocates and its opponents would do well to consider. In the official cult the solar conception of divinity tended to swallow up all else; Ra, the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, was identified with the other deities of Egypt, and came in time to absorb them. The king himself was from the earliest days