Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/188

164 of the united monarchy regarded not only as the "Son of the Sun," but as an incarnation of the Sun-god himself, and in the pantheistic monotheism of Khu-n-Aten, the royal reformer of the Eighteenth dynasty, the visible symbol of the all-pervading deity was found in the solar disk. The sun, in fact, became the mask which hid the one god of abstract philosophy from the human senses. That the Sun-god, Ra, should have been thus prominent in Egyptian religion was perhaps due to the position occupied in the prehistoric age by the city of which he was the patron. Heliopolis was from the first a city of priests and religious influence; its schools were celebrated even as late as classical days.

Ra of Heliopolis had a rival in Osiris. It is still doubtful whether the original seat of the Osirian worship was at Mendes in the Delta, or at Abydos in Upper Egypt; in either case Osiris was primitively a Sun-god, and it is beginning to be probable that his name and cult had alike been brought from Babylonia. In Egypt, what we may term the legend of Osiris assumed a special shape, and crystallised into a form of religion which eventually swallowed up all the other faiths and varieties of worship or belief in the valley of the Nile. From the outset the worship of Osiris was closely connected with the doctrine of immortality; Osiris was the Sun of night, the judge of the dead, through faith in whom the soul could pass in safety through the grim horrors which guarded the entrance to the next world. Osiris had been slain and had risen again from the dead, and his faithful followers had power given them to rise again in the same way. In his son Horus, Osiris lived again in another form; for Horus was the Sun of the morning, the avenger of his father, and "the Redeemer" from evil of those who put their trust in him. In Turn, the Sun-god of the evening, the divine essence revealed itself in yet a third form, thus completing the Egyptian Trinity. The influence exercised through Alexandria by these Egyptian conceptions upon early Greek Christianity is one which still requires to be worked out.

I have spoken of the worship of the sacred animals as a puzzling feature in Egyptian religion. The explanation of it which I put forward fifteen years ago, and which has been to some extent confirmed by recent discoveries, still seems to me the only one that is at all plausible. Animal-worship, I believe, represents the religion of the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt, that part of the population which cultivated the fields and built the pyramids for