Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/372

338 and its original meaning been lost alike for the educated and for the uneducated classes of a later day; the classical explanations of it belong to an age when it had become a mere unmeaning tradition; while from the outset the cleft between the popular and the more cultivated view of religion was greater even than it is in the modern world. When we add to this the fragmentary character of our knowledge of the official cult itself, and the uncertainty which still hangs over the exact translation of words and passages in the theological literature, it is easy to understand that our attempts to unravel the mysteries of the old Egyptian faith must in great measure be nothing else than guesswork.

Nevertheless there are certain facts which may be regarded as fairly well ascertained. The official cult was a mixture of various beliefs and theological systems which did not always harmonise with one another. It is probable that in many cases the mixture was due to a mixture of races, as Professor Petrie maintains, though there are other cases in which local differences alone were the cause of it. We still know so little about the origin and primitive history of the Egyptian population that the greatest caution must be used in making an ethnographic map of the different elements in its religion. Thus, while I agree with Professor Petrie in believing that one of the elements in the aboriginal population of Egypt was Libyan and that the Pharaonic Egyptians of the monuments and of history came from Babylonia, I must absolutely dissent from his assertion that Osiris and his worship were of Libyan origin. On the contrary, if anything is certain, it is that Osiris is of Babylonian derivation. As Mr. Ball first pointed out, Osiris (Asari) not only agrees with the old Babylonian god Asari in name, attributes, and title, but the names of the two gods are expressed in Egyptian hieroglyphics and the picture-writing of primitive Chaldæa by exactly the same ideo- graphs, which have the same forms, the same meanings, and the same phonetic values.

It is in the various theories about the nature of the soul and its future life that the discordant and contradictory character of the beliefs amalgamated in the official creed is perhaps the most apparent. One of these theories, termed "the Earthly" by Professor Petrie, played a very important part in Egyptian religion, and influenced the whole of its conception of the nature of man. According to this theory all objects, animate and inani-