Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/547

Rh histories and genealogies of the gods to which posterity continually referred. . ..

Egypt never had a system of religion that could have been formulated in the shape of a collection of dogmas or a catechism as THE religion of Egypt. But once in the history, covering thousands of years, of the realm of the Pharaohs, was the attempt made to force a uniform, consistent faith upon the people. It was when Amenophis II, in the 15th century B. C. sought to compel the worship of his henotheistic deity, Aten, the solar orb. All gods were to recede before him, even the one who for some centuries had begun in fact, though not in name, to permeate the entire pantheon, the solar deity Ra, who, in contradistinction from the purely material deity Aten, represented an intelligent, anthropomorphic power controlling the sun.

This attempt of the king who went so far as to lay aside his name, Amenophis, "the gift of Amon," because it contained the name of one of the old gods, and adopted the name Chu-en-aten, "radiance of the sun-orb," was bound to fail. After his death the cult of Aten was suppressed by the efforts of the priest, and the Ra faith resumed its career of conquest. One after another the gods were amalgamated with him, Amon was changed to Amon-Ra, Chnum to Chnum-Ra, etc., and those gods who did not take the name, assumed the properties of Ra. When the Greeks entered Egypt nearly all deities had become representatives of the sun and its properties, the sun itself, the morning, noon, and evening sun, the burning heat of the sun, the fructifying and nourishing warmth of the sun, and similar conceptions. This process was a free one that went on in the people as with the necessity of a law of nature. An Egyptian, even of the hellenistic period, would have been much surprised had he been told that his religion was a cult of the sun. While his gods had become identical in their utterances of life and power he did not go so far as to make them equal dogmatically. Each one continued a separate existence, .... there was no national, uniform religion, there were no recognized and unrecognized, or heretical, doctrines. In this lack of system the Egyptian went so far that he suffered the most glaring contradictions to stand side by side, that each circle of conceptions may be