Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/35

Rh as "the Great One," "the Unique," or "the Eternal," even though these titles were given to so many different gods. To their minds a pure monotheism was disguised under the out ward appearance of a symbolic polytheism, which had at its root the belief that all the different gods were in reality only diverse manifestations of the same supreme being. It is quite true that such views are found on some monuments, but it is utterly erroneous to regard them as the general opinion or as the original religion of the Egyptians. As additional religious texts were discovered in course of time, the religion revealed itself to be increasingly crude and polytheistic in direct proportion to the earliness of the date of the documents concerned: the older the texts, the ruder and lower are the religious views which they set forth. All pantheistic or supposedly monotheistic passages represent only the development of Egyptian thought from a comparatively recent period. Furthermore, they were isolated attempts of a few advanced thinkers and poets and did not affect the religion of the masses; and finally, they are still far removed from a real monotheism or a systematic pantheism.

Among the apologists for Egyptian religion in an earlier generation of scholars H. K. Brugsch endeavoured with special zeal, but in a way which was far from convincing, to demonstrate that Egyptian religion was originally pantheistic; to maintain his theory he was compelled to analyse the divine principle into eight or nine cosmic forces by means of bolder identifications of the various divinities than even the later Egyptians ever attempted. Previous to him Le Page Renouf had emphasized the cosmic features of the pantheon in a manner which was not confirmed by the discovery of the earliest religious texts; and still earlier Lepsius had tried to interpret Egyptian polytheism as a degeneration of a solar monotheism or henotheism, thus taking a position intermediate between that of the earlier French scholars and that of later investigators. In like fashion, though assuming a