Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/43

Rh was no real difference between the small village deity whose shrine was a little hut of straw and the “great god” who had a stately temple, numerous priests, and rich sacrifices. If we had full information about Egyptian life, we certainly should be able to trace the development by which a spirit or fetish which originally protected only the property of a single peasant gradually advanced to the position of the village god, and consequently, by the growth of that village or by its political success, became at length a “great god” who ruled first over a city and next over the whole county dominated by that city, and who then was finally worshipped throughout Egypt. As we shall see, the latter step can be observed repeatedly; but the first progress of a “spirit” or “soul” toward regular worship as a full god2 can never be traced in the inscriptions. Indeed, this process of deification must have been quite infrequent in historic times, since, as we have already seen, only the deities dating from the days of the ancestors could find sufficient recognition. In a simpler age this development from a spirit to a god may have been much easier. In the historic period we see, rather, the opposite process; the great divinities draw all worship and sacrifices to their shrines and thus cause many a local god to be neglected, so that he survives only in magic, etc., or sinks into complete oblivion. In some instances the cult of such a divinity and the existence of its priesthood were saved by association with a powerful deity, who would receive his humbler colleague into his temple as his wife or child; but in many instances even a god of the highest rank would tolerate an insignificant rival cult in the same city, sometimes as the protector of a special quarter or suburb. Originally the capital of each of the forty-two nomes, or counties, of Egypt seems to have been the seat of a special great divinity or of a group of gods, who were the masters and the patrons of that county; and many of these nomes maintained the worship of their original deity until the latest period. The priests in his local temple used to extol their pa- XII-3