Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/44

18 tron as though he was the only god or was at least the supreme divinity; later they often attributed to him the government of all nature and even the creation of the whole world, as well as the most important cosmic functions, especially, in every possible instance, those of a solar character; and they were not at all disturbed by the fact that a neighbouring nome claimed exactly the same position for its own patron. To us it must seem strange that under these conditions no rivalry between the gods or their priests is manifest in the inscriptions. To explain this strange isolation of local religion it is generally assumed that in prehistoric times each of ‘these nomes was a tribal organization or petty kingdom, and that the later prominence given to their divine patron or patrons was a survival of that primitive political independence, since every ancient Oriental state possessed its national god and worshipped him in a way which often approximated henotheism.3 Yet the quasi-henotheistic worship which was given to the patron of these forty-two petty capitals recurred in connexion with the various local gods of other towns in the same nome, where even the chief patron of the nome in question was relegated to the second or third rank in favour of the local idol. This was carried to such an extent that every Egyptian was expected to render worship primarily to his “city-god” (or gods), whatever the character of this divinity might be. Since each of the larger settlements thus worshipped its local tutelary spirit or deity without determining his precise relation to the gods of other communities, we may with great probability assume that in the primitive period the village god preceded the town god, and that the god of the hamlet and of the family were not unknown. At that early day the forces of nature appear to have received no worship whatever. Such conditions are explicable only from the point of view of animism. This agrees also with the tendency to seek the gods preferably in animal form, and with the strange, fetish-like objects in which other divinities were represented.