Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/46

20 these gods, nor could it dethrone more than a part of the local deities.

As we have already said, the difficulty of maintaining separate cults, combined with other reasons, led the priests at a very early time to group several divinities together in one temple as a divine family, usually in a triad of father, mother, and son; in rarer instances a god might have two wives (as at Elephantine, and sometimes at Thebes); in the case of a goddess who was too prominent to be satisfied with the second place as wife of a god, she was associated with a lesser male divinity as her son (as at Denderah). We may assume that all these groups were formed by gods which originally were neighbours. The development of the ennead (perhaps a triple triad in source) is obviously much later (see pp. 215-16).

As long as no cosmic rôle was attributed to the local gods, little mythology could be attached to their personality; even a deity so widely worshipped as the crocodile Sobk, for example, does not exhibit a single mythological trait. Of most gods we know no myths, an ignorance which is not due to accidental loss of information, as some Egyptologists thought, but to the fact that the deities in question really possessed little or no mythology. The only local divinities capable of mythological life, therefore, were those that were connected with the cycle of the sun or of Osiris.

A possible trace of primitive simplicity may be seen in the fact that some gods have, properly speaking, no names, but