Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/47

Rh are called after their place of worship. Thus, the designation of the cat-shaped goddess Ubastet means only “the One of the City Ubaset,” as though she had long been worshipped there without a real name, being called, perhaps, simply “the goddess”; and, again, the god Khent(i)-amentiu (“the One Before the Westerners,” i.e. the dead),7 who was originally a jackal(?), seems to have received his appellation simply from the location of his shrine near the necropolis in the west of This. These instances, however, admit of other explanations —an earlier name may have become obsolete;8 or a case of local differentiation may be assumed in special places, as when the jackal-god Khent(i)-amentiu seems to be only a local form of Up-uaut (Ophoïs). Names like that of the birdheaded god, “the One Under his Castor Oil[?] Bush” (beq), give us the impression of being very primitive.9 Differentiation of a divinity into two or more personalities according to his various centres of worship occurs, it is true; but, except for very rare cases like the prehistoric differentiation of Mîn and Amon, it has no radical effect. In instances known from the historic period it is extremely seldom that a form thus discriminated evokes a new divine name; the Horus and Hat-hôr of a special place usually remain Horus and Hat-hôr, so that such differentiations cannot have developed the profuse polytheism from a simpler system. On the contrary, it must be questioned whether even as early an identification as, e.g., of the winged disk Behdeti (“the One of Behdet” [the modern Edfu]) with Horus as a local form was original. In this instance the vague name seems to imply that the identification with Horus was still felt to be secondary.

Thus we are always confronted with the result that, the nearer we approach to the original condition of Egypt, the more we find its religion to be an endless and unsystematic polytheism which betrays an originally animistic basis, as described above. The whole difficulty of understanding the religion of the historic period lies in the fact that it always hovered between