Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/49



AKING animism as the basis of the earliest stage of Egyptian religion, we must assume that the principal cosmic forces were easily personified and considered as divine. A nation which discovers divine spirits in every remarkable tree or rock will find them even more readily in the sun, the moon, the stars, and the like. But though the earliest Egyptians may have done this, and perhaps may even have admitted that these cosmic spirits were great gods, at first they seem to have had no more thought of giving them offerings than is entertained by many primitive peoples in the animistic stage of religion who attach few religious thoughts to the great cosmic factors. Was it that these forces, which were beheld every day, appeared to be less mysterious and, therefore, less divine than the tutelary spirits of the town, or did these local spirits seem nearer to man and thus more interested in his welfare than the cosmic gods, who were too great and too remote for the ordinary mortal? At any rate, we can observe that, for instance, in historic times the god of the earth (Qêb) is described as the father of all the gods and as one of the most important personages of the pantheon, but that, despite this, he does not seem to have possessed temples of his own in the New Empire; and the like statement holds true of the god Nuu (the abyss), although he is declared to be the oldest and wisest of all gods, etc. By their very contradictions the later attempts to transform the old local spirits and fetishes into personifications of cosmic powers prove that no such per- sonification was acknowledged in the prehistoric period to