Ten Great Religions Part 20

The dress of the priests was simple, chiefly of linen, consisting of an under-garment and a loose upper robe, with full sleeves, and the leopard-skin above; sometimes one or two feathers in the head.

Chaplets and flowers were laid upon the altars, such as the lotus and papyrus, also grapes and figs in baskets, and ointment in alabaster vases.

Also necklaces, bracelets, and jewelry, were offered as thanksgivings and invocations.

Oxen and other animals were sacrificed, and the blood allowed to flow over the altar. Libations of wine were poured on the altar. Incense was offered to all the G.o.ds in censers.

Processions were usual with the Egyptians; in one, shrines were carried on the shoulders by long staves pa.s.sed through rings. In others the statues of the G.o.ds were carried, and arks like those of the Jews, overshadowed by the wings of the G.o.ddess of truth spread above the sacred beetle.

The prophets were the most highly honored of the priestly order. They studied the ten hieratical books. The business of the stolists[159] was to dress and undress the images, to attend to the vestments of the priests, and to mark the beasts selected for sacrifice. The scribes were to search for the Apis, or sacred bull, and were required to possess great learning.

The priests had no sinecure; their life was full of minute duties and restrictions. They seldom appeared in public, were married to one wife, were circ.u.mcised like other Egyptians, and their whole time was occupied either in study or the service of their G.o.ds. There was a gloomy tone to the religion of Egypt, which struck the Greeks, whose wors.h.i.+p was usually cheerful. Apuleius says "the G.o.ds of Egypt rejoice in lamentations, those of Greece in dances." Another Greek writer says, "The Egyptians offer their G.o.ds tears."

Until Swedenborg[160] arrived, and gave his disciples the precise measure and form of the life to come, no religion has ever taught an immortality as distinct in its outline and as solid in its substance as that of the Egyptians. The Greek and Roman hereafter was shadowy and vague; that of Buddhism remote; and the Hebrew Beyond was wholly eclipsed and overborne by the sense of a Divine presence and power immanent in s.p.a.ce and time. To the Egyptian, this life was but the first step, and a very short one, of an immense career. The sun (Ra) alternately setting and rising, was the perpetually present type of the progress of the soul, and the Sothiac period (symbolized by the Phoenix) of 1421 years from one heliacal rising of Sirius at the beginning of the fixed Egyptian year to the next, was also made to define the cycle of human transmigrations. Two Sothiac periods correspond nearly to the three thousand years spoken of by Herodotus, during which the soul transmigrates through animal forms before returning to its human body. Then, to use the Egyptian language, the soul arrived at the s.h.i.+p of the sun and was received by Ra into his solar splendor. On some sarcophagi the soul is symbolized by a hawk with a human head, carrying in his claws two rings, which probably signify the two Sothiac cycles of its transmigrations.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,[161] is as old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain extracts from the Ritual of the Dead. One hundred and forty-six chapters of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the Turin papyrus, the most complete in Europe. Chapters of it are found on mummy-cases, on the wraps of mummies, on the walls of tombs, and within the coffins on papyri. This Ritual is all that remains of the Hermetic Books which const.i.tuted the library of the priesthood. Two antagonist cla.s.ses of deities appear in this liturgy as contending for the soul of the deceased,--Osiris and his triad, Set and his devils. The Sun-G.o.d, source of life, is also present.

An interesting chapter of the Ritual is the one hundred and twenty-fifth, called the Hall of the Two Truths. It is the process of "separating a person from his sins," not by confession and repentance, as is usual in other religions, but by denying them. Forty-two deities are said to be present to feed on the blood of the wicked. The soul addresses the Lords of Truth, and declares that it has not done evil privily, and proceeds to specifications. He says: "I have not afflicted any. I have not told falsehoods. I have not made the laboring man do more than his task. I have not been idle. I have not murdered. I have not committed fraud. I have not injured the images of the G.o.ds. I have not taken sc.r.a.ps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not cheated by false weights. I have not kept milk from sucklings. I have not caught the sacred birds." Then, addressing each G.o.d by name, he declares: "I have not been idle. I have not boasted. I have not stolen. I have not counterfeited, nor killed sacred beasts, nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor despised G.o.d in my heart." According to some texts, he declares, positively, that he has loved G.o.d, that he has given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and an asylum to the abandoned.

Funeral ceremonies among the Egyptians were often very imposing. The cost of embalming, and the size and strength of the tomb, varied with the position of the deceased. When the seventy days of mourning had elapsed, the body in its case was ferried across the lake in front of the temple, which represented the pa.s.sage of the soul over the infernal stream. Then came a dramatic representation of the trial of the soul before Osiris. The priests, in masks, represented the G.o.ds of the underworld. Typhon accuses the dead man, and demands his punishment. The intercessors plead for him.

A large pair of scales is set up, and in one scale his conduct is placed in a bottle, and in the other an image of truth. These proceedings are represented on the funeral papyri. One of these, twenty-two feet in length, is in Dr. Abbott's collection of Egyptian antiquities, in New York. It is beautifully written, and ill.u.s.trated with careful drawings.

One represents the Hall of the Two Truths, and Osiris sitting in judgment, with the scales of judgment before him.[162]

Many of the virtues which we are apt to suppose a monopoly of Christian culture appear as the ideal of these old Egyptians. Brugsch says a thousand voices from the tombs of Egypt declare this. One inscription in Upper Egypt says: "He loved his father, he honored his mother, he loved his brethren, and never went from his home in bad-temper. He never preferred the great man to the low one." Another says: "I was a wise man, my soul loved G.o.d. I was a brother to the great men and a father to the humble ones, and never was a mischief-maker." An inscription at Sais, on a priest who lived in the sad days of Cambyses, says: "I honored my father, I esteemed my mother, I loved my brothers. I found graves for the unburied dead. I instructed little children. I took care of orphans as though they were my own children. For great misfortunes were on Egypt in my time, and on this city of Sais."

Some of these declarations, in their "self-pleasing pride" of virtue, remind one of the n.o.ble justification of himself by the Patriarch Job.[163] Here is one of them, from the tombs of Ben-Ha.s.san, over a Nomad Prince:--

"What I have done I will say. My goodness and my kindness were ample. I never oppressed the fatherless nor the widow. I did not treat cruelly the fishermen, the shepherds, or the poor laborers. There was nowhere in my time hunger or want. For I cultivated all my fields, far and near, in order that their inhabitants might have food. I never preferred the great and powerful to the humble and poor, but did equal justice to all."

A king's tomb at Thebes gives us in few words the religious creed of a Pharaoh:--

"I lived in truth, and fed my soul with justice. What I did to men was done in peace, and how I loved G.o.d, G.o.d and my heart well know. I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and a shelter to the stranger. I honored the G.o.ds with sacrifices, and the dead with offerings."

A rock at Lycopolis pleads for an ancient ruler thus: "I never took the child from its mother's bosom, nor the poor man from the side of his wife." Hundreds of stones in Egypt announce as the best gifts which the G.o.ds can bestow on their favorites, "the respect of men, and the love of women."[164] Religion, therefore, in Egypt, connected itself with morality and the duties of daily life. But kings and conquerors were not above the laws of their religion. They were obliged to recognize their power and triumphs as not their own work, but that of the great G.o.ds of their country. Thus, on a monumental stele discovered at Karnak by M. Mariette, and translated by De Rouge,[165] is an inscription recording the triumphs of Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty (about B.C. 1600), which sounds like the song of Miriam or the Hymn of Deborah. We give some stanzas in which the G.o.d Amun addresses Thothmes:--

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Syrian princes; Under thy feet they lie throughout the breadth of their country, Like to the Lord of Light, I made them see thy glory, Blinding their eyes with light, O earthly image of Amun!

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Asian peoples; Captive now thou hast led the proud a.s.syrian chieftains; Decked in royal robes, I made them see thy glory; In glittering arms and fighting, high in thy lofty chariot.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down western nations; Cyprus and the Ases have both heard thy name with terror; Like a strong-horned bull I made them see thy glory; Strong with piercing horns, so that none can stand before him.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Lybian archers; All the isles of the Greeks submit to the force of thy spirit; Like a regal lion, I made them see thy glory; Couched by the corpse he has made, down in the rocky valley.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down the ends of the ocean.

In the grasp of thy hand is the circling zone of the waters; Like the soaring eagle, I have made them see thy glory, Whose far-seeing eye there is none can hope to escape from."

A similar strain of religious poetry is in the Papyrus of Sallier, in the British Museum.[166] This is an epic by an Egyptian poet named Pentaour, celebrating the campaigns of Ramses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, of the nineteenth dynasty. This great king had been called into Syria to put down a formidable revolt of the Kheta (the Hitt.i.tes of the Old Testament).

The poem seems to have been a famous one, for it had the honor of being carved in full on the walls at Karnak, a kind of immortality which no other epic poet has ever attained. It particularly describes an incident in the war, when, by a stratagem of the enemy, King Ramses found himself separated from the main body of his army and attacked by the enemy in full force. Pentaour describes him in this situation as calling on Amun, G.o.d of Thebes, for help, recounting the sacrifices he had offered to him, and asking whether he would let him die in this extremity by the ign.o.ble hands of these Syrian tribes. "Have I not erected to thee great temples? Have I not sacrificed to thee thirty thousand oxen? I have brought from Elephantina obelisks to set up to thy name. I invoke thee, O my father, Amun. I am in the midst of a throng of unknown tribes, and alone. But Amun is better to me than thousands of archers and millions of hors.e.m.e.n. Amun will prevail over the enemy." And, after defeating his foes, in his song of triumph, the king says, "Amun-Ra has been at my right and my left in the battles; his mind has inspired my own, and has prepared the downfall of my enemies. Amun-Ra, my father, has brought the whole world to my feet."[167]

Thus universal and thus profound was the religious sentiment among the Egyptians.

-- 3. Theology of Egypt. Sources of our Knowledge concerning it.

As regards the theology of the Egyptians and their system of ideas, we meet with difficulty from the law of secrecy which was their habit of mind. The Egyptian priesthood enveloped with mystery every opinion, just as they swathed the mummies, fold above fold, in preparing them for the tomb. The names and number of their G.o.ds we learn from the monuments.

Their legends concerning them come to us through Plutarch, Herodotus, Diodorus, and other Greek writers. Their doctrine of a future life and future judgment is apparent in their ceremonies, the pictures on the tombs, and the papyrus Book of the Dead. But what these G.o.ds _mean_, what are their offices, how they stand related to each other and to mankind, what is the ethical bearing of the religion, it is not so easy to learn.

Nevertheless, we may find a clew to a knowledge of this system, if in no other way, at least by ascertaining its central, ruling idea, and pursuing this into its details. The moment that we take this course, light will begin to dawn upon us. But before going further, let us briefly inquire into the sources of our knowledge of Egyptian mythology.

The first and most important place is occupied by the monuments, which contain the names and tablets of the G.o.ds of the three orders. Then come the sacred books of the Egyptians, known to us by Clemens Alexandrinus.

From him we learn that the Egyptians in his time had forty-two sacred books in five cla.s.ses. The first cla.s.s, containing songs or hymns in praise of the G.o.ds, were very old, dating perhaps from the time of Menes.

The other books treated of morals, astronomy, hieroglyphics, geography, ceremonies, the deities, the education of priests, and medicine. Of these sacred Hermaic books, one is still extant, and perhaps it is as interesting as any of them. We have two copies of it, both on papyrus, one found by the French at Thebes, the other by Champollion in Turin. And Lepsius considers this last papyrus to be wholly of the date of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty, consequently fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred years before Christ, and the only example of an Egyptian book transmitted from the times of the Pharaohs. Bunsen believes it to belong to the fourth cla.s.s of Hermaic books, containing Ordinances as to the First Fruits, Sacrifices, Hymns, and Prayers. In this book the deceased is the person who officiates. His soul journeying on gives utterance to prayers, confessions, invocations. The first fifteen chapters, which make a connected whole, are headed, "Here begins the Sections of the Glorification in the Light of Osiris." It is ill.u.s.trated by a picture of a procession, in which the deceased soul follows his own corpse as chief mourner, offering prayers to the Sun-G.o.d. Another part of the book is headed, "The Book of Deliverance, in the Hall of twofold Justice," and contains the divine judgments on the deceased. Forty-two G.o.ds occupy the judgment-seat. Osiris, their president, bears on his breast the small tablet of chief judge, containing a figure of Justice. Before him are seen the scales of divine judgment. In one is placed the statue of Justice, and in the other the heart of the deceased, who stands in person by the balance containing his heart, while Anubis watches the other scale. Horus examines the plummet indicating which way the beam inclines. Thoth, the Justifier the Lord of the Divine Word, records the sentence.[168]

-- 4. Central Idea of Egyptian Theology and Religion. Animal Wors.h.i.+p.

We now proceed to ask what is the IDEA of Egyptian mythology and theology?

We have seen that the idea of the religion of India was Spirit; the One, the Infinite, the Eternal; a pure spiritual Pantheism, from which the elements of time and s.p.a.ce are quite excluded. The religion of Egypt stands at the opposite pole of thought as its antagonist. Instead of Spirit, it accepts Body; instead of Unity, Variety; instead of Substance, Form. It is the physical reaction from Brahmanism. Instead of the wors.h.i.+p of abstract Deity, it gives us the most concrete divinity, wholly incarnated in s.p.a.ce and time. Instead of abstract contemplation, it gives us ceremonial wors.h.i.+p. Instead of the absorption of man into G.o.d, it gives us transmigration through all bodily forms.[169] It so completely incarnates G.o.d, as to make every type of animal existence divine; hence the wors.h.i.+p of animals. It makes body so sacred, that the human body must not be allowed to perish. As the Brahman, contemplating eternity, forgot time, and had no history, so on the other hand the Egyptian priest, to whom every moment of time is sacred, records everything and turns every event into history; and as it enshrines the past time historically on monuments, so it takes hold of future time prophetically through oracles.

The chief peculiarity about the religion of Egypt, and that which has always caused the greatest astonishment to foreigners, was the wors.h.i.+p of animals. Herodotus says (Book II. -- 65), "That all animals in Egypt, wild and tame, are accounted sacred, and that if any one kills these animals wilfully he is put to death." He is, however, mistaken in a.s.serting that _all_ animals are sacred; for many were not so, though the majority were.

Wilkinson gives a list of the animals of Egypt to the number of over one hundred, more than half of which were sacred, and the others not. As hunting and fis.h.i.+ng were favorite sports of the Egyptians, it is apparent that there must have been animals whom it was lawful to kill.

Nevertheless, it is certain that animal wors.h.i.+p is a striking peculiarity of the Egyptian system. Cows were sacred to Isis, and Isis was represented in the form of a cow. The G.o.ds often wore the heads of animals; and Kneph, or Amun, with the ram's head, is one of the highest of the G.o.ds, known among the Greeks as Jupiter Ammon. The wors.h.i.+p of Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, the representative of Osiris, was very important among the Egyptian ceremonies. Plutarch says that he was a fair and beautiful image of the soul of Osiris. He was a bull with black hair, a white spot on his forehead, and some other special marks. He was kept at Memphis in a splendid temple. His festival lasted seven days, when a great concourse of people a.s.sembled. When he died his body was embalmed and buried with great pomp, and the priests went in search of another Apis, who, when discovered by the marks, was carried to Memphis, carefully fed and exercised, and consulted as an oracle. The burial-place of the Apis bulls was, a few years ago, discovered near Memphis. It consists of an arched gallery hewn in the rock, two thousand feet long and twenty feet in height and breadth.

On each side is a series of recesses, each containing a large sarcophagus of granite, fifteen by eight feet, in which the body of a sacred bull was deposited. In 1852 thirty of these had been already found. Before this tomb is a paved road with lions ranged on each side, and before this a temple with a vestibule.

In different parts of Egypt different animals were held sacred. The animal sacred in one place was not so regarded in another district. These sacred animals were embalmed by the priests and buried, and the mummies of dogs, wolves, birds, and crocodiles are found by thousands in the tombs. The origin and motive of this wors.h.i.+p is differently explained. It is certain that animals were not wors.h.i.+pped in the same way as the great G.o.ds, but were held sacred and treated with reverence as containing a divine element. So, in the East, an insane person is accounted sacred, but is not wors.h.i.+pped. So the Roman Catholics distinguish between Dulia and Latria, between the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.ds and reverence of saints. So, too, Protestants consider the Bible a holy book and the Sabbath a holy day, but without wors.h.i.+pping them. It is only just to make a similar distinction on behalf of the Egyptians. The motives usually a.s.signed for this wors.h.i.+p--motives of utility--seem no adequate explanation. "The Egyptians," says Wilkinson, "may have deified some animals to insure their preservation, some to prevent their unwholesome meat being used as food." But no religion was ever established in this way. Man does not wors.h.i.+p from utilitarian considerations, but from an instinct of reverence. It is possible, indeed, that such a reverential instinct may have been awakened towards certain animals, by seeing their vast importance arising from their special instincts and faculties. The cow and the ox, the dog, the ibis, and the cat, may thus have appeared to the Egyptians, from their indispensable utility, to be endowed with supernatural gifts. But this feeling itself must have had its root in a yet deeper tendency of the Egyptian mind. They reverenced the mysterious manifestation of G.o.d in all outward nature. No one can look at an animal, before custom blinds our sense of strangeness, without a feeling of wonder at the law of instinct, and the special, distinct peculiarity which belongs to it. Every variety of animals is a manifestation of a divine thought, and yet a thought hinted rather than expressed. Each must mean something, must symbolize something. But what does it mean? what does it symbolize? Continually we seem just on the point of penetrating the secret; we almost touch the explanation, but are baffled. A dog, a cat, a snake, a crocodile, a spider,--what does each mean? why were they made? why this infinite variety of form, color, faculty, character? Animals thus in their unconscious being, as expressions of G.o.d's thoughts, are mysteries, and divine mysteries.[170]

Now every part of the religion of Egypt shows how much they were attracted toward _variety_, toward nature, toward the outward manifestations of the Divine Spirit. These tendencies reached their utmost point in their reverence for animal life. The shallow Romans, who reverenced only themselves, and the Greeks, who wors.h.i.+pped nothing but human nature more or less idealized, laughed at this Egyptian wors.h.i.+p of animals and plants.

"O sacred nation! whose G.o.ds grow in gardens!" says Juvenal. But it certainly shows a deeper wisdom to see something divine in nature, and to find G.o.d in nature, than to call it common and unclean. And there is more of truth in the Egyptian reverence for animal individuality, than in the unfeeling indifference to the welfare of these poor relations which Christians often display. When Jesus said that "not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father," he showed all these creatures to be under the protection of their Maker. It may be foolish to wors.h.i.+p animals, but it is still more foolish to despise them.

That the belief in transmigration is the explanation of animal wors.h.i.+p is the opinion of Bunsen. The human soul and animal soul, according to this view, are essentially the same,--therefore the animal was considered as sacred as man. Still, we do not _wors.h.i.+p_ man. Animal wors.h.i.+p, then, must have had a still deeper root in the sense of awe before the mystery of organized life.

-- 5. Sources of Egyptian Theology. Age of the Empire and Affinities of the Race.

But whence came this tendency in the human mind? Did it inhere in the race, or was it the growth of external circ.u.mstances? Something, perhaps, may be granted to each of these causes. The narrow belt of fertile land in Egypt, fed by the overflowing Nile, quickened by the tropical sun, teeming with inexhaustible powers of life, continually called the mind anew to the active, creative powers of nature. And yet it may be suspected that the law of movement by means of antagonism and reaction may have had its influence also here. The opinion is now almost universal, that the impulse of Egyptian civilization proceeded from Asia. This is the conclusion of Bunsen at the end of his first volume. "The cradle of the mythology and language of Egypt," says he, "is Asia. This result is arrived at by the various ethnological proofs of language which finds Sanskrit words and forms in Egypt, and of comparative anatomy, which shows the oldest Egyptian skulls to have belonged to Caucasian races." If, then, Egyptian civilization proceeded from Central Asia, Egyptian mythology and religion probably came as a quite natural reaction from the extreme spiritualism of the Hindoos. The question which remains is, whether they arrived at their nature-wors.h.i.+p directly or indirectly; whether, beginning with Fetichism, they ascended to their higher conceptions of the immortal G.o.ds; or, beginning with spiritual existence, they traced it downward into its material manifestations; whether, in short, their system was one of evolution or emanation. For every ancient theogony, cosmogony, or ontogony is of one kind or the other. According to the systems of India and of Platonism, the generation of beings is by the method of emanation.

Creation is a falling away, or an emanation from the absolute. But the systems of Greek and Scandinavian mythology are of the opposite sort. In these, spirit is evolved from matter; matter up to spirit works. They begin with the lowest form of being,--night, chaos, a mundane egg,--and evolve the higher G.o.ds therefrom.

It is probable that we find in Egypt a double tendency. One is the Asiatic spiritualism, the other the African naturalism. The union of the ideal and the real, of thought and pa.s.sion, of the aspirations of the soul and the fire of a pa.s.sionate nature, of abstract meditation and concrete life, had for its result the mysterious theology and philosophy which, twenty centuries after its burial under the desert sands, still rouses our curiosity to penetrate the secret of this Sphinx of the Nile.

We have seen in a former section that the inst.i.tutions of Egypt, based on a theocratic monarchy, reach back into a dim and doubtful antiquity.

Monuments, extending through thirty-five centuries, attest an age preceding all written history. These monuments, so far as deciphered by modern Egyptologists, have confirmed the accuracy of the lists of kings which have come to us from Manetho. We have no monument anterior to the fourth dynasty, but at that epoch we find the theocracy fully organized.[171] The general accuracy of Manetho's list has been demonstrated by the latest discoveries of M. Mariette, and has rendered doubtful the idea of any of the dynasties being contemporaneous.

The main chronological points, however, are by no means as yet fixed.