RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD. THE EGYPTIAN RELIGION, BY C. P. TIELE, D.D., LL.D. Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion in the WHEN the student turns his attention to the Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, he is at once confronted with the disputed question as to its essential character. The discovery of Champollion enabled his pupils and their successors to advance from the scanty notices of the Greek classical writers and the fragments of Manetho, to the study and elucidation of the original Egyptian sources; and as these sources multiplied, much new light was shed upon the nature of the Religion. But, as usually happens in such cases, the more this knowledge increased, the more clearly did its limitation appear, and the more questions remained unsolved. When the student consults the works of the Egyptologists, he still finds himself compelled to choose between two diametrically opposite theories. The advocates of the one view see in the Egyptian Religion what amounts to a pure monotheism, exhibiting itself through the manifestly silly or even barbaric forms of a multiform polytheism, with the loftiest ideas hidden like a pure gem in the crude shell of magical arts and symbolical notions. The advocates of the other view see in it a religion which is still really barbaric, animistic, and therianthropic, and to which priests and scribes endeavoured to give a mystical sense-a sense not understood by the people, and one which left the superstitious practices undisturbed. Both views are maintained, with great knowledge and talent, by celebrated scholars; and they are supported by texts which seem to prove completely those different positions. As a matter of fact, the existence of a certain contradiction in the bosom of the Egyptian Religion cannot be denied; nor can it, in my opinion, be satisfactorily explained by either of these views. Even if we could accept as a fact the existence of such a pure and lofty religion in pre-historic times, it yet appears to me inconceivable that, just as the civilization of the people increased, their religion should of itself, and without any accessory causes, have degenerated into such a gross fetishism and into such silly sorcery, accompanied, as it was, by senseless formulas, which those who muttered them did not themselves understand. And still les can I suppose that such a sublime conception of God, and such outpourings of religious feeling as not a few texts unquestionably give evidence of, could have been developed out of so decidedly an animistic form of worship, as the Egyptian must originally have been, solely under the influence of a rich but-in the main-materialistic civilization. We are therefore compelled to regard the Egyptian Religion, as it appears in history, as presenting the fusion of two heterogeneous elements, and ashaving arisen out of the mixing of two very differently endowed races. In other words, the National Religion of Egypt was-and continued to bea genuine Nigritian polydæmonism, with which a ruling minority (belonging to races which came from Asia in pre-historic times, and which became the ruling class) tried to unite their own purer religious ideas by giving to that polydæmonism a mystic, symbolical meaning. It is only by this hypothesis that the otherwise apparently insoluble contradictions in the Egyptian Religion can be satisfactorily explained. Among the older aboriginal elements must be reckoned two things which were specially characteristic of the Egyptian Religion, viz., the Worship of Animals, and the Worship of the Dead, especially dead Kings. Worship of Animals has been found to be very common in antiquity, and among barbarous and uncivilized peoples. But it nowhere reached such a height as in Egypt. The animals worshipped were those which were distinguished by extraordinary qualities, real or imagined, and regarded as evidencing magical power; those which were specially feared or valued; and, above all, those which were supposed to stand in a certain mysterious connection with the origin of all life and prosperity in Egypt-the periodic overflow of Every tribe and district, every place and family, had its own sacred animal; but certain animals-the bull, the crocodile, the cat, the hippopotamus, and others-were for special reasons very generally worshipped. Originally nothing but fetishes, which they continued to be for the great majority of the worshippers, they were brought by the doctrinal expositions and by the educated classes into connection with certain particular gods, and thus came to be regarded as the terrestrial incarnation of these gods. The Worship of the Dead and of the Dead Kings, took the foremost place in the Religion of Egypt. Nowhere has there been so much care bestowed on the construction and ornamentation of tombs, and on the preservation of the bodies of the dead, nor so much treasure applied to these purposes, as in Egypt. Of all the magical texts, the most sacred and cherished were those which were collected in the so-called Book of the Dead; and so, too, the most sacred and precious rites were those which had reference to embalming and entombing, or to the life after death. In its origin the care of the dead was as animistic as the worship of animals, and at first it had no other aim than to provide for them security from their persecutions or punishments, by making them want for nothing even in the grave, and arming them against the terrible demons of the kingdom of darkness. And so much were these demons feared, that the individual even in his lifetime took care to be secured against them by the provision of a strong tomb and rich endowments. But even these usages, to which the people remained so much attached from no higher motive than the one indicated, had a deeper meaning gradually given to them by the priests and the more cultivated members of the community. Myths which arose independently, and from which the worship of the dead certainly cannot have sprung, were closely attached to it; and mystical union with a dying. and living god became the pledge of the survival of the individual, to which certain moral requirements were afterwards added by the doctrine of retribution. / To the non-African elements, on the other hand, belong the oldest chief myths of Egypt: those of Osiris and of Rê or Râ, of which the former were localized at Abydos, and also in some places of Northern Egypt, and the latter especially at Anu (On) or Heliopolis. They soon came to be moulded into a certain whole by the priests of the latter place, and they constitute the religious basis of the eschatology. They are forms of wellknown myths which are found among many nations of antiquity: one of he light and dark, two beneficent and dreaded brothers, representing the alternation of the seasons, the struggle between fertility and sterility in nature, between cultivation and rude strength in society, and transferred in its ultimate form to the first human beings and the oldest social union ; the other of the god of light, victorious over the serpent of darkness, and ever reviving after a temporary overthrow. Within our limited space we cannot give an extended description and explanation of these myths, nor an enumeration of the principal gods of the Egyptian mythology. Suffice it to say that Osiris, who, after being kiled by his brother Set, is avenged by his son Horos, but does not return to the world of the living, becomes the god of the dead, par excellence, the sovereign of the Kingdom of the Dead, with whom every dead perso identified himself. Traces of his former more general significance may still be often found, after the restriction of his domain to the other world; but they only become prominent when, during the last centuries of Egypt's existence, he becomes again the highest god. Râ, on the contrary, the father of gods and men, and as such the first ruler on earth becomes inc re and more the national god of Egypt, with whom in the course of tir e all the principal gods of Egypt are identified. This did not, however, take place before the Egyptian Religion had passed through several centuries of development. At the outset there cannot have existed anything like unity in this religion. Different, albeit kindred, culis existed in comparative independence alongside of each other; and it was only where a powerful lord succeeded in uniting several provinces. into one kingdom, over which he held the sovereignty, that the principal. god of his seat of government became the sovereign of the local gods, the latte being grouped around the former as his relatives and courtiers. The same thing took place when the two great kingdoms of Upper and Lower |