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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter III: Part II}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{osiris
dead
gods
re
god
isis
egypt
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religion}
$Date{1913}
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Egypt
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter III: Part II

     The more completely the worship in the temples became the business of the
rulers and the priests, in which the people had no part except as spectators,
the more the common man turned to gods who had no place in the state cult -
such figures as the bandy-legged dwarf, Bes, or the she-hippopotamus Thoueris,
to Onuris and Nefertem, and the wise Imhotep. Many foreign gods also appear in
this age; soldiers and captives introduced the Syrian deities Baal and
Resheph, Anat and Astarte.

     There is no doubt that the Egyptians had a large store of myths about
both the local deities and the great nature gods; the liturgies are larded
with allusions to such stories.  Among the few specimens that have been
preserved, chiefly in texts from the time of the Empire or later, the most
interesting are that which tells how Isis learned the secret name of Re, and
the myth of the destruction of mankind.  Isis was an adept in the magical
arts, but her most potent spell was the hidden name of Re, and this is how she
got the secret from him: Re was drooling with age, his slaver trickled to the
ground; Isis kneaded earth with it and made a viper, which she laid in the
path where Re went out to walk; the viper smote Re as he passed attended by a
train of gods, and he cried out in pain.  To the concerned inquiry of his
companions he at length replies: "I am a prince and son of a prince, the
divine offspring of a god; I am a great one and the son of a great one.  My
father and my mother told me my name, and it has remained hidden in my body
since my birth, that no magician might gain magical power over me.  I went
abroad to behold what I had made, and passed through the two lands (Upper and
Lower Egypt) that I had created.  Then something stung me, I know not what.
Fire it is not, water it is not; my heart is burning, my body shivers, and all
my limbs tremble."

     All the gods are summoned, and among them comes Isis, with well-feigned
solicitude.  "What is it?  what is it, divine father?  A reptile has hurt
thee, one of thy children has lifted up its head against thee.  It shall yield
to a potent charm; I will overthrow it by powerful magic." Re repeats the
story, and Isis rejoins: "Tell me thy name, O divine father, for the man's
life is saved who is called by his (true, but secret) name." Re recites a
string of mouth-filling titles such as abound in the ritual, concluding: "I am
Khepre in the morning and Re at noon and Atum in the evening" - an old
priestly formula - but it did no good.  "That is not thy name," Isis says;
"tell me thy true name, that the poison may leave thee." At last Re yields,
and by its magical virtue she restores him to health.

     This is what may be called a professional myth; the enchanter who has
learned from Isis to heal ailments by the magic power of names explains how
Isis came to know the greatest of all.

     The myth of the destruction of men belongs to a different class, of which
the widely distributed deluge myths are the best known. ^1 Re has grown old
and feeble, and his authority is despised; men conspire against him, as might
happen to a Pharaoh who had outlived himself.  Re summons the gods to a
council, and on the advice of Nun sends the fierce lion-headed goddess Sekhmet
to pursue men into the mountain fastnesses whither they have fled and destroy
them.  The goddess descends to earth, and executes her mission with such
good-will that the whole valley swims with blood, and Re, fearing that the
human race will be exterminated, repents of his command.  It was not so easy
to call off the lioness who had tasted blood, but Re found a way.  A mixture
of beer with the juice of (narcotic?) fruit and human blood was prepared -
seven thousand jars full - and poured out in the early dawn upon the fields.
Sekhmet, sallying forth to resume her work of slaughter, found these pools of
blood as she thought and drank till she was too far gone to recognise men any
more; so the remnant was saved.  But Re was weary of the thankless task of
ruling the world, and, after appointing Thoth his viceroy on earth, retired to
rest on the back of the sky-cow in the heavens.

[Footnote 1: Egypt, where the inundation is the greatest of blessings, has, of
course, no flood myth.]

     The myth of Osiris is known to us most fully through Plutarch, but
innumerable allusions in texts from all ages show that the story is very old.
The actors are the four deities who constitute the last generation of the
Heliopolitan Ennead, Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys.  Osiris was a wise and
good king, who taught the Egyptians agriculture and gave them laws - the
founder of Egyptian civilisation.  His brother Set plotted his destruction,
and accomplished it by an ingenious trick.  At a feast he produced a beautiful
and richly decorated chest which he had had made exactly to the measures of
Osiris, offering to present it to any one whom it should fit; one after
another tried it, until at last Osiris laid himself in it. ^1 Thereupon Set
and his accomplices clapped on the cover, fastened it securely, and threw the
chest into the Tanitic arm of the Nile. Isis fled to a retreat in the marshes,
where she gave birth to a son, Horus.  Leaving him there, Isis set forth in
quest of Osiris' body, and found it at last at Byblos, in Phoenicia, whither
the current had borne the coffin.  She brought it back to Egypt and concealed
it; but while she was gone to Buto to see her son Horus, Set, hunting by
moonlight, discovered the coffin, and vented his hatred on the dead body by
rending it limb from limb and scattering the members far and wide.  Isis
sought them out, and buried them wherever she found them - the backbone, for
example, at Buto, the head at Abydos - and each of these places became a seat
of Osiris worship.  When Horus grew up he took it upon him to avenge his
father, and engaged in a fierce conflict with his uncle, in which he had one
eye torn out and Set was emasculated.  Finally Thoth parted the combatants and
healed their wounds.  Set had to own himself beaten, and Horus ascended the
throne of his ancestor, Geb, and ruled on earth, while his father Osiris
became king of the dead.

[Footnote 1: This feature of the story has thus far not been found in native
Egyptian sources.]

     From the time when Rameses II removed his capital to Tanis, in the Delta,
Thebes was never again permanently the residence of the kings; but it was
still the religious capital, and there the rulers were buried.  The kings of
the Eighteenth Dynasty cut their tombs in the face of the cliffs in a narrow
lateral valley.  Long galleries, here and there opening out into chambers,
were drifted far into the solid rock; at the farther end was the "golden
house," in which the stone sarcophagus laid.  The walls of the galleries and
chambers were covered with religious texts, pictorially illustrated, dealing
with the other world, and the same texts were also painted on coffins.  The
longest of these is Amduat, the "Book of Him Who is in the Under-World," which
has for its subject the nocturnal voyage of the sun, from his setting behind
the mountains in the west to his reappearance in the east.  In this voyage he
passes through twelve regions, or districts (corresponding to the twelve hours
of the night), which lie strung out along the course of a river on which the
god in his barge passes from town to town, ordering their affairs and
bestowing feoffs on his companions, just as the Pharaoh did when he made a
royal progress on the Nile.  The regions of the other world are peopled with
gods and demons, and with the dead; over each a deity presides.  Numerous gods
accompany the sun in his barge or convoy him on his way.  At the end of the
journey the boat is dragged through a serpent six hundred yards long, and when
he emerges from the jaws of the serpent the sun is the beetle Khepre, the god
of the morning sun.  Then the sun god seats himself in his morning barge and
ascends the sky.

     The composite origin of this picture of the other world is obvious. The
regions traversed in the fourth and fifth hours are the gloomy realm of Sokar,
the old Memphite god of the dead, which has a character altogether its own.
The country is a sandy desert, full of reptiles; there is no water for Re's
boat, and he continues his journey on the back of a long serpent or
serpent-shaped sledge drawn by four gods.  It is so dark that he cannot see
the inhabitants of the land, but at length he emerges through a narrow passage
or tunnel, "the road by which the body of Sokar entered," i. e., through the
mound of sand in which Sokar is buried.  Evidently a piece of the local
eschatology of Memphis is here preserved.  The following regions, from the
sixth hour on, are lands of Osiris, but of an Osiris who is not so far removed
from Sokar; the inhabitants are called "those who are upon their sands," as in
Sokar's realm.  All these are dead, gods as well as men.  Re sees the mounds
of sand under which are buried not only the bodies of Shu and Tefnut, but of
Atum, Re, and Khepre; he sees also the house of Osiris, in which are the
mummies of kings of Upper and Lower Egypt, as well as of private persons well
provided with offerings.  In another place vengeance is taken on the enemies
of Osiris, who lie beheaded or bound before the "flesh" (the dead body) of the
god.  In the eleventh hour there are fiery furnaces in which the enemies of
Osiris are consumed, soul, shadow, and head, under the direction of goddesses
in full armour, belching flames, and there are other like tortures - it is a
corner of hell.  Another Osirian realm is traversed in the third hour, where
Osiris and his companions live.  But not even here is there anything like the
Fields of Earu, the paradise where Osiris rules over the blessed dead, nor is
there anywhere an allusion to the Osirian judgment.  The sun is the overlord
in the world of night and the dead; Osiris is but a feudal vassal of his.  One
feature of properly solar mythology - besides the night voyage itself - is
embodied, the encounter with the dragon Apophis, "whose place is in heaven,"
that is, according to the common view, the demon of storm; more likely the
eclipse dragon.

     The texts and illustrations have, as the texts do not fail to emphasise,
a magical value; what particular benefit is to be gained by knowing this or
that name or formula or accurately copying such and such a scene is explained
at every turn.  For example, "he possesses food in the underworld, and is
satisfied with the gifts of the followers of Osiris, while his kindred upon
earth also make gifts to him," or "he is a passenger in the barge of Re in
heaven and in earth." "But he who does not know these things" cannot escape
Apophis.

     A work of similar nature is the Book of Portals.  The sun in his night
journey through the twelve regions has to pass fortifications like those of
Egyptian cities.  These formidable gates, each guarded by a great serpent,
open, however, when the god pronounces the potent word.  The picture of the
lower world in this book is more in accord with the common Osirian doctrine,
including the judgment.

     The tombs of the Theban kings were both by their form and their situation
ill-adapted to the maintenance of the cult of the dead, and mortuary temples
were accordingly built on the western bank of the river at Thebes.  In the
tombs of persons of lower rank the decorations and inscriptions had hitherto
been chiefly concerned with provision for the material needs of the dead - the
thousand loaves of bread and the thousand jars of beer.  Now texts and
illustrations from the Book of the Dead and similar compilations become
common, and the walls are decorated with representations of the daily life or
the public career of the occupant. The funeral and the funeral feast are
frequently depicted, and while the old beliefs and customs have not been
outgrown, human relations and sentiments find here freer expression.

     That the dead man might be forearmed against the many and varied perils
of the tomb and the other world, he was provided with a library of magical
texts, so that whatever happened he might know what to do and say. The surest
defence against all evils was to identify himself with some god and overcome
by his divine magic.  Such texts were now written on papyrus rolls and
deposited in the coffin.  A certain selection and grouping of them became
customary, and grew eventually into what we call the Book of the Dead; but it
was only in the Saite time that this collection assumed what may be called a
canonical form, in one hundred and sixty-five "chapters," and even then copies
differ widely in completeness.  They were fabricated commercially, like the
other funerary necessities, blanks being left for the insertion of the man's
name in the proper places - for example, in the verdict of acquittal before
the judgment seat of Osiris. In these writings notions of every age and origin
are jumbled together, and the whole is enveloped in an impenetrable veil of
mystification; for what might by any chance be intelligible is ineffective in
magic.

     Besides the Book of the Dead and kindred texts, amulets of many varieties
were deposited in the coffin or the tomb; the symbols of Osiris and Isis were
frequently placed in the dead man's hand, models of the crowns of Upper and
Lower Egypt, crowns and sceptres in the form worn by deities, eyes, hearts, a
head-rest, a level and square, a staircase, and many more, the particular use
of which is unknown, were laid, each in its proper place.  At a later time we
hear that one hundred and four amulets were necessary to protect the body as
completely as that of Osiris himself. The tombs of this period are equipped
with furniture and ornaments, but the older devices for supplying the dead
with an unfailing abundance of food have fallen into disuse.  The viscera are
now enclosed in four jars with the heads of the four sons of Horus for covers,
and these gods are trusted not to let the inwards suffer from hunger.

     Of conceptions of the life after death, the abode in the Fields of Earu
continues to be the most popular.  The notion, however, that the dead might be
called out by Osiris to work in his fields as in the corvee of the king was
not altogether pleasing to the great of this world, unaccustomed to such
labours on earth.  They therefore provided themselves with numbers of little
mummy figures of labourers in glazed pottery or stone, with hoes and baskets,
to do the work for them.  The inscription makes the purpose plain: "O thou
Answerer (Ushebti), when I am called, when I am required to do any kind of
work which is done in the other world . . . and am required at any time to
cultivate the fields, to irrigate the banks, to convey sand from the east to
the west, thou shalt say, Here am I." In every sphere magic prevails; all good
fortune can be secured, all perils averted by its potent aid.  The moral
element in religion, which promised to convert the future life into a sphere
of just retribution for the deeds done in this, is nullified by amulets and
spells.  On the breast of the dead, over the place of the heart, was laid a
scarab, a symbol of the new-born sun god, with the inscription: "O heart that
I have from my mother!  O heart that belongs to my spirit!  Do not appear
against me as a witness, do not oppose me before the judges, do not contradict
me before him who governs the balance; thou art my spirit that is in my body .
. . do not suffer our name to shrink . . . tell no lie against me before the
god!" Wherever the doctrine of retribution has been taken seriously, men have
addressed themselves to find some escape from its rigour, and they have
frequently fallen upon ways which we call magical; but it probably never
occurred to any other people to effect this end by vitiating the testimony of
conscience itself at the bar of God.

     The collapse of the empire under the Twenty-first Dynasty was followed by
three centuries under Libyan and Nubian dynasties, at the close of which came
the Assyrian conquest of Lower Egypt.  With the loosening of the Assyrian hold
on its western provinces in the conflicts which preluded the fall of Nineveh,
a vigorous line of Saite kings once more reunited Egypt for a century and a
quarter under native rule, and endeavoured to revive the great traditions of
ancient times.  Nowhere is this effort more conspicuous than in religion; and
what gives the Saite restoration its distinctive character is that it did not
take the New Empire for its model, but the Old Kingdom, the golden age of
Egypt's far off youth.  The researches of the priests in the monumental
inscriptions and the long-neglected manuscripts in temple libraries brought to
light things forgotten or unheeded for centuries, and to their antiquarian
souls precious in proportion to their antiquity and obscurity.  Nor did these
discoveries remain the proud possession of the learned; they were brought out
for every-day use, and titles and names of the pyramid age were worn by the
courtiers and priests of Psammetichus; ancient cults and rites were
repristinated; complete catalogues of the gods with their epithets were drawn
up and inscribed on temple walls.  It is no wonder that the Greeks, whose
nearer acquaintance with the land began in this period, thought that the
Egyptians were the most religious of mankind, however they appraised such
excess of religiousness.

     The worship of animals, installed as living gods in the temples, was
cultivated in this age and subsequently in Greek and Roman times more
zealously than ever before.  At Memphis the bull Apis was regarded as the body
of the god Ptah, whose spirit resided in the beast, or as a son of Ptah, or of
Re, or of Osiris - varying attempts to connect the worship of the beast with
the religion of the gods.  The bull was black, with certain distinctive white
markings; when one died there was universal mourning until a successor,
recognised by these marks, was discovered, whereupon all Egypt rejoiced in the
assurance of divine favour.  He received all the veneration due to a god
manifest in the flesh, and when he died was buried with the pomp and
circumstance of a Pharaoh.  In the Apis cemetery (Serapeum) have been found
the tombs of over sixty of these divine beasts, ranging from the time of
Amenophis III (about 1400 B.C.) to that of Ptolemy Alexander I (died 88 B.C.).
The carcases were embalmed in the most costly manner; for one that died in 547
B.C.  Amasis provided a sarcophagus of red granite "such as never has been
made of stone by any king or at any time." It was hewn out of a single block
thirteen feet long and nearly ten feet high.  The bull Mnevis at Heliopolis
and the bull Bacis at Hermonthis, both as "the living body of Re," received
similar honours.  The ram at Mendes was hardly less famous.  Both at Memphis
and at Lake Moeris, according to Herodotus, a tame crocodile was adorned with
jewels in his ears and bracelets on his paws, and daily received rations of
bread and a number of victims; when he died he was embalmed and buried in a
holy place.

     The sacredness of the whole species to which the living god belonged was
now carried to the absurdity of its logical conclusion; not only were these
animals protected while alive, so that to kill one even by accident was a
grave or even a capital crime, but when they died a natural death they were
often carefully mummied and transported to the cemetery of their kind, cats,
e. g., to Bubastis, falcons to Buto, ibises to Hermopolis. Such cemeteries
have been found in many places in Egypt; at Beni Hasan cats were buried in
such enormous numbers that sacrilegious modern enterprise has turned them to
practical use for fertilisers.  Each region had its own sacred animals, which
might be unconsidered or even detested in an adjoining district, and violent
collision between the people of neighbouring towns sometimes resulted from
this localisation of holiness.

     The priests were subject to many and minute rules of ceremonial purity in
shaving, bathing, dress, and diet; they were attached in great numbers to the
several temples, from which they had their whole living.  The Greeks give
interesting accounts of popular religious festivals, at which scenes from the
myths were acted out, and the participants threw themselves so thoroughly into
the spirit of the thing that the controversies of the gods resulted in many
broken heads among their devoted followers.

     As in the religion of the gods, so also in the religion of the dead, the
Egyptians of the Saite period gave themselves great pains to gather up
everything that had come down from antiquity and to restore texts which had
been for centuries disused.  The Book of the Dead was continuously enlarged,
until a papyrus roll seventy feet long was necessary to transcribe it.  The
voyage of the sun by night as it was depicted in the Book of the Other World
and the Book of Portals in the tombs of the Theban kings, and even the
earliest funerary texts from the pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties,
were brought into use again, and original additions made to this funerary
literature, such as the Lamentation of Isis and Nephthys over Osiris, the
Lamentation of Sokar, the Conquest of Apophis, and the Book of Breathings.
The tombs of wealthy private citizens exceed in size at least those of all
their predecessors; the coffins were frequently wrought in the hardest stone.
Ushebtis were provided by hundreds - sometimes one for every day in the year -
and amulets in great variety.

     The Persian conquerors did not always treat the religion of their
Egyptian subjects with respect; Cambyses is reported to have killed the Apis
bull with his own hand, and a similar story is told of Artaxerxes Ochus.  But
the wiser rulers among them adopted a more conciliatory policy. The Ptolemies
followed in this respect the example of Alexander, who made an expedition to
the famous oracle of Amon in the oasis to get himself recognised as the son of
the god, and reverently offered sacrifice to the gods of Memphis.  His
successors sedulously cultivated the fiction of legitimacy, and supported the
old Egyptian religion as the religion of the state.  Early in the Ptolemaic
period a new era of temple-building began which continued well down into Roman
times.  Among these structures are some of the greatest now remaining in
Egypt.  The kings and queens took part in the Egyptian festivals, as though
they had been descendants of the great Pharaohs.  The priests of Mendes
celebrate in a memorial inscription that their ram was the first sacred animal
visited by Ptolemy Philadelphus after his accession to the throne.  He
fulfilled all the ceremonies of a royal visitation as they are described in
the books, and returned to his residence full of joy for what he had done for
"the Fathers, the rams of Mendes." When Queen Arsinoe died, her statue was
carried in procession with the sacred ram, and she received the honorary
title: "She who is beloved by the ram, Arsinoe Philadelphus." Later in the
reign of the king a new sacred ram was discovered which fulfilled all the
requirements of the ancient writings, and the king honoured this "king of the
animals of Egypt" with a great feast.

     The introduction of Greek deities, which had begun long before, made no
impression on the Egyptian religion beyond perhaps the creation of some sadly
mixed types of gods and goddesses for domestic use.  One foreign god, however,
had the distinction of being taken over bodily into the Egyptian religion.
When the second Ptolemy, in consequence of a dream, imported Sarapis, the
Hades of Sinope, the priests at once discovered that, notwithstanding his very
un-Egyptian exterior, Sarapis was nothing else than Osar-Hapi, Osiris-Apis;
and when he began his somewhat successful career in the Roman world it was as
a genuine Egyptian deity.

     Isis, who in early times was celebrated in the mythology as the faithful
wife of Osiris and mother of Horus, but enjoyed, as it appears, no conspicuous
honour in religion, became of much greater importance in the Greek and Roman
period.  Among the foreign cults which, in the form of mysteries, spread
widely in the Roman Empire that of Isis was one of the most popular. ^1

[Footnote 1: See below, pp. 584 ff.]

     Early Christianity in Egypt was almost exclusively Greek, and made slow
progress among the native population.  The edict of Theodosius closed the
temples, and put a legal end to the public worship of the gods, but even after
the valley of the Nile had been for centuries nominally Christian, the old
burial customs in considerable part survived, and with them doubtless the
fundamental beliefs which had given birth to them.