The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0079/00797.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 26KB | 393 lines

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$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter III: Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{osiris
dead
gods
re
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isis
egypt
texts
book
religion}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
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