Explanation ofmythology throughthe study oflanguage.
The study of language has perhaps done more than anything else to clear away the puzzles which mythologies formerly presented to students. It has helped in two ways: first, by tracing the names of objects of worship to their root-forms, and thus showing their meaning and revealing the thought which lay at the root of the worship; secondly, by proving the identity between the gods of different nations, whose names, apparently different, have been resolved into the same root-word, or to a root of thesame meaning, when the alchemy of philological research was applied to them.
The discovery of a closer relationship than had been formerly suspected between the mythologies of various nations is a very important one, as it enables us to trace the growth of the stories told of gods and heroes, from the mature form in which we first become acquainted with them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians, to the primitive shape in which the same creeds were held by the more metaphysical and less imaginative Eastern peoples among whom they originally sprang up. In some respects this task of tracing back the poetical myths of Greek and Northern poets to the simpler, if grander, beliefs of the ancient Egyptians or Chaldæans or Hindus is not unlike our search in a perfected language for its earliest roots. We lose shapeliness and beauty as we come back, but we find the form that explains the birth of the thought, and lets us see how it grew in the minds of men. One chief result arrived at by this comparison of creeds, and by unravelling the meaning of the names of ancient gods and heroes, is the discovery that a worship of different aspects and forces of nature lies at the bottom of nearly all mythologies, and that the cause of the resemblance between the stories told of the gods and heroes (a resemblance which strikes us as soon as we read two or three of them together) is that they are in reality only slightly different ways of describing natural appearances according to the effect produced on different minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the year. Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, we soon become expert in hunting the parable through all the protean shapes in which it is presented to us. The heroes of the old stories we have long loved begin to lose their individuality and character for us. And instead ofthinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles, and Thor as separate idealizations of heroic or godlike character; of Ariadne, and Idun, and Isis as heroines of pathetic histories, our thoughts as we read are busied in tracing all that is said about them to the aspects of the sun in his march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of a bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and the tenderly glowing and fading colours of the western sky into which he sinks when his course is run.
Our first feeling on receiving this simple explanation of the old stories of mythology is rather one of disappointment than of satisfaction; we feel that we are losing a great deal—not the interest of the stories only, but all those glimpses of deep moral meanings, of yearnings after Divine teachers and rulers, of acknowledgment of the possibility of communion between God and man, which we had hitherto found in them, and which we are sure that the original makers of them could not have been without. It seems to rob the old religions of the essence of religion—spirituality—and reduce them to mere observations of natural phenomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any instincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of language, with which we were about to quarrel as having robbed us, comes in to restore to the old beliefs those very elements of mystery, awe, and yearning towards the invisible, which we were fearing to see vanish away. As is usually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the explanation which seemed at first to impoverish really enhances the beauty and worth of the subject brought into clearer light. It teaches us to see something more in what we have been used to call mere nature-worship than appears at first sight.
When we were considering the beginnings of language,we learned that all root-words were expressions of sensations received from outward things, every name or word being a description of some bodily feeling, a gathering-up of impressions on the senses made by the universe outside us. With this stock of words—pictorial words, we may call them—it is easy to see that when people in early times wanted to express a mental feeling, they were driven to use the word which expressed the sensation in their bodies most nearly corresponding to it. We do something of the same kind now when we talk ofwarmlove,chillfear,hungryavarice, anddarkrevenge—mixing up words for sensations of the body to heighten the expression of emotions of the mind. In using these expressions we are conscious of speaking allegorically, and we have, over and above our allegorical phrases, words set aside especially for describing mental actions, so that we can talk of the sensations of our bodies and of our minds without any danger of confounding them together. But in early times, before words had acquired these varied and enlarged meanings, when men had only one word by which to express the glow of the body when the sun shone and the glow of the mind when a friend was near, the difficulty of speaking, or even thinking, of mental and bodily emotions apart from each other must have been very great. Only gradually could the two things have become disentangled from one another, and during all the time while this change was going on an allegorical way of speaking of mental emotions and of the source of mental emotions must have prevailed. It is not difficult to see that while love and warmth, fear and cold, had only one word to express them, the sun, the source of warmth, and God, the source of love, were spoken of in much the same terms, and worshipped in songs that expressed the same adoration and gratitude. It follows, therefore, that whilewe acknowledge the large proportion in which the nature element comes into all mythologies, we need not look upon the worshippers of nature as worshippers of visible things only. They felt, without being able to express, the Divine cause which lay behind the objects whose grandeur and beauty appealed to their wonder, and they loved and worshipped the Unseen while naming the seen only. As time passed on and language developed, losing much of its original significance, there was, especially among the Greeks and Romans, a gradual divergence between the popular beliefs about the gods and the spirit of true worship which originally lay behind them. People no longer felt the influence of nature in the double method in which it had come to them in the childhood of the race, and they began to distinguish clearly between their bodies and their minds, between the things that lay without and the emotions stirred within. Then the old nature-beliefs became degraded to foolish and gross superstitions, and yearning souls sought God in a more spiritual way.
The mythologies of the different Aryan nations are those which concern us most nearly, entering as they do into the very composition of our language, and colouring not only our literature and poetry, but our cradle-songs and the tales told in our nurseries. We shall find it interesting to compare together the various forms of the stories told by nations of the Aryan stock, and to trace them back to their earliest shape.
Egyptianreligion.
But before entering on this task, it may be well to turn our attention for a little while to a still earlier mythology, where the mingling of metaphysical conceptions with the worship of natural phenomena is perhaps more clearly shown than in any other, and which may therefore serve as a guide to help us in grasping this connection in the more highly coloured, picturesquestories we shall be hereafter attempting to unravel. This earliest and least ornamented mythology is that of the ancient Egyptians, a people who were always disposed to retain primitive forms unchanged, even when, as in the case of their hieroglyphics, they had to use the primitive forms to express thoughts which these forms could not naturally convey. That they followed this course with their religious ceremonies and in their manner of representing their gods, is perhaps fortunate for us, as it enables us to trace with greater ease the particular aspect of nature, and the mental sensation or moral lesson identified with it, which each one of their gods and goddesses embodied. We have the rude primitive form embodying an aspect or force of nature, instead of a beautiful confusing story, merely for the most part titles, addresses, and prayers, whose purport more or less reveals the spiritual meaning which that aspect of nature conveyed to the worshipper.
The chief objects of nature-worship must obviously be the same, or nearly the same, in every part of the world, so that even among different races, living far apart, and having no connection with each other, a certain similarity in the stories told about gods and heroes, and in the names and titles given to them, is observable. The sun, the moon, the heavens and stars, the sea, the river, sunshine and darkness, night and day, summer and winter,—these objects and changes must always make the staple, the back-bone so to speak, round which all mythological stories founded on nature-worship are grouped. But climate and scenery, especially any striking peculiarity in the natural features of a country, have a strong influence in modifying the impressions made by these objects on the imaginations of the dwellers in the land, and so giving a special form or colour to the national creed, bringing perhaps some Divineattribute or some more haunting impression of the condition of the soul after death, into a prominence unknown elsewhere. The religion of the ancient Egyptians was distinguished from that of other nations by several such characteristics, and in endeavouring to understand them we must first recall what there is distinctive in the climate and scenery of Egypt to our minds.
Influenceof nature inEgyptian religion.
The land of Egypt is, let us remember, a wedge-shaped valley, broad at its northern extremity and gradually narrowing between two ranges of cliffs till it becomes through a great part of its length a mere strip of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. Its sky overhead is always blue, and from morning till evening intensely bright, flecked only occasionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that the sun’s course, from the first upshooting of his keen arrowy rays over the low eastern hills to his last solemn sinking in a pomp of glorious colour behind the white cliffs in the west, can be traced unimpeded day after day through the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which receive the sun’s first and last greeting stretches a boundless waste—the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had ever traversed, which led no one knew where, from whose dread, devouring space the sun escaped triumphant each morning, and back into which it returned when the valley was left to darkness and night.
The neighbourhood of the desert, and the striking contrast between its lifeless wastes and the richly cultivated plains between the hills, had, as we can see, a great effect on the imaginations of the first inhabitants of the land of Egypt, and gave to many of their thoughts about death and the world beyond the grave an intensity unknown to the dwellers among less monotonous scenery. The contrastwas a perpetual parable to them, or rather perhaps a perpetualmemento mori. The valley between the cliffs presented a vivid picture of active and intense life, every inch of fruitful ground teeming with the results of labour—budding corn, clustering vines, groups of palm-trees, busy sowers and reapers and builders; resounding, too, everywhere with brisk sounds of toil or pleasure. The clink of anvil and hammer, the creaking of water-wheels, the bleating and lowing of flocks and herds, the tramp of the oxen treading out the corn, the songs of women, and the laughter of children playing by the river. On the other side of the cliffs, what a change! There reigned an unbroken solitude and an intense silence, such as is only found in the desert, because it comes from the utter absence of all life, animal or vegetable: no rustle of leaf or bough, no hum of an insect or whirr of a wing, breaks the charmed stillness even for a minute. There is silence, broad, unbroken sunshine, bare cliffs, rivers of golden sand—nothing else. Amenti, the ancient Egyptians called the western desert into which, as it seemed to them, the sun went down to sleep after his day’s work was done; Amenti, the vast, the grand, the unknown; and it was there they built their most splendid places of worship, there that they carried their dead for burial, feeling that it spoke to them of rest, of unchangeableness, of eternity.
Another striking and peculiar feature of Egyptian scenery was the beautiful river—the one only river—on which the prosperity, the very existence, of the country depended. It, too, had a perpetual story to tell, a parable to unfold, as it flowed and swelled and contracted in its beneficent yearly course. They saw that all growth and life depended on its action; where its waters reached, there followed fruitfulness and beauty, and a thousand teeming forms of animal, vegetable,and insect life; where its furthest wave stayed, there the reign of nothingness and death began again. The Nile, therefore, became to the ancient Egyptians the token and emblem of a life-giving principle in nature, of that perpetual renewal, that passing from one form of existence into another, which has ever had so much hopeful significance for all thinking minds. Its blue colour when it reflected the sky was the most sacred of their emblems, and was devoted to funeral decorations and to the adornments of the dead, because it spoke to them of the victory of life over death, of the permanence of the life-principle amid the evanescent and vanishing forms under which it appeared. Of these two distinctive features of nature in Egypt, the unexplored western desert and the unending river, we must, then, think as exercising a modifying or intensifying effect on the impressions produced on the minds of ancient Egyptians by those aspects of nature which they had in common with other Eastern peoples. Let us think what these are. First and most conspicuous we must put the sun, in all his changing aspects, rising in gentle radiance over the eastern hills, majestically climbing the cloudless sky, sending down fierce perpendicular rays through all the hot noon, withdrawing his overwhelming heat towards evening as he sloped to his rest, and painting the western sky with colour and glory, on which the eyes of men could rest without being dazzled, vanishing from sight at last behind the white rocks in the west. And then the moon—white, cold, changeable, ruling the night and measuring time. Besides these, the planets and countless hosts of stars; the green earth constantly pouring forth food for man from its bosom; the glowing blue sky at noon and the purple midnight heaven; the moving wind; the darkness that seemed to eat up and swallow the day.
Sun-gods.
Amun.
Now let us see how the ancient Egyptians personified these into gods, and what were the corresponding moral or spiritual ideas of which each nature-power spake to their souls. We shall find the mythology easier to remember and understand if we group the personifications round the natural objects whose aspects inspired them, instead of enumerating them in their proper order as first, second, and third class divinities. So for the present we will class them as Sun-gods, Sky-gods, Wind-gods, etc.; and we will begin with the sun, which among ancient Egyptians occupied thefirstplace, given, as we shall see, to the sky among our Aryan ancestors. The sun, indeed, not only occupies the most conspicuous position in Egyptian mythology, but is presented to us in so many characters and under so many aspects that he may be said to be the chief inspiration, the central object of worship, nothing else, indeed, coming near to his grandeur and his mystery. It is to be remarked, however—and this is a distinctive feature in the Egyptian system of worship—that themysteryof the sun’s disappearance during the night and his reappearance every morning is the point in the parable of the sun’s course to which the Egyptians attached the deepest significance, and to the personification of which they gave the most dignified place in their hierarchy of gods. Atum, or Amun, ‘the concealed one,’ was the name and title given to the sun after he had sunk, as they believed, into the under-world; and by this name they worshipped the concealed Creator of all things, the ‘Dweller in Eternity,’ who was before all, and into whose bosom all things, gods and men, would, they thought, return in the lapse of ages. The figure under which they represented this their oldest and most venerable deity was that of a man, sometimes human-headed and sometimes with theman’s face concealed under the head and horns of a ram—the word ‘ram’ meaning ‘concealment’ in the Egyptian language. The figure was coloured blue, the sacred colour of the Source of life. Two derivations are given for the name Amun. It means that which brings to light; but it also expresses the simple invitation ‘Come,’ and in this sense it appears to be connected with a sentence in the ritual, where Atum is represented as dwelling alone in the under-world in the ages before creation, and on ‘a day’ speaking the word ‘Come,’ when immediately Osiris and Horus (light and the physical sun) appeared before him in the under-world.
Osiris.
The aspect of the sun as it approached its mysterious setting exercised, perhaps, a still greater power over the thoughts of the Egyptians, and was personified by them in a deity, who, if not the most venerable, was the best loved of all their gods. Osiris was the name given from the earliest times to the kind declining sun, who appeared to men to veil his glory, and sheathe his dazzling beams in a lovely, many-coloured radiance, which soothed and gladdened the weary eyes and hearts of men, and enabled them to gaze fearlessly and lovingly on the dread orb from which during the day they had been obliged to turn their eyes. This was the god who loved men and dwelt among them, and for man’s sake permitted himself to be for a time quenched and defeated by the darkness—it was thus that the ancient people read the parable of the sun’s evening beauty and of his disappearance beneath the shades of night, amplifying it, as the needs of the human heart were more distinctly recognized, into a real foreshadowing of that glorious truth towards which the whole human race was yearning—thetruth of which these shows of nature were, indeed, speaking continually to all who could understand.The return of Osiris every evening into the under-world invested him also, for the ancient Egyptians, with the character of guardian and judge of souls who were supposed to accompany him on his mysterious journey, or at all events to be received and welcomed by him in Amenti (the realm of souls) when they arrived there. Osiris therefore filled a place both among the gods of the living and those of the dead. He was the link which connected the lives of the upper and the under worlds together, and made them one—the Lover and Dweller among men while yet in the body, and also the Judge and Ruler of the spirit-realm to which they were all bound. Two distinct personifications showed him in these characters. As the Dweller among men and the Sharer of the commonness and materiality of their earth-life, he was worshipped under the form of a bull—the Apis, in which shape his pure soul was believed constantly to haunt the earth, passing from one bull to that of another on the death of the animal, but never abandoning the land of his choice, or depriving his faithful worshippers of his visible presence among them. In his character of Judge of the dead, Osiris was represented as a mummied figure, of the sacred blue colour, carrying in one hand the rod of dominion, and in the other the emblem of life, and wearing on his head the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. In the judgment scenes he is seated on a throne at the end of the solemn hall of trial to which the soul has been arraigned, and in the centre of which stands the fateful balance where, in the presence of the evil accusing spirit and of the friendly funeral gods and genii who stand around, the heart of the man is weighed against a symbol of Divine Truth.
Next in interest to the setting sun is the personification under which the Egyptians worshipped the strong young sun, the victorious conqueror of the night, who each
Horus.
Ra.
morning appeared to rise triumphant from the blank realm of darkness in which the rays of yesterday’s sun had been quenched. They figured him as the eldest son of Osiris, Horus, the vigorous bright youth who loved his father, and avenged him, piercing with his spear-like ray the monster who had swallowed him up. Horus is represented as sailing up the eastern sky from the under-world in a boat, and slaying the serpent Night with a spear as he advances. The ultimate victory of life over death, of truth and goodness over falsehood and wrong, were the moral lessons which this parable of the sun’s rising read to the ancient Egyptians. The midday sun, ruling the heavens in unclouded glory, symbolized to them majesty and kingly authority, and was worshipped as a great and powerful god under the name of Ra, who was often identified with Amun and worshipped as Amun-Ra. This was especially the case at Thebes.
Ptah.
Though these four appearances may well seem to exhaust all the aspects under which the sun can be considered, there are still several other attributes belonging to him which the ancient Egyptians noticed and personified into other sun-gods. These we will enumerate more briefly. Ptah, a god of the first order, worshipped with great magnificence at Memphis, personified the life-giving power of the sun’s beams, and in this character was sometimes mixed up with Osiris, and in the ritual is spoken of also as the creative principle, the ‘word’ or ‘power’ by which the essential deity revealed itself in the visible works of creation. Another deity, Mandoo, appears to personify the fierce power of the sun’s rays at midday in summer, and was looked upon as the god of vengeance and destruction, a leader in war, answering in some measure, though not entirely, to the war-gods of other mythologies.
Sekhet-Pasht.
There were also Gom, Moui, and Kons, who are spoken of always as thesonsof the sun-god, those who reveal him or carry his messages to mankind, and in them therays, as distinguished from thediskof the sun, are apparently personified. The rays of the sun had also a feminine personification in Sekhet or Sekhet-Pasht, the goddess with the lioness’s head. To her several different and almost opposite qualities were attributed: as, indeed, an observer of the burning and enlightening rays of an Eastern sun might be doubtful whether to speak oftenest of the baleful fever-heat with which they infect the blood, or of their vivifying effects upon the germs of animal and vegetable life. Thus the lioness-goddess was at once feared and loved; dreaded at one moment as the instigator of fierce passions and unruly desires, invoked at another as the giver of joy, the source of all tender and elevating emotions. Her name, Pasht, means ‘the lioness,’ and was perhaps suggested by the fierceness of the sun’s rays, answering to the lion’s fierce strength or the angry light of his eyes. She was also called the ‘Lady of the Cave,’ suggesting something of mystery and concealment. Her chief worship was at Bubastis; but, judging from the frequency of her representations, must have been common throughout Egypt.
Thoth.
We will now take the second great light of the heavens, the moon, and consider the forms under which it was personified by the Egyptians. Rising and setting like the sun, and disappearing for regular periods, the moon was represented by a god, who, like the god of the setting sun, occupied a conspicuous position among the powers of the under-world, and was closely connected with thoughts of the existence of the soul after death, and the judgment pronounced on deeds done in the body. Thoth,‘the Word,’ the ‘Lord of Divine Words,’ was the title given to this deity; but though always making one in the great assemblage in the judgment-hall, his office towards the dead does not approach that of Osiris in dignity. He is not the judge, he is the recorder who stands before the balance with the dread account in his hand, while the trembling soul awaits the final sentence. His character is that of a just recorder, a speaker of true words; he wears the ostrich feather, the token of exact rigid evenness and impartiality, and yet he is represented as havingunevenarms, as if to hint that the cold white light of justice, untempered by the warmth of love, cannot thoroughly apprehend what it seems to take exact account of, leaving, after all, one side unembraced, unenlightened, as the moonlight casts dense shadows around the spots where its beams fall. The silent, watching, peering moon! Who has not at times felt an inkling of the parable which the ancient Egyptians told of her cold eye and her unwarming rays which enlighten chilly, and point out while they distort?
In spite of his uneven arms, however, Thoth (the dark moon and the light moon) was a great god, bearing sway in both worlds in accordance with his double character of the revealed and the hidden orb. On earth he is the great teacher, the inventor of letters, of arithmetic, and chronology; the ‘Lord of Words,’ the ‘Lover of Truth,’ the ‘Great and Great.’ Thoth was sometimes represented under the form of an ape; but most frequently with a human figure ibis-headed; the ibis, on account of his mingled black and white feathers, symbolizing the dark and the illumined side of the moon. Occasionally, however, he is drawn with a man’s face, and bearing the crescent moon on his head, surmounted by an ostrich feather; in his hand he holds his tablets and his recording pencil.
Maut andNeit.
The sky-divinities were all feminine among the Egyptians; representing the feminine principle of receptivity, the sky being regarded by them mainly as the abode, the home, of the sun and moon gods. The greatest of the sky-deities was Maut, or Mut, the mother, who represents the deep violet night sky, tenderly brooding over the hot exhausted earth when the day was over, and wooing all living things to rest, by stretching cool, protecting arms above and around them. The beginning of all things, abysmal calm, but above all, motherhood, were the metaphysical conceptions which the ancient Egyptians connected with the aspect of the brooding heavens at midnight, and which they worshipped as the oldest primeval goddess, Maut. The night sky, however, suggested another thought, and gave rise to yet another personification. Night does not bring only repose; animals and children sleep, but men wake and think; and, the strife of day being hushed, have leisure to look into their own minds, and listen to the still small voice that speaks within. Night was thus the parent of thought, the mother of wisdom, and a personification of the night sky was worshipped as the goddess of wisdom. She was named Neit, a word signifying ‘I came from myself,’ and she has some attributes in common with the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athene, whose warlike character she shared. Nu, another sky-goddess, who personifies the sunlit blue midday sky, may also on other accounts claim kinship with the patroness of Athens. She is the life-giver—the joy-inspirer. Clothed in the sacred colour which the life-giving river reflects, the midday sky was supposed to partake of the river’s vivifying qualities, and its goddess Nu is very frequently pictured as seated in the midst of the tree of life, giving of its fruits to faithful souls who have completedtheir time of purification and travel in the under-world, and are waiting for admission to the Land of Aoura, the last stage of preparation before they are received into the immediate presence of the great gods.
Saté andHathor.
Two other aspects of the sky were considered worthy of personification and worship. The morning sky, or perhaps the eastern half of the morning sky, which awaited the sun’s earliest beams, and which was called Saté, and honoured as the goddess of vigilance and endeavour, and the beautiful western sky at even, more lovely in Egypt than anywhere else, to the exaltation of which the Egyptians applied their prettiest titles and symbols. Hathor, the ‘Queen of Love,’ was the name they gave to their personification of the evening sky, speaking of her at once as the loving and loyal wife of the sun, who received the weary traveller, the battered conqueror, to rest on her bosom after his work was done, and the gentle household lady whose influence called men to their homes when labour was finished, and collected scattered families to enjoy the loveliest spectacle of the day, the sunset, in company. Hathor is represented as a figure with horns, bearing the sun’s disk between them, or sometimes carrying a little house or shrine upon her head.
Kneph.
The sky, however, with the ancient Egyptians, did not include theair; that again was personified in a masculine form, and regarded as a very great god, some of whose attributes appear to trench on those of Osiris, and Ptah; Kneph was the name given to the god who embodied the air, the living breath or spirit; and he was one of the divinities to whom a share in the work of creation was attributed. He is represented in a boat, moving over the face of the waters, and breathing life intothe newly created world. He was no doubt connected in the minds of pious Egyptians with thoughts of that breath of God by whose inspiration man became a living soul; but in his nature-aspect he perhaps especially personified the wind blowing over the Nile valley after the inundation, and seeming to bring back life to the world by drying up the water under which the new vegetation was hidden.
Isis.
The soil of the country thus breathed upon, which responded to the rays of Osiris and the breath of Kneph by pouring forth a continual supply of food for men, was naturally enough personified into a deity who claimed a large share of devotion, and was worshipped under many titles. Isis, the sister-wife of Osiris, was the name given to her, and so much was said of Isis, and so many stories told of her, that it appears at times as if, under that single name, the attributes of all the other goddesses were gathered up. Isis, was a personification, not of the receptive earth only, but of the feminine principle in nature wherever perceived, whether in the tender west that received the sun, or in the brooding midnight sky that invited to repose, or in the cherishing soil that drew in the sun’s warmth, and the breath of the wind, only to give them forth again changed into flowers and fruit and corn. Isis of ‘the ten thousand names’ the Greeks called her; and if we consider her as the embodiment of all that can be said of the feminine principle, we shall not be surprised at her many names, or at the difficulty of comprehending her nature. She was, above all else, however, the wife of Osiris and the mother of Horus, which certainly points to her being, or at all events to her having been originally, a sky-goddess; but then again she is spoken of as dressed in robes of many hues, which points to the changing and parti-coloured earth. Some of her attributes
Nephthys.
seem to connect her with the dark moon, especially the fact that her most important offices are towards the dead in the under-world, whose government she is spoken of as sharing with her husband Osiris. In pictures of the funeral procession she is drawn as standing at the head of the mummied body during its passage over the river that bounds the under-world, and in that position she represents the beginning; her younger sister, Nephthys, the end, stands at the foot of the still sleeping soul; the two goddesses thus summing up, with divinity at each end, the little span of mortal life. In the judgment-hall, Isis stands behind the throne of Osiris, drooping great protecting wings over him and it. This quality of protecting, of cherishing and defending, appears to be the spiritual conception worshipped under the form of the many-named goddess. Isis is constantly spoken of as the protector of her brother Osiris, and is drawn on the tomb with long drooping wings. She is also frequently represented as nursing Horus, the son who avenged his father, and in that character she wears the cow’s head, the cow being sacred to Isis, as was the bull to Osiris.
But when we have made this summary there is one thing which should also be borne in mind with regard to the religion of Egypt. Ancient Egypt, which appears at first sight such a single and united empire, was in reality (and in this respect it was something like the Chinese empire) deeply infected with a sort of feudalism, in virtue of which the different divisions (nomes) of the country did in reality constitute something like different states. And each state tried to preserve its sense of independence by having some special divinity or group of divinities which it held in peculiar honour. So that the Egyptian pantheon itself is infected by this republican spirit. Almost each single godis supreme somewhere; elsewhere he may be almost overlooked.
Animal-gods.
The origin of the strangely intimate connection between these Egyptian gods, and certain animals held to be sacred to them, and in some cases to be incarnations of them, is a very difficult question to determine. Two explanations are given by different writers. One is that the animal-worship was a remnant of the religion of an inferior race who inhabited Egypt in times far back, and who were conquered but not exterminated by immigrants from Asia, who brought a higher civilization and a more spiritual religion with them, which, however, did not actually supersede the old, but incorporated some of its baser elements into itself. Other writers look upon the animal-worship as but another form of the unending parable from nature, which, as we have seen, pervades the whole Egyptian mythology. The animals, according to this view, being not less than the nature-gods worshipped as revelations of a divine order, manifesting itself through the many appearances of the outside world; their obedient following of the laws imposed on their natures through instinct making them better witnesses to the Divine Will than self-willed, disobedient man was found to be.
This is one of the problems which must be left to be determined by further researches into unwritten history, or perhaps by a fuller understanding of Egyptian symbols. That a great deal of symbolical teaching was wrapped up in the Egyptians’ worship of animals may be gathered by the lesson which they drew from the natural history of the sacred beetle, whose habit of burying in the sand of the desert a ball of clay, full of eggs, which in due course of time changed into chrysalises and then into winged beetles, furnished them with their favourite emblem of theresurrection of the body and the continued life of the soul through the apparent death-sleep—an emblem which was wanting to no temple, and without which no body was ever buried. Thinking of this, we must allow that their eyes were not shut to the teaching of the ‘visible things’ which in the ages of darkness yet spoke a message from God.
We have now gone over the most important of the Egyptian gods, connecting them with the natural appearances which seem to have inspired them, so as to give the clue to a comparison with the nature-gods of the Aryans, of which we shall speak in the next chapter. There were, of course, other objects of worship, not so easily classed, among which we ought to mention Hapi, the personification of the river Nile; Sothis, the dog-star, connected with Isis; and two more of the funeral gods—Anubis, who in his nature-aspect may be possibly another personification of air and wind, and who is always spoken of as the friend and guardian of pure souls, and represented at the death-bed sometimes in the shape of a human-headed bird as helping the new-born soul to escape from the body; and Thmei, the goddess of Truth and Justice, who introduces the soul into the hall of judgment. The evil powers recognized among the ancient Egyptians were principally embodiments of darkness and of the waste of the desert, and do not appear to have had any distinct conception of moral evil associated with them. They are, however, spoken of in the book of the dead as enemies of the soul, who endeavour to delude it and lead it out of its way on its journey across the desert to the abode of the gods. Amenti was no doubt the desert, but not only the sunlit desert the Egyptians could overlook from their western hills—it included the unknown world beyond and underneath, to which they supposed the sun to go when he sank below the horizon,and where, following in his track, the shades trooped when they had left their bodies. The story of the trials and combats of the soul on its journey through Amenti to the judgment-hall, and its reception by the gods, is written in the most ancient and sacred of Egyptian books, the Ritual, or Book of the Dead, which has been translated into French by M. de Rougé, and later by M. Pierret, and into English by Dr. Birch. The English translation is to be found in the Appendix to the fifth volume of Bunsen’sEgypt’s Place in History.
Chaldæanreligion.
The mythologies of the other uninspired Semitic nations resemble the Egyptian in the main element of being personifications of the powers of nature. The Chaldæans directed their worship chiefly towards the heavenly bodies as did the ancient Egyptians, but not exclusively. Their principal deities were arranged in triads of greater and less dignity; nearly all the members of these were personifications of the heavens or the heavenly bodies. The first triad comprised Ana, the heavens or the hidden sun, Father of the gods, Lord of Darkness, Ruler of a far-off city, Lord of Spirits. By these titles, suggestive of some of the attributes and offices towards the dead, attributed by the Egyptians to Atum and Osiris, was the first member of their first order of gods addressed by the Chaldæans. Next in order came Bil, also a sun-god: the Ruler, the Lord, the Source of kingly power, and the patron and image of the earthly king. His name has the same signification as Baal, and he personifies the same aspect of nature, the sun ruling in the heavens, whose worship was so widely diffused among all the people with whom the Israelites came in contact. The third member of the first triad was Hoa or Ea, who personified apparently the earth: Lord of the abyss, Lordof the great deep, the intelligent Guide, the intelligent Fish, the Lord of the Understanding, are some of his titles, and appear to reveal a conception somewhat answering to that of Thoth. His symbol was a serpent, and he was represented with a fish’s head, which connects him with the Philistine’s god Dagon. The second triad comprised Sin, or Urki, a moon-god, worshipped at Ur, Abraham’s city—his second name Urki, means ‘the watcher,’ and has the same root as the Hebrew name for ‘angel’—San, the disk of the sun; and Vul, the air. Beneath these deities in dignity, or rather perhaps in distance, came the five planets, each representing some attribute or aspect of the deity, or rather being itself a portion of deity endowed with a special characteristic, and regarded as likely to be propitious to men from being less perfect and less remote than the greater gods. These planetary gods were called—Nebo (Mercury), the lover of light; Ishtar (Venus), the mother of the gods; Nergal (Mars), the great hero; Bel Merodach (Jupiter), the ruler, the judge; Nin (Saturn), the god of strength. To these gods the chief worship of the Assyrians was paid, and it was their majesty and strength, typifying that of the earthly king, which Assyrian architects personified in the winged, man-headed bulls and lions with examples of which we are familiar. The gods of the Canaanite nations, Moloch, Baal, Chemosh, Baal-Zebub, and Thammuz, were all of them personifications of the sun or of the sun’s rays, considered under one aspect or another; the cruel gods, to whom human sacrifices were offered, representing the strong, fierce summer sun, and the gentle Thammuz being typical of the softer light of morning and of early spring, which is killed by the fierce heat of midday and midsummer, and mourned for by the earth till his return in the evening and in autumn. Ashtoreth, thehorned queen, symbolized by trees and worshipped in groves, is the moon and also the evening star; but, like Isis, she seems to gather up in herself the worship of the feminine principle in nature. The Canaanites represented their gods in the temples by symbols instead of by sculptured figures. An upright stone, either an aerolite or a precious stone (as in the case of the great emerald kept in the shrine of the Temple of Baal-Melcarth at Tyre), symbolized the sun and the masculine element in nature; while the feminine element was figured under the semblance of a grove of trees, the Ashara, sometimes apparently a grove outside the temple, and sometimes a mimic grove kept within.
There was, however, behind and beyond all these, another and perhaps a more ancient and more metaphysical conception of God worshipped by all the Semitic peoples of Asia. His name, Il or El, appears to have been for Chaldæans, Assyrians, Canaanites, and for the wandering tribes of the desert, including the progenitors of the chosen people, the generic name for God; and his worship was limited to a distant awful recognition, unprofaned by the rites and sacrifices wherein the nature-gods were approached. Il became a concealed, distant deity, too far off for worship, and too great to be touched by the concerns of men, among those nations with whom the outside aspects of nature grew to be concealers instead of revealers of the Divine; while to the chosen people the name acquired ever new significance, as the voice of inspiration unfolded the attributes of the Eternal Father to His children.
This sketch of the heathen mythology of the Shemites is, it must be owned, very barren in incident and character. It presents, indeed, no more than a shadowy hierarchy of gods and heroes, through whose thin personalities the shapes ofnatural objects loom with obtrusive clearness. They may serve, however, as finger-posts to point the way through the mazes of more complex, full-grown myths, and it must also be remembered that we have not touched upon the later more ornamented stories of the Egyptian gods, such as that of the death and dismemberment of Osiris by his enemy Typhon, and the recovery of his body, and his return to life through the instrumentality of Isis and Horus.
Nature-worship.
Thatmorning speech of Belarius (inCymbeline) might serve as an illustration of a primitive religion, a nature-religion in its simplest garb:
‘Stoop, boys: this gateInstructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows youTo morning’s holy office: the gates of monarchsAre arched so high, that giants may jet throughAnd keep their impious turbans on, withoutGood-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!We house i’ the rock, yet use thee not so hardlyAs prouder livers do.’
‘Stoop, boys: this gateInstructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows youTo morning’s holy office: the gates of monarchsAre arched so high, that giants may jet throughAnd keep their impious turbans on, withoutGood-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!We house i’ the rock, yet use thee not so hardlyAs prouder livers do.’
‘Stoop, boys: this gateInstructs you how to adore the heavens, and bows youTo morning’s holy office: the gates of monarchsAre arched so high, that giants may jet throughAnd keep their impious turbans on, withoutGood-morrow to the sun. Hail, thou fair heaven!We house i’ the rock, yet use thee not so hardlyAs prouder livers do.’
Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of disappointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of mountain life, different altogether from our life, free alike from its cares and temptations and moral responsibilities. Belarius gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and fearlessly pays his morning orisons. ‘Hail, thou fair heaven!’ There is no sense here of sin, humility, self-reproach. And in this respect—taking this for the moment as the type of an Aryan religion—how strongly it contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers! Is thisthe voice of natural as opposed to inspired religion? Not altogether; for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear—awe in the higher religion, fear in the lower—than ever belonged to the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions of Egypt and Assyria; and it will be remembered that, when speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan races, we took occasion to say that it may very well have been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their religious system; for among all the Semitic people, whether in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency—if no more—towards religious thought, and towards thoughts of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian mythology.
But the Aryans grew up and formed themselves into nations, and developed the germs of their religion apart from external influence, and in a land which from the earliest times had belonged to them alone. Their character, their religion, their national life, were their own; and though in after-times these went through distinctive modifications, when the stems of nations that we know, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and the rest, grew out of the Aryan stock, they yet bore amid these changes the memory of a common ancestry. The land in which they dwelt was favourable to the growth of the imaginative faculties, and to that lightness and brightness of nature which afterwards so distinguished the many-minded Greeks, rather than to the slow, brooding character of the Eastern mind. There, down a hundred hillsides and along a hundred valleys trickled the rivulets whose waters were hurrying to swell the streams of the Oxus and the Jaxartes. And each hill and valley had its separate community, joined, indeed, by language and custom to thecommon stock, but yet living a separate simple life in its own home, which had, one might almost say, its individual sun and sky as well as hill and river. No doubt in such a land innumerable local legends and beliefs sprang up, and these, though lost to us now, had their effects upon the changes which among the many branches of the race the Aryan mythology underwent—a mythology which before all others is remarkable for the endless diversity of its legends, for the infinite rainbow-tints into which its essential thoughts are broken.