Waverley Books - Ancient Egypt Myth and History: The religion, myths, and gods of ancient Egypt explained against the background of its history

This book is divided into two parts. In Part One, the myths and legends of ancient Egypt are embraced in an historical narrative that begins with the rise of the great civilisation of the Nile and ends with the Graeco-Roman age. The principal gods are dealt with chiefly at the various periods in which they came into prominence, while the legends are so arranged as to throw light on the beliefs and manners and customs of the ancient people. Metrical renderings are given of those representative folk songs and poems as can be appreciated in the modern world.

Part Two is a comprehensive dictionary of Egyptology, the study of ancient Egypt in all its aspects, and it contains its own Introduction on page 307.

Egyptian mythology has a highly complex character and cannot be considered apart from its racial and historical aspects. The Egyptians were, as a Hebrew prophet declared, a mingled people, and this view has been confirmed by ethnological research. The process of racial fusion begun in the Delta at the dawn of history, wrote Elliot Smith, spread through the whole land of Egypt. In localities the early Nilotic inhabitants accepted the religious beliefs of settlers and fused these with their own. They also clung tenaciously to the crude and primitive tribal beliefs of their remote ancestors and never abandoned an archaic belief, even when they acquired new and more enlightened ideas. They accepted myths literally and regarded with great sanctity ancient ceremonies and usages. They even showed a tendency to increase rather than reduce the number of their gods and goddesses by symbolising their attributes. As a result, we find it necessary to deal with a bewildering number of gods and a confused mass of beliefs, many of which are obscure and contradictory. But the average Egyptian was never dismayed by inconsistencies in religious matters he seemed rather to be fascinated by them.

There was, strictly speaking, no orthodox creed in Egypt. Each provincial centre had its own distinctive theological system, and the religion of an individual appears to have depended mainly on his habits of life. The Egyptian, as Professor Wiedemann wrote, never attempted to systematise his concepts of the different divinities into a homogeneous religion. It is open to us to speak of the religious ideas of the Egyptians, but not of an Egyptian religion.

The differing character of some of the ancient myths is dealt with in this Introduction so as to simplify the study of a difficult but extremely fascinating subject. It is shown that one section of the people recognised a Creator like Ptah, who created himself and shaped his limbs before he created the universe, while another section perpetuated the idea of a Creatrix, a female creator, who give birth to all things. At the dawn of history these rival concepts existed side by side, and they were perpetuated until the end. It is evident, too, that the theologies that were based on these fundamental ideas had undergone, before the fusion of peoples occurred, a sufficiently prolonged process of separate development to give them a racial or, at any rate, a geographical significance. This much is suggested by the differing ideas that obtained regarding the world. One section, for instance, conceived of a land surrounded by sky-supporting mountains, peopled by gods and giants, around which the sun ass galloped to escape the night serpent. Another section believed that the world was embraced by the great circle ocean and that the Nile flowed from sea to sea. A third concept was of a heavenly and an underground Nile. There were also two paradises the Osirian and the Ra (sun gods). Osiris judged men according to their deeds. He was an agricultural deity, and the early system of Egyptian ethics seems to have had its origin in the experiences enshrined in the text: Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Admission to the paradise of the sun cult was secured, on the other hand, by the repetition of magic formulae. Different beliefs also obtained regarding the mummy. In the Book of the Dead, it would appear that the preservation of the body was necessary for the continued existence of the soul. Herodotus, however, was informed that after a period of three thousand years the soul returned to animate the dead frame, and this belief in transmigration of souls is illustrated in the Anpu-Bata story (Chapter 4), and is connected with a somewhat similar concept that the soul of a father passed to a son, who thus became the image of his sire, as Horus was of Osiris, and husband of his mother.

Of special interest in this connection are the various forms of the archaic chaos-egg myth associated with the gods Ptah, Khnum, Geb, Osiris and Ra. As the European giant hides his soul in the egg, which is within the duck, which is within the fish, which is within the deer, and so on, and Bata hides his soul in the blossom, the bull and the tree before he becomes husband of his mother, so does Osiris hide his essence in the shrine of Amun, while his manifestations include a tree, the Apis bull, the boar, the goose and the Oxyrhynchus fish. Similarly, when Seth was slain he became a raring serpent, a hippopotamus, a crocodile or a boar. The souls of Ra, Ptah and Khnum are in the chaos egg like two of the prominent Hindu and Chinese gods. Other Egyptian deities who are hidden include Amun, Sokar and Neith. This persistent myth, which appears to have been associated with belief in the transmigration of souls, may be traced even in Akhenatens religion. We have Shu [atmosphere god] in his Aten [sun disc] and a reference in the famous hymn to the air of life in the egg. There can be little doubt that the transmigration theory prevailed at certain periods and in certain localities in ancient Egypt and that the statement made by Herodotus was well founded, despite attempts to discredit it.

It is shown that the concept of a Creator was associated with that form of earth, air and water worship that was perpetuated at Memphis, where the presiding god was the hammer god Ptah, who resembles the Chinese Pan-ku, Indra of the Aryans, Tarku and Sutekh of Asia Minor, Heracles, Thor, etc. The Creatrix, on the other hand, was more closely associated with lunar, earth and water worship and appears to have been the principal goddess of the Mediterranean race, which spread into Asia Minor and Europe. In Scotland, for instance, as is shown, she is called Cailleach Bheur and, like other archaic tribal deities and ghosts, she was the enemy of humankind. Similarly, the Egyptian goddesses Sekhmet and Hathor were destroyers and Tefnut was goddess of plagues. Even the sun god Ra produced calamity after your [Osiriss] heart, as one of the late temple chants puts it.

In the chapter dealing with animal worship (Chapter 5), the racial aspect of early beliefs, which were connected with fixed and definite ceremonies, is illustrated in the Horus-Seth myth. The black pig was Seth (the devil) in Egypt. Pork was taboo, and the swineherd was regarded as an abomination and not allowed to enter temples. The Gauls and Achaeans, on the other hand, honoured the swineherd and ate pork freely, while in the Teutonic Valhal and the Celtic (Irish) paradise, swines flesh was the reward of heroes. In Scotland, however, the ancient prejudice against pork exists in some places even today, and the devil is the black pig. In his