William Matthew Flinders Petrie - Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt

W. M. FLINDERS PETRIE

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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PREFACE

T HESE lectures, though based on the literature of the Egyptians, cover also some general considerations which are equally applicable to the Religion and Conscience of other nations. They are intended as an attempt to indicate lines of study, and to observe what actually is the construction of human thought, as shown in some of the oldest and most continuous records. It may be said that the relation of these to certain standard views in ethics and religion should have been treated; and that some more logical and systematic ideas are needed to start from. But my object was to see what really is, and not to try to fit that in with any theories, however highly supported, or any views, however orthodox. Treating the divagations of human thought as if they must have been systematic and logical has been the bane of all theories; and many a house of cards has been built to match one single fact or principle which has been grasped. I do not touch the larger questions here, but only deal with what we can readily see and prove; and in this place I no more attempt to enquire what lies behind the growth of ideas here traced, than the biologist enquires what lies behind the comparison and nature of the structures which he unravels. We each try to see what actually exists; usually a safe and needful course before attempting to account for its results or its causes.

I need hardly say that these are mere sketches, intended to suggest a mode of looking at the subject; and any one who might expect from the title to find a full account of matters so vast and complex, will be disarmed when he sees what a mere note-book this volume is.

The Religion lectures are arranged as first used; but the Conscience lectures seemed better to be here re-arranged into three, rather than two as originally delivered. The final notes deal with matters too lengthy for the scale of the lectures.

CONTENTS

L ECTURE I

L ECTURE II

L ECTURE III

L ECTURE IV

L ECTURE V

L ECTURE VI

L ECTURE VII

N OTE A

N OTE B

N OTE C

N OTE D

ABBREVIATIONS

M. E. E. Maspero, tudes de Mythologie et d'Archologie Egyptienne, part ii.

M. H. A. Maspero, Histoire Ancienne, tom, i., 1894.

M. Dend. Mariette, Denderah texte.

Rec. Recueil Egyptien (Maspero).

LECTURE I

THE HISTORICAL CONDITIONS OF RELIGIONS

1. B EFORE considering the Egyptian religion, it will be desirable to look briefly at the general laws which belong to similar cases of a mixture of religions and of races, and to observe what is to be looked for in examining this case in particular. It may seem strange to say that we are greatly in the dark about a religion which has left us the most ample remains of any in the ancient world; but in this case we have enough material to begin to estimate our own ignorance and to realize how much is required before we can understand the mind of another race. That we have in Egypt to deal with a continuous record of four thousand years before Christianity, and an unknown age before that record, makes our difficulties the greater, but affords us an unparalleled spectacle of religious history and development. And that we have in Egypt to deal with at least four distinguishable races in the earliest history, and a dozen subsequent mixtures of race during recorded history, again makes our difficulties the greater, but gives a fuller example of such a history of a religion than can be found elsewhere.

Before we try to understand another mindand without such understanding we can never realize another religionwe must quit our present point of view; we must try to see how very different the minds of most other peoples have been from our own at present. We must feel that the greater part of mankind has had systems of language which would be wholly incapable of expressing our ideas; systems of religion which would be a horror to us; ideas of gods which would be monstrous to us; their ways of life would make them flee into the fields from our dwellings; their systems of propriety would bring them into the police court; and their systems of morality would land them at once in the law court. We must set aside all the framework of mind and thought and habit in which we have been formed, and try to leave our ideas free to re-crystallize in a different system. Of course we cannot do all this, we cannot do a tenth of it; but if we can do a very little we shall at least feel how different the world must look, how different the motives must be, among people of another race, another faith, another standard, and another order of things. Close practical contact with a very different race is the best guide to seeing how far apart the organizations of thought are on different bases. Learn to respect, and love, and be intimate with, a man of a far distant stage of life, and you see then how very deep down is the wide platform of elemental feeling and thought which you have together in common; and you begin to perceive how much you have each built on that platform, which isolates you from one another, and makes the point of view of each incomprehensible to the other.

2. In dealing with religion the first question is, What is religion? To say it is the ideas about a divinity is to limit it at once to theology, which is only a branch of it. And what is a divinity? If it be anything that is worshipped, we are left at once with every visible object included, as there is perhaps no thing or no being that has not been worshipped at some time. The only view which will cover the extremely various instances is that religion is belief concerning any ideas which cannot be immediately verified by the physical senses. The ideas themselves do not constitute religion; but the act of belief in what is not provable to the senses is the very basis and limiting boundary of all religions.

The idea of animism which constitutes so large a part of most religions is expressly an explanation of phenomena by bringing in a belief in that which is unprovable. The ideas of primitive medicine, which are incorporated so strongly in savage religion, again are based on beliefs about the unprovable; and as the limits of proof expand by real knowledge, so the limits of religion in medicine contract.

That the idea of personal morality is not an integral part of most religions, is obvious to anyone who has had a practical view of them. Right and wrong do not enter into the circle of religious ideas to most races. The piety of the Carthaginian before Moloch, of the Roman as he sent his captives from the Capitol to be slaughtered in the Colosseum, of Louis XI. as he confided his duplicities to the Virgins in his hat-band, or of Louis XV. as he prayed in the Parc-aux-Cerfs, show what the brigand who pays for his masses, or the Arab who swindles in the intervals of his prayers, prove in the present daythat the firmest religious beliefs have no necessary connection with the idea of moral action. In these instances, be it observed, we are not concerned with differences between profession and practice, but with simultaneous acts of the same mind; deeply religious on one side, but destitute of any sense of incongruity between the religion and the action which is recognizedly wrong on the other side. Another principle of many, perhaps most religions, is that they are public and not private; they are collective and not individual. They are concerned with ceremonies, with common action, with the relation of man to man; the initiation, the witch doctor, the tabu, are their prominent parts. The ideal of a purely personal religion, irrespective of any other human being, and inextricably interwoven with the highest sense of right and wrong, is wholly different from what we have to review in the great mass of mankind, and is a growth of which the beginning may be seen but very rarely in ancient times. With that, therefore, we are not concerned at present.