WE have now completed our preliminary survey of the nature and origin of Gods in general. We have seen how men first came to believe in the objective existence of these powerful and invisible beings, how they learnt to invest them with majestic attributes, and how they grew to worship them under the various forms of mummies or boulders, stone or wooden idols, trees or stumps, wells, rivers, and fountains. In short, we have briefly arrived at the origin of Polytheism. We have now to go on to our second question—How from the belief in many gods did men progress to the belief in one single God, the creator and upholder of all things? Our task is now to reconstruct the origin of Monotheism.

But Monotheism bases itself entirely upon the great God of the Hebrews. To him, therefore, we must next address ourselves. Is he too resoluble, as I hinted before, into a Sacred Stone, the monument and representative of some prehistoric chieftain? Can we trace the origin of the Deity of Christendom till we find him at last in a forgotten Semitic ghost of the earliest period?

The chief Hebrew god Jahweh, when we first catch a passing glimpse of his primitive worship by his own people, was but one among a number of competing deities, mostly, it would appear, embodied by their votaries in the visible form of stone or wooden pillars, and adored by a small group of loosely-connected tribes among the mountain region in the southwest of Syria. The confederacy among 155whom he dwelt knew themselves as the Sons of Israel; they regarded Jahweh as their principal god, much as the Greeks did Zeus, or the early Teutons their national hero Woden. But a universal tradition among them bore witness to the fact that they had once lived in a subject condition in Egypt, the house of bondage, and that their god Jahweh had been instrumental in leading them thence into the rugged land they inhabited throughout the whole historical period, between the valley of Jordan and the Mediterranean coast. So consistent and so definite was this traditional belief that we can hardly regard it otherwise than as enclosing a kernel of truth; and not only do Kuenen and other Semitic scholars of the present day admit it as genuine, but the Egyptologists also seem generally to allow its substantial accuracy and full accord with hieroglyphic literature. This sojourn in Egypt cannot have failed to influence to some extent the Semitic strangers: therefore I shall begin my quest of the Hebrew god among the Egyptian monuments. Admitting that he was essentially in all respects a deity of the true Semitic pattern, I think it will do us good to learn a little beforehand about the people among whom his votaries dwelt so long, especially as the history of the Egyptian cults affords us perhaps the best historical example of the growth and development of a great national religion.

A peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind to the evolution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else in the world can we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism and philosophic theology. There are savage cults, it is true, which show us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds which show us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single supreme Ruler of the Cosmos. But there is no other 156religious system known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break, the whole evolutionary movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually expanded and etherealised into the later. The origin of the other great historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable: in Egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate goal of pure monotheism.

I would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history by saying, once for all, that while I make no pretensions to special Egyptological knowledge, I must nevertheless dissent on general anthropological grounds from the attitude taken up by Mr. Le Page Renouf in his Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt. That learned writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century behind its time. It is written as though the doctrine of evolution had never been promulgated; and every page contains glaring contradictions of the most elementary principles of human development. Mr. Renouf still adheres to the discredited ideas that polytheism grew out of an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of adoration are “symbolical” in origin; and that “the sublimer portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of development or elimination from the grosser.” Such theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which Mr. Renouf brings forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. A plain survey of the Egyptian monuments in the Nile valley, and of the known facts about Egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from the warping influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide anthropological enquiry, to precisely opposite and more probable conclusions. For it must be carefully borne in mind 157that on these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be implicitly and unhesitatingly accepted. The religion of Egypt, like the religion of Jud忙a or the religion of Hawaii, must be judged, not in isolation, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been found so disastrous in the case of the Semitic and the Aryan cults, must be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless error. The key to the origin of the Egyptian faith is to be found, not in the late philosophising glosses quoted by M. de Roug茅 and his English disciple, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of existing African savages.

Looked at from this point of view, then—the evolutionary point of view—nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early Egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations, ancestor-worship and totemism.

I will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to consider by far the earliest, and infinitely the most important. And I may add that it is also, to judge by the Egyptian evidence alone, both the element which underlies the whole religious conceptions of the Nile valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon, including Osiris, Ptah, Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as many of their correlative goddesses. There is not, in fact, any great ethnical religion on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in which the basal importance of the Dead Man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient cult of Pharaohnic Egypt.

The Egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. It is impossible for a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty shade of the desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent the streets of Thebes and Memphis. The commonest object of worship on all the monuments of Nile is beyond doubt the Mummy: sometimes the private mummy of an ancestor 158or kinsman, sometimes the greater deified mummies of immemorial antiquity, blended in the later syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities, but represented to the very last in all ages of art—on the shattered Rameseum at Thebes or the Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken Denderah—as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. If ever there was a country where the Worship of the Dead was pushed to an extreme, that country was distinctly and decisively Egypt.

“The oldest sculptures show us no acts of adoration or of sacrifice,” says Mr. Loftie, “except those of worship at the shrine of a deceased ancestor or relative.” This is fully in keeping with what we know of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and with the immense importance always attached to the preservation of the mummy intact throughout the whole long course of Egyptian history. The Egyptian, in spite of his high civilisation, remained always at the first or corpse-preserving stage of custom as regards the dead. To him, therefore, the life after death was far more serious than the life on earth: he realised it so fully that he made endless preparations for it during his days above, and built himself a tomb as an eternal mansion. The grave was a place of abode, where the mummy was to pass the greater part of his existence; and even in the case of private persons (like that famous Tih whose painted sepulchre at Sakkarah every tourist to Cairo makes a point of visiting) it was sumptuously decorated with painting and sculpture. In the mortuary chambers or chapels attached to the tombs, the relations of the deceased and the priests of the cemetery celebrated on certain fixed dates various ceremonies in honour of the dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the mummy within. “The tables of offerings, which no doubt formed part of the furniture of the chambers, are depicted on the walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits, bread, and wine which had to be presented in kind.” These parentalia undoubtedly formed the main feature of the practical religion 159of early Egypt, as exhibited to us on all the monuments except the late tomb-caves of royal personages, devoted to the worship of the equally mummified great gods.

The Egyptian tomb was usually a survival of the cave artificially imitated. The outer chamber, in which the ceremonies of the offertory took place, was the only part accessible, after the interment had been completed, to the feet of survivors. The mummy itself, concealed in its sarcophagus, lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by the end of a corridor often containing statues or idols of the deceased. These idols, says M. Maspero, were indefinitely multiplied, in case the mummy itself should be accidentally destroyed, in order that the Ka (the ghost or double) might find a safe dwelling-place. Compare the numerous little images placed upon the grave by the Coast Negroes. It was the outer chamber, however, that sheltered the stele or pillar which bore the epitaph, as well as the altar or table for offerings, the smoke from which was conveyed to the statues in the corridor through a small aperture in the wall of partition. Down the well beyond, the mummy in person reposed, in its eternal dwelling-place, free from all chance of violation or outrage. “The greatest importance,” says Mr. Renouf, “was attached to the permanence of the tomb, to the continuance of the religious ceremonies, and to the prayers of passers-by.” Again, “there is a very common formula stating that the person who raised the tablet ‘made it as a memorial to his fathers who are in the nether world, built up what he found was imperfect, and renewed what was found out of repair.’” In the inscription on one of the great tombs at Beni-H芒ssan the founder says: “I made to flourish the name of my father, and I built chapels for his ka [or ghost]. I caused statues to be conveyed to the holy dwelling, and distributed to them their offerings in pure gifts. I instituted the officiating priest, to whom I gave donations in land and presents. I ordered funeral offerings for all the feasts of the nether world [which are then enumerated 160at considerable length]. If it happen that the priest or any other cease to do this, may he not exist, and may his son not sit in his seat.” All this is highly instructive from the point of view of the origin of priesthood.

How long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is shown by Mr. Renouf himself in one instructive passage. The kings who built the Pyramids in the Early Empire endowed a priestly office for the purpose of celebrating the periodical rites of offering to their ghosts or mummies. Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a certain person who lived under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before his time. We have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors who filled the same office immediately after Khufu’s death. So that in this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch continued for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “If in the case of private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we find no proof of so persistent a veneration, that is because in ordinary tombs the ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children or descendants of the deceased person. Often, at the end of a few generations, either through negligence, removals, ruin, or extinction of the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out altogether.”

For this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense importance was attached by the Egyptians to the begetting of a son who should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed by others after him. The duty of undertaking these rites is thoroughly insisted upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while on the other hand, the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the most terrible of all ancient Egyptian imprecations. “Many centuries after the construction of a tomb, Egyptian travellers have left a record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, 161of the abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the funeral formula.” In fact, the whole practical religion of the ordinary Egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of the ka—the genii, manes, or lares of the departed.

If even the common herd were thus carefully embalmed—if even the lesser functionaries of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs, daintily painted and exquisitely sculptured—it might readily be believed that the great kings of the mighty conquering dynasties themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special splendour and becoming magnificence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt, their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in Upper Egypt they are artificial caves. The dreary desert district west of the Nile and south of Cairo consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of Memphis—a vast and mouldering city of the dead—whose chief memorials are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the desecrated tombs piled up for the kings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. There, under stone tumuli of enormous size,—barrows or cairns more carefully constructed,—the Pharaohs of the Old Empire reposed, in peace in sepulchres unmarked by any emblems of the mystic gods or sacred beasts of later imagination. But still more significant and infinitely more beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, belonging to the great monarchs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development. Those magnificent subterranean halls form in the truest and most literal sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions for the officers 162of state, still destined to attend upon their sovereign in the nether world. Some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal palaces of Medinet-H芒bu or the corridors of Luxor.

M. Mariette has further shown that the huge Theban temples which skirt in long line the edge of the desert near the Valley of Tombs were really cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and worshipped. Thus the Rameseum was the mastabah or mortuary chapel for the tomb and ghost of Rameses II.; the temple of Medinet-H芒bu fulfilled the same purpose for Rameses III.; the temple of Kurneh for Rameses I.; and so forth throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins, with their correlated group of subterranean excavations.

At any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial person to examine the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the Nile without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central object of worship—that the entire practical religion of the people was based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal offerings to the manes of ancestors. Everything in Egypt points to this one conclusion. Even the great sacred ritual is the Book of the Dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that they were really enjoying everlasting life. Mors janua vitae is the short summing-up of Egyptian religious notions. Death was the great beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship.

Moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of the religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship 163to God-Worship. Thus, in the tombs of Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire (Fifth Dynasty), all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. The quotations from (or anticipations of) the Book of the Dead are few and short. The great gods are rarely alluded to. Again, in the grottos of Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty) the paintings mostly represent scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities are still absent. The doctrine of rewards and punishments remains as yet comparatively in abeyance. It is only at the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes (of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire chapters of the Book of the Dead are transcribed at length, and the walls are covered with “a whole army of grotesque and fantastic divinities.”

“But the Egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods, distinct from their ancestors—national, or local, or common gods—whose names and figures have come down to us inscribed upon all the monuments.” Quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors—gods whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. But it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various ruling families or dominant cities; and in one or two of the most important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.

I will take, to begin with, one typical example. There is no single god in the Egyptian pantheon more important or more universally diffused than Osiris. In later forms of the national religion, he is elevated into the judge of the departed and king of the nether world: to be “justified by Osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “a justified Osiris,” is the prayer of every corpse as set forth in his funeral 164inscription; and identification with Osiris is looked upon as the reward of all the happy and faithful dead. Now Osiris, in every one of his representations and modes, is simply—a Mummy. His myth, to be sure, assumed at last immense proportions; and his relations with Isis and Horus form the centre of an endless series of irreconcilable tales, repeated over and over again in art and literature. If we took mythology as our guide, instead of the monuments, we should be tempted to give him far other origins. He is identified often with other gods, especially with Amen; and the disentanglement of his personality in the monuments of the newer empire, when Ra, the sun-god, got mixed up inextricably with so many other deities, is particularly difficult. But if we neglect these later complications of a very ancient cult, and go back to the simplest origin of Egyptian history and religion, we shall, I think, see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental symbolism into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to be—a revered and worshipped Mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the town or little district of This by Abydos.

I do not deny that in later ages Osiris became much more than this. Nor do I deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and pious dead. Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was identified in the end with an annual slain Corn-God. I will even allow that there may have been more than one original Osiris—that the word may even at first have been generic, not specific. But I still maintain that the evidence shows us the great and principal Osiris of all as a Dead Chief of Abydos.

We must remember that in Egypt alone history goes back to an immense antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced civilisation and a developed picture-writing. Therefore the very oldest known state of Egypt 165necessarily presupposes a vast anterior era of slow growth in concentration and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower Egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the bank of the Nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and each worshipping its own local deceased potentates. The sheikh of the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless Pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses. Each tribe had also its special totem, about which I shall have a little more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later Egyptian Zoolatry and the animal-headed deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion bore marked traces of this original tribal form; the great multiplicity of Egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption of so many of them, after the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. The local gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially worshipped in their original sites. Thus the ithyphallic Amen-Khem was specially worshipped at Thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency upon every temple; Apis was peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at Bubastis; Anubis at Sekhem; Neith at Sais; Ra at Heliopolis; and Osiris himself at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.

Even Egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a state of things, for it asserts that before the time of Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. In other words, it was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines which reigned in the various provinces of the Nile valley before the unification.

In the case of Osiris, the indications which lead us in this direction are almost irresistible. It is all but certain that Osiris was originally a local god of This or Thinis, a 166village near Abydos, where a huge mound of rubbish still marks the site of the great deity’s resting-place. The latter town is described in the Harris papyrus as Abud, the hand of Osiris; and in the monuments which still remain at that site, Osiris is everywhere the chief deity represented, to whom kings and priests present appropriate offerings. But it is a significant fact that Menes, the founder of the united monarchy, was born at the same place; and this suggests the probability that Osiris may have been the most sacred and most venerated of Menes’s ancestors. The suggestion derives further weight from the fact that Osiris is invariably represented as a mummy, and that he wears a peculiar head-dress or cap of office, the same as that which was used in historical times as the crown of Upper Egypt. He also holds in his hands the crook and scourge which are the marks of kingly office—the crook to lead his own people like a shepherd, the scourge to punish evil-doers and to ward off enemies. His image is therefore nothing more nor less than the image of a Mummied King. Sometimes, too, he wears in addition the regal ostrich plumes. Surely, naught save the blind infatuation of mythologists could make them overlook the plain inference that Osiris was a mummified chief of Abydos in the days before the unification of Egypt under a single rule, and that he was worshipped by his successors in the petty principality exactly as we know other kingly mummies were worshipped by their family elsewhere—exactly, for example, as on the famous Tablet of Ancestors found at Abydos itself, Sethi I. and Rameses II. are seen offering homage to seventy-six historical kings, their predecessors on the throne of United Egypt.

Not only, however, is Osiris represented as a king and a mummy, but we are expressly told by Plutarch (or at least by the author of the tract De Osirid............