Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999
The Egyptians found it much more natural to adore the sun than did the Mesopotamians. The sun was no less harsh but it had no effect on the annual deluge by the Nile which cut its narrow groove through the desert. The Nile reliable provided the fertile earth and the sun reliably provided the warmth to nurture the crops. There was nothing to fear here, and everything to admire.
About 5000 years ago the narrow strip of land along the river was united under one Pharaoh. There were no city states here, no clash of cultures or gods, though there were plenty of them. The cities were part of one country but developed their own traditions in priestly schools and even the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt forced together in contradictory partnership different sets of gods. The sun was worshipped in a confusing number of aspects and human personality was itself similarly interpreted in many different layers. It is rather like the way the Eskimos reputedly have hundreds of words for snow, because it is important to them to distinguish every different variety of it. So the Egyptians looked to every different aspect of the sun.
So there was only one sun god but he appeared in many different forms and with many different titles. First he was Ra, creator of the Universe, and the first king of Egypt. All other gods sprang from him and so were him. Ra lifted the first land, the Primeval Hill, out of Nun, the watery abyss, making it the place of the first sunrise, the coming of light. He was Atum of the temple of Heliopolis. He was Khepri, He who Comes Forth, depicted as a scarab beetle because they were thought to generate spontaneously in animal dung. The scarab beetle pushed its little ball of dung to some suitable spot and the Egyptians saw a parallel with the sun rolling across the heavens. They saw in their imagination a scarab pushing the sun, and so it was painted.
The sun was also briefly under Amenhotep IV, who called himself Akhnaten, Aten with its rays like nurturing hands. He was Horakhte, Horus of the Horizon or Sunrise, depicted as a falcon. Horus began as a sky god but adopted a confusing number of titles and characteristics. He was the Great God, the Lord of Heaven, son of Hathor, the Mother Goddess, but also the son of Isis and Osiris, who lost an eye avenging Osiris's murder by Seth. The sun god was also Pharaoh, the king of the two Egypts, and also a god. Each morning when the priests greeted the rising sun, having already been ritually prepared, so too did the Pharaoh greet his alter ego, Ra as Horakhte.
The supremacy of the sun in Egypt can be seen in every pyramid and obelisk, in every image of the falcon and in the symbol of a disk, whether it be on a barque or between the horns of Hathor and Isis. Reflecting the main form of transport along the Nile the sun was most often shown being carried across the sky in a boat carrying a man, a falcon or a beetle. At the same time they could imagine the sun god being swallowed by Nut, goddess of the heavens, and being reborn from her thighs each morning.
After the invasion of the Hyksos introduced the war chariot to Egypt, one can search in vain for pictures of the sun being carried by a chariot. Egypt was the most conservative of cultures and apparently could not bring themselves to cart the solar disk across the sky, like Apollo.
Permanent death has never been a comfortable realisation by humans once they achieved consciousness. People find it hard, for some reason, to imagine their consciousness going forever, despite experiencing it going every night of their lives. Gods never died and humans wanted to be the same.
For most societies, it was achieved through some form of communion. For Egyptians the communion was through the Pharaoh, a god on earth. Pharaoh was Horus, The Lord of Heaven, and from the time of king Menes, traditionally the first king of united Egypt, was shown as accompanied by a falcon.
Both were sun gods and according to convention were painted with golden skin. But Horus was also the son of Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld, and when he died became him, while his son became the new Horus. We have here again the unity but division of the triumphant heavenly sun and the vegetation god, dying and being resurrected in an endless seasonal cycle to induce the plants to bloom. In Egypt the king who was the living god was the link between sun and vegetation. The Pharaoh was also Atum-Ra, the Supreme Creator, a title he got after being identified with Horus, but one which in the fashion of religions was to blaze brightly for awhile.
Atum-Ra lived at On or Heliopolis. The centre of worship was the Benben stone, a conical phallic symbol representing the Primeval Hill. Atum-Ra created himself at the first sunrise over the Primeval Hill and the Benben stone solidified from his Primeval Ejaculation. Later storytellers then say the god appeared on the Benben stone in the form of a Phoenix, the golden plumed sun bird.
This cult triumphed for a long time in Egypt and even later, when the Hidden One, Amun, became the main god, he had to be associated with Ra as Amun-Ra.
The Primeval Hill was also seen in flights of steps and, in the Third Dynasty, the genius, Imhotep, made models of the Primeval Hill on a heroic scale for his Pharaoh, Djoser. The next dynasty perfected the engineering and built the three huge pyramids of Giza—tombs for the sun-god in the form of his first manifestation over the Primeval Hill. In the pyramid chambers the dead Pharaoh is called the Son of Ra. From the Fifth Dynasty the title Son of Ra was adopted by the Pharaohs. Ra was God so they became Sons of God—Rameses means Born of Ra and therefore son of Ra.
Nevertheless, the certainties of the rule of Ra were to be overthrown when at the end of the third millennium BC the kingdom fell into chaos. Egyptians were quite unprepared for the disaster and it is said the Nile crocodiles were sated with the flesh of suicides. Order had been the norm but order collapsed and with it the old faith in Ra.
When order was restored, the outlook was more pessimistic and Osiris, god of the dead, had become much more important. The glory in the rule of the sun gave way to an obsession with death. Previously, ritual had been restricted to the Pharaoh as a god but now came a new egalitarianism and all successful people hoped for a communion with Osiris and a rebirth after bodily death.
Ra receded to become an attribute of the Hidden God, Amun, a god of righteousness worshipped at Thebes in the Upper Kingdom, but his glory hardly faded. Even in the Underworld, Osiris was not the final judge of souls, Ra was, as president of a tribunal of godly judges. The scales of Justice were carried by Ra.
The Middle Kingdom ended with invasions by the Hyksos and, after two centuries, the New Kingdom strengthened the adoration of Osiris even more, a result once again of pessimism. People were looking for a gods who understood human suffering and hadn't Osiris suffered at the hands of his evil brother Set (Seth)?
The sun was identified with Osiris in the underworld in its nightly journey below the horizon. Osiris was depicted with a dark face because the sun no longer shined at night and it was assumed did not shine in the underworld. Osiris took the scales of justice from Ra.
Horus was seen more as the son of Osiris than as the Sun of the Horizon. Images in the tombs in the valley of the kings still showed Ra, usually at the tomb's entrance, but within were pictures of night fears, the inhabitants of the unconscious that occupy the underworld.
In the world of the living, vast temples to Ra were still built, just as splendidly as before, so he was still considered the god of the living but the preoccupation with death was deeper. At Karnak and Luxor, Amun-Ra still continued to be worshipped in style and the complicated temples there remain a major tourist attraction.
Who was this Amun? Initially he had been one of the gods of chaos, being the god of wind, but wind more subtly is breathe and breathe becomes spirit—the word for spirit in the Hebrew Bible is properly breathe or wind! Similarly the word for spirit in the Greek New Testament is not the Greek word for soul but the Greek word for wind, pneuma, and translators translate it as they see fit. Amun-Ra was light and spirit together.
The priesthood of Amun with its mighty temples on either side of the Nile at Luxor and Karnak eventually became incredibly rich, especially as Tuthmosis III merged all the priestly schools including the old proud school of Heliopolis under the control of the High Priest of Amun. Constantine the Great of Rome, almost 2000 years later, was to take a similar action when he merged the solar gods of the Romans under the Catholic Christian Pope.
Egypt now was on a long slow decline tempered only by a brief revival under Rameses II. With the gradual decline, the pessimism returned and the importance of Osiris continued to grow.
In his Great Temple at Abu Simbel, Rameses cut a cleft into the rock and cut four immense statues of himself to guard the entrance which faced the rising sun. Above the door, sure enough was the falcon of Horakhte but, inside, the Pharaoh depicted himself as Osiris with the crook and the flail. At the very back of the shrine, in the gloom except when the sun's rays illuminate them at dawn, the Pharaoh sits with Amun, Horus and Ptah.
Though impressive the nature of the temple is a far cry from the earlier sun temples and it was the god of the underworld, Osiris who supervised entry to the four gods in conclave at the back of the temple.
The loss of confidence in the ability of local gods to provide adequately for their people through their earthly representatives or sons led to greater pessimism, and ultimately to a change in religious needs. People became more conscious of themselves and their own ultimate destiny rather than sublimating it in a wider social context presided over by a local god. They became burdened by their souls and concerned about the salvation of their individual personality.
It was a dogma of the priests of the Middle Ages that there had been no virtue until God began to instruct the Jews and eventually sent Christianity into the world. The measurement and excavation of Egypt changed it all. Theosophists and Freemasons began to trace their secret rites to the ancient temples on the banks of the Nile.
Egyptian culture is a natural part of human evolution and it helps explain the Christian culture which followed. Egypt was neither inferior to Christendom nor equal to the secular civilization of modern times. Its science remained simple, though Egyptians had a high level of practical skill, learning quickly from experience how to tackle difficult practical problems. Its legends were primitive like those of the Jews, but its ethic was high.
There is no mystery about the beginning of civilization in Egypt and Babylonia. They were desirable countries to live in and people about 10,000 years ago noticed this. The Egyptians had a large advantage over those of the north chilled by the ice age. Their climate was glorious, and their soil, annually replenished from river mud, was remarkably fertile. It was ideal for mankind to develop a new skill called agriculture.
First New Stone Age people settled on the soil. Their primitive religious ideas, at the dawn of civilization, were an intense belief in survival, a great deal of magic and demonism and a readiness to imagine spirits throughout nature—trees, stones, rivers. This state of things passes gradually into primitive civilization: which was no miracle of genius, but a slow process stretching over two thousand years. Villages grew into towns. Chiefs became petty kings, picture-writing began, pottery, weaving, and agriculture improved.
Egypt is essentially a one dimensional country. The desert and high cliffs at the edge of the flood plain restricted the early Egyptians to the valley, and the narrow way south or north restricted cultural intercourse along the river. The first Egyptians therefore developed as independent tribes along the river and on either bank who had their own favourite gods and fetishes.
Many Egyptian gods have animal heads, suggesting they were local totem animals. Totemism means a tribe thought it had some family or mystic connection with an animal, and took it as their sacred symbol. The early Egyptians revere the bull in one place, the ram in another, the hawk in another. The totem animal is sacred and cannot be killed or eaten like the sacred cows of the Indians. The reason why Jews do not eat pork is likely to be because pigs were at one time a totem animal for some Hebrew or Canaanitish tribe.
Tribal priesthoods grew round these totems. At this stage, at the beginning of Egyptian history—about 3300 BC—the statues of the gods are animal statues.
It was easy for a primitive mind to imagine that the hawk, the lioness, or the bull had a very powerful spirit in it. People did not suppose that a goddess with a cow's head or a god with a hawk's head was in the heavens—the animal head stood for its desirable characteristics. Religion, though, is always conservative and the Egyptians were more conservative than most. Worshippers of particular gods resist changes. So later when gods became humanised, they retained their animal features.
However, all Egyptian gods did not have an animal origin:
A very large number of the Egyptian deities were deified animals but some—the great god Osiris particularly—never had an animal form. Some of these, and they were very old deities, were nature-gods: Horus and Ra and other sun-gods, Seb the earth-god, Neith the sky-goddess, and so on. Osiris, on the other hand, is said in Egyptian legend to have once been king of the country, and most scholars believe that this is a case of deification of an ancestor. Later, other gods were added to the pantheon as the spirits of abstract ideas (of love, of war, of writing, of truth, and so on).
The Egyptians differed most from contemporary peoples in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and this influenced the life of the people profoundly. The life of Egypt seems at first sight to have been one long preoccupation about the future life. Nearly all the relics we have of Egyptian daily life come from tombs, placed there because of their belief in the after-life. This is slightly misleading. The homes of the Egyptians are buried under twenty feet of Nile mud after thousands of years of annual flooding. The tombs, on the contrary, are naturally on raised dry land at the edge of the desert. Tombs are more accessible than buried homes.
The Roman Church believes in two judgements of the dead: the Particular Judgement of each soul after death, and the General Judgement of all men at the end of the world. The Persians believed in a Day of Judgement, when God, Ormuzd, would destroy the earth, summon before him the souls of all men who had ever lived, reward the good and punish the living. It is clearly from Persia that certain sects of the Jews, and Christ and the early Christians, took this idea of the coming kingdom of Heaven. The Egyptians however believed in a particular judgement of each person at death.
The Egyptians conceived of humans as complex beings on several levels or having several aspects. They had a khu, a soul of intelligence, a ka, or double, the seat of sense and perception, an ethereal counterpart of the physical body or a sort of guardian angel, the ba, a disembodied soul, winged like a bird and flitting about the tombs and cemeteries at night. There were also other fanciful abstractions, an essence of the heart, of the navel, the confusion of which is difficult to resolve.
Probably in prehistoric times, when tribes were merging to form the two kingdoms, besides having to find places for different gods from the tribes, the priests had to find places for different concepts of the human spiritual body and their seat. The ka seems to be the original conception of the soul as the shadow, reflexion or double of the body. The khu is a recognition of the mind as the seat of the personality. The ba is a ghost, thought to be an aspect of the body freed after death and flitting around the graveyards in the form of a white owl.
The home of the dead for the Egyptians gradually receded as they got to know their world better. At first the dead went to a region in the Delta where Osiris had his sea. Later the home of the dead was Syria. Later still it was placed in the sky, a happy garden of Osiris, watered by the celestial Nile, the Milky Way.
Even before the dawn of history, the Egyptians believed that a man's soul went to live with the god Osiris. At first the Egyptians did not mummify dead bodies. They cut off the corpse's head and limbs, stripped its flesh from its bones, cleaned the bones, and then put the pieces together again to be buried. They cleaned the corpse to prepare it to meet a god.
What were the sins which disqualified the Egyptian? Obviously this intense belief in a future life of eternal happiness, which would be forfeited by sin, had a profound influence. The famous Book of the Dead gives us the full code of conduct by which the soul was judged. Thoth, the assistant of Osiris who took down the record of a man's deeds, was the wisdom-god of Egypt, the scribe of the great gods; and the Book of the Dead was known to the Egyptians as the Book of Thoth.
The book goes back beyond 3000 BC, but just like the Jewish scriptures was revised by the priests. In its complete form the collection included forty-two books and dealt with theology, cosmogony, and all kinds of ecclesiastical rules. The part we have is essentially concerned with the long and arduous journey of the soul after death.
We deduce the morals of Egypt from its ideals and from the incentives to observe them. If an eternal reward for good conduct and annihilation for evil conduct are not sufficient incentives, then the Christian has little reason to speak.
A funeral song urges the Egyptians not to be miserable in life but to be joyful or to bother too much about the dead in the other world because:
No one comes thence to tell us what is become of them.
To tell us how it fares with them, to comfort our heart.
Until thou approachest the place whither they are gone.
Forget not to glorify thyself with joyful heart,
And follow thy heart as long as thou livest.
Adorn thyself; make thyself as fair as thou canst;
And let thy heart sink not.
Follow thy heart and thy joy.
As long as thou livest upon earth:
Trouble not thy heart until the day of mourning come upon thee.
With joyous countenance keep a day of festival, and rest not in it;
For no one takes his goods with him;
Yea, no one returns that is gone hence.
The writers of some moral treatises, which have been found amongst the remains of ancient Egypt, seem to have been monotheistic quite early in Egyptian history. The popular gods are rarely mentioned, and then only with the kind of graceful gesture with which a learned Greek might speak of Zeus and Aphrodite. The writers speak of God using a word that implies an eternal deity behind the gods of the priests. Even this one God is more of a heavenly principle rather than a person.
The writers of these little treatises are educated or middle- class Egyptians, and the best known work of the kind is a pseudepigraphical papyrus entitled The Maxims of Ptah-hotep kept in the British Museum at London. Ptah-hotep was an early Egyptian king. The book is not spiritual and does not speak of sin or virtue or repentance. There is also part of a book giving counsels or rules of conduct to judges, teachers, and other professional people.
The book completely ignores the poor as if they did not exist. Egypt was a drastic feudal monarchy, and the workers were not specifically cared for by law, as they were in Babylon, but they did have recourse to justice:
These maxims demonstrate as high a rule of life as any religion ever taught.
A wife was metaphorically chained to a man but the author of the maxims advises:
She will be doubly attached if the chain is sweet to her.
In fact, women were as free as men in ancient Egypt, and had their own property. Nowhere, until we come to Greece and Rome, do we find anything remotely approaching the long subjection of women under Christianity or the least need for any kind of woman-movement.
Four thousand years ago educated Egyptians were monotheistic and had the same code of conduct as we have.
Inscriptions on tombs like that of a provincial governor also show the compassion of many officials in this ancient country:
He lowered the shoulder of the proud; he shortened the hour of the cruel; he was the husband of the widow and the refuge of the orphan.
He was the father of the orphan, the husband of the widow, the eye of the blind, the foot of the lame.
He gave bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothed the naked.
He was exempt from all vice, virtuous in all his thoughts; there was no guile in him.
These eulogies might be exaggerated as inscriptions on tombs often are but they give us the Egyptian ideal. Three millennia before the Sermon on the Mount is supposed to have been written its finest contents were commonplaces in Egypt! The seven works of mercy were required of a man by Osiris. The very phrases at times sound like the phrases of the New Testament.
Osiris, a very old Egyptian god, generally regarded as a deified king of the prehistoric period, was turned by the priestly legend-makers into a son of the oldest and discarded gods, and brother of Set. Their sisters were Isis and Nephthys. This was the usual way of adjusting the claims of rival deities when political fusion brought their worshippers under one head.
But quite early, in the very dawn of history, it was represented that Set had killed his brother-god Osiris. Set gave a banquet and, producing a beautiful chest or cabinet, said that he would give it to any person present who would lie in it. Osiris took up the challenge, and the conspirators nailed down the lid and poured molten lead on it. It was put on the river and drifted out to the Asiatic coast.
Then began the adventures of Isis in search of the body of her brother and husband—a subsidiary legend said that they had been married in the womb—until she found it in Syria. She hid the body but Set found it and tore it into fourteen pieces, which he buried in different localities—a priestly explanation of why there were fourteen rival graves of Osiris in Egypt). Isis recovered the fourteen parts. She reassembled the pieces but lacking the penis had to make an artificial one with which she conceived Horus—a kind of virgin birth because no god or mortal actually penetrated her. Seeing her grief, the god Ra who had had to be given an important role as the God of some other sect—restored Osiris to life and he became the god and judge of the dead.
Osiris's death was annually celebrated with long and very popular ceremonies. A figure of him was laid on a bier, with corn sprouting round it, or corn was actually planted in the figure and grew out of it. The ceremony therefore seems like a celebration of the annual death and rebirth of the vegetation god, but it might have been a celebration of the annual flooding of the Nile which fertized the crops and might have been seen as an annual rebirth. Either could easily and quickly have been conflated with the annual death and rebirth of the sun. The point is that for several millennia before the time of Christ all Egypt annually celebrated the cruel death and restoration to life of a god who became the judge and recorder of the dead.
Isis naturally shared the popularity of Osiris. During the greater part of Egyptian history she was rather a private or domestic deity, without great temples. She was the model spouse, the model mother: with the women the most popular figure of the Egyptian holy family. Late in Egyptian history her importance grew so much that temples were built to her, her cult was Hellenized and spread as far as Rome. The cult of Isis was not immoral, and involved no sacred prostitution. Roman writers tell us that devotees of Isis were ascetic, and in Egypt the worship of her was in the latest period associated with a cult of virginity and asceticism. She was the predecessor and prototype of the Christian Mary.
An early Christian work, the Paschal Chronicle, tells us that every year the temples of Horus presented to worshippers, in mid-winter, about 25 December, a scenic model of the birth of Horus. He was represented as a babe born in a stable, his mother Isis standing by.
The Roman writer Macrobius in Saturnalia makes the same statement about the representation of the birth of Horus in the temples and adds that the young god was a symbol of the rebirth of the sun. The whole world by the year 1 AD was familiar with the Egyptian statues or pictures of Isis with the divine babe Horus in her arms.