Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity: The Religion of Lower Egypt

AFTER the fall of Thebes, after the conquest of Egypt by the Ethiopians, and after the disorders which followed thereupon, we find in about the year B.C. 700, a race of kings, who made Sais in the Delta their capital, sovereigns of all Egypt. After their rise, we note a considerable change in the Egyptian religion as it appears upon the more modern monuments. This may have arisen from any or all of three causes. First, during the late troublous centuries, while fewer monuments . were made, the religion of the nation may have been slowly undergoing a change, which now at length shows itself on the monuments. Or, secondly, as frailer records, such as wooden mummy cases and the papyri inclosed therein, have been saved to us in greater numbers, from these more modern times, while the older Theban records are mostly sculptures on the stone walls, it is very possible that a different class of sentiments may be thereby shown to us. Or, thirdly, the people of Lower Egypt, having always been somewhat of a different race from those of Upper Egypt, may have always had in many points a different religious opinion.

77), and he sometimes holds a club over his head, as if in the act of threatening his worshippers with vengeance (see Fig. 78). He is the father of a brood of children as ugly and malicious as himself. These are the Cabeiri, whose office

51, was one of them. For the purpose of torturing their victims, they are armed with swords, snakes, and lizards, as in Fig. 79, where they accompany their father Pthah, with his enlarged head.

Fig. 77.

Fig. 78.

Fig. 79.

One of them is represented in the form of a gibbet, armed with a sword, with a human head hanging from it. Near them is the bottomless pit and lake of fire, into which their victims are to he thrown; it is guarded by an ape sitting at each corner. The pit and these gods seem to be both mentioned in Job xxxiii. 22.

80 represents Pharaoh Hophra on his knees, presenting two cones of baked clay, typical of his gifts, to one of these monsters, with a double

Fig. 80.

bull's head, as an atoning sacrifice on behalf of the nation, to turn aside the threatened punishment. This fear of future punishment sometimes made the priests set the hated Typhon, the hippopotamus, who was one of the Cabeiri, at the head of a funereal tablet, as a divinity who was to be appeased with gifts. Herodotus tells us that these Cabeiri were more particularly the gods of the Phenician settlements in the Delta; but from the papyri we learn that their worship was common to all the natives of

79. On the papyri they join the souls of the departed in worshipping the sun, when on its journey under ground, after sinking into the arms of the ocean; and when they accompany the boa' of Ra, as on the tablet (Egypt Inscript., pl. 46), we must suppose that the god is then on its midnight passage through the valley of the shadow of death.

Another Phenician deity is the foreign Venus, chiefly worshipped at Memphis, who, unlike the Egyptian goddesses, is wholly unclothed. She is Athor under a new form, having her long hair falling in two locks on her shoulders, and having a basket on her head (see Fig. 81). She shows us a front view, and stands upon a lion that walks side-ways. She stands between two gods, each on the top of a small temple with a door. One is the Egyptian Chem, who, with his right arm raised, holds the whip. The other is a foreign god, with an Asiatic beard: he holds a spear in his right hand, and the character for life in his left hand. In place of the sacred Asp, the usual ornament of a god's forehead, he has a dog's or stag's head with two long ears, like that on the top of an Anubis-staff. The name of the goddess is Koun, the queen of Heaven; the name of the foreign god is Ranpo, Lord of Heaven, and king of the other gods. To Chem, the goddess presents a bunch of flowers, emblems of life, and to the foreign god two serpents, emblems of death, thus declaring the Gnostic and Manichean doctrine of Antitheses or oppositions between life and death, or good and evil, a doctrine of which we see many more traces in

Fig. 81.

The cherubs that guarded the entrance of the garden of Eden, with flaming swords which turned on every side (Genesis iii. 24.), were perhaps copied from these Cabeiri; but we must not class with these enemies of man the cherubs which ornamented the Holy of Holies in Solomon's temple (2 Chron. v. 8).

The goddess Anaita, who is mentioned by Strabo as a

81, p. 64, she is threatening to destroy with her battleaxe the worshippers who have covered her altar with their various offerings. But the human mind, when it has created for itself so much to be feared, by a natural effort creates for itself also a protector. At Sais, this protector was the goddess Neith, to whom the worshipper turned in love and hope, when he had frightened himself with the belief that even the hated Typhon might take the place of his judge, and that Anaita and Ranpo were waiting to attack him, and the Cabeiri to torture him and thrust him into the pit of fire. Every king of Sais professed that he was beloved by Neith, as the kings of Thebes said they were beloved by Amun-Ra. The people of Lower Egypt lived under the shadow of her wings (see Fig. 76, page 59), as the people of Upper Egypt lived under the winged sun (see Fig. 1, page 1).

Thus we see that in Lower Egypt the priests taught far less worthy views of their gods than had been formerly held in Upper Egypt; and it is of the first importance to remark that the worse religion belonged to the less civilised people. Love for the gods had been held by the freer and nobler race of Thebans, while fear alone was felt by the more slavish race in the Delta. The greater ignorance which led them to see no cause for gratitude towards those beings which they fancied were the rulers of the world, and authors of their lives, may be traced even in the lessened excellence of the sculpture.

It is to the later times of Egyptian history--perhaps to the five centuries immediately before the Christian era--that the religious opinions contained in the funereal papyri

51. After the trial we are shown the lake of fire into which the wicked are to be thrown (see page 72), and the gods of punishment, the Cabeiri, with swords in their hands (see Fig. 79). These, however, do him no injury, they are in his case overcome, and each safely imprisoned in a cell under ground, or under the river Nile.

Sometimes the tree of life, with the goddess Neith in its branches, is one of the trees in the paradise which the deceased enters. Sometimes he only reaches this happy

Fig. 82.

That some of these were very early Egyptian opinions we learn from our finding traces of them in the oldest of the Hebrew Scriptures, though the writers there are not so far warped by them as to rob the Creator of the praise for his own works. The author of the book of Genesis tells us that the Almighty formed our earth and its inhabitants by dividing the land from the water, and then commanding them both to bring forth living creatures; and again one of the Psalmists says that his substance, while yet imperfect, was by the Creator curiously wrought in the lowest depths of the earth. The Hebrew writer, however, is never misled, so far as to think that any part of the creation was its own creator. But in the Egyptian philosophy sunshine and the river Nile are themselves the divine agents; and hence fire and water received divine honours, as the two purest of the elements, and every day when the temple of Serapis in Alexandria was opened, the singer standing on the steps of the portico sprinkled water over the marble floor while he held forth fire to the people (see Fig. 82), and though he and most of his hearers were

60).

The waters were also thought to be peopled by some kind of ghosts or spiritual beings, and we see them represented among the sculptures on the sarcophagus of Oimenepthah I. (see Fig. 82a). They are in the form of men, but

Fig. 82a.

whether they were thought at any time to come out of the water and walk the earth does not appear. That they were natives of the water, and not new comers, we learn from the Book of job, which is full of Egyptian opinions. We there read in the Hebrew, ch. xxvi. 5, that these "Ghosts are born beneath the waters, and are the inhabitants thereof."

The sarcophagus of Oimenepthah represents the earth as a round plain, encircled by the body of Osiris, and floating in the ocean, while the goddess Neith, the heavens, stands upon the head of Osiris to increase the height, and thus holds up the sun.

At the same time a large figure of the ocean rises out of the water, and holds up with his two hands the boat of Ra, in which the sun is carried. This opinion about

Among the Egyptian festivals was one called the Feast of Lamps, when upon a night in winter the houses and temples were lighted up with numerous lights. This was more particularly celebrated at Sais, in honour of the goddess Neith; but those who could not come up to that city to keep the festival burnt their own lamps at home (Herodotus ii. 62). The Jews seem to have borrowed this festival. It was the first that Judas Maccabœus had an opportunity of celebrating in the Temple after he had gained possession of Jerusalem. It was the festival with which he recommenced the Temple service in the year B.C. 164., after it had been interrupted; and hence the Feast of Candles was more often called the Feast of Dedication (Josephus, Antiq. xii. 7). The Christians would seem to have taken the custom from the Egyptians as much as from the Jews, as the purpose of our Candlemas day, which is to commemorate the purification of the Virgin Mary, more resembles the worship of the goddess Neith than the purification of the Temple by Judas Maccabœus.

Pit of Fire.

Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity: The Religion of Lower Egypt

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