Egyptian Religion

   It is not possible to give more than the briefest outline of Egyptian religion in the space available. The original basis appears to have been the totems of the pre-dynastic tribes, many of which were female, and later became metamorphosed into goddesses and gods. In the earliest stages these birds, beasts, and fishes were recognized for what they were, but later, with the advent of the polytheism which is the sure sign of religions in decay, they all were endowed with the functions of actual gods.

   Later came the divine kings, originally perhaps the object of sacrifice, but later to emerge as supreme rulers. The story of the murder of Osiris is clearly that of the death by sacrifice of a barley king. Such beings as Ament, Anquet, Hathor, Isis, Maat, Nephthys, Ptah, Set, and Thoth may have been kings and queens, priests and priestesses, who were deified after their deaths; while the stories of the fights between the gods are obviously memories of intertribal wars, in which Set, Osiris, Horus, Isis, and Nephthys were the names of leading personalities involved.

   As it is obvious that no human beings were actually present at the Creation, in whatever manner it may have occurred, the Creation Legends of the Egyptians, in common with those of other countries, must be made up of memories of some great disaster from which mankind only emerged with great difficulty, combined with priestly ideas as to what might possibly have occurred in the beginning.

   The gradual change of Osiris from being the god of a most depressing nether world into the potential saviour of the soul must have taken a long time, and is intimately linked up with the story of his resurrection by Isis and of his begetting Horus in the interval before he became ruler of the Kingdom of the Dead. The somewhat excessive preoccupation of the Egyptian with the problems of the next world must have been fostered by the dry climate which made mummification relatively easy, and also by the fact that the system of regulated agrarian life left long periods for leisure and contemplation. The trend towards monotheism, which came to its zenith with the worship of Aten, appears always to have been that of the ruling classes, as the vast bulk of the populace preferred the potential delights of the Osirian paradise to the somewhat impersonal joys of accompanying Ra in his sun boat.

   The problem of life in the after-world is revealed by the number of parts of the body and personality which had to be considered. They were the Khat or physical body; the Ka or double; the Ba or soul; the Khu or aura; the Khaibit or shadow; the Sekhem or vital force; the Ren or name, the Ab or will, symbolized as a heart; the Hati or physical heart; the Sahu or spirit body; and the Ikh or final spiritual state.

   The Egyptians may take credit for having evolved the first Holy Trinity of Father, Mother, and Child (Osiris, Isis, and the Child Horus), and also for conception of the future life directly related to the moral value of conduct on this earth, and, finally, the first abstract monotheism, in the worship of Aten, in 1375 B.C., which arose at a time when the Hebrews were still struggling in