The second main class of divinities that entered into the composition of the Egyptian pantheon was due to that innate and universal speculative bent which seeks, and never fails to find, an explanation of the facts of the external world. Behind the great natural phenomena that they Cosmic deities. perceived all around them, the Egyptians, like other primitive folk, postulated the existence of divine wills not dissimilar in kind to their own, though vastly superior in power. Chief among these cosmic deities was the sun-god Re, whose supremacy seemed predestined under the cloudless sky of Egypt. The oldest conceptions represented Re as sailing across the heavens in a ship called “Manzet,” “the bark of the dawn”; at sunset he stepped aboard another vessel named “Mesenktet,” “the bark of the dusk,” which bore him back from west to east during the night. Later theories symbolized Re in many different ways. For some he was identical with Horus, and then he was falcon-headed and was called Hor-akhti, the Horus of the horizons. Others pictured him to themselves as a tiny infant in the early dawn, as full-grown at noon, and as an infirm old man in the evening. When the sky was imagined as a cow, he was a calf born anew every morning. The moon was a male deity, who likewise fared across the heavens in a boat; hence he was often named Chons, “the sailor.” The ibis-god Thoth was early identified with the moon. The stars and planets were likewise gods. Among them the bright star Sirius was held in special esteem; it was a goddess Sothis (Sopde), often identified by the Egyptians with Isis. The constellations that seemed unceasingly to speed across the sky were named “the never-resting ones,” and the circumpolar stars, which never sink beneath the horizon, were known as “the imperishables.” Concerning earth and sky there were many different opinions. Some thought that the sky was a goddess Nut, whom the god Show held aloof from her husband Keb the earth, on whose back the plants and trees grew. Others believed in a celestial ocean, personified under the name of Nun, over which the heavenly bodies sailed in boats. At a later date the sky was held to be a cow (Hathor) whose four feet stood firm upon the soil; or else a vast face, in which the right eye was the sun and the left eye the moon. Alongside these fanciful conceptions there existed a more sober view, according to which the earth was a long oval plain, and the sky an iron roof supported by the tops of mountains
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Beneath the ground lay a dark and mysterious region, now conceived as an inverse heaven (Nenet), now as a vast series of caverns whose gates were guarded by demons. This nether world was known as the Duat (Dat, Têi), and through it passed the sun on his journey during the hours of night; here too, as many thought, dwelt the dead and their king Osiris. That great natural feature of Egypt, the Nile, was of course one of the gods; his name was Hapi, and as a sign of his fecundity he had long pendulous breasts like a woman. In contradistinction to the tribal gods, it rarely happened that the cosmic deities enjoyed a cult. But there are a few important exceptions: Re in Heliopolis (here identified with a local god Etom) and in Hermonthis; Hathor at Dendera and elsewhere. Certain of the tribal gods early became identified with cosmic divinities, and the latter thus became the objects of a cult; so, for instance, the Horus of Edfu was a sun-god, and Thoth in Hermopolis Magna was held to be the moon.
An extension of the principle that created the cosmic gods
gave rise to a large number of minor deities and demons. Day
and night, the year, the seasons, eternity, and many
similar conceptions were each represented by a god
or goddess of their own, who nevertheless possessed
Minor deities
and demons.
but a shadowy and doubtful existence. Human
attributes like Taste, Knowledge, Joy and so forth were likewise
personified, no less than abstract ideas such as Fate, Destiny
and others; rather more clearly defined than the rest was Maat,
the goddess of Truth and Right, who was fabled to be the daughter
of Re and may even have had a cult. Certain gods were purely
functional, that is to say, they appeared at special times to
perform some appointed task, at the completion of which they
vanished. Such were Nepri, the god of the corn-harvest;
Meskhonit, the goddess who attended every child-bed; Tait, the
goddess of weaving. Numberless semi-divine beings had no
other purpose than to fill out the myths, as, for instance, the
chattering apes that greeted the sun-god Re as he rose above
the eastern horizon, and the demons who opened the gates of
the nether world at the approach of the setting sun.
We take this opportunity of mentioning sundry other divinities who were later introduced to swell the already overcrowded ranks of the pantheon. Contact with foreign lands brought with it several new deities, Baal, Anat and Resheph from Syria, and the misshapen dwarf Bes Foreign deities. from the south; earlier than these, the Astarte of Byblus, whom the Egyptians identified with Hathor. In Thebes Amenophis I. and his spouse Nefertari were worshipped as patron gods of the necropolis many centuries after their death. Two men of exceptional wisdom received divine honours, and had temples of their own in the Ptolemaic period; these were Imouthes, who had lived under Zoser of the IIIrd Dynasty, and Amenophis son of Hapu, a contemporary of the third king of the same name (XVIIIth Dyn.). The hill of Sheikh Abd-el-gurna at Thebes was looked upon as a particularly holy place, and was revered as a goddess. Almost anything that was regarded with awe, any object used in the divine ritual could at a given moment be envisaged as a deity. Thus the boat of Osiris (Neshemet) and those of the sun-god were goddesses; and various wands and sceptres belonging to certain gods were imagined as harbouring the divine being. Truly it might have been said in ancient Egypt: of the making of gods there is no end!
For such order as can be discerned in the mythological conceptions of the Egyptians the priesthood was largely responsible. At a very early date the theological school of Heliopolis undertook the task of systematizing the gods and the myths, and it is mainly to them that is due the Egyptian Theological combinations. religion as we find it in the Pyramid texts. Their influence is particularly conspicuous in the prominent place accorded to the sun-god Re, and in the creation-legend that made him the father of gods and men. First of all living things was Re; legend told how he arose as a naked babe from a lotus-flower that floated on the primeval ocean Nun. Others held the view that he crept from an egg that lay on a hill in the midst of a lake called Desdes; and a third, more barbarous, tale related his obscene act of self-procreation. Re became the father of the pair of gods Show and Tefnut (Tphenis), who emanated from his spittle. They again gave birth to Keb and Nut, from whom in their turn sprang Osiris and Seth, Isis and Nephthys. These nine gods were together known as the great Ennead or cycle of nine. A second series of nine deities, with Horus as its first member, was invented at the same time or not long afterwards, and was called the Lesser Ennead. In later times the theory of the Ennead became very popular and was adopted by most of the local priesthoods, who substituted their own favourite god for Re, sometimes retaining and sometimes changing the names of the other eight deities. Thus locally many different gods came to be viewed as the creators of the world. Only in two instances, however, did a local god ever obtain wide acceptance in the capacity of demiurge: Ptah of Memphis, who was famed as an artist and master-builder, and Khnum of Elephantine, who was said to have moulded mankind on the potter’s wheel.
Already in the Pyramid texts the importance of Osiris almost rivals that of Re. His worship does not seem to have been due to Heliopolitan influence, and may possibly have been propagated by active missionary effort. It is apparently through the funeral cult that Osiris so early took a firm hold on the imagination of the people; for at a very ancient date he was identified with every dead king, and it needed but a slight extension of this idea to make him into a king of the dead. In later times the moral aspect of his tale was doubtless the main cause of its continued popularity; Osiris was named Onnophris, “the good Being” par excellence, and Seth was contrasted with him as the author and the root of all evil. Still the Egyptians themselves seem
