wishing to die, they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old
age; they prayed that, 'if possible, they might live to the perfect age of
one hundred and ten.' They were addicted to all kinds of pleasures.
They drank, they sang, they danced, they were fond of excursions
into the country, where the sports of hunting and fishing were
specially reserved for the upper class. As a natural effect of this
desire for enjoyment, gay conversation and pleasantry which was
sometimes rather free, jokes and what we should call chaff, were
much in vogue: even their tombs were not sacred from their desire for
a jest."[67]
The worst government, the sternest oppression, could never
extinguish this natural gaiety; it was too intimately connected with the
climate and the natural conditions of the country, conditions which
had never changed since the days of Menes. Never were the
Egyptians more roughly treated than under Mehemet Ali and the late
viceroy; their condition was compared, with justice, to that of the
negroes in Carolina and Virginia, who, before the American civil war,
laboured under the whips of their drivers, and
42
enjoyed no more of the fruits of their own labour than what was barely
sufficient to keep life in their bodies. Torn from their homes and kept
by force in the public works, the fellahs died in thousands; those who
remained in the fields had to pay the taxes one or two years in
advance; they were never out of debt, nominally, to the public
treasury, and the rattan of the collector extorted from them such
savings as they might make during years of plenty, up to the last coin.
But still laughter did not cease in Egypt! Look, for instance, at the
children in the streets of Cairo who let out mounts to sight-seeing
Europeans. Let the tourist trot or gallop as he will, when he stops he
finds his donkey-boy by his side, full of spirits and good humour; and
yet perhaps while running behind his "fare" he has been making his
midday meal upon a few grains of maize tied up in a corner of his
shirt.
Fig. 31.—Water Tournament, from a tomb at Khoum-el-Ahmar.
(From Prisse.)
In 1862 I returned from Asia Minor in company with M. Edmond
Guillaume, the architect, and M. Jules Delbet, the doctor, of our
expedition to Ancyra. We took the longest way home, by Syria and
Egypt. At Cairo, Mariette, after having shown us the museum at
Boulak, wished to introduce us to his own "Serapeum." He took us for
a night to his house in the desert, and showed us the galleries of the
tomb of Apis by torchlight. We passed the next afternoon in
inspecting those excavations in the necropolis of Sakkarah which
have led to the recovery of so many wonders of Egyptian art. The
works were carried on by the labour of four hundred children and
youths, summoned by the corvée for fifteen
43
days at a time from some district, I forget which, of Middle Egypt. At
sunset these young labourers quitted their work and seated
themselves in groups, according to their native villages, upon the still
warm sand. Each drew from a little sack, containing his provision for
two or three weeks, a dry cake; those whose parents were
comfortably off had also, perhaps, a leek or a raw onion. But even for
such gourmands as those, the repast was not a long one. Supper
over, they chattered for a time, and then went to rest; the bigger and
stronger among them took possession of some abandoned caves,
the others stretched themselves upon the bare earth; but, before
going to sleep they sang; they formed themselves into two choirs who
alternated and answered one another, and this they kept up to an
advanced hour of the night.
Fig. 32.—Mariette's House.
I shall never forget the charm of that night in the desert, nor the weird
aspect of the moonlight upon the sea of sand. Were it not that no star
was reflected upon its surface, and that no ray scintillated as it does
even on the calmest sea, we might have thought ourselves in mid
ocean. Sleep came to me reluctantly. While I listened to the alternate
rise and fall of the chorus outside, I reflected upon how little those
children required; upon the slender wants of their fathers and
mothers, who, like them, sink into their nightly sleep with a song upon
their lips. I compared this easy happiness with the restless and
complicated
44
existence which we should find, at the end of a few days, in the
ambitious cities of the West, and I regretted that our year of travel,
our twelve months of unrestrained life in the desert or the forest, had
come to an end.
§ 5. The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the
Plastic Arts.
We have still to notice the profoundly religious character of Egyptian
art. "The first thing that excites our surprise, when we examine the
reproductions of Egyptian monuments which have been published in
our day, is the extraordinary number of scenes of sacrifice and
worship which have come down to us. In the collection of plates
which we owe to contemporary archæologists, we can hardly find one
which does not contain the figure of some deity, receiving with
impassive countenance the prayers or offerings of a prostrate king or
priest. One would say that a country with so many sacred pictures
and sculptures, must have been inhabited by gods, and by just
enough men for the service of their temples.[68] The Egyptians were a devout people. Either by natural tendency or by force of education,
they saw God pervading the whole of their universe; they lived in Him
and for Him. Their imaginations were full of His greatness, their words
of His praise, and their literature was in great part inspired by
gratitude for the benefits which He showered upon them. Most of their
manuscripts which have come down to us treat of religious matters,
and even in those which are ostensibly concerned only with profane
subjects, mythological names and allusions occur on every page,
almost at every line."[69]
An examination into the primitive religious beliefs of the Egyptians is
full of difficulty. In discovering new papyri, in
45
determining the signification of signs which have been puzzling
egyptologists, the inquirer will undoubtedly do good work, and will
establish facts which are sure not to lack interest and even
importance; but even when documents abound and when every
46
separate word they contain is understood, even then it is very difficult
to penetrate to the root of their meaning. A glimpse will be caught of
it, I admit, by one of those efforts of inductive divination which
distinguish modern research; but even then it will remain to explain
the primitive and only half-understood notions of five or six thousand
years ago in the philosophical vocabularies of to-day. It is here that
the most difficult and irksome part of the task begins. We who
represent the old age, or, perhaps, the prime, of humanity, think of
these matters and speak of them as abstractions, while the
Egyptians, who were children compared to us, thought of them under
concrete forms. Their very ideals were material, more or less vague
and refined perhaps, but still material. Their only conception of a deity
was of a figure larger, more vigorous and more beautiful than mortals;
the powers and attributes with which it was endowed were all
physical. If we attempt to express their conceptions in abstract terms,
we falsify their meaning. We cannot avoid altering it to a certain
extent, for exact equivalents are not to be found, and, in spite of all
precautions, we give to the confused and childish ideas of ancient
religion, a precision which is entirely modern.
Fig. 33.—Amenhotep or Amenophis III. presented by Phré to
Amen-Ra; Thebes. (Champollion, pl. 344.)
If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most
learned and refined form—namely, that which it attained during the
eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties—we shall dimly perceive that it
implies a belief in the unity of the First Cause of all life. But this belief
is obscured behind the numerous gods who are, in fact, emanations
from its substance and manifestations of its indefatigable activity. It is
in the person of these gods that the divine essence takes form. Each
of them has his own name, his own figure, and his own special share
in the management of the universe; each of them presides over the
production of some particular order of phenomena and insures their
regularity. These gods are related to each other as fathers, mothers,
and sons. They thus form a vast hierarchy of beings, superior to man,
and each enjoying a dignity corresponding to his rank in the series.
There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are nearest to the
"one God in heaven or earth who was not begotten." These deities
are divided into groups of three, each group constituting a family, like
those of earth, consisting of father, mother, and son. Thus from triad
to triad, the concealed god develops his sovereign powers to all
eternity, or, to use an
47
expression dear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, "he creates
his own members, which are themselves gods."[70]
How should the science of comparative religion class this form of
faith? Should it be called polytheism or pantheism? The answer is,
perhaps, not of great importance, and this is hardly the place for its
discussion. It is certain that, practically, the Egyptians were
polytheists. The Egyptian priests, indeed, had, by dint of long
reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the
contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of life—
that inexhaustible stream of which the Nile with its fertilising waves
was the concrete image—in its long journey across time and space.
But the devotion of the people themselves never succeeded in
mounting above the minor divinities, above those intermediaries in
whom the divine principle and attributes became personified and put
on the tangibility of body necessary to make them intelligible to
childish understandings. So, too, was it with artists, and for still more
powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the ideas
which they had conceived. Even in those religions which are most
clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity, art
has done something of the same kind. Aided in secret by one of the
most powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite
of all resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to those
parts of our belief which seem least fitted for such treatment; and it
has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us
that we see nothing unnatural in the representation under the
features of an old man, of the first Person of the Trinity,—of that
Jehovah who, in the Old Testament, proscribed all graven images
with such impartial rigour; who, in the Evangel, described Himself as
"the Truth and the Life."
In Egypt, both sculptors and painters could multiply their images to
infinity without coming into collision with dogma, without provoking
the regrets or censures of its most severe interpreters. Doctrine did
not condemn these personifications, even when it had been refined
and elaborated by the speculative
48
theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis. In the interior of the temples,
there was a small class of mystics who took pleasure in
contemplating "the 'One' who exists by his own essential power, the
only being who substantially exists." Even then men tried, as they
have often done since, to define the undefinable, to grasp the
incomprehensible, to perceive the supreme "I am" through the shifting
and transparent veil of natural phenomena. But those refined
metaphysics never touched and influenced the crowd, and never will.
The deity, in order to be perceived by them and to touch their
feelings, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be
admissible, be cut up into morsels for them.
By a process of "abstraction" which is as old as religion itself, the
human intelligence is led to consider separately each of the qualities
of existence, each of the forces which it perceives to be at work either
within man himself or in the exterior world. At first it thinks those
forces and qualities are distributed impartially to all creation. It
confounds existence with life. Hence the reign of fetishism, when man
believes, as young children do, that thought, passion, and volition like
his own, are to be found in everything he meets. His own image
seems to him reflected as in a mirror with a thousand converging
facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real condition of things
outside it.
Certain celestial and terrestrial bodies make a particularly strong
impression upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or
beneficial effects upon himself. They fill him with more than the
average gratitude, admiration, or terror. Driven by the illusion which
possesses him, he places the origin of those qualities which seem to
him the highest and most important, in the bodies which have made
so deep an impression upon his senses; to them he attributes the
friendly or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire and
his fear. According to circumstances a fetish might be a mountain, a
rock or a river, a plant or an animal. It might be those heavenly bodies
which exercised much more influence over the life of primitive man
than they do over us; it might be the moon and stars, which tempered
the darkness of the night and diminished its terrors; it might be the
cloud, from whose bosom came rain and thunder; above all, it might
be the sun which returned every morning to light and warm the world.
Differences of climate and race had their modifying effect, but
everywhere one common characteristic is to be found. It was always
to some
49
material and visible object that the human intellect referred those
forces and qualities which it drew from its own consciousness; forces
which, when thus united with something tangible, constituted the first
types of those divine beings whom mankind have so long adored, to
whom they have turned for ages in their hope and fear.
As the years passed away, man advanced beyond his primitive
conceptions. He did not entirely renounce them—we may indeed see
reminiscences of them all around us—but he superimposed others
upon them which were more complex. His powers of observation, still
imperfect though they were, began to insinuate into his mind a
disbelief in the activity of inanimate matter, and those objects which
were nearest to him, which he could touch with his hand, were the
first victims of his disenchantment. Thus began a long course of
intellectual development, the result of which we know, although the
various stages of its progress are difficult to follow at this distance of
time. It appears certain, however, that star worship formed the
transition between fetishism and polytheism. Men no longer attributed
vital forces and pre-eminent qualities generally to bodies with which
they themselves were in immediate contact, to stones and trees; but
they found no difficulty in continuing to assign them to those great
luminaries whose distance and beauty placed them, so to speak
outside the material world. As they gradually deprived inanimate
matter of the properties with which they had once gifted it, they
sought for new objects to which they might attach those properties.
These they found in the stars which shone in the firmament century
after century, and knew neither old age nor death; and especially in
the most brilliant, the most beneficent, and the most necessary of
them all, in that sun whose coming they awaited every morning with
an impatience which must once have been mixed with a certain
amount of anxiety.
The attributes which awakened intelligence had taken away from the
inanimate objects of the world could not be left floating in space. They
became gradually and imperceptibly grouped in men's minds around
the great luminary of day, and a bond of union was found for the
different members of the group by endowing the sun with a
personality modelled upon that of man. This operation was favoured
by the constitution of contemporary language, by its idioms made up
entirely of those images and metaphors which, by their frank
audacity, surprise and charm us
50
in the works of the early poets. It commenced with the first awakening
of thought, when man endowed all visible nature with the bounding
life which he felt in his own veins. No effort of intelligence was
required for its commencement or for its prosecution. The sun
became a young hero advancing, full of pride and vigour, upon the
path prepared for him by Aurora; a hero who pursued his daily path in
spite of all obstacle or hindrance, who, when evening came, went to
his rest amid all the glories of an eastern sunset, and amid the
confidence of all that after his hours of sleep he would take up his
eternal task with renewed vigour. He was an invincible warrior. He
was sometimes an angry master, whose glance killed and devoured.
He was above all the untiring benefactor of mankind, the nurse and
father of all life. Whether as Indra or as Amen-Ra, it was the same cry
that went up to him from Egypt and Hindostan; the prayers which we
find in the Vedas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and
were addressed to the same god.[71]
This solar god and the divinities who resemble him, form the
transition from the simple fetish to complete deities, to those gods
who played such an important part in the Egyptian religion, and
attained to their highest and most complete development in the
Hellenic mythology. In some respects, the luminous globe of the sun
with its compulsory course, belonged to the same category as the
material objects which received the first worship of humanity. But its
brilliance, its tranquil and majestic movement, and the distance which
conceals its real substance from the eye of man, allowed his
imagination to endow it with the purest and noblest characteristics
which the finest examples of humanity could show; while the
phenomena which depend upon its action are so numerous that there
was no hesitation in assigning to it qualities and energies of the most
various kinds.
This type when once established was used for the creation of other
deities, which were all, so to speak, cast in the same mould. As the
intellect became more capable of abstraction and analysis, the
personality and moral individuality of these gods gradually threw off
its astral or physical characteristics, although it never lost all trace of
their existence. It resulted that, both in Egypt and in Greece, there
were deities who were mere entities, the
51
simple embodiment of some power, some quality, or some virtue. It
requires all the subtle finesse of modern criticism to seek out and
distinguish the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the
naturalistic beliefs of earlier ages. Sometimes absolute certainty is
not to be attained, but we may safely say that a race is polytheistic
when we find these abstract deities among their gods, such deities as
the Ptah, Amen, and Osiris of the Egyptians, and the Apollo and
Athenè of the Greeks.[72]
Fig. 34.—Amen or Ammon, from a bronze in the Louvre. Height
22·04 inches.
We may, then, define polytheism as the partition of the highest
attributes of life between a limited number of agents. The imagination
of man could not give these agents life without at the same time
endowing them with essential natural characteristics and with the
human form, but, nevertheless, it wished to regard them as stronger,
more beautiful and less ephemeral than man. The
52
system had said its last word and was complete, when it had
succeeded in embodying in some divine personality each of those
forces whose combined energy produces movement in the world or
guarantees its duration.
When religious evolution follows its normal course, the work of
reflection goes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries. It
refers, by efforts of conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of
causes, which it calls gods. It next perceives that these causes, or
gods, are of unequal importance, and so it constitutes them into a
hierarchy. Still later it begins to comprehend that many of these
causes are but different names for one thing, that they form but one
force, the application of a single law. Thus by reduction and
simplification, by logic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize and
proclaim the unity of all cause. And thus monotheism succeeds to
polytheism.
Fig. 35.—Ptah, from a bronze in the Louvre. Actual size.
In Egypt, religious speculation arrived on the threshold of this
doctrine. Its depths were dimly perceived, and it was even taught by
the select class of priests who were the philosophers of those days;
but the monotheistic conception never penetrated into the minds of