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worship of the solar disc itself was not absolutely strange. An Egyptian, for instance, who was buried at Kom el-Aḥmar, opposite El-Kab, in the reign of Thothmes iii., speaks of being “beloved by the beams of the solar disc” (Aten-Ra); and though no determinative of divinity is attached [pg 098] to the words, it was but a step forward to make the disc the equivalent of the sun-god.

      Nevertheless, between the “doctrine” of Khu-n-Aten and the older Egyptian ideas of the sun-god there was a vast, if not impassable, distance. The “doctrine” was no result of a normal religious evolution. That is proved not only by the opposition with which it met and the violent measures that were taken to enforce it, but still more by its rapid and utter disappearance or extermination after the death of its royal patron. It came from Asia, and, like the Asiatic officials, was banished from Egypt in the national reaction which ended in the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty.

      The god of Khu-n-Aten, in fact, has much in common with the Semitic Baal. Like Baal, he is the “lord of lords,” whose visible symbol is the solar orb. Like Baal, too, he is a jealous god, and the father of mankind. It is true that Baal was accompanied by the shadowy Baalat; but Baalat, after all, was but his pale reflection, necessitated by the genders of Semitic grammar; and in some parts of the Semitic world even this pale reflection was wanting. Chemosh of Moab, for instance, and Asshur of Assyria were alike wifeless.

      On the other hand, between Aten and the Semitic Baal there was a wide and essential difference. The monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was pantheistic, and as a result of this the god he worshipped was the god of the whole universe. The character and attributes of the Semitic Baal were clearly and sharply defined. He stood outside the creatures he had made or the children of whom he was the father. His kingdom was strictly limited, his power itself was circumscribed. He was the “lord of heaven,” separate from the world and from the matter of which it was composed.

      But Aten was in the things which he had created; [pg 099] he was the living one in whom all life is contained, and at whose command they spring into existence. There was no chaos of matter outside and before him; he had created “that which was not,” and had formed it all. He was not, therefore, a national or tribal god, whose power and protection did not extend beyond the locality in which he was acknowleged and the territory on which his high places stood; on the contrary, he was the God of the whole universe; not only Egypt, but “all lands” and all peoples are called upon to adore him, and even the birds and the flowers grow and live through him. For the first time in history, so far as we know, the doctrine was proclaimed that the Supreme Being was the God of all mankind.

      The fact is remarkable from whatever point of view it may be regarded. The date of Khu-n-Aten is about 1400 b.c., a century before the Exodus and the rise of Mosaism. More than once it has been suggested that between Mosaism and the “doctrine” of Aten there may have been a connection. But in Mosaism we look in vain for any traces of pantheism. The Yahveh of the Commandments stands as much outside His creation as the man whom He had made in His own image; His outlines are sharply defined, and He is the God of the Hebrews rather than of the rest of the world. The first Commandment bears the fact on its forefront: other nations have their gods whose existence is admitted, but Yahveh is the God of Israel, and therefore Him only may Israel serve.

      [pg 100]

Lecture V. Animal Worship.

       Table of Contents

      St. Clement of Alexandria thus describes the religion of his Egyptian neighbours (Pædag. iii. 2): “Among (the Egyptians) the temples are surrounded with groves and consecrated pastures; they are provided with propylæa, and their courts are encircled with an infinite number of columns; their walls glitter with foreign marbles and paintings of the highest art; the sanctuary is resplendent with gold and silver and electrum, and many-coloured stones from India and Ethiopia; the shrine within it is veiled by a curtain wrought with gold. But if you pass beyond into the remotest part of the enclosure in the expectation of beholding something yet more excellent, and look for the image which dwells in the temple, a pastophorus or some other minister, singing a pæan in the Egyptian language with a pompous air, draws aside a small portion of the curtain, as if about to show us the god; and makes us burst into a loud laugh. For no god is found therein, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent sprung from the soil, or some such brute animal … and the Egyptian deity is revealed as a beast that rolls itself on a purple coverlet.”

      St. Clement was a Christian philosopher and apologist, but the animal worship of the Egyptians was quite as much an object of ridicule to the pagan writers of Greece and Rome. “Who has not heard,” says Juvenal (Sat. [pg 101] xv.)—“who has not heard, where Egypt's realms are named—

      “What monster gods her frantic sons have framed?

      Here Ibis gorged with well-grown serpents, there

      The crocodile commands religious fear; …

      And should you leeks or onions eat, no time

      Would expiate the sacrilegious crime;

      Religious nations sure, and blest abodes,

      Where every orchard is o'errun with gods!”

      A Roman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was torn to pieces by the mob before the eyes of Diodorus, although the Romans were at the time masters of the country, and the reigning Ptolemy did his utmost to save the offender.66 For the majority of the people the cat was an incarnate god.

      This worship of animals was a grievous puzzle to the philosophers of the classical age. The venerable antiquity of Egypt, the high level of its moral code, and, above all, the spiritual and exalted character of so much of its religion, had deeply impressed the thinking world of the Roman Empire. That world had found, in a blending of Egyptian religious ideas with Greek metaphysics, a key to the mysteries of life and death; in the so-called Hermetic books the old beliefs and religious conceptions of Egypt were reduced to a system and interpreted from a Greek point of view, while the Neo-Platonic philosophy was an avowed attempt to combine the symbolism of Egypt with the subtleties of Greek thought. But the animal worship was hard to reconcile with philosophy; even symbolism failed to explain it away, or to satisfy the mind of the inquirer. Plutarch had boldly denied that the worship of an animal was in any way more absurd than that of an image; the deity, if so he chose, could manifest himself in either [pg 102] equally well. Porphyry had recourse to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If the soul migrated after death into the body of some lower animal, he urged, it would communicate to the latter a portion of the divine essence. But after all this was no explanation of the worship paid to the animal; the soul had not been worshipped while it was still in the body of its original possessor, and there was therefore no reason why it should be worshipped when it was embodied in another form. Moreover, metempsychosis in the Greek sense was never an Egyptian doctrine. All the Egyptian held was that the soul, after it had been justified and admitted to a state of blessedness, could enter for a time whatever material form it chose; could fly to heaven, for instance, in the body of a swallow, or return to the mummified body in which it had once dwelt. But such embodiments were merely temporary, and matters of free choice; they were like a garment, which the soul could put on and take off at will.

      Modern writers have found it as difficult to explain the animal worship of ancient Egypt as the philosophers and theologians of Greece and Rome. Creuzer declared that it was the result of a poverty of imagination, and that the beasts were worshipped because they embodied certain natural phenomena. Lenormant argued, on the other hand, that it was due to a high spiritual conception of religion, which prevented the Egyptians from adoring lifeless rocks and stones like the other nations of antiquity. Of late the tendency has been to see in it a sort of totemism which prevailed among the aboriginal population of the country, and was tolerated by the higher religion of the Pharaonic immigrants. In this case it would represent the religion of the prehistoric race or races, and its admittance into the official religion would be paralleled by the history of Braḥmanism, which [pg 103] has similarly tolerated the cults and superstitions of the aboriginal tribes of India. Indeed, it is possible to discover an analogous procedure in the history of Christianity itself. The lower beliefs

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