Egyptian Religion

 

 

EGYPTIAN RELIGION

 

Like all semi-developed religions (which the Sumerian and in fact all imperial religions BCE were) the Egyptian religion was polytheistic with its gods representing or represented by the major heavenly bodies as well as major earthly features and creatures.  For the Egyptian the Nile as his immediate life-giver and the sky over him and everything else were the two major gods.  In fact in all BCE religions except Judaism we find the sky as the chief god, sometimes the sun representing the sky as a whole; hence the sun god as chief god in both Sumeria and Egypt. This common feature of the sky survived into many modern languages, for example in English the words Heaven and God are used synonymously. We say “Only Heaven knows” or interject “Good Heavens!”

 

In all moon definitely was a god as were Venus, Mars and other more prominent stars. They were believed to have souls and be interested in men’s world and demand worship from them.  The sky was filled by a cow, its belly was clad in ten thousand stars while its feet were firmly grounded in the earth. This cow god was named Hathor. The earth was the god Nuit and from the copulation of the sky and the earth all things were born. Some greater god occasionally ate the moon and until the god vomited it the moon was in eclipse.

 

The chief god was the sun and was called as ‘Ra’ and sometimes Horus. This was the Creator seeing that it fertilised the earth with its rays.  The first man and woman were the first children of Ra and all pharaohs were also in some way Ra’s sons. So, the son of God status for kings has had a too ancient ancestry to make it special about another would-be king or Messiah, namely Jesus son of Mary-  Messiah is another term for a king in Hebrew language.

 

Like in Sumeria, the early community of people were pious but had gradually descended into impiety. In the Sumerian and other neighbouring kingdoms the gods had destroyed them by a flood while according to the Egyptians they were destroyed by Ra by other means. In both empires though there were learned atheists who dismissed these beliefs and like their modern brethren believed that early men were just brutes even without speech and only gradually developled into civilisation. Which means Darwins and Durkheims of our age were no originators of any original ideas but re-heaters and re-servers of old dishes.

 

On top of these major gods the simpler Egyptians could worship anything and everything he fancied for some reason; a local spring or useful plant or impressive animal could be adopted as a god and offered offerings of food and devout worship.

 

Animal gods were so numerous and animal forms so frequently represented their gods that one scholar called the Egyptian pantheon a zoological pantheon. From the humble cat to the mighty crocodile animal gods fired the imagination of the Egyptian and provoked his adoration.  The bull and the cow were especially important which fact we also shall meet in India later in this essay.  In many animal representations of gods the phalluses of them featured prominently; they were oversize specimens of male reproductive power and in fact in all primitive and semi-developed religions sexual organs and representations of extra fertile men and women defined the most popular gods. This obsession with high breeding power and rate most probably was a projection of all primitive nations to breed faster than their environments and enemies could destroy; it was a spiritualised representation for their anxieties about survival as a group.  As a result worship of the sex organs either in isolation or as attached to an idol of a god as well as sexual orgy as the culmination of a group worship featured prominently in all semi-developed religions. The devotees, on special days would converge on the local temple or shrine and eat, drink and dance into a frenzy and then copulate with the priestesses of the site or promiscuously among themselves. Perhaps this was an instinctively created method to impregnate as many women as possible seeing that not every couple could produce enough children given the fact that one of the partners could not be fertile enough in the hands of the other.  During religious processions representations of male and sometimes of female organs were carried through the streets. Some of these had mechanical contraptions giving them movement as in copulation.

 

On top of the priestesses or sometimes themselves as priestesses were the prostitutes and prostitution was part of the temple establishment which then taxed the prostitutes.

Morality was enjoined on the believers but its influence was largely undone by the institution of pardon against a contribution to the temple in the form of cash or in kind. Gold and silver as well as produce and animals were accepted and that made the conscience easy enough to repeat any sin.  As we shall also see the case of India all these semi-developed religions (which we normally call paganism) had a very developed and populous priesthoods living and functioning from palatial temples and receiving on behalf of the resident gods the gifts of the people as well as kings. All gods were imagined in human form, flesh, muscle and blood, eating, drinking, quarrelling and copulating, begetting sons and daughters and committing murder and bereaving after their murdered fellows who some god could sometimes bring back from death.

 

It seems that the whole theology of these pagans was unconsciously derived from parent worship. As children they saw their world dominated by parents and other close adult relations because they lived as very vast extended families at times breaking up here and there  and creating offshoots as new if closely related clans. Land or game or sexual disputes set one adult against the other and conspiratorial alliances and fighting, plunder, abduction and murder followed.  Watching all such clashes and brutalities and yet deeply needing the adults and attached to them it was quite natural for pagan children to grow up and believe in gods who were human in every sense except in form (like an animal’s) and power. In other words a god was a superman or superwoman and therefore subject to all human needs and failings as only mollified by far greater strength and capabilities.  Since the gods themselves were not always moral but frequently immoral and often got their way by the exercise of strange powers, it was natural for their worshippers also committing similar indecencies and resorting to magic to get their way. Men even at times deceived and robbed their gods or played one against the other and could sometimes get away with it, as the myths narrated. We see this especially in the Greek paganism to be looked at later. Although morality was sometimes important success by all means was the greater ethos and ambition. The Greek more than anything else, was a clever man. And ruthless.

 

Lastly one of the worst excesses of paganism was its very poor regard for human life. Parents could dispose of their children, especially the babies and more especially the girls while human sacrifice to gods was the supreme devotion.  In wars the both the enemy soldiery and civilians were subject to any amount and form of slaughter while those who offended the law or tradition of their society could be punished in any barbaric way as the king or the judge prescribed.  To give just and idea one of the most barbaric punishments were burying a man in a box with only the head sticking out, force feeding him any food or rubbish on the pain of gouging his eyes out or cutting other parts; as the man’s natural excreta accumulated in the box and pickled him he was gradually eaten by all sorts worms and insects until dead.  This was evidenced in Assyria, the country Abraham lived in as a young man, boasting of perhaps the cruellest of all Mesopotamian regimes under ‘nimrods’.

We shall see this incredible insensitivity to the sufferings of other human beings under certain circumstances to be a constant part of paganism while enviable compassion might be shown to other human beings under other circumstances. As such, there is a schizoid attitude towards fellow men whose loving care or wanton cruel destruction including mass destruction may depend on how their powerful respondent regards them. This is a very distinguishing mark between a fully advanced religion like Islam and the semi-advanced.

 

Very interesting for us is the myth of Isis who was the Great Mother for the Egyptians as were, among others, Ishtar of the Babylonians and Demeter for the Greeks.  She was the royal sister and wife of Osiris. She was represented by the black silty soil of the Nile valley and the delta while Osiris was represented by the Nile itself. From their copulation the agricultural blessings of Egypt were being produced. In such myths we see the examples of the omnipresent metaphor language of all religions down into Islam itself-  Supernatural belief and metaphor are inseparable. It was Isis who had discovered wheat and barley for example and thereby providing the staple diet of her Egyptian worshippers- a metaphor for a mother’s or woman’s prominent role in an agrarian society precariously dependent on the fertility of the soil.  The Egyptians adoration of her was something worth seeing; they depicted her as a richly bejewelled matron, called her ‘Mother of God’, for she had begat the sun god Horus after a miraculous (immaculate conception) and nursed her in a stable- all of which mythical elements survived into Christianity. Even the tonsured heads of her priests survived into Catholicism showing that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ most boasts of something being new and original are often based on ignorance or ignoring of precedents. In fact some early Christians actually worshipped before the images of Isis suckling baby Osiris from which example the later Madonna suckling the divine baby must have descended.

 

Here we have one of the earliest trintities of godhead; Eventually the Egyptian trinity developed into the Trinity of Ra (another name for Horus), Amon and Ptah, the three being the three persons or aspects of the One Supreme deity-  just like in the Christian Godhead. The king was the chief priest and ruled absolutely on behalf of gods, he in fact was the son of the sun god.  He always married his nearest relations, that is to say a sister or daughter to keep the royal and divine blood pure.  Under him was a vast cadre of priests organised temple by temple and in hierarchical levels and monopolised all spiritual and academic knowledge as well as high state positions and transmitting their offices from father to son. As usual this temple establishment became the richest institution in Egypt as elsewhere; with riches came power even unto deposing one way or another the kings- we see a lot of this tradition in Catholicism, especially at Medieval times.  Popes could sometimes depose and humble kings.

 

An interesting interlude in Egyptian religion exemplifies this fact quite graphically; Pharaoh Amonhotep came to the throne in 1380 BCE.  Soon after becoming king he denounced the polytheism of the temples where all gods were under a chief god called Amon or more precisely Amon-Ra (Ra meaning sun). In fact the temple was at its most corrupt; it was filled with vast numbers of young women presented as the concubines of the chief god but in actual fact and as in the case of all donations to the temple were serving the priests. Like a monotheistic prophet (which he must have been) he was disgusted with idol worship, blood sacrifices, obscurantist myths and exploitative practices of the priests who additionally robbed people for their false services like divination, curse imposing and curse lifting and less discreditably healing.  Benefiting from the supposed absolute authority of a pharaoh he denounced all gods and their idolatry as well as the abuses and excesses of the priesthood and announced that only one god existed, namely Aton which was represented by the sun. He was not the first man to declare this unitarian view though; even in Sumeria and Babylonia there had passed a few examples of the same triumphant realisation that ultimately the universe was a single, well-integrated organism with one Soul or Mind and this could only mean One God, One Will, One Law.  He eulogised the Only Lord in beautiful poetry similar to those in the Old Testament, especially the Psalms.  Just a few verses:

 

“How manifold are Thy works

They are hidden from us

O Sole God whose powers no other possessed

Thou didst create the earth as Thou pleasest

While Thou wast alone”

 

He changed his idolatrous name of Amonhotep (Amon’s servant) to Ikhnaton (Aton is pleased) and for a while his will prevailed however the shocked and greatly inconvenienced priestshood resented. All temples were voided of idols of pervious gods and rededicated to Aton and ceremonies cleaned up and abuses banned. Temple revenues plummeted and the unwilling priests totally antagonised. Personally he lived like a saint, devoted to his  wife and children and showed humility and kindness not habituated in a pharaoh which made him the secret laughingstock of others. In addition to his terrible unpopularity at home his vassals the kings of all neighbouring lands like Syria saw this extremely unusual pharaoh a weakling impossible not to take advantage of and stopped paying tribute. He hesitated to fight them back into subjection because he detested bloodshed just like today’s pacifists. As a result provinces seceded and the royal treasury dried up. Increasing noises of discontent filled Egypt and the saintly king, worn out with worry and increasing impotence died at the early age of just 30.  After him the old paganism made a vengeful comeback.

 

INDIAN RELIGION

 

As if copycatted from the Sumerian,Babylonian and the Egyptian we find in ancient India a similar polytheism under one chief god, this time Brahma and a forest of temples and priesthoods serving idol gods with individual portfolios for the running of the affairs of the world and the men living in it. The priests similarly monopolise learning and teaching, make and brake men by their magical powers and exact from them protection money to spare them from the wrath of gods. They also get extremely rich and powerful and consume the lion’s share of national wealth. Temples compete with royal palaces for grandeur, magnificence and luxury as priests do with the kings albeit more discreetly and behind closed doors. Concubines in the guise of priestesses abound and are similarly exploited in both ways- as bed fellows of the priests and prostitutes for hire.

Again like elsewhere temple ceremonies and rituals feature sexual climaxes when everything goes under the blessings of gods. Again as elsewhere these climaxes are exceptional if regular events; otherwise Indian ladies are the most faithful wives to their husbands. As again elsewhere in paganism, family is very sacred and parental authority inviolable. Ladies seem, under law, to serve their husbands and always be under the suzerainty of husbands or sons when the husband is no more, yet as always they subtly float out of it in practice and occupy an almost divine authority as the mother of the family. It may be argued that the subjection of women in many (not all) pagan cultures derive from man’s fear of women based on man’s experience as the son of a woman which experience moulds him into a pack of frozen fear and respect for woman impossible to outgrow. So, what he cannot win psychologically man tries to win by legal sanction. To the prestige of motherhood a wife adds her irresistible sexual charms and then it is no wonder that out of nine houses in ten man’s powers are virtual and often rarely exercised while woman’s is real but rarely acknowledged by either party. Still, man’s legal superiority asserts itself in crucial and momentous occasions-  widowed women must accompany their husbands to the grave or the funeral pyre so that they can continue to serve their lords in the next world. Surprisingly, women generally took this stoically and at least in principle as well as near totally in actual practice voluntarily went to death, often regarding it an honoured privilege to follow their husbands to heaven.  This practice survived into late and even early 20^th century and only the British rule and the more democratic governments influenced by British ways could put an end to it.

 

The most ancient and still the main religion of India has been Brahmanism originally developed from the sacred texts called the Vedas.  Contained in massive rolls the Vedas were an accumulation of religious literature of India roughly as from 3000 BCE. By 1200 CE today’s Hinduism had taken its final form, an evolution taking more than four millenia. Its basic theme is reincarnation designed to explain why people often suffer a lot throughout their lives. The explanation is that men offend gods by many bad actions and therefore do not deserve eternal and happy life in heaven but must be sent back to pay for their sins and try again. The sins are often so bad that a man can be reincarnated in a rat or insect or other animal and must await another reincarnation for a luckier start. As such it must reflect the terrible abuses of human rights in India since times lost in the mists of the distant past as well as only too many dangers and unpredictables of a complex environment like India-  mostly hot and humid, infested with only too many terrible animals from man-eating ants to cobras and tigers and crocodiles to poisonous  plants whose a drop of juice could kill. The extremely fertile but unhealthy climate very favourable to deadly micro-organisms bred many illnesses which could decimade children as well as weakly adults in epidemics made the life of an Indian totally unsafe and unpredictable and needed an explanation.

 

Added to this were the interminable waves of conquests which brought great slaughter, enslavement and plunder while the hostile rivalries between the too many petty princes dividing the lands between them made war a regular state of affairs making the people live in perpetual fear of their safety and welfare. Among all this tumult and uncertainties only one and one group could sort out the mess around them and make themselves both safe and prosperous and that was the priesthood. By their clever theology and doctrines as well as fascinating and brain-washing rituals and also all-effective magical feats they held both the populace and royalty in their awe and debt and faced and beat all opposition.  Yet and ironically, it was they as always in paganism (and Catholicism) who gave their environment any possible degree of stability and comfort to suffering souls whatever the exploitations and even hypocrisy and cynicism. Psychologically immature people who always make up the majority cannot resist believing in miraculous claims made by those who have a talent in making them believably and this law still applies when modern people consult horoscopes in daily papers at the least or consult astrologers, mediums or magicians or resort to shrines in search of cures to their mental or physical sufferings. Cults are mushrooming as well as prospering everywhere in the modern world and India still leads the world in the exploitation of spiritual needs of men. In fact many Western mystical movements can be traced to India and Christianity itself owes no mean debt to it.  Although Muslims also got some very resilient spiritual infections from pagan India in the form of several superstitions and magical gurus and their followers Islam’s survival of scripture and the fullness and clarity of its creed and law prevented its going under and all who cares can rediscover true Islam and live from it.

 

The main features of Brahmanist theology and law are as follows:

 

There are many gods as usual but the chief god, against as usual is a universal god named Brahma. Formerly, the godhead was a trinity made of Brahma (the Creator), Shiva (the Preserver) and Vishnu (the Destroyer); only lately Brahma, with a slight variation renamed ‘Brahman’ become the only and first time in Hindu history the transcendent god.  But this advance on theology did nothing to abate the old polytheism and crass idolatry of the masses or gave the Brahmins the priestly class any motivation to take this monotheism even one inch into practice and for example make Hinduism a strictly Unitarian faith with no idol worship as Judaism or Islam.  Their material and social interests as a caste went only too badly against a true unitarianism in which their bread basket and influence factory the temple had to go. So this theological development meant nothing to anybody in practice.

 

Similarly it could no nothing to dismantle the re-incarnation theory or give men a brighter prospect after death by cutting down on its harshness. People had still to try the impossible to avoid re-birth and settle in ‘nirvana’ the Hindu paradise of sorts. Understandably the more sensitive, hysterical and therefore desperate souls had to resort to incredibly harsh methods of self-denial; yogis as most severe ascetics in history kept volunteering into harsh self-disciplining or rather almost wanton self-punishing practices. One could see and can even occasionally today see a yogi who lived in a grave for years and eating almost nothing and doing nothing, another maintaining the same posture for ages and for example clinch his fists so tightly and permanently that his hand became atrophied and paralysed and his every growing nails growing through his palms and coming up out of his top of the hand like the claws of an eagle. Still, most of the yogis to this day are plain beggars and bogus miracle workers faking yogic effects and the members of European colony  in India were weary of discovering and exposing them on every pavement and at every street corner.

 

No culture could ever rival India in the manufacture of gods and myths or the development and performance of magical effects all of which amounted to the prostitution of yogic abilities and prestige.  These strangely prestigious excesses had a lot to do with the development of ascetic practices in the Middle East which gave this area its mystery traditions and eventually monastic Christianity and to Islam the more excessive forms of Sufi practices-  yet none could outdo their Hindu parents. Apparently the reason has been that India has always been a densely populated country with high concentrations of settled people around rivers and in jungle clearings and transmission of inventions of mind and body by imitation was easiest in comparison to the more sparse settling patterns of the generally arid Middle East.  Only Egypt around the Nile and in its extremely wet delta could produce a similar if far inferior sophistication of polytheistic spirituality and domineering temple establishment. The ascetic component though could never make a progress comparable to the Hindu example although magic did not lag too far behind.

An interesting and partially successful deviant development in Hinduism has been Buddhism.

 

Introduced by prince Gautama (6^th century BCE) subsequently called the Buddha (the Enlightened One) it began as a mystic philosophical school discrediting polytheism and idolatry and consequently undermining the Brahmin caste; it was almost atheistic, almost because a few quotations from the Buddha refers to almost a certain transcendent deity at one point described as ‘neither begotten nor begat’ (like the Surat al Ikhlas in the Qur’an). It is quite probable that the Buddha being so weary of the thousands of gods of Hinduism found the term god too contaminated a word and had to shun it as much as possible.

Buddhism was based on practical morality based on personal psychological maturation whereby both the superstitions and natural selfishness of childhood was to be transcended. This was formulated as Four Noble Truths,  namely

 

1. Existence is characterised by suffering  2. The cause of suffering is craving/desire 3. Ending craving stops the suffering 4. The way to achieve this by the application of eight measures collectively called the Eightfold Path, which comprises

1. Right understanding,  2. Right intention, 3. Right speech, 4. Right action, 5. Right livelihood, 6. Right effort, 7. Right mindfulness, 8. Right meditation.

All these and more are in Islam and we can give the exact Islamic equivalents of all above in Muslim terminology in Arabic:

1. (Genuine) al Fiqh,  2. al Ikhlas 3. Kalam al Haqq, 4. Amal al Salih, 5. Rizq al Halal, 6. Hamiyyat al Islam, 7. Al Taqwa, 8. Dhikr Allah

 

As such the Buddhist principles misses love, charity, heroic struggle to beat and expel evil and many more precise Islamic commandments.  Buddhism is too abstract and philosophical to address the problems of humbler men which make up the overwhelming majority of mankind in all ages. As a result it affected this majority too little to give them the consolations they need and understandably they remained Hindus or if converted to Buddhism soon reformed it almost back to Hinduism. Within a few centuries the Buddhists produced their own priesthood and temple establishment and the Buddha ended as another stone god with superstitions in and demands from its believers quite similar to Hinduism. For their part, in the paganisation of Buddhism the Brahmins gave a great helping hand; they deified the Buddha and added him to their pantheon to be worshipped and bring revenue like all the other gods.  It spread to Indo-China, China and Japan among other Asian lands but with always the same result- idolisation and paganisation.

 

Alongside these two pagan religions India continued to practice all the primitive habits and delusions of the animist savages despite so many sophistications of civilisation being available to them;  to this day elephants, snakes, rats, monkeys… are worshiped and also lavishly fed as acts of piety.  Still, the cow rules supreme as the chief national animal god. Superstition and magic have almost as rich a life as they have had since millennia. The images of  such gods occupy the place of honour in many temples and reports that these images as well as the images of other gods listen to prayers, open their mouths and answer back, drink the milk etc. given them and even move arms and legs or weep in compassion are given. These compare well with the Catholic superstitions of statues or paintings of Mary weeping tears of blood or speaking to the worshipper or becoming engulfed in heavenly lights. It becomes increasingly certain that Islam has nothing to look back and that we owe an incalculable debt to Allah through His Messenger Muhammad sws for saving us from all such delusions, waste and the barbarities blessed by them.