Ancient Egypt - Light Of The World, Volume 2 E-Book

Gerald Massey

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1131

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is part 2 of the Gerald Masseys work about the comparisons between the Judeo-Christian religion and the Egyptian religion. No one ever understood the mythology and ritual of Ancient Egypt so well as Gerald Massey since the time of the Ancient Philosophers of Egypt. This book is one of the best of its kind and a must-have for every student of Egyptian mythology and history.

Leseprobe

Ancient Egypt - Light Of The World, Volume 2

Gerald Massey

Contents:

Ancient Egyptian Religion

Ancient Egypt - Light Of The World, Volume 2

Book IX - The Ark, The Deluge, And The World’s Great Year.

The World’s Great Year.

Book X - The Exodus From Egypt And The Desert Of Amenta

The Seed Of Ysiraal.

The Title Of Pharaoh.

Book XI - Egyptian Wisdom In The Revelation Of John The Divine

Book XII - The Jesus-Legend Traced In Egypt For Ten Thousand Years.

The Jesus-Legend In Rome.

The Egypto-Gnostic Jesus.

Double Horus, Or Jesus And The Christ.

The Mysteries And The Miracles.

Jesus In The Mount.

Sut And Horus As Historic Characters In The Canonical Gospels.

The Group In Bethany.

The Founders Of The Kingdom

The Last Supper: The Crucifixion And The Resurrection.

The Resurrection From Amenta, Or Coming Forth To Day.

The Sayings Of Jesus.

Ancient Egypt - Light Of The World, Volume 2, G. Massey

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Germany

ISBN: 9783849641313

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

www.facebook.com/jazzybeeverlag

[email protected]

Ancient Egyptian Religion

An Essay by Eugène Hyvernat (1858 – 1941)

God and man, those two essential terms of every religion, are but imperfectly reflected in the Egyptian religious monuments. A book similar in scope to our Bible certainly never existed in Egypt, and if their different theological schools, or the priests of some particular theological school, ever agreed on certain truths about God and man, which they consigned to official didactic writings, such writings have not reached us. Nor is the vast body of religious monuments bequeathed to us by ancient Egypt of such a nature as to compensate for this lack of positive and systematic information. The figured and inscribed monuments discovered in the temples, and especially in the tombs, acquaint us with the names and external aspects of numerous deities, with the material side of the funerary rites, from which we may safely conclude that they admitted the dependency of man on superior beings, and a certain survival of man after death. But as to the essence of those gods, their relation to the world and man as expressed by the worship of which they were the objects, the significance and symbolism of the rites of the dead, the nature of the surviving principle in man, the nature and modes of the survival itself as depending on earthly life, and the like, the monuments are either silent about or offer us such contradictory and incongruous notions that we are forced to conclude that the Egyptians never evolved a clear and complete system of religious views. What light can be brought out of this chaos we shall concentrate on two chief points:

The Pantheon, corresponding to the term God; and

The Future Life, as best representing the term Man.

(a) The Egyptian Pantheon.—By this word we understand such gods as were officially worshipped in one or more of the various nomes, or in the country at large. We exclude, therefore, the multitude of daemons or spirits which animated almost everything man came in contact with—stones, plants, animals—and the lesser deities which presided over every stage of human life—birth, naming, etc. The worship they received was of an entirely local and private nature, and we know almost nothing of it.

Each nome had its own chief deity or divine lord, male or female, apparently inherited from the ancient tribes. With each deity an animal, as a rule, but sometimes also a tree or mineral, was associated. Thus Osiris of Busiris was associated with a pillar, or the trunk of a tree; Hathor of Denderah, with a sycamore; Osiris of Mendes, with a goat; Set of Tanis, with an ass; Buto of the city of the same name, with a serpent; Bast of Bubastis, with a cat; Atàm, or Tàn, of Heliopolis, with a serpent, a lion, or possibly, later the bull Mnevis; Ptah of Memphis, with the bull Apis; Sovek, in the Fayàm and at Ombos (Kôm Ombo), with a crocodile; Anubis of Assiàt, with a jackal; Thoth of Hermopolis, with an ibis or a baboon; Amon of Thebes, and Chnàm, at the Cataract, with a ram; Horus of el-Kab and Edfu, with a hawk. According to some scholars, this association at first was merely symbolical; it was not till the Nineteenth Dynasty that sacred animals, having gradually come to be considered as incarnations, or at least as dwelling-places, of the various gods, began to be worshipped as gods (Breasted, "Hist. Anc. Egypt.", 59, 324). But this view, once quite common, is now generally abandoned, and fetishistic animal-worship is now considered as the true basis of the Egyptian religion [cf. Chantepie de la Saussaye, "Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte" (1905), I, 194 sqq.]. In any case the origin of the association of certain animals with certain gods, whether symbolical or not, is unknown; as a rule, the same may be said of the various attributes of the various gods or goddesses. We understand that Thoth, being a lunar god, could have been considered the god of time, computation, letters, and science (although we do not know how, being associated with the ibis or a baboon, he became a lunar god); but we do not see why the ram-god Chnàm should have been represented as a potter, nor why the cow-goddess, Hathor, and the cat-goddess, Bast, were identified with beauty, joy, and love, while the lioness-deity, Sekhmet, was the goddess of war, and Neith was identified both with war and with weaving. The names of the gods, as a rule, give no clue. At an early date the crude primitive fetishism was somewhat mitigated, when the deities were supposed to reside in statues combining human figures with animal heads.

Triads.—In other respects gods and goddesses were imagined to be very much like men and women; they ate, drank, married, begat children, and died. Each nome, besides its chief god or goddess, had at least two secondary deities, the one playing the part of a wife or husband to the chief deity, the other that of a son. Thus, in Thebes the group of Amon, Màt (or Ament), and Chons; in Memphis the group of Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertem; etc. Sometimes the triad consisted of one god and two goddesses, as at Elephantine, or even of three male deities. Those groups were probably first obtained by the fusion of several religious centers into one, the number three being suggested by the human family, or possibly by the family triad Osiris, Isis, and Horus, of the Osiris cycle. In some cases the second element was a mere grammatical duplicate of the first, as Ament, wife of Amen (Amon), and was considered as one with it; it was then natural to identify the son with his parents, and so arose the concept of one god in three forms. There was in this a germ of monotheism. It is doubtful, however, whether it would ever have developed beyond the limits of henotheism but for the solar religion which seems to have sprung into existence towards the dawn of the dynastic times, very likely under the influence of the school of Heliopolis. But before we turn to this new phase of the Egyptian religion, we must consider another aspect of the ancient gods which may have furnished the first basis of unification of the various local worships.

The Gods of the Dead.—Gods, being fancied like men, were, like them, subject to death, the great leveller. Each community had the mummy of its god. But in the case of gods, as in that of men, death was not the cessation of all life. With the assistance of magical devices the dead god was simply transferred to another world, where he was still the god of the departed who had been his devotees on earth. Hence two forms of the same god, frequently under two different names which eventually led to the conception of distinct gods of the dead. Such were Chent-Ament, the first of the Westerners (the dead) at Abydos, Sokar (or Seker), probably a form of Ptah, at Memphis. Sometimes, however, the god of the dead retained the name he had before, as Anubis at Assiut, Khonyu at Thebes, and Osiris, wherever he began to be known as such.

Legend of Osiris.—Each of these gods had his own legend. Osiris was the last god who reigned upon the earth, and he was a wise and good king. But his brother Set was a wicked god and killed Osiris, cutting his body into fragments, which he scattered all over the land. Isis, sister and wife of Osiris, collected the fragments, put them together, and embalmed them, with the assistance of her son Horus, Anubis (here, perhaps, a substitute for Set, who does not seem to have been originally conceived as his brother's slayer), and Nephthys, Set's wife. Isis then, through her magical art, revives her husband who becomes king of the dead, while Horus defeats Set and reigns on the earth in his father's place. According to another version, Qeb, father of Osiris, and Set put an end to the strife by dividing the land between the two competitors, giving the South to Horus and the North to Set.

Sidereal and Elemental Gods.—It is generally conceded that some of the local gods had a sidereal or elemental character. Horus, of Edfu and el-Kb (Ilithyaspolis), and Anher, of This, represented one or other aspect of the sun. Thoth of Hermopolis and Khonsu of Thebes were lunar gods. Min, of Akhmim (Chemmis) and Coptos, represented the cultivable land and Set, of Ombos (near Nakadeh), the desert. Hapi was the Nile, Hathor the vault of heaven. In some cases this sidereal or elemental aspect of the local gods may be primitive, especially among the tribes of Asiatic origin; but in other cases it may be of later date and due to the influence of the solar religion of Re, which, as we have already said, came into prominence, if not into existence, during the early dynastic times.

Solar Gods, Re or Ra.—That Re was such a local god representing the sun, is generally taken for granted although by no means proven. We cannot assign him to any locality not furnished with another god of its own. We never find him, like the vast majority of the local gods, associated with a sacred animal, nor is he ever represented with a human figure, except as a substitute for Atàm, or as identified with Horus or some other god. His only representative among men is the pharaoh, who in the earliest dynastic monuments appears as his son. Finally, it is difficult to understand how the kings of the southern kingdom, after having extended their rule to the north, should have given up their own patron god, Horus, for a local deity of the conquered land. It looks as if the worship of Re had been inaugurated some time after the reunion of the two lands, and possibly for political reasons. At all events, the solar religion soon became very popular, and it may be said that to the end it remained the state religion of Egypt. Re, like the other gods, had his legend—or rather myth—excogitated by the theological school of Heliopolis in connection with the cosmogonic system of the same school. He had created the world and was king over the earth. In course of time the mortals rebelled against him because he was too old, whereupon he ordered their destruction by the goddess of war, but on the presentation of 7000 jars of human blood he was satisfied and decided to spare men. Tired of living among them, he took his flight to heaven, where, standing in his sacred bark, he sails on the celestial ocean. The fixed stars and the planets are so many gods who play the parts of pilot, steersman, and oarsmen. Re rises in the east, conquers the old foe (darkness), spreads light, life, wealth, and joy on all sides, and receives everywhere the applause of gods and men; but now he comes to the western horizon, where, behind Abydos, through an enormous crevice, the celestial waters rush down to the lower hemisphere. The sacred bark follows the eternal river and, unretarded, the god passes slowly through the kingdom of night, conquering his foes, solacing his faithful worshippers, only, however, to renew his course over the upper hemisphere, as bright, as vivifying, as beautiful as ever. Soon each phase of the sun's course received a special name and gradually developed into a distinct god; thus we find Harpochrates (Horus's Child) representing morning sun; Atàm, the evening sun; Re, the noon sun; while Harmakhuti (Horus on the two horizons—Harmachis, supposed to be represented by the great Sphinx) is both the rising and the setting sun.

Cosmogony and Enneads.—Different cosmogonic systems were excogitated at a very early date (some of them, possibly, before the dynastic times) by the various theological schools, principally by the School of Heliopolis. Unfortunately, none of these systems seem to have been handed down in the primitive form. According to one of the versions of the Heliopolitan cosmogony, the principle of all things is the god Nàn, the primordial ocean, in which Atàm, the god of light, lay hidden and alone until he decided to create the world. He begat all by himself Shu, the atmosphere, and Tefnàt, the dew. In their turn Shu and Tefnàt begat Qeb, the earth, and Nàt, the vault of heaven. These two were lying asleep in mutual embrace in the Nàn, when Shu, stealing between them, raised Nàt on high. The world was formed, and the sun could begin its daily course across the heavens. Qeb and Nàt begat Osiris, the cultivable land and the Nile united in one concept, Set the desert, and the two sisters Isis and Nephthys. To this first ennead, of which Tàm (later supplanted by Re) appears as the head, two others were added, the first of which began with Horns, as son of Osiris and Isis. The three enneads constituted as many dynasties of gods, or demi-gods, who reigned on the earth in predynastic times. We have seen above that the third of these dynasties, called "the shades" (nekues) by Manetho, represents the predynastic kings mentioned on the Palermo Stone. The Heliopolitan Ennead became very popular, and every religious center was now ambitious to have a similar one, the same gods and order being generally retained, except that the local deity invariably appeared at the head of the combination.

It has long been customary to assert that in Egypt human life was compared to the course of the sun, and that Osiris was nothing but the sun considered as dead. It is far more correct, however, to say, with Professor Maspéro [Revue de l'histoire des religions (1887), XV, 307 sqq.], that the course of the sun was compared to that of human life. Osiris is not a sun that has set, but the sun that has set is an Osiris; this is so true that when the sun reappears on the eastern horizon, he is represented as the youth, Horus, son of Osiris.

The great prominence given to Re and Osiris by the Heliopolitan School of theology not only raised the Egyptian belief to a higher plane, but brought about a certain unification of it—a consolidation, so to speak, of the local worships. Naturally, the local gods retained their original external appearance, but they were now clothed with the attributions of the new Heliopolitan deity, Re, and were slowly identified with him. Every god became now a sun-god under some aspect; and in some cases the name of the Heliopolitan god was added to the name of the local god, as Sobek-Re, Chnàm-Re, Ammon-Re. It was a step towards monotheism, or at any rate towards a national henotheism. This tendency must have been encouraged by the pharaohs in their capacity rather of political than of religious rulers of the nation. There could be no perfect and lasting political unity as long as the various nomes retained their individual gods.

It is significant that in the only two periods when the pharaohs seem to have had absolute political control of Egypt—viz. from the Fourth to the Fifth and from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty—the systems of Re, in the former period, and his Theban form, Ammon-Re, in the latter period, come clearly to the front, while the local religious systems fall into the background. These, however, though they were no more than tolerated, seemed to constitute a menace to political unity. The effort of Amenhotep IV to intro-duce the cult of his only god, Aton (see above, in Dynastic History; Second Period), was perhaps not prompted exclusively by a religious ideal, as is generally believed. A similar attempt in favor of Re and his ennead was perhaps made by the Memphite kings. From Khafre, second king of the fourth dynasty, to the end of the sixth dynasty, the word Re is a part of the name of almost every one of those kings, and the monuments show that during that period numerous temples were erected to the chief of the Heliopolitan Ennead in the neighboring nomes. Such encroachments of the official religion on the local forms of worship may have caused the disturbances which marked the passage from the fifth to the sixth dynasty and the end of the latter. That such disturbances were not of a merely political nature is clear in the light of the well-known facts that the royal tombs and the temples of that period were violated and pillaged, if not destroyed, and that the mortuary statues of several kings, those of Khafre in particular, were found, shattered into fragments, at the bottom of a pit near these pyramids. Evidently, those devout "sons of Re" were not in the odor of sanctity with some of the Egyptian priests, and the imputation of impiety brought against them, as recorded by Herodotus (II, 127, 128; cf. Diodorus Siculus, I, 14), may not have been quite as baseless as is assumed by some modern scholars (Maspéro, Histoire Ancienne, pp. 76 sq.).

If the foregoing sketch of the Egyptian religion is somewhat obscure, or even produces a self-contradictory effect, this may perhaps be attributed to the fact that the extremely remote periods considered (mostly, in fact, prehistoric) are known to us from monuments of later date, where they are reflected in superimposed outlines, comparable to a series of pictures of one person at different stages of life, and in different attitudes and garbs, taken successively on the same photographic plate. The Egyptians were a most conservative people; like other peoples, they were open to new religious concepts, and accepted them, but they never got rid of the older ones, no matter how much the older might conflict with the newer. However, if the writer is not mistaken, two prominent features of their religion are sufficiently clear: first, animal fetishism from beginning to end in a more or less mitigated form; secondly, superposition, during the early Memphite dynasties, of the sun-worship, the sun being considered not as creator, but as organizer of the world, from an eternally pre-existing matter, perhaps the forerunner of the demiurge of the Alexandrine School.

(b) The Future Life.—As early as the predynastic times the Egyptians believed that man was survived in death by a certain principle of life corresponding to our soul. The nature of this principle, and the condi tions on which its survival depended, are illustrated by the monuments of the early dynasties. It was called the ka of the departed, and was imagined as a counterpart of the body it had animated, being of the same sex, remaining throughout its existence of the same age as at the time of death, and having the same needs and wants as the departed had in his lifetime. It endured as long as the body, hence the paramount importance the Egyptians attached to the preservation of the bodies of their dead. They generally buried them in ordinary graves, but always in the dry sand of the desert, where moisture could not affect them; among the higher classes, to whom the privilege of being embalmed was at first restricted, the mummy was sealed in a stone coffin and deposited in a carefully concealed rock-excavation over which a tomb was built. Hence, also, the presence in the tombs of lifelike statues of the deceased to which the ka might cling, should the mummy happen to meet destruction. But the ka could also die of hunger or thirst, and for this reason food and drink were left with the body at the time of the burial, fresh supplies being deposited from time to time on the top of the grave, or at the entrance of the tomb. The ka, or "double", as this word is generally interpreted, is confined to the grave or tomb, often called "the house of the ka'". There near the body, it now lives alone in darkness as once, in union with the body, it lived in the sunny world. Toilet articles, weapons against possible enemies, amulets against serpents, are also left in the tomb, together with magic texts and a magic wand which enable it to make use of these necessaries.

Along with the ka, the earliest texts mention other surviving principles of a less material nature, the ba and the khu. Like the ka, the ba resides in the body during man's life, but after death it is free to wander where it pleases. It was conceived as a bird, and is often represented as such, with a human head. The khu is luminous; it is a spark of the divine intelligence. According to some Egyptologists, it is a mere transformation which the ba undergoes when, in the here-after, it is found to have been pure and just during lifetime; it is then admitted to the society of the gods; according to others, it is a distinct element residing in the ba. Simultaneously with the concepts of the ba and the khu, the Egyptians developed the concept of a common abode for the departed souls, not unlike the Hades of the Greeks. But their views varied very much, both as to the location of that Hades and as to its nature. It is very likely that, originally, every god of the dead had 'a Hades of his own; but, as those gods were gradually either identified with Osiris or brought into his cycle as secondary infernal deities, the various local concepts of the region of the dead were ultimately merged into the Osirian concept. According to Professor Maspéro, the kingdom of Osiris was first thought to be located in one of the islands of the Northern Delta whither cultivation had not yet extended. But when the sun in its course through the night had become identified with Osiris, the realm of the dead was shifted to the region traversed by the sun during the night, wherever that region might be, whether under the earth, as more commonly accepted, or in the far west, in the desert, on the same plane with the world of the living, or in the northeastern heavens beyond the great sea that surrounds the earth.

As the location, so does the nature of the Osirian Hades seem to have varied with the different schools; and here, unfortunately, as in the case of the Egyptian pantheon, the monuments exhibit different views superimposed on one another. We seem, however, to discern two traditions which we might call the pure Osiris and the re-Osiris traditions. According to the former tradition the aspiration of all the departed is to be identified with Osiris, and live with him in his kingdom of the Earu, or Yalu, fields—such a paradise as the Egyptian peasant could fancy. There ploughing and reaping are carried on as upon the earth, but with hardly any labor, and the land is so well irrigated by the many branches of another Nile that wheat grows seven ells. All men are equal; all have to answer the call for work without distinction of former rank. Kings and grandees, however, can be spared that light burden by having ushebtis (respondents) placed with them in their tombs. These ushebtis were small statuettes with a magic text which enabled them to impersonate the deceased and answer the call for him.

To procure the admission of the deceased into this realm of happiness his family and friends had to perform over him the same rites as were performed over Osiris by Isis, Nephthys, Horus, and Anubis. Those rites consisted mostly of magical formulae and incantations. The mummification of the body was considered an important condition, as Osiris was supposed to have been mummified. It seems, also, that in the beginning at least, the Osirian doctrine demanded a certain dismemberment of the body previous to all further rites, as the body of Osiris had been dismembered by Set. Possibly, also, this took place in the pre-dynastic times, when the bodies of the dead appear to have been intentionally dismembered and then put together again for burial (Chantepie de la Saussaye, op. cit., I, 214). At all events Diodorus narrates that the surgeon who made the first incision on the body previous to the removal of the viscera had to take to flight immediately after having accomplished his duty, while the mob pretended to drive him away with stones (Diodorus Siculus, I, 91), as though he impersonated Set. This custom, however, of dismembering bodies may be older than the Osirian doctrine, and may explain it rather than be explained from it (Chantepie de la Saussaye, op. cit., I, 220). When all the rites had been duly performed the deceased was pronounced Osiris so-and-so—he had been identified with the god Osiris. He could now proceed to the edge of the great river beyond which are the Earu fields. Turn-face, the ferryman, would carry him across, unless the four sons of Horus would bring him a craft to float over, or the hawk of Horus, or the ibis of Thoth, would condescend to transport him on its pinions to his destination. Such were, during the Memphite dynasties, the conditions on which the departed soul obtained eternal felicity; they were based nn ritual rather than on moral purity. It seems, however, that already at that time some texts show the deceased declaring himself, or being pronounced, free of certain sins. In any case, under the twelfth dynasty the deceased was regularly tried before being allowed to pass across the waters. He is represented appearing before Osiris, surrounded by forty-two judges. His heart is weighed on scales by Horus and Anubis, over against a feather, a symbol of justice, while Thoth registers the result of the operation. In the meantime the deceased recites a catalogue of forty-two sins (so-called "negative confession") of which he is innocent. Between the scales and Osiris there is what seems to be a female hippopotamus, appearing ready to devour the guilty souls; but there was no great danger of falling into her jaws, as the embalmers had been careful to remove the heart and replace it by a stone scarab inscribed with a magical spell which prevented the heart from testifying against the deceased. The concept of retribution implied by the judgment very likely originated with the School of Abydos [see Maspéro, "Revue de l'histoire des religions" (1887), XV, 308 sqq.].

According to another tradition, which is represented along with the foregoing in the Pyramid Texts, the deceased is ultimately identified not with Osiris himself, but with Re identified with Osiris and his son Horus. His destination is the bark of Re on the eastern horizon, whither he is transported by the same ferryman Turn-face. Once on the sacred bark, the deceased may bid defiance to all dangers and enemies, he enjoys absolute and perfect felicity, leaves the kingdom of re-Osiris, and follows re-Horus across the heavens into the region of the living gods. The same concept was resumed by the Theban School. An important variant of this re-Osiris tradition is to be found in two books due to the Theban Ammon-Re School of theology, the "Book of what there is in the Duat" (Hades) and the "Book of the Gates". In both compositions the course of Re in the region of darkness is divided into twelve sections corresponding to the twelve hours of night, but in the latter book each section is separated by a gate guarded by gigantic serpents. Some of these sections are presided over by the old gods of the dead, Sokar and Osiris, with their faithful subjects. The principal features of these two books is the concept of a retribution which we now meet clearly expressed for the first time. While the innocent soul, after a series of transformations, reaches at last, on the extreme limit of the lower world, the bark of Re, where it joins the happy crowd of the gods, the criminal one is submitted to various tortures and finally annihilated,

Ancient Egypt - Light Of The World, Volume 2

BOOK IX - THE ARK, THE DELUGE, AND THE WORLD’S GREAT YEAR.

ATfirst sight the general effect of the innumerable deluge-legends is to suggest the existence of a primitive kind of catastrophobia resulting from fear of the water-flood. The arkite symbolism originated in the mount and tree, the cave or enclosure being a natural place of refuge when the waters were out upon the earth; and these were followed by the raft, the boat, or ark that swam the waters as a means of human safety. Before the legends of a deluge could have been formulated, the deluge as an overwhelming flood of water had become a figure used in sign-language to express the natural fact in a variety of phenomena to which the type might be and was applied. It is expressed in English still by what is termed “a flooding.” But a deluge is not only an overflow of water. There is a deluge of blood (both Egyptian and Polynesian). Night brings its deluge of darkness, and dawn lets loose the floods of day. The so-called deluge-legend comprises a hundred legends and a hundred applications of the same type, from one single origin in sign-language as the primitive mode of representing a fact in nature. The deluge is universal because it was not local. The human race spread out over all the earth would not have been greatly troubled about an excessive overflow of water once upon a time in Mesopotamia. The legend is coeval with all time, and current amongst all people, because the deluge did not occur “once upon a time.” On the grand scale it was the mythical representation of the ending and submergence of an old order of things in the astronomical mythology; but there were various distinct deluges with that meaning, and not merely one. The Egyptian deluge in the so-called “destruction of mankind” is described as continuing for three nights and days. The time is measured by three days’ length in navigation through a deluge of blood (Records of the Past, 6, 103). Now, three nights and days is the length of time that was computed for the monthly absence of the moon in the nether-world. Hence there was a deluge of darkness on that scale in mythology. But the deluge occurred in at least four categories of phenomena. There was a deluge of blood and a deluge of darkness, as well as a deluge of water. There is also the deluge that was a type of periodic time; and by no black art of bibliolatry can these four kinds of deluge be combined in one.

A deluge being an ending of a cycle in time, we can understand the language of the Codex Chimalpopoca (translated by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg) concerning the flood, when it says, “Now the water was tranquil for forty years plus twelve.” “All was lost. Even the mountains sank into the water, and the water remained tranquil for fifty-two springs.” In this account, the well-known Mexican cycle of fifty-two years is measured by means of a deluge at the end of the period. In Inner Africa the year was reckoned by the periodic great rain; in Egypt by the inundation; and a deluge, we repeat, became the natural type of an ending in time in the uranographic representation. In India, a solar pralaya, in which the waters rise till they reach the seven Rishis in the region of the pole, is of necessity kronian, and applies solely to the keeping of time and period astronomically. The Assyrian deluge is described as lasting seven days. This agrees with the seven days’ silence in the Wisdom of Esdras, by which the consummation of the age, or ending of the period, was to be commemorated “like as in the former judgments,” deluges, or endings of the cycle or age in time. The flood of Noah is on the scale of the year or thereabouts. The deluge of time, as it was called by the Chaldean magi, is a breach of continuity, a phase of dissolution. It was a period of negation that was filled in with a festival as a mode of memorialising the dies non or no time. It was a condition of the lawlessness of misrule, of promiscuous intercourse, of drunkenness, that characterized the saturnalia by which it was celebrated.

There is a Kamite prototype in “the destruction of mankind” for the woman who is the reputed cause of a deluge in the Egyptian mythos. This is Sekhet the avenger. She is the very great one of the liquid domain. No one is master of the water of Sekhet, which she lets loose as an element of death and destruction. She was the great mistress of terror in fire and flood. In “the destruction of mankind” it is said, “There was Sekhet, during several nights, trampling the blood under her feet as far as Heracleopolis.” Ra, the solar god, “ordered the goddess to slay the evil race in three days of navigation.” “And the fields were entirely covered with water through the will of the majesty of the god; and there came the goddess (Hathor) in the morning, and she found the fields covered with water, and she was pleased with it, and she went away satisfied and saw no men” (i.e., none of the exterminated evil race). This is a form of the Egyptian deluge designated a great destruction, but with no earthly application to the human race. In the African legend relating to the origin of Lake Tanganyika, that was told to Stanley by the Wagigi fishermen, it was a woman, to whom the secret of the water-spring had been entrusted, who was the cause of the deluge. Possibly this woman was the earth as mother of the waters, seeing that Scomalt is the earth-mother of the Okanagaus, and that she also was charged with letting in the deluge. Scomalt is a form of the primordial genetrix, equivalent to Apt in Egypt. Long ago, they say, when the sun was no bigger than a star, this strong medicine-woman ruled over what appears to have become a lost continent. Her subjects rose against her in rebellion. Whereupon she broke up the land, and all the people but two met with their death by drowning. A man and a woman escaped in a canoe and arrived on the mainland, and from this pair the Okanagaus are descended (Bancroft, vol. III, 149).

A starting-point in various deluge-legends is from the world all water. This originated with the firmament as the celestial water that was called the Nnu, or Nun. Now one meaning of the word Nun in Egyptian is the flood. Thus the water of heaven is synonymous with the deluge. In one aspect the deluge, as a figure in the sign-language of the astronomical mythology, was a mode of representing the sinking of the pole in the celestial ocean which was figured as the world of water. This is the world all water in the legendary lore. The flood upon which Jehovah sat as king was no other than the firmamental Nun (Ps. XXIX. 10). So the throne of Osiris was based upon the flood, that is upon the Nun. In the vignettes to the Ritual Osiris sits upon the throne in Amenta as the great judge and ruler, and his throne is “balanced” as it is described, upon the flood. Water being the primary element of life, it was also based on figuratively; and Osiris with his throne resting on the water takes the place of the earlier Nnu, or later Noah, resting in his ark as master of the deep. Nnu was god of the celestial water. The wateress in one form was the goddess Nut. This, then, and nothing short of it, is the root of the matter when, as in the Navajo-Indian legend, certain persons, who are so often one female and one male, make their escape from the overwhelming waters by climbing up a reed to the land of life which, as a land of reeds, was the primal paradise, or the fields where the papyrus was in flower above the waters of a universal deluge, as represented in the veriest drawing of mythology.

We have to learn the sign-language before we can understand the nature of mythology. When it is said that Horus inundates the world like the sun each morning, that is with the light as the deluge of day. There is a white water and a black, equivalent to the white bird of light and the black bird of night, as opposite figures of Sut and Horus for the dark and the day. The evil Apap, who drinks the water cubit by cubit at each gulp as the sun goes down, is slain by Horus at daybreak, when he once more sets free the waters of light which are designated the waters of dawn. In like manner, the waters of day rush forth when Indra slays the serpent of darkness, who was thought of as the swallower of the light=water of heaven. Osiris is called the “overflower,” the “great extender,” the “shoreless one,” who in this imagery of the deluge “brings to its fulness the divine force which is hidden within him” (Rit., ch. 64, 13-15, Renouf). Thus, in continuing the primitive mode of thinging the concept, Osiris is the water-force personified, instead of being represented as a crocodile, which was also one of the primal types of water.

“The deluge” is only single as a type. There are various deluges known to mythology, and various agents who are held responsible for causing them. In one legend or folk-tale it was the mischievous monkey. In another it was the tortoise, who sank in the waters and drowned the people who had their dwelling-place upon its back. In another it is caused by the killing of a sacred bird, which might be the vulture or cygnus. In a fourth the fountains of the great deep are opened by the taking out of the star, whereupon the deluge follows. A cause of the deluge is attributed to the star-gods, Sut in Egypt and Bel in Babylonia. It was caused by a failure in keeping time, and the failure is followed in a number of legends by the new heaven, in which the supreme time-keeper is the moon or the lunar divinity who is Taht in the Kamite representation.

Some most precious remains of the primitive wisdom now extant outside of Egypt are preserved by the oldest races of the world. Much of the matter is found amongst the people of the Polynesian islands, far more to the purpose than anything to be found in the Hindu or the Hebrew sacred books. The Samoans have what may, in a symbolical sense, be termed a deluge legend. Tangaloa, the originator of the heavens, was the builder. Of old the heavens were always falling down when they consisted of water without any bulwark or embankment. To put a limit, to build or make any firm enclosure, was to circumscribe the waters and secure a place of refuge from the dreaded deluge. In the time of Ptah, their great architect, the Egyptians were advanced enough in craftsmanship for the enclosure formed by him to keep out the waters of the deluge in Amenta to be made of either iron or steel, called the ba-metal. An ark was a primitive enclosure formed in the celestial water. This, as Egyptian, is the ark of Nnu, and Nnu is heaven, as water, also a name for the deity of the celestial water. In the Samoan legend, an ark is built before there was any water or water-flood, or before the firmament had been figured as water. “Tangaloa of the heavens and his son Lu=Shu built a canoe or vessel up in the heavens.” When the vessel was finished there was no water to float it. Gaogao, the ancient mother, told her son Lu to have the vessel ready and she would make the water. She then gave birth to a lake, or the water of life, and also to the salt water, as it is said “there was no sea at that time.” The lake we identify with “the lake of the thigh,” or the meskhen of the water-cow. Sea and lake imply both salt and fresh water, the two waters of earth and heaven that were repeated in the two lakes of Amenta. The Samoan deluge lasted until the seventh day, like the Babylonian. As it is said of Lu, “He was not many days afloat, some say six, when (on the seventh) his vessel rested on the top of a mountain called Malata” (Turner, Samoa, p. 12). In a papyrus at Turin the god who claims to be self-existent says, “I make the waters and the Mehura comes into being.” That is heaven as the celestial water. In a hymn to Ptah it is said, “The waters of the inundation cover the lofty trees of every region.” These, however, are the waters of Nnu or the Nun (Renouf, H. L., pp. 221-2), and not the overwhelming flood of water on the earth. When the Mehura first came into existence it was a heaven imaged as the water that was undivided by the astronomers, the islands or other land-limits that were figured in the aërial vast; and heaven as the celestial water was the Nnu or Nun. A “true explanation of the world-wide deluge myths” no longer need be sought for in the book of Genesis or in the tradition of a great flood that swept the plains of Mesopotamia; nor in any vast cataclysm that might have been caused by the melting of the ice at the close of the glacial period (Huxley, Nineteenth Century, 1890, pp. 14-15). We find by the Egyptian wisdom that “the deluge,” as it is commonly termed, belongs neither to geography, nor geology, nor history. Geology, the latest of the sciences, was comparatively unknown to the early world. Geology did not furnish the kind of fact with which the ancient science was concerned. Whatsoever the Egyptian “mystery-teachers of the depths” may have known of mines and metals, mythology was not geological in the least degree. Neither did the Kamite chronology include the computation of geological time.

It was confidently asserted by Bunsen that the deluge legend was unknown to the Egyptians. But they had all the deluges that ever were, as the Hir-Seshta informed Solon, including the “great deluge of all,” whereas the Greeks could only muster two. But in no case were these geological catastrophes. M. Lenormant asserted that the story of the deluge was unknown to the black race, and that “while the tradition holds so considerable a place in the legendary memories of all branches of the Aryan people, the monuments and original texts of Egypt, with their many cosmogonic speculations, have not afforded one even distant allusion to this cataclysm.” The statement sounds authoritative, but it is not true. Professor Sayce, following Lenormant, asserts that “no tradition of a deluge had been preserved by the Egyptians” (Fresh Light from the Monuments, p. 47). This comes of raking for human history, and for nothing else, in the Semitic débris of the Kamite astronomical mythology. Both are wrong, and both were equally misled through looking for the deluge with the Semitic versions for their determinatives. Bibliology has gone perilously near to ruining Assyriology and Egyptology for the first generations of students in this country. It is fortunate for genuine scholarship that there are livers out of Bible-burdened Britain.

To identify the deluge-legend in Egypt you must know how to look for it; no use in peering through the Semitic spectacles. The legend of Atlantis re-told by Plato in Timæus was Egyptian, and no doubt with the legend came the name of lost Atlantis, transliterated through the Greek. As Egyptian, the word atr=atl has several meanings in relation to water. Atru is the water, the water-flood, the water-boundary, limit, measure, frontier, embankment. Egyptian in the early stages had no sign of l. But by substitution of the later letter l for r the word atr becomes atl, the root of such names as Atlantis and Atlantic. With this change of letter the Atarantes of Africa become the Atalantes. The word antu or anti signifies a division of land. Thus Atlanti, whence Atlantis, as a compound of two Egyptian words, denotes the land divided by the waters, or canals of water. Now the earliest nuit or nomes of Egypt were seven in number, and these were seven territories marked out, limited, and bounded by the atlu (atru) as river, canal, conduit, or water-boundaries. In the valley of the Nile, the land was bounded first by water as the natural boundary, and seven nomes would be enclosed by seven atlu, long before the land limit was marked out by the boundary-stones or stelæ. And atl-antu, we suggest, is the original for the names of Atlantis and the Atlantic Ocean. It is noticeable that in the Nahuatl vocabulary atl is also the water name, and that atlan denotes the border or boundary of the water (Baldwin, Ancient America, p. 179). Atlan thus becomes a name for the mound, island, or tesh that was placed as a limit to the water in Egypt. This would be the land of Atlan, as we find it both in Africa and America. There were seven such water limits to the land in Egypt when it was divided into seven nomes. And seven astronomes named after these become the seven islands of the lost Atlantis, which sank in the celestial waters, the heptanomis of the seven lands below having been repeated in the mapping out of heaven in seven astronomes. The heptanomis above, like the one below, was formed of seven lands that were divided by the seven waters, canals, or atlu (atru), and both together constituted the Atlantis of Uranography, the only one that could ever be lost by the celestial waters overflowing the celestial lands. The seven rulers of the astronomes attained the status of divine princes in the celestial heptanomis. And among the nomes of Lower Egypt we find the nome of the Prince of Annu; the nome of the prince of Lower Egypt; the nome of Supti (Sut); the nome of Samhutit (Horus); the nome of Sebek; the nome of Shu; the nome of Hapi. Here then, if anywhere on earth, we find a geographical prototype for the Atlantis that was lost in seven islands, according to the records kept by the astronomers, which are preserved in the mythography. Among the many types of the heptanomis and its septenary of powers and stations of the pole may be enumerated:—A mount with seven caves; seven islands in the sea; the seven-headed serpent whelmed beneath the waters; a tree with seven branches; a fish with seven fins; a pole with seven horns; a cross with seven arms; the seven supporting giants; the ark of seven cubits; the boat with seven Kabiri on board; the group of seven cities.

It is not necessary to suppose that the Egyptians were the helpless victims of their own symbolism, who lived in mortal dread of the celestial waters falling down and overwhelming them in a deluge once for all. But there can be no doubt that the water-flood on earth against which the early race was powerless produced a profound and permanent impression, so that the deluge idea became associated with the firmamental water. This can be proved by the mythical deluge dramatically represented in the Ritual. “I am the Father of the Inundation,” says Anup at the northern pole, whence the waters issued in the deluge of the Milky Way, or White Nile of the Nun. The Egyptian Ritual affords a study of the deluge mythos in the phase of eschatology. The passage for the soul in death has long and universally been likened to a river or some dark water flowing betwixt the two worlds of earth and heaven. This in Egypt was the Nun. The way of the gods in their ascent and descent to earth was by water. The way of souls in their ascent to heaven is equally by water, whether in the ark of the moon, the bark of Orion, or the boat of the sun. The manes on entering the other life thus addresses the sailors of the solar bark, “O ye seamen of Ra, at the gloaming of day let me live after death, day by day, as doth Ra.” That is by means of the boat which keeps the sun or the soul of the deceased afloat upon the drowning element (ch. 3). In the chapter for travelling on the road which is above the earth (ch. 4), the speaker says, “It is I who voyage on the stream which divideth the divine pair.” These are the two sisters Isis and Nephthys, whose stations in the Osirian solar mythos were at the western and eastern sides of the river which ran north and south in heaven as in Egypt. Some prophetic tableaux show the deceased in his funeral bark, speeding before the wind with all sail set, having started on his way to the next world the very day that he took possession of his new abode in death (Maspero, Egypt. Arch., p. 120). Amongst the words that are said on the day of burial to bring about “the resurrection and the glory,” the deceased asks that he may see the ship of the holy Sahus traversing the sky; that is, the ark of souls represented in the constellation of Orion. He also pleads, “Let the divine vessel Neshemet advance to meet me.” The Osiris tells us that the name of his bark is “Collector of Souls.” “The picture of it is the representation of his glorious journey upon the canal” (ch. 58). Safe in the ark, he crosses the waters in which the helpless souls are wrecked.

In the chapter by which the ship is sailed in the nether-world, the speaker not only sails across the water of Nnu, for he says, “I come from the lake of fire and flame, from the field of flame,” and he stands erect and safe “in the bark which the god is piloting, at the head of Aarru,” that is, on the summit of the mount, or final resting-place of the ark (Rit., ch. 98, Renouf), which the deceased had safely reached through fire and flood. On entering the solar bark the Osiris says, “I have come myself and delivered the deity from the pain and suffering that were in the trunk, in shoulder, and in leg. I have come and healed the trunk and fastened the shoulder and made firm the leg. And I embark for the voyage of Ra.” The leg of Osiris, like the leg of Nut or the leg of Ptah, imaged the supporting power of the pole. The manes pleads, “Let not the Osiris Nu be shipwrecked on the great voyage” (ch. 130). “Let not disasters reach him.” “May the steering be kept clear from misadventure.” “Let me come to see my father Osiris” (ch. 99). “O, thou ship of the garden of Aarru, let me be conveyed to that bread of thy canal as my father, the great one, who advanceth in the divine ship” (ch. 106, Renouf). “Lo, I sail the great bark on the stream of the god Hetep. I took it at the mansion of Shu”—the starry heaven (ch. 110, Renouf). “I sail upon its stream and range within the garden of Hetep” (ch. 110). When about to enter the bark of Ra, the speaker says, “O great one, let me be lifted into thy bark. Let me make head for thy staircase. Let me have charge of those who convey thee, who are attached to thee, and who are of the stars which never set” (Rit., ch. 102). These are the seven that pull at the rope, or as we should say, that keep the law of gravitation and equipoise; the seven arms of the balance, or the seven bonds of the universe; the seven tow-ers that became the later seven rowers, sailors, or Kabiri. These are sometimes called the seven spirits of Annu, that is at the pole, the mount of glory in the stellar mythos. Four of the seven can be identified as Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Kabhsenuf (Rit., ch. 97). “Said at the bark: Staff of Anup, may I propitiate those four glorified ones who follow after the master of all things?” These are four of the seven that pulled the bark up to the landing-stage upon the summit with the primitive rope, who are afterwards stationed as the four oars at the four cardinal points, in a later heaven, and also as the children of Horus, who had previously been his brothers. There is a great bursting forth of the floods in Amenta, described in the Ritual as a vast and overwhelming inundation. This passage of the waters shows the deluge-legend in the Kamite eschatology. The Osiris calls upon the lord of the flood, “the great one who is shoreless,” to save him. “Do thou save me!” “I who know the deep waters” is my name. But “I am not one who drowneth. Blessed are they who see the bourne. Beautiful is the god of the motionless heart who causeth the stay of the overflowing—or the flood. Behold! there cometh forth the lord of life, Osiris thy support, who abideth day by day.” “The tunnels of the earth have given me birth.” This overflow of the great waters called the flood also occurs in Sheol amongst the other trials and tribulations of the sufferer represented in the Hebrew book of Psalms. “The channels of waters appeared, and the foundations of the world were laid bare” (ch. 18). “He drew me out of great waters.” As one means of salvation from the overwhelming waters the manes clings to the sycamore-tree which standeth in the lake of Akeb. He exclaims, “I embrace the sycamore, I am united to the sycamore-tree.” That is, to Osiris in the tree, the tat or pole, the type of fixity to be clasped for safety amid the waters rising round the soul in death and in the darkness of the nether earth. Sufficient mythical matter for a legend of the deluge and the ark may be found in the 64th chapter of the Ritual. It is recorded in the rubrical directions appended to the chapter that it “was discovered on a plinth of the god of the Hennu-bark by a master-builder of the wall in the time of King Septi the victorious.” Septi, or Seti, was a king in the first dynasty who lived and ruled in Egypt from 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. At that time the chapter was rediscovered as an ancient writing. We learn from this that the bursting forth of the waters in an overwhelming flood was based upon the natural fact of the inundation in Egypt. The imagery had been reproduced in heaven, and also in Amenta, the lower Egypt of the nether-world. A great catastrophe caused by the waters that have broken out of bounds is more than once referred to in the Ritual. The Osiris says to the powers, “Grant ye that I may have the command of the water, even as the mighty Sut had the command of his enemies on the day of disaster to the earth. May I prevail over the long-armed ones in their (four) corners, even as that glorious and ready god prevailed over them” (Renouf, ch. 60). The bursting forth of the waters is described as a great disaster. In this chapter there is an application of the deluge imagery to the sun in the mythos and the departed soul in the eschatology. With the Egyptians, the supreme type of helpfulness and charity, or of love to the neighbour, was an ark or boat that offered safety to the shipwrecked amidst the waters. Hence, when pleading in the Hall of Judgment the speaker claims to have “done the right thing in Tamerit” (Egypt), he clinches it by saying, “I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and a boat to the shipwrecked” (ch. 125).

The subject-matter is very ancient. It belongs to that early time when Sut was a pre-Osirian form of the Good Being, in relation to the pole, the dog-star, and the inundation of the Nile. Here the deluge of the inundation is a deluge of destruction directed against the workers of evil. In short, it does what the inundation did for Egypt in washing away the result of drought, in cleansing from corruption and restoring a healthy new life to the land. Hence the deceased desires to have the same command over the waters in Amenta that Sut had when they burst forth in a drowning flood. Thus, 6,000 years ago the so-called “deluge legend” was ancient in Egypt, and it belonged to the time when Sut, in command of the waters, had not lost his place in glory; and his deluge was employed to destroy the Sebau, the Sami, the Apap-dragon, the long-armed ones, and other evil enemies of God and man who were not human beings. In the same chapter Osiris has superseded Sut as lord of the flood. Further, the two divine sisters Isis and Nephthys were imaged as two birds. The ark of Nnu described in the Ritual is conducted over the Nun by two birds which represent the two sister-goddesses Isis and Nephthys. It is said to these in relation to the inundation, “Ye two divine hawks upon your gables, who are giving attentive heed to the matter, ye who conduct the ship of Ra,