The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions — Inside the Classic

ossess monumental evidence.” And quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled in Egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before Menes were significantly known as “the successors of Horus.” As late as the times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of Menes and other Pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings took the title of the Golden Horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from Chafra onward the reigning monarch was known as the Son of Ra and the Great God. Amenophis IL, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like Ra, the sacred seed of Amen, the son whom he begot.” And on all the monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature as the gods themselves: he converses with them on equal terms; they lead him by the hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or present him with the symbols of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family.

The {173}former guerdon bestows upon him the same rank they themselves had held on earth; the latter advances him to share with them the glories of the other existence. In the temple of Kurneh, Rameses I. (then dead) receives the offerings and liturgies of his royal grandson. Hard by, Rameses II. offers to Amen-ra, Khonso, and Rameses I., without distinction of divinity. On the side wall, Sethi I. receives similar divine honours from the royal hands: while in the centre chamber Sethi himself officiates before the statue of his father placed in a shrine. The King is thus but the Living God: the God is thus but the Dead King.

I conclude, therefore, that a large part of the greater Egyptian gods--the national or local gods, as opposed to those worshipped by each family in its own necropolis--were early kings, whose myths were later expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and adorned by priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies. But down to the very latest age of independence, inscriptions of the god Euergetes, and the goddess Berenice, or representations like that at Philæ, of the god Philadelphus suckled by Isis, show that to the Egyptian mind the gulf between humanity and divinity was very narrow, and that the original manhood of all the deities was an idea quite familiar to priests and people.

There was, however, another class of gods about which we can be somewhat less certain; these are the animal-gods and animal-headed gods which developed out of the totems of the various villages. Such bestial types, Professor Sayce remarks, “take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt,” say rather, the custom of Egypt, “was still totemism.” But in what precise relation totemism stood to the main line of the evolution of gods I do not feel quite so sure in my own mind as does Mr. Herbert Spencer. It seems to me possible that the totem may in its origin have been merely the lucky-beast or badge of a particular tribe (like the regimental {174}goat or deer); and that from being at first petted, domesticated, and to some extent respected on this account, it may have grown at last, through a confusion of ideas, to share the same sort of divine honours which were paid to the ghosts of ancestors and the gods evolved from them. But Mr. Frazer has suggested a better origin of totemism from the doctrine of the Separable Soul, which is, up to date, the best explanation yet offered of this obscure subject. Be that as it may, if the totems were only gradually elevated into divinities, we can easily understand Mr. Renouf’s remark that the long series of tombs of the Apis bulls at Sakkarah shows “how immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later times than in the former.”

May I add that the _worship_ of totems, as distinct from the mere _care_ implied by Mr. Frazer’s suggestion, very probably arose from the custom of carving the totem-animal of the deceased on the grave-stake or grave-board? This custom is still universal among the Indian tribes of Northwestern America.