During the last thirty years there has been a great accession of material relating to the religion and mythology of Ancient Egypt. A generation ago it was fashionable to regard the gods as primitive figures and the legends about them as a disorderly jumble. Increased knowledge of the lan¬ guage and better editions of the texts have revealed that Egyptian literature was of a very high order and that the thought

underlying the hymns and rituals was much duction to this collection ol intensely in- more rational and genuinely devotional teresting texts to appear in English. In than had previously been supposed. telling the myths the author has attempted, This book is concerned with the chief whenever possible, to let the texts speak myths as they are recorded in the texts of for themselves. Considerable attention has the earlier and more creative periods of been given to the philosophical ideas which Egyptian history, down to about 1750 B.C. the myths were trying to express and The chief sources are the Pyramid Texts, which foreshadowed the philosophy of the which were inscribed on the walls of the Greeks and even Christian theology. I he inner rooms of Pharaohs and queens of Egyptians — or some of them — were basi- the Sixth Dynasty (2350-2250 B.C.), and cally concerned with the same problems the Coffin Texts, which belong to the that have beset the profoundest minds of succeeding period. The author has ren- all ages.

dered appropriate passages from these The main themes treated in this book texts into English specifically for the are the myths that grew up around the present work. The Coffin Texts are the Creator and around the passion of Osiris, earliest and most intelligible version of In both cases the earlier and later stages many sections of the famous Book of the of myth-making have been treated sep- Dead. This book contains the first intro- arately. These are the twin poles ol

Egyptian spirituality, the gods about whom there was deepest feeling. A chapter on “Miscellaneous Myths” deals with later material, when mythology was becoming literary and the gods were treated in a lighter vein. Egyptian myths and art used a complex system of symbols; in the last chapter the author has tried, through examples, to show how the symbolism worked and how the literature is related with the art forms. There is a mythological scheme which puts the various myths into a developing sequence, a list of gods, and a final section on the use of the myth as a language of religious symbols.

R. T. Rundle Clark is an authority on Egyptian history and language and teaches in the Department of Ancient History, Birmingham University, England.

Myth and Man

MYTH AND SYMBOL IN ANCIENT EGYPT

MYTH AND SYMBOL

//

IN

ANCIENT EGYPT

R. T. RUNDLE CLARK

WITH 1 8 PLATES IN PHOTOGRAVURE 40 LINE DRAWINGS A CHART OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS AND A MAP

GROVE PRESS, INC.

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT © BY THAMES. AND HUDSON 1959

FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION i960

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9260

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

PREFACE ¥ale 11

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 16

THE GODS 18

MYTHOLOGICAL SCHEME 20

MAP: CHIEF CULT CENTRES OF ANCIENT EGYPT 23

INTRODUCTION 25

I THE HIGH GOD IN THE OLD KINGDOM 35

II THE HIGH GOD IN THE AGE OF THE COFFIN

TEXTS 68

III OSIRIS— ORIGINAL SCHEME 97

IV OSIRIS UNIVERSALIZED I24

V ESOTERIC OSIRIS *57

VI SOME MYTHS ABOUT THE GREAT GODS l8l

1 How Re left the lower world 181

2 The Delta Cycle 186

3 The Great Quarrel *95

4 Seth and Apopis 208

5 The Birth and Flight of Horns 213

VII MYTHOLOGICAL SYMBOLS 218

1 The Eye 2*8

2 The Waters of Eternity 23°

3 The Ka 23*

4 The Djed Column 235

5 The Lotus 239

6 The Cosmic Serpent 239

6

Contents

7	The Phoenix	page 245
8	The Primeval Ocean	249
9	Separation of Earth and Sky	250
10	Dawn	251
11	The Transformation of the Soul	252
CHART	OF THE MAJOR RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS	257
VIII CONCLUSION	260
NOTES		269

INDEX

283

ILLUSTRATIONS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

1 6

17

18

Photogravure Plates

The spirit of the eternal waters protects the eye of the High God

Semty and Lector priests

Shu separates earth and sky

Horns the child sets out to avenge his father

Nephthys weeps for Osiris

Horus raises the Djed Column

The ibis of Thoth

The Divine Falcon

Osiris in the starry Underworld, protected by the Cosmic Serpent

The Soul rising from the Primeval Lotus

facing page 112

112

113

128

129

160

161 161

176

177

The Phoenix

Sito, the Primeval Serpent

Symbols of upward movement

Sunrise

Sunrise— alternative version Night and morning sun

The soul bird flies through the Underworld with the sun Transformations of the soul

192

193

208

209

224

225

240

241

8 Illustrations

Line Drawings

Fii- Page

1 Representations of sunrise 32

2 Primeval Mound symbols 39

3 Pictures of Khopri 40

4 Symbolic ways of writing Inland 41

5 Offering Mayet, the World Order 43

6 Shu, helped by wind spirits, separates Nut and Geb 49

7 The Cosmic Serpent ‘Provider of Attributes' 52

8 The Cosmic Serpent encircles Hermopolis 53

9 The Primeval Goose 55

10 The halfsformed Self Creator and the Cosmic Flower 66

11 Two serpents enclose the Cosmic Form 8 1

12 Forms of Hathor Head 89

13 The Eye as an independent god 93

14 The Inundation makes the vegetation grow 101

15 Isis suckles Horus in the Delta Swamps 107

16 The Seth animal u$

17 Isis and Nephthys mourn Osiris 129

18 The Atef Crown 137

19 Forms of the Aker 154

20 One end of the Aker at the edge of the world 155

21 The souls ofRe and Osiris meet at Mendes 158

22 Re and Osiris as one god, sustained by Isis and Nephthys 159

23 The serpent enfolds Osiris in the earth i<Si

24 Seven forms of Osiris within the serpent 167

25 Osiris breaks out of the serpent's coils 1 69

Illustrations

9

Fig. 26	Straightening out Apopis	Page 170
27	Osiris enthroned on the Mound	171
28	Horus arises from Osiris	173
29	Falcon and human forms of the Eye	219
30	The parts of the Eye	220
31	Vicissitudes of the Eye	221
32	Onuris, who rescued the Eye	229
33	Forms of the Ka sign	231
34	A child dandled by its own Ka (good luck)	233
35	Forms of the Djed Column	235
36	Djed Columns supporting an arch	236
37	Djed Columns supporting the World Space	237
38	Time and Form emerge from the Cosmic Serpent	244
39	Serpent containing the Cardinal Points	245
40	The Phoenix	247

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

The EGYPTIANS lived apart from the rest of the ancient world. The Nile valley was separated from Asia by sea and tracts of desert. There are signs of relations with the developing civilization of Mesopotamia at the very beginning of Egyptian history but after that very little was borrowed from abroad until Asiatic invaders overwhelmed the country about 1700 B.c. It is this cultural isolation which makes Egyptian ideas so difficult to appreciate.

The myths, symbols and social concepts of the Babylonians, Syrians and Jews were passed on from people to people to become part of the Western heritage, whereas those of the Egyptians were never transmitted and so seem completely alien. Furthermore, whilst the cuneiform script of the Mesopotamians became the means of communication between the peoples of the Near East, Egyptian hieroglyphs never became popular beyond the borders of Egypt itself.1 Hence, even when Egyptian art forms were taken up by Asiatics the ideas which they expressed were left behind. So the idea grew up that the Egyptians were somehow different from the rest of mankind and that the values of their civilization were impenetrable.

Basically this cannot be true. In recent years psychologists and anthropologists have been showing with increasingly con/ vincing evidence that the major psychic, religious and social problems are common to all mankind. If, then, the thinking of any people makes no sense to us it must be that we have not yet understood the unfamiliar terms in which it is presented. In Egypt the terminology is mythological, but not quite in the way we usually understand myths. Our ideas about myths are derived from the stories of the Greeks and the Norsemen. It is

n

12 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

only in the last few years that we have come to realize that these are late and sophisticated versions of more primitive originals. They have lost their connection with ritual and make their appeal as stories whose significance is in themselves rather than in what they may hint at beyond themselves. They are about human beings, not gods, whatever names the characters may have.

But there is another kind of mythology. Egyptian myths are not closely integrated stories. They concern gods who are not blown-up human beings but forces of nature. There is a close relation between the things done in the myths and temple or popular ritual, but this is less obtrusive than the symbolism. The Egyptians lived before the birth of philosophy as an independent way of thinking. They used their myths to convey their insights into the workings of nature and the ultimately indescribable realities of the soul. This is why their legends cannot be understood without constant reference to the support' ing theology. Egyptian gods are nearer the stark archetypes of the unconscious mind than the Greek ones and, in a sense, they are more intellectual too, for they are expressing ideas. Egyptian myths cannot be retold, for then they become mean/ ingless or trivial; they can only be appreciated through the actual texts, and these are to be read not for their linguistic interest but for their religious and metaphysical penetration. It will then be seen that the matter is not so strange after all. The Ancient Egyptians were an immensely able and deeply God/conscious people, concerned with the same great themes that are familiar to us in Greek and Christian literature.

The study of Egyptian religion is still in its infancy. In the last few years there has been a notable tendency to treat the texts with greater respect for their contents than was usual a generation ago. The religious literature cannot be understood without some sympathy for the outlook of its authors. But this is exactly what modern scholars have found most difficult. The moving rhetoric of the hymns and prayers cannot be conveyed in flat literal translation because Egyptian means of expression

13

Preface

were very different from our own. But the rhetoric and under' lying excitement may be the most important thing that should be expressed, at least to the non/specialist reader. Hence there is a need to paraphrase in some places; in others, excessive caution leads to complete misunderstanding. It is in interpre/ tation, however, that courage is really needed. The Pyramid and Coffin Texts, for example, are the supreme achievements of their time and are to be explained as such and not as a chance collection of heterogeneous tags put together to justify the pretensions of rival priesthoods. The more they are studied the greater appear their literary quality and intellectual content. It is in this spirit that the present work has been written. The author is convinced that the Egyptians are themselves their best interpreters. Where possible, therefore, the myths have been told in the words of the original. The references in the hymns are often so oblique that they have to be coaxed to reveal their true or significant meaning. But the Egyptians did this them' selves, as we know from the explanatory glosses which they interspersed in their most important theological works. It is only fair to warn the reader that this is a personal interpretation of the material; it could be no other in the present state of our knowledge. The rationalistic and slighdy contemptuous objectivity of the traditional Orientalist can no longer be upheld in this field.

Too much time and energy has been spent studying the origins of the Egyptian gods. It is vain, for example, to seek for the prehistory of Osiris until one knows what sort of god he was in his heyday. This work therefore omits all reference to origins; it concentrates on the creative and classical phases of Egyptian history. That is, it deals with the myths known to have been current between 2700 and 1700 B.c. This is not to say that after the latter date there was no creative spirit left in the religion. However, the subsequent developments did not add significantly to the repertoire of myths.

The selection of myths may seem somewhat arbitrary, but this cannot be avoided in such a vast subject. The Egyptians

14 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

had many myths not mentioned here, but it is hoped that the main themes have been described. The chief sources are the Pyramid Texts, which were inscribed in the walls of the inner rooms of pharaohs and queens of the Sixth Dynasty (2350— 2250 b.c.), and the Coffin Texts which belong to the succeed/ ing period; the latter provide a new source of material not available to the general public in translation and give a unique insight into the workings of the Egyptian mind. They are the earliest and most intelligible version of many sections of the famous Book of the Dead.

A chapter has been added on the visual symbolism because it has such close connections with the literature— in fact, one cannot be understood without the other. Where possible the illustrations have been chosen from coffins of the late Hew Empire in the British Museum, a relatively unfamiliar but accessible source of material.

The author is indebted to the following for permission to reproduce objects in their charge: Mr I. E. S. Edwards, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities and the Trustees of the British Museum (Pi. 1, 3-5, 7-12, 14-17), the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Pi. 6, 13), the Director and Trustees of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (PI. 18). He has received invaluable help from Dr J. Gwyn Griffiths of University College, Swansea, who has read most of the work in MS. and saved him from many errors. He is grateful to the Rev. Professor S. G. F. Brandon of the University of Man/ Chester for many suggestions and advice. Mr T. G. H. James and Mr A. F. Shore of the British Museum were of great service in helping to choose the illustrations and made many valuable suggestions and corrections. He wishes to thank Professor Otto of Heidelberg, and Professor Brunner of Tubingen, for invaluable and stimulating letters on the cos/ mology and the Coffin Texts. Dr Erik Hornung kindly allowed the author access to his doctoral thesis on Egyptian ideas of darkness and night. He has benefited much from his talks with colleagues at the University of Birmingham,

Preface 15

notably Professor George Thomson, Dr F. J. Tritsch and Mr R. Willetts. He has to thank Mr F. Rushton, the univer/ sity’s photographer, for several fine pictures, and Mrs D. God/ win and Mrs J. Cattell who have typed his MS.

R.T.R.C.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE (TO THE END OF THE NEW KINGDOM)

Following the example of Manetho, who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek in the second century b.c., it is customary to arrange the kings in dynasties. The First and Second Dynasties cover the Early Dynastic Period. Then follows the Old Kingdom: the Third to Sixth Dynasties. This is succeeded by what is now known as the First Intermediate Period, followed by the Middle Kingdom, then the Second Inters mediate Period and the New Kingdom, which ends with the collapse of the Twenty^first Dynasty.

EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD

Dynasty i Union of Upper and Lower Egypt into one nation,

c. 3000 B.c. with capital at Memphis.

Beginnings of writing.

Formative period of ritual and calendar.

High God — Horus as a falcon.

Dynasty 2 South and north fall apart.

c. 2850 B.c. Southern kingdom takes Seth as its emblem.

OLD KINGDOM Dynasty 3 c. 2780 B.C.

Dynasty 4 c. 2600 B.C.

Reassertion of united kingdom.

Construction of earlier phase of Heliopolitan theology.

Presumed time of the development of the Osiris legends.

Kings buried in step/pyramid complexes.

High God — Atum.

Great Pyramid Age, absolute concentration of power in the hands of the royal family.

Supreme achievements of art and architecture.

High God — Atum or Re.

16

17

Chronological Table

Dynasties 5 and 6 High priests of Heliopolis increase power, c. 2500 B.c. Decline of royal power and the beginnings of

feudalism.

Spread of Osiris cult. Pyramid Texts.

FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

Dynasties 7 to 10 Anarchy, followed by the rise of a kingdom at c . 2250 B.c. Herakleopolis and a rival power at Thebes.

Intense literary activity.

Early Coffin Texts.

MIDDLE KINGDOM

Dynasties 1 1 to 13 Theban power victorious. State reunited. c. 2050 b.c. Reorganization of monarchy. End of feudalism.

Developing relations with Asia and Crete. High God — Amun.

SECOND INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

Dynasties 14 to 17 Egypt invaded by Asiatic invaders, the ‘Hyksos*. c . 1750 B.c. Introduction of horses and chariots, bronze and

improved methods of irrigation.

NEW KINGDOM

Dynasty 18 Hyksos driven out. Restoration of native rule.

c. 1580 B.c. Egypt takes the warpath and becomes an imperial

power, and the richest State in the civilized world.

Priesthood of Amun at the height of its power and influence.

Development of theology of Amun as Universal Spirit.

Rebellion against Amunism by Akhenaton in favour of a monotheistic concept of the visible sun.

Dynasties 19 to 21 Restoration of Amunism.

c . 1320 b.c. Second period of imperial wars. Egypt’s drive to the

north cut off by the Hittites.

Israelites attested in Palestine.

Invasions of sea peoples repelled.

Literary activity — tales and love poetry.

Merging of the church of Amun with the State.

THE GODS

1 THE SYSTEM OF HELIOPOLIS

Alum (or Re)

Shu - == -

f

Geb - = -

r r i t i

Osiris = Isis Seth = Nephthys Horns the Elder

i

Horus the child

2 THE GODS OF MEMPHIS

Ptah — Creator and supreme lord (cf. Atum)

Nefertem— the Primeval Lotus Sakhmet — the Terrible Lioness Sokar — the God of the Dead (cf. Osiris)

3 THE GODS OF HERMOPOLIS

Nothing, Endlessness, Inertness, Darkness — the negatives of the Primeval Waters (given consorts they form ‘the Eight*)

Thoth — Ibis or baboon. Intelligence, writing and Moon God. Master of Ceremonies at the Divine Court

4 THE GREAT GODDESS

She had different names:

Hathor — at Dendera

Neith — at Sais

Mut— at Thebes

Ejo (the Cobra) — at Buto

Nekhabit (the Vulture)— at El Kab

l8

- Tefnut

l

- Nut

The Gods

19

5 THE GODS OF THEBES

Amun— ‘the Invisible One’— created by the spirits of Hermopolis and the Sun God Re at the same time Mut — Amuns consort

Khonsu— the Moon Child of Amun and Mut

6 THE GOD OF EDFU

Horus as the Winged Sun Disk, Falcon and human hero

7 THE GODS OF DENDERA

Hathor — woman, cow, sky. Mother of all things

Ihy— Hathor’s child, worshipped as Child or Primeval Serpent

(The systems of Edfu and Dendera were interrelated)

N.B. The system of Heliopolis was the orthodoxy, but it was not regarded as exclusively correct, except in Heliopolis itself.

MYTHOLOGICAL SCHEME

The Universe was organized in stages. All Egyptian myths are episodes in a developing scheme from the beginning to the establishment of Horus as king of the present world. It was roughly as follows:

In the Primeval Waters Original Spirit moved and begat the

first Twain and dispatched his original Eye

or Original Spirit created the patterns of future creation

or Negative Qualities came together to form the Cosmic Egg

The Emergence Spirit appeared as Primeval Mound

or as Flower, as rearing Serpent, as Child, as Pillar

or a series of these transformations or Spirit recalled the first Twain or Spirit flew up as Primeval Bird

The Order The Spirit (now High God) embraced

his daughter

or recalled his Eye

The taming of the Eye

The tears of the Eye become mankind

The reign of Re — a Golden Age

The Departure of the High God The High God retreated from his

creation

The reign of Shu— birth of Geb and Nut (Earth and Sky)

The Separation ofEarth Shu separated his children

and Sky Nut gave birth to the stars

Nut gave birth to her five great children

20

21

Mythological Scheme

	or . Geb assumed serpent'form and swallowed seven cobras, thus forming the ring of the world. Rule of Geb
The Reign of Osiris	Osiris* claims were disputed by Seth
Osiris taught mankind the arts of civilization Another (and alternative) Golden Age
The Passion of Osiris	Osiris murdered by Seth. Isis sought his body and cared for it The procreation of Horus The vigil over the body of Osiris
The Reign of Seth	Seth ruled the world — confusion and tenor Isis went into hiding and gave birth to (Horus The childhood adventures of Horus Horus set out to avenge his father (Perhaps here?) Seth defeated a sea monster
The Great Quarrel	Horus and Seth fought for the supremacy The adventures of the Eye of Horus and the testicles of Thoth Thoth persuaded the two contestants to take their dispute to the Council of the Gods
The Judgment	Horus was awarded the supremacy and crowned king Seth became the God of Storm and was put into the boat of the Sun God
The Salvation of Osiris	Horus (or his representative) went down to the Underworld to see Osiris Osiris was given the Eye or the good news that Horus was king The soul of Osiris was liberated The reign of Horus— the beginning of the earthly monarchy

CHIEF CULT CENTRES OF ANCIENT EGYPT

The principal deities worshipped in the temples marked on the map opposite were:

buto: Originally two temples, one on each bank of the river. The western one was sacred to Ejo, the cobra^goddess, the eastern to a heron and later to Horus the son of Isis

sais: Neith

tanis: Seth — at least in the later period busiris: Osiris

letopolis: Horus who controls his two eyes — a form of Horus the Elder

Heliopolis: Atum or Re Memphis: Ptah and Sakhmet herakleopolis: Hei^hef

hermopolis: Thoth and the ‘Eight* — the primordial creatures of the Abyss

siut: Wepwat, the ‘Opener of the Ways’ thinis: Onuris

abydos: a jackal called ‘Controller of the Westerners’ and, later, Osiris

dendera: Hathor and her child Ihy koptos: Min ombos: Seth thebes: Amun EL kab: Nekhabit hierakonpolis: Horus the Elder edfu: Horus as the High God elephantine: Khnum

Hathor was the goddess of mountainous or desert foreign countries — especially Syria, Sinai or the Eastern Desert

Libya, the Western Desert, belonged to Seth or to Ha, the patron of the Western Mountains

22

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INTRODUCTION

About 3000 B . c . the Egyptians of the Nile valley invaded and conquered the Delta. This was the beginning of the ‘Two Lands’, the first great nation State. Since the system of picture/ writing known as Hieroglyphs was being evolved at the same time, the union of Egypt marks the beginning of history. During the following five centuries the Egyptians made very rapid advances in material culture, social organization and government. This was paralleled by equally vigorous activity in the more intellectual spheres of literature and religion. By the end of the so/called Old Kingdom, about 2300 B.C., the pat/ tern of Egyptian civilization was complete. Much happened in the following two millennia, but there was no fundamental change until the conversion to Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. An Egyptian of the early dynasties would have been at home in the Egypt of the Roman Empire; he would have recognized the gods, the art, the methods of agriculture and, with a little help, he would have been able to read the public inscriptions.

The apparendy fixed pattern of Ancient Egyptian civilization is usually explained in terms of the unchanging system of irrigational agriculture, which has remained almost the same from the beginning of history until the present time. Now it is true that the modern fellah spends his time performing practi/ cally the same tasks as his predecessor did four thousand years ago, and with very much the same tools. As a consequence the peasant of today must resemble his remote ancestor in many ways. In fact, this is true in all sorts of things — music, humour, folk/tales, birth customs, diet, festivals and attitudes towards the aged and children. But what may be valid for the peasantry has certainly not been the case with the leading sections of the

25

26 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

people. The upper classes have been profoundly affected by political events, while conversion to Christianity, and then to Islam, completely changed the lives and outlooks of the educated. When we speak of Ancient Egypt we are not thinking of the unchanging world of the peasant but the great world of the pharaohs and the priests, scribes and artists who supported it. And this world, in spite of foreign invasions and political domination by Creeks and then by Romans, remained more or less intact until the third century a.d. It was Christianity that killed it, in all its aspects. The inevitable conclusion is that Egyptian religion was the heart of the civilization. When that lost its nerve or was superseded the rest fell apart.

Any religion is a complex thing; Egyptian religion was especially so, partly because of the rich diversity of the civilize tion but even more because it penetrated and informed every aspect of life. The Greeks were the first to discover spheres of activity which were independent of religious conditions or to be expressed in non^religious terms. Since then— but only intermittently — Western man has been accustomed to set experience into two divisions. Church and State, clerical and lay, religion and science. The Egyptians belonged to the pre^ Greek era; for them there was no dichotomy. The gods were everywhere, the king was the essential priest and all acts were played out against a background of divine patterns. Gods, men, animals, plants and physical phenomena all belonged to the same great order. There were no distinct realms of being. Conception, germination, sickness or chemical change were just as much god'directed as the motions of the stars or the beginnings of the world. The first and most characteristic mark of the religion was the ritual. This was built around a few basic ceremonies — a dedication rite known as ‘Opening the Mouth’; the treatment of images in their shrines; the offering of Mayet, the Goddess of the World Order, at the end of certain rites; the liturgy of offerings; the enthronement rites of the king; and the Proyet or public procession of the god. The various rites determined the calendar, primarily an arrangement of

Introduction 27

festivals, which was arranged with reference to the phases of the moon and governed by reference to the observation of Sirius, the dog star. The dispositions of the celebrants in these rites were the governing factor in the design of temples and tombs. And the ritual alphabet, so to speak, remained almost unchanged for several thousand years. However complex the services became, they were compounded of the same elements. One is reminded of how the Christian Church has been a place for the celebration of Holy Communion and how this determined the layout of every building and provided the element of architectural continuity.

Religious ritual is not just a series of actions performed for their own sake. These acts are symbolic; that is, they refer to things other than themselves, and this reference is always to something in the world of the gods. In Egyptian religion there is a theology wound around the ritual, so that one cannot be considered without the other. The shrine of the god, for instance, was ‘the Horizon , the land of glorious light beyond the dawn horizon where the gods dwelt. The temple was an image of the universe as it now exists and, at the same time, the land on which it stood was the Primeval Mound which arose from the waters of the Primordial Ocean at creation. When, again, at the close of the daily temple service, the priest raised a small figure of Mayet in front of the divine image, this act was meant to assert that rightness and order had been re-established, but it was also a repetition of an event that took place at the beginning of the world. It is vital to the spirit of Egyptian religion that the symbolism should be twofold. The rite was celebrated to ensure that divine grace should flow out into the affairs of mankind, but it also stood for the repetition of some mythical happening in the time of the gods. A ceremony was meaningless without its mythical and theological references, and these were provided in the prayers, litanies and hymns that accompanied the actions. Things done and things said were complementary. This is why there were two priestly roles in any service, the Celebrant and the Reader. The former was

28

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

called the ‘Semty’ and wore a leopard^skin draped over his back, the latter was ‘the Holder of the Roll* and was distins guished by a strip of linen passing over one shoulder like a deacon’s stole.

All the universal religions look back to some founder or particular revelation. This implies that they are deliberately different from the earlier cults and outlooks of the countries where they originated. Egyptian religion belonged to the older dispensation. It grew direcdy out of the customs of prehistoric farmers and herdsmen.

In spite of much speculation, nothing definite is known about this early religion. It was obviously a collective business, concerned with the prosperity of the community in terms of fertility and success in war and hunting. It was also devoted to the cult of the dead or ancestor worship and had an especial regard for the moon and stars. In one respect the Egyptians remained throughout their long history addicted to these primitive attitudes. It is likely that the main cult of the pr&- historic people was that of a Mother Goddess who was also the sky. This goddess-worship seems to have been kept alive among the common people throughout the ages, reappearing in pro*- vincial centres and whenever the official religion lost its grip, until finally it almost ousted all the other gods in the great expansion of Isis mysteries at the second and third centuries a.d. Most of the ritual was a legacy from the prehistoric past, when it had been performed by semi'divine chieftains to ensure the continuation of the powers of nature. During the formative period of the first five dynasties, however, these ceremonies were transformed and reinterpreted to suit the requirements of new religious ideas. There is no doubt that the priests of Heliopolis and Memphis were the leaders in this practice and that the centralizing kings of the time gradually forced the ceremonies of Heliopolis on the rest of the country. The process can be seen at work in the texts on the pyramids of the Old Kingdom, where the temple hymns have been taken from their contexts to provide the services of the then new

Introduction

29

funerary cult. It can be seen, too, very clearly in the rite of ‘Opening the Mouth’ and the ‘Liturgy of Offerings’ which have been revised to fit the doctrines of Osiris. In other places one can see myths being composed to fit or justify the old ritual.1 The ritual was fixed but the myth was elastic. There/ fore the myths went on being revised and elaborated, particu/ larly during the time of the kings of the Ninth Dynasty, but to some extent all through Egyptian history.

In recent years it has come to be realized that Egyptian art is nearly all symbolism. The architectural arrangements and decoration were a kind of mythical landscape. This was worked out down to the last detail of the furnishing; everything had a meaning or could be made to have one. Columns, capitals, walls, window/lattices, drainage outlets, gateways, screens and shrines all had significant traditional shapes with decoration indicative of mythical or theological schemes. The great temple halls, for example, with their papyrus/shaped columns simulated a Delta swamp in which the god’s boat floated when it was carried out of the inner shrine in procession. The papyrus swamp, however, was not quite the earthly one but the ‘Reed Marshes’,2 the faery Land of the Rising Sun just beyond the eastern horizon. If we say that the architecture provided a background for the ritual, that is to make the one subordinate to the other; but in fact the visual arts, mythology and ritual were facets of one reality. An Egyptian temple appealed to the eye and the imagination at the same time. The full sensuous impact of a great ceremony must have been very impressive indeed. In addition to what can be direcdy known there must have been the music, the stately language of the prayers and the prevailing atmosphere. But all had a deeper meaning, part mystical, part reasonable.

Even so, the religion would not have persisted so long had it not been for the many ways in which it satisfied and enriched intellectual curiosity. The texts are full of explanatory asides and added notes, the accretions of generations of speculating or inquiring scribes. Many Egyptians were deeply aware that

30

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

their myths and symbols expressed intuitions about the nature of God, man and the universe and that there could only be partial answers to the major metaphysical and spiritual problems. The difficult and perhaps insoluble questions that have bedevilled Christian theology are to be encountered in the literature of Ancient Egypt: the rival claims of the immanent and transcendent concepts of God, for example; the paradox about the uncreated Creator; the origin of evil; the male and female sides of the divine; or whether God exists in time. Such problems were already worrying the minds of men two thousand years before Christ. They were more noticeable in the formative periods discussed in this book, but the rational spirit never died out, as can be seen from the enigmatic script of the Ptolemaic temples.

In two ways Egyptian religion is unique — in the elaborate theory which it wove around the monarchy and in its pre/ occupation with the after/life. Essentially the pharaonic king/ ship was concerned with the same things as kingship every/ where. It grew out of the ideas and customs of the prehistoric chieftains of the Neolithic world. The real spirit, however, was created during the third millennium B.C., in historical times. The pharaoh had a complex relationship with the divine world. He was the manifestation of the Godhead on earth, the son of God as the sun, begotten through divine intervention. The ritual of the Osiris cycle connected him with the powers of nature. On the earthly plane he was the supreme man, heroic warrior and hunter, champion of right, uniquely vigorous and virtuous. All beneficial power flowed into the world through him, so he was the only true priest and all ceremonies were conducted in his name.3 Egypt was a union of two distinct regions, the Delta in the north and the Nile valley in the south, and the king was the reconciler of the two. According to one symbol he was the son of an earthly mother and a heavenly father, while according to another he was born — or reborn — the child of the great Mother Goddess. All this was acted out in elaborate ceremonies and expressed in the five

Introduction

3i

names which each pharaoh bore. The king belonged half to the world of myth. Egyptian legends described the trans/ formations of godly power from the first stirrings in the Primeval Waters until the final establishment of Horus, the first king and the pattern of rule and authority.

The cult of the dead has been responsible, one way or another, for preserving most of the remains of Egyptian civile zation that we have. It penetrated into nearly every sphere of life. It largely dictated the system of land tenure, its need for permanent buildings was the stimulus for the erection of the first buildings in dressed stone and, more than the royal religion, it linked men with the powers of the unseen world. But in spite of all this, Egyptian ideas about the next world were not very precise. There were two quite distinct fates. According to one, the deceased joined his ancestors who were already lodged in the cemetery on the edge of the desert and with diem lived a carefree existence on the model of that on earth — or would do so if his tomb was properly attended to. The other belief was that the soul soared up to join the stars and the sun and moon in their eternal round. The difficulty is that both fates were believed in at the same time. The second idea was expanded considerably during the early Middle Kingdom. In order to reach the heights of the sky the soul had to undergo those transformations which the High God had gone through as he developed from a spirit in the Primeval Waters to his final position as Sun God, or into some of the assistants at these great events. It was this idea that made the cult of the dead an opportunity for creative speculation and gave scope for the elaboration of mythical detail in the funerary literature. Looked at sceptically all this excessive preoccupation with the fate of the dead is foolishness and wishful thinking. The imposing facade of Egyptian culture seems to be nothing but an elaborate excuse for refusing to face up to the inevitable; and some Egyptians themselves felt this. On the other hand, the subtler texts are hardly about death at all but are really about the nature of the human soul and nature and God. Under pressure from

32

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Fig. i. Representations of sunrise

crude minds the scribes of the Middle Kingdom provided a Paradise and several Hells, but the majority of the texts provide alternative symbols of redemption rather than graphic descrip/ tions of ultimate fate. However childish and magkvridden the cult of the dead may have been, it was the way the Egyptians rose above collective religion into the realm of personal piety.

The mythology had therefore to serve two purposes. It was to give the steps whereby the universe was arranged, leading up to the final triumph of Horus and the coming of the pharaonic monarchy. The other purpose — only gradually understood—

Introduction 33

was to provide a series of symbols to describe the origin and development of consciousness. The theory of divine kingship was the stimulus of the one, the cult of the soul was the stimulus of the other. This sounds like the verdict of a modern psycho/ logist, but it was already realized by the Egyptians themselves, although not in modern terms. When they mythologized they knew what they were doing.

CHAPTER I

The High God in the Old Kingdom

The basic principle of Egyptian cosmology is the Primeval Waters. It is common to all the accounts of the origin of the universe, however much they may differ in detail. Every creation myth assumes that before the beginning of things the Primordial Abyss of waters was everywhere, stretch' ing endlessly in all directions. It was not like a sea, for that has a surface, whereas the original waters extended above as well as below. There was no region of air or visibility; all was dark and formless. The present cosmos is a vast cavity, rather like an auvbubble, amid the limitless expanse. Hence the waters are still to be met everywhere at the limits of the known — below the earth, above the sky, and at the ends of the world. Seas, rivers, rains, wells and Hoods are parts of the eternal ocean. For the Egyptians as for the Hebrews, the sky was a ‘firmament* which ‘divides the waters from the waters’.

The universe is the abode of light, surrounded by infinite ‘thick darkness’, a bubble of clarity and order enveloped by the eternal night of the Primordial Ocean. Before creation ‘dark' ness was upon the face of the deep’ and the present world, the dominion of the Sun God, is only a partial rolling back of the eternal night. When the gods give dominion to an Egyptian monarch they

‘cause your boundaries to extend beneath the whole reach of the sky, to the limits of the eternal darkness’1

while in a late myth the cosmic sun'bird who illumines the world says:

‘I can see right through to the limits of the darkness, I can behold everything right through to the Primeval Waters.’2

35

3 <5 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

All the legends of origins are, therefore, explanations of how the positive region of light and form was generated amid the indefinite watery nothingness of the timeless night.

Water is formless, it has no positive features and of itself assumes no shape. The Primeval Waters being infinite, all dimensions, directions or spatial qualities of any kind are irrelevant. Nevertheless the waters are not nothing. They are the basic matter of the universe and, in one way or another, all living things depend upon them. Without the rain and the river floods plants and animals could not live and the return of the season of inundation or winter showers marks the start of a new year of life and growth. The waters are, then, ‘the waters of life* and the Primordial Ocean,- known to the Egyptians as Nun, is ‘the father of the gods’.

The emergence from the waters has four aspects: it signifies the coming of light, life, land and consciousness. The legends of how things began — the cosmogonies — differ according to which elements are stressed. The first appearance of light gives the separation of earth and sky— the myth of Shu, or the first dawn, when the sun arose out of the waters — often symbolized by a Divine Child with its finger in its mouth. Life means ^ spontaneous movement — essentially movement upwards — and this can be conceived in terms of a rearing serpent or a flower rising from the waters and opening its petals to reveal the first light. Land means the emergence of the Primeval Mound, the First Place or the Primeval Throne’, and with it the establish' ment of order and direction. The world of life implies mind or will and mastery over a self. In this sense the origins can be understood through the original ‘Word’ and the multitude of phenomena derived from semi/personified abstractions such as Command’ or ‘Will’, and ‘Understanding*. There is no recorded cosmogony where only one of these four elements is considered in isolation; every account is a compound of several symbols. Moreover, a canonical or official cosmogony never existed in Ancient Egypt; there seems to have been a feeling that the creation of the universe was too mysterious and complex to

37

The High God in the Old Kingdom

be explained always in the same terms. It has been the custom of Egyptologists to believe that the symbols of the creation legends derive from distinct myth cycles associated with the major temples, such as Heliopolis, Hermopolis, Memphis or Thebes. But doubts have recently been expressed whether this is, in fact, correct. There was no standard creation myth, even in the most important cult centres. Re, the High God of Heliopolis, appears as the original spirit in quite early texts from Hermopolis — where the chief god was Thoth, whereas at Herakleopolis the presiding deity, a ranvheaded figure known as Arsaphes (‘he who presides over his pool’), only receives acclaim as the Creator of the universe during the late period, when he was no more than the god of a provincial town.3

Heliopolis, now a suburb on the northern side of Cairo, is the site of the greatest theological centre in Ancient Egypt. Here was the chief temple of Re, the High God as the sun, or, as he was called in early times, Atum— ‘the Complete One’. From the time of Zoser in the twenty^eighth century b.c. the doctrines of Heliopolis were developed to become the nearest approach to an orthodoxy known in Egypt — at least until the rise of Amun at Thebes. The Pyramid Texts, which are the largest single collection of religious compositions yet recovered from the early period, were obviously composed in the main by Heliopolitan priests. They contain the oldest references to cosmogony in terms of Atum. Utterance 600 is a prayer which puts the whole complex of buildings around the pyramid under the protection of the major gods; it begins with a call to the High God:

‘O Atum! When you came into being you rose up as a High Hill,

You shone as the Benben Stone in the Temple of the Phoenix in Heliopolis.’

Atum is therefore the Primeval Hill itself. This is still clearer from Utterance 587 which begins:

38

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt ‘Hail to you, O Atum!

Hail to you, O Becoming One who came into being of himself!

You rose up in this your name of High Hill,

You came into being in this your name of “Becoming One”/

There was no fixed form for the Primeval Hill. In the Pyramid Text just quoted it is engraved as a simple hill slope. Such an idea could be easily derived from the mounds which emerged each year from the waters as the Nile flood receded. Soon the muddy hillocks would sprout with weeds and begin to teem with insect and animal life. The earth itself would seem to be the source of myriads of new creatures. This, enlarged to cosmic dimensions, is the idea of Atum— the conv plete and all/containing one — the world/mound rising out of the Primeval Ocean containing within it the promise of all that was to come. The mound was soon formalized into an eminence with sloping or battered sides or a platform sur/ rounded by steps on each side. This became the most usual symbol. It is probably what the step pyramids represent. In Pyramid Utterance 600, Atum is the ‘High Hill’ at Helios polis on which the temples were built. As such it was said to be the site of the emergence out of the Abyss — the ‘mound of the first time’. A later text, when describing the condition of the High God before the creation of the world, makes him say:

‘. . . when I was still alone in the waters, in a state of inertness,

before I found anywhere to stand or sit, before Heliopolis had been founded that I might be therein/4

So Heliopolis was itself the Primeval Mound, the first part of the land world to appear from the depths of the waters and the dwelling/place of the High God as light. But there is an in' consistency here. If the Great Spirit emerged, this assumes that

39

The High God in the Old Kingdom

the waters had a surface — ‘the face of the deep’. On the other hand, the Primeval Waters stretched in all directions and emergence would have been impossible. This, however, is a modern quibble; the Egyptians do not seem to have been bothered by such a contradiction in their ideas.

Q L - V > - S. / - 1

Fig. 2. Primeval Mound symbols

The appearance of Atum as, or, in later versions, on the Primeval Mound was not the only way of expressing the first event, even in Heliopolis. Since the waters were in absolute darkness the emergence of God meant the coming of light, the first morning. For the Heliopolitans morning was marked by the shining of light on an erect pillar or pyramidion on a support which could reflect the rays of the rising sun. At the beginning a light/bird, the Phoenix, had alighted on the sacred stand, known as the Benben, to initiate the great age of the visible God. The rising of the mound and the appearance of the Phoenix are not consecutive events but parallel states ments, two aspects of the supreme creative moment. But the original appearance was not unique. In a sense it is repeated every day at dawn and every month with the coming of the new moon, perhaps at every recurrent festival. Creation was ' also repeated in the rebirth of the soul after death and it pro' vided the basic theme in the installation ceremonies of the kings. In fact most solemn religious rites derived their power or authority from the pretence that they were in some way a return to the original events of creation. The temple which enclosed the Benben stone was the centre of calendrical rites as well as the scene of the rising of the High God. It was the place where the mysteries of creation were ceremonially repeated. Hence, in Chapter 140 of the Book of the Dead the damaged parts of the Eye are restored in the temple of the Benbenet6 at full moon in the second month of winter:

4° Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

‘and His Majesty shines forth as he shone on the first occasion

when the Divine Eye (sun and moon) was first upon his head.’

Another Heliopolitan form of the emerging deity was Khoprer — ‘the Becoming One’ — a word which was pronounced like the word for a scarabaeus beetle, an insect which has the habit

Fig. 3. Pictures of Khopri: (left) rising from Primeval Mound; ( centre ) pushing out the sun from the Underworld; (right) sailing over the Monster of the Waters

of pushing its egg out of the sand enclosed in a ball of its own dung. The beetle therefore became the symbol of God as he came into existence and of the rising sun, the daily recapitula/ tion of creation. Chapter 85 of the Book of the Dead— a text of the period which succeeded the Old Kingdom (i.e. just before 2000 b.c.) — makes the Creator say:

‘I came into being of myself in the midst of the Primeval Waters in this my name of Khopri.’

Khoprer lost the final *r* in Middle Egyptian to become Khopri, the rising sun, halfway between a person and an abstract idea. As a human being with a beetle for a head he takes his place among the attendant gods in the solar barque.

The Primeval Mound has many aspects. When the deceased, impersonated by his statue, was crowned during the final ceremony inside the pyramid he was invested with the red

The High God in the Old Kingdom 41

crown of Lower Egypt.6 A heap of sand was put on the floor and the statue placed upon it while a long prayer was recited, beginning:

‘Rise upon it, this land which came forth as Atum, the spitde which came forth as Khoprer, assume your form upon it, rise high upon it, that your father may see you, that Re may see you.’7

SHB itilk

Fig. 4. Symbolic ways of writing Tivland: (a) land; (b) God’s Land; (c) the World; (d) the Two Lands (Egypt)

The sand represents the Primeval Mound. When the king stands upon it in full regalia he will be ‘recognized’ by his father, the High God. The land is an exhalation— literally a ‘spitting forth’ — from the waters. It is the manifestation of God as he ‘came into being’ — that is, as Khoprer. Hence in the late symbolic hieroglyphic script the word ‘To/land’ — can be written as a beetle or as a spitting serpent, signifying out/ flow or exhalation. Both ideas are present in this text. The instruction to the king is to ascend the mound and be greeted by the sun. This implies that the mound can become the world mountain whereon the king ascends to meet God in his present form — the sun. Atum is the aboriginal deity and ultimate but hidden godhead; Khoprer is God as he appears in visible form, whether at the beginning or every day; Re is God now in the sky. Atum is essentially invisible, so he later becomes the night sun as it journeys through the underworld or the arbiter of destiny perched on top of the world pole.

Atum was at first alone in the universe. He was not only God but all things to come. The writers of the texts speak of him as a male but he was really bisexual — ‘that great He/She*.8 In Utterance 571 of the Pyramid Texts the king (in this case

4 2 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty) is reborn as the aboriginal off¬ spring of the High God in his primary state in the waters:

‘O Actor as the mother wherein was Pepi! O Dweller in the nether sky!

This Pepi was born by his father Atum before the appearance of the sky, before the appearance of the earth,

before the appearance of men, before the birth of the gods, before the appearance of death. . . .’9

But why should God have produced an offspring; Being all alone he desired a companion. A Coffin Text alludes to an old myth:

‘O you that arose in your [first] arising,

O you that came into being in this your name of Khopri, You are he that did say, “Would that I had a son to cleanse me when I appear in my might and bring me acclaim in the pure land.”'10

So Atum proceeded to create the first creatures, Shu and Tefnut, male and female. Pyramid Utterance 527 says:

‘Atum was creative in that he proceeded to masturbate with himself in Heliopolis; he put his penis in his hand that he might obtain the pleasure of emission thereby and there were born brother and sister — that is Shu and Tefnut.’

This, to us, excessively crude motif of masturbation was to remain the most popular creation motif throughout Egyptian history. It emphasizes the bisexual character of Atum or, what is the same thing at a more sophisticated level, the self- sufficiency of the High God who ‘divided his contentment in the condition of the Primeval Waters*.11 The masturba' tion is usually said to have taken place in the waters, but here

The High God in the Old Kingdom

43

Fig. 5. Offering Mayet, the World Order

Heliopolis is the location. This looks like an interpolation and it may well be that Heliopolis was not the source of the mastmv bation legend.12 As time went on the gods grew more personal. Atum became more of a man and less of an abstract principle. He became exclusively male and his hand, which had performed the creative act, became his consort. This strange misunderstanding is certainly as old as the pyramids; it may even be implied in the name of King Wedimu, one of the earliest pharaohs.13 This hand/goddess was called lusas — ‘she comes and is mighty’ — and had a special shrine in the sacred enclosure at Heliopolis.

Another myth accounted for Shu and Tefnut by having them spat forth from the Creator’s mouth. Thus, Utterance 600 of the Pyramid Texts, after the section quoted above, goes on:

‘You spat forth as Shu, you expectorated as Tefnut, you put your arms around them in an act of Kif'giving, so that your Ka might be in them.’

There are two puns here. Shu has a sound similar to ishesh — ‘to spit’, while Tefnut resembles tej— another word with the

44 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

same meaning as ishesb. The mythical motif is built around the verbal assonance. The masturbation tale belongs to a primitive naturalistic view of the world which can only account for creation in terms of physical generation, whereas the spitting motif expresses creation through the Divine Word or the entry of the breath of life. Although they were now in existence Shu and Tefnut were still protected by their father, for we are told that he held them in his embrace, shielding them from harm and imparting to them his Ka, i.e. his vital essence.

The Egyptians lived under an absolute and benevolent autocracy. There was one source of authority on earth, so it was natural that they should have believed in a single creator and originator of divine power. The merit of the Hehopolitans is that they accounted for the development of the cosmos from the stirring of the original spirit down to their own times in terms which pay regard not only to the single divine purpose but to the infinite diversity of phenomena in the created world. The masturbation motif stresses the reproductive aspect of life, but behind lies the mystery of life itself, the breath of the Divine Soul. Hence the generation of Shu and Tefnut has to be described in terms of both the masturbation and the spitting myths — they are, in fact, complementary, not alternative. This is not clear from the texts of the Old Kingdom, but the early Coffin Text quoted above14 is quite definite on this point.

(Shu speaks to Atum/Re):

‘This was the manner of your engendering: you conceived with your mouth

and you gave birth from your hand in the pleasure of emission.

I am that star which came forth from the two . . .16 of Re, I am that space which came about in the waters,

I came into being in them, I grew in them, but I was not consigned to the abode of darkness.*

Conception and birth provide the author with the frames work into which he can fit both spitting and masturbation.

The High God in the Old Kingdom 45

From the two acts came Shu, the ‘space’, the light cavity in the midst of the primordial darkness. Shu is both light and air, and as the offspring of God he is manifest life. As light he separates the earth from the sky and as air he upholds the sky vault. The Primeval Waters are here stretching endlessly in all directions, whereas the earlier cosmogonies had assumed that a mound emerged out of the ocean.

Between the Old and the Middle Kingdoms the Heliopolitan cosmogony became more comprehensive. Shu, who had originally been the air and the separator of earth and sky, became ‘the Eternal One’ — Life itself and the mediator between the One, the High God, and the multiplicity of subsequent creatures. At the same time Tefnut, a colourless deity in the Pyramid Texts, became Mayet, the World Order. Spell 80 of the Coffin Texts contains a complete mythological composition in dramatic form. It will be given here because it throws light on the Heliopolitan cosmogonies of the Old Kingdom.

(Shu, the spirit of life and eternity speaks):

‘I am Eternity, the creator of the millions, who repeats the spitting of Atum — that which came from his mouth —

He put forth his hand [to create] the matter he desired before he let it fall to the ground.’

And Atum said:

‘That is my daughter, the living female one, Tefnut, who shall be with her brother Shu.

Life is his name. Order is her, name.

[At first] I lived with my two children, my little ones, the one before me, the other behind me.

Life reposed with my daughter Order, the one within me, the other without me.

I rose over them, but their arms were around me.’

(The text then alludes to Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky):

46

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

‘As for Geb, as for my grandson, after the appearance of my Eye, which I dispatched while I was still alone in the waters in a state of inertness, before I had found anywhere to stand or sit, before Heliopolis had been founded that I might be there, before a perch had been formed for me to sit on, before I had created Nut that she might be above my head, before the first corporation had been born, before the Primeval Companies of the Gods had come into being.

[In this primordial epoch] Atum said to the Abyss:

I am in a relaxed state, whereof I am very weary, my humanity are inert,16

If earth were alive it would cheer my heart and enliven my bosom.

Let my limbs be assembled for (J.e. to form) him, and let this great weariness be settled for us.

And the Abyss said to Atum:

Kiss your daughter Order,17 put her to your nose, so will your heart live.

Never let her leave you, let Order, who is your daughter, be with your son Shu, whose name is Life.

You will eat (sic MSS.) with your daughter Order, while your son Shu will lift you up.’

(At this point Shu intervenes to say):

‘I am Life, the son of Atum, he has borne me from his nose.

Let him place me on his neck that he may greet me with my sister Order

when he shines every day as he appears from his egg.

The birth of the god is the appearance of daylight, and he is acclaimed by his scions on the horizon.’

At the beginning the great spirit Atum lay helpless and inert in the waters of the Abyss. The god had already procreated Shu and Tefnut, but they and he were still together in the

The High God in the Old Kingdom 47

waters in one body— or, as the text explains it, embracing one another. Initially God seems to have had only one Eye — a mysterious entity which is separable from its owner and which is sent out as an envoy to seek Shu and Tefnut, who have become separated from Atum and are lost in the immensity of the Abyss. The Eye finds them and brings them back to their father who proceeds to regenerate them as the life and order of the universe. Atum is distressed because he has no resting/ place. He asks the Abyss how the firm earth can be created. He is told to kiss his daughter, the World Order — or as the Egyptians would express it — to put her to his nose, while he makes Shu hold him up. The basic arrangement of the universe is, then, a combination of Atum as Primary Spirit, Life and the World Order. Every morning the creative process is repeated when the sun — symbolized as a bird burst/ ing forth from its egg — soars up into the air of Shu upon the ways of the Order. Heliopolis is mentioned as the first location of the High God and essential home of God on earth. There are allusions to the separation of earth (Geb) and sky (Nut) — which is the next act in the cosmic drama. Mayet, the World Order, had been worshipped from at least the Third Dynasty, but she had been distinct from Tefnut. In combining the two goddesses and reinterpreting the Heliopolitan creation legends in this light the author of the text has recognized that the universe depends upon the life/force controlled by the laws of what we should now call nature. How things began was not, with the Egyptians, the matter of a traditional tale but a challenge to their imagination and understanding of the world. They manipulated the symbols of their myths to express their growing and earnest concern with the major problems of life — the working of God as spirit and intelligence, the source of time and motion, the moral and natural order — metaphysical questions that have perplexed men throughout history. Their cosmogony is, then, a serious business, it is philosophic rather than imaginative and concerned with inquiries into the nature of a divine power of whom they were passionately aware.

48 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Atum was unhappy in the Primeval Waters because he was, in the words of this text, ‘in a relaxed state, very weary and inert’. This existence in the waters was painful; Atum was in travail until he could setde his limbs in a definite place. From the emerging deity’s point of view the waters are bad, they represent the conditions of helplessness and chaos which have to be transcended. On the other hand they can be regarded as ‘pure’ and as ‘the waters of life’ for the soul who wishes to return to their state of negation. Immersion in them means going back to primeval innocence. This ambivalence of the waters will be noted in other contexts.

In the Heliopolitan legends Shu and Tefnut produced the next pair — Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. The Pyramid Texts have echoes of lost tales about the gestation of Nut and how she freed herself violently from her mother’s womb. But the essential event connected with Geb and Nut is their separation. The belief that earth and sky were originally one and were rent apart is one of the basic myths of many races. In Egypt there is no narrative of this myth; it has to be inferred from textual allusions and pictures on the coffins of the late New Kingdom, where it is a favourite theme. The earliest reference occurs in the Pyramid Texts in a recitation which accompanied the lowering of the lid upon the sarcophagus con/ taining the body of the dead king. The sarcophagus represents the earth and its lid stands for the sky.18

(Priest speaks):

‘O Nut, spread yourself over your son Osiris,

and hide him from Seth. Protea him, O Nut!

Have you come to hide your son 2 . . .*

(Words to be spoken by Geb):19

‘O Nut! You became a spirit,

you waxed mighty in the belly of your mother Tefnut before you were born.

How mighty is your heart!

49

The High God in the Old Kingdom

Fig. 6. Shu, helped by wind spirits, separates Nut and Gcb

You stirred in the belly of your mother in your name of Nut,

you are indeed a daughter more powerful than her mother . . .

O Great One who has become the sky!

You have the mastery, you have filled every place with your beauty,

the whole earth lies beneath you, you have taken possession thereof,

you have enclosed the whole earth and everything therein within your arms. . . .

As Geb shall I impregnate you in your name of sky,

I shall join the whole earth to you in every place.

O high above the earth! You are supported upon your father Shu,

but you have power over him,

he so loved you that he placed himself— and all things beside — beneath you

so that you took up into you every god with his heavenly barque,

and as “a thousand souls is she” did you teach them

that they should not leave you — as the stars/

jo Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Myth and ritual are closely interwoven in this hymn. The deceased is Osiris, who lies within the earth, still in great danger from Seth, the demon of death and decay. As the lid is set down on the sarcophagus the sky makes union with the earth. The symbolism is based on a legend that originally earth and sky were together in total and sexual union. So, when the sky descends ritually upon the earth, Nut is impregnated by Geb. We are then told why the sky was lifted away from the earth. Shu, Nut’s father, ‘so loved her’ that he separated her from her mate Geb and, as the air, held her aloft with his arms. Nut was then able to give birth to the stars and to ‘take them up’ — allow them to sail across her belly, the sky. Presumably this means that Shu was enamoured of Nut and in jealousy broke up her union with Geb. There is also an allusion to a lost legend that Nut rebelled against her mother ‘while still in the womb’.

There was a myth about a primeval serpent, but it is inv possible to be precise about it because no text or picture yet discovered gives a detailed description of the origin of the world in terms of this symbol. The inscriptions of the later periods abound in references to ‘the Serpent in the Primeval Darkness’.20 In Thebes it was called Kematef— ‘he who conv pleted his time*; in Dendera it was ‘Horus the combiner of the Two Lands’. It was generally referred to as Sito, ‘Son of Earth’, or Iru^To, ‘Creator of Earth’ — a monstrous serpent who ‘took form as Iru/To, arising out of the darkness of the Primeval Waters before any definite thing yet existed.’21 This manifestation of the High God in his emergent form was, however, already known to the Pyramid Texts, for par. 1146 makes the Creator/spirit say:

‘I am the outflow of the Primeval Flood, he who emerged from the waters.

I am the “Provider of Attributes” serpent with its many coils,

I am the Scribe of the Divine Book

which says what has been and effects what is yet to be.’

The High God in the Old Kingdom 51

Here the serpent is the creator of multiplicity, God as the spirit who assigns to everything its essence — its Ka. The serpent is therefore a symbol for creation by word, the belief that the universe in its variety is based on the realization of the com/' mands of a designing and conscious mind. In a hymn from the Coffin Texts the serpent exclaims:

‘I extended everywhere, in accordance with what was to come into existence,

I knew, as the One, alone, majestic, the Indwelling Soul, the most potent of the gods.

He [the Indwelling Soul] it was who made the universe in that he copulated with his fist and took the pleasure of emission.

I bent right around myself, I was encircled in my coils, one who made a place for himself in the midst of his coils. His utterance was what came forth from his own mouth.’22

The Primeval Serpent came into being in the midst of the dark waters of the Abyss. In one sense he is the Atum figure of Heliopolis performing creation by masturbation. In another he is the serpent whose coils delimit the creation— the outer coils of the serpent are the limits of the world. God is the serpent but he is also in the centre of the coils, where he devises the Logos, the creative Word which lays down the laws of what is to be made. Hence the serpent in the Pyramid Text merges into the scribe of the divine book, while in the Coffin Text the ‘utters ance’ comes from the serpent’s mouth. In another recitation of the First Intermediate Period the ‘Universal Master’ explains to the minnr gods how he came to deliver the four basic laws of creation:

‘while I was still in the midst of the serpent coil.’23

The combination of the masturbating motif with the serpent is significant. The beginning of the world is so mysterious and so complex that the best expression is a series of fleeting images, each merging into the next.

$2 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

The serpent is an image of God at the beginning, but God is not now manifest in this form, for it has been superseded. The serpent belongs to the mythological past. Chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead prophesies that at the end of time the world will revert to the primary state of undifferentiated chaos and Atum will become a serpent once more. This must have been a common belief, for it provided a figure of speech; rulers of Siut in the First Intermediate Period claimed to be as pre/ eminent as

‘that great surviving serpent, when all mankind has re/ verted to the slime.’

God the Serpent therefore exists at both ends of time, when the world emerged from the waters and when, at the end of the present dispensation,24 it is engulfed in them once more. In the Pyramid Texts the ‘Provider of Attributes’ serpent .is some/ times the supreme deity but in one of the spells he is the enemy of Atum. A ritual object is described as:

‘this is the claw of Atum which was upon the neck of the Provider of Attributes serpent and which put an end to the uproar in Hermopolis.’25

Fig. 7. The Cosmic Serpent ‘Provider of Attributes*

The High God in the Old Kingdom

53

Fig. 8. The Cosmic Serpent encircles Hermopolis

There are later representations of Atum as a mongoose, a snake/destroying animal. This can only make sense if Atum in a new form as mongoose became the killer of his earlier form. The uproar in Hermopolis must mean the old age of con/ fusion, the time of the Primeval Waters. Atum put an end to the time of the serpent and instituted a new age. Hermopolis is here the original state of the world rather than the actual city in Middle Egypt. This remained a lively tradition for a thousand years after die composition of the Pyramid Texts; in some coffin pictures of the Twenty/first Dynasty the serpent encircles the district of Hermopolis.

The original serpent was known to the people of the Old Empire under a variety of names. ‘Provider of Attributes* — Neheb/kau — was associated with Hermopolis and with the belief in the doctrine of the Divine Word. There were, how/ ever, other aspects. The serpent came before the appearance of light, so it was sometimes called Amun, the ‘Hidden* or ‘Invisible One*. At Heliopolis there was also a primordial serpent enemy called Imy/Uhaf— which seems to mean some/ thing like ‘Slippery One*. The High Priest at Heliopolis wore a side lock to commemorate:

54

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

‘what happened when Re had an altercation with the Slippery Serpent about the inheritance of Heliopolis. His mouth was hurt . . . Then he said, “I will take my harpoon that I may inherit this city,” and Re said, “I will stir up my brethren against him to drive him away.” Now it happened that ... the Slippery One surprised him before he could raise his arm against him,26 ensnaring him in the form of a curly/haired maiden. And thus came “he with the lock of hair” in Heliopolis.’27

Since Re is both the Master of the World and the Lord of Heliopolis, the serpent’s challenge over ‘the inheritance of Heliopolis’ was really a contest for universal supremacy. In the first phase the enemy must be a water monster, for the god has to take a harpoon against it. Apparently the serpent then resorted to a ruse, taking the shape of a beautiful woman. One senses an echo of a legend quite different from the serious, hieratic creation myths. Who was the seductive maiden with the curly hair? Kees thinks she is the Moon Goddess, but whatever her cosmic connotations she is the prototype of the temptresses who are the most dangerous forms of the dragon of chaos — from Circe to the Wagnerian Venus, the representa/ tives of an earlier dispensation who must be overcome by the High God in his heroic form.

Primordial Ocean, Primeval Waters, Abyss — there is no agreement whether the original state should be described as one or many. In Heliopolis the waters are one — Nun — and this is the general Egyptian tradition. At Hermopolis, however, a city in Middle Egypt, there was a doctrine that the idea of the abyss could be best conveyed by saying what it was not, by enumerating a list of negative characteristics. The Shu Texts of the First Intermediate Period, which are strongly influenced by Hermopolitan ideas, have preserved a phrase:

‘in the infinity, the nothingness, the nowhere and the dark,’28

which is repeated like a refrain to emphasize that something happened in the Primeval Waters before the coming of

The High God in the Old Kingdom

55

positive, visible, created things in time. In a contemporary spell, when the soul has to cross the heavenly ocean its path lies amid the waters

‘where the Universal Lord dwelt when he was in the infinity, the nothingness and the listlessness.’29

In another text the characteristics are personified:

‘when the Waters spoke to Infinity, Nothingness, No/ where and Darkness.*30

Whenever the ancients had to divide a cosmic unity into parts they imagined a division into three, four or seven— or into multiples of these numbers. At Hermopolis the sacred number was four.31 Accordingly in the local cosmogony the waters became, or produced out of themselves, four beings— Nothing, Inertness, Infinity and Invisibility or Darkness. To emphasize their creative role they were given female counterparts. These eight genii gave the name Shmunu, ‘Eight Town , to Hermo/ polis. They were worshipped there as genii with the heads of frogs and serpents — creatures of mud and slime. These eight swam together and formed the primeval egg

‘in the darkness of Father Nun.’32

56 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

The egg was invisible, for it took shape before the appearance of light. In fact, the bird of light burst forth from the egg.

T am the Soul, the creation of the Primeval Waters . . .

my nest was unseen, my egg was unbroken,’33

for the generation of the egg took place in the time of non/ being.

There was another version of the myth in which the egg was laid by a goose, the Great Primeval Spirit. This bird was ‘the Great Cackler whose voice broke the silence-while the world was still flooded in silence’.34

The egg contained the bird of light, but other sources make it clear that it was filled with air. The authors of the Coffin Texts realized that it was the first created thing — although invisible — and therefore the equivalent of Shu in the myth of Heliopolis:

‘Hail, Atum (I am the Double Lion), give me the pleasant breeze that is in your nose, for I am that egg that was in the Great Primeval One,

I am the keeper of that great support that separates Geb from Nut. . . .

I breathe the breezes it breathes,

I am he who both joins and separates.

for I go all around the egg, the master of yesterday.’35

The egg in the waters is therefore the air and so ‘that great support* — the separator of earth and sky which, as we are told, both holds apart and unites the two halves of the world. Time is regulated by the motion around the egg, so it is ‘the master of yesterday’. In another sense the egg contains the breath of life and so marks the victory over ‘yesterday’ — the old time of the inert waters.36

The earliest allusion to the creation genii of Hermopolis occurs in a Pyramid Text where the king makes an offering to the creatures of the Primeval Waters— here equated with the

The High God in the Old Kingdom 57

lower world— so that they should not hinder him from ascend' ing to the High God in his present form as the spirit who presides over the universe at the apex of the sky:

‘The accustomed offering cake is still yours, O Niu and Naunet!

O you that were the source of the gods and kept them in your protective shade!

The accustomed offering cake is still yours, O Amun and Amaunet!

O you that were the source of the gods, etc.

The accustomed offering cake is still yours, O Atum and Double Lion!

You two that have created your own divine selves and powers!

that is, Shu and Tefnut, the pair who engendered the gods and put them in their proper places.

(apparently added as a gloss)

Tell your father that I have given you your accustomed offering cakes. . . .

Do not hinder me as I proceed to him.’37

The endowments founded at the beginning of history for the Primeval Gods have been continued by the king during his lifetime, so he hopes they will allow him to ascend to the sky where he will meet him, the transcendent deity of the world order, the master of destiny in his present form. Niu and Naunet are members of the Hermopolitan eight. So, in some versions, are Amun and Amaunet, the personifications of invisibility. Atum and the Double Lion are the corresponding Heliopolitan figures. The Double Lion is, we are told by an ancient editor, a manifestation of Shu and Tefnut. Burial in the sarcophagus was a return to the waters or into the earth of the Primeval Mound. The soul had to break free from the con' strictions of the primeval epoch to ascend to the present divine world of light. The powers of the old mythical past might restrain it, so they have to be placated or cajoled. In its use of

58 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

creation myths to realize the rebirth of the soul this text is typical of the pyramids. The doctrines of Heliopolis and Hermopolis are woven together to form a background for a transcendent God who presides over the cosmic circuit of stars from the top of the heavenly pole. The primeval deities are described as sources, springs set in shady groves — a surprising poetical touch. The theological subdety and literary artifice of these early hymns and litanies is very impressive. There must have been a vigorous intellectual movement in the late Old Kingdom when all the rest of the world — Mesopotamia excepted — was still engulfed in illiterate barbarism.

The Egyptians arranged the stars in patterns representing the figures of their mythology. There was a crocodile climbing on the back of a hippopotamus; there were wrestlers, lions, ser- pents, a god stretching a cord, a hawk perching on a papyrus, Orion as a striding man for ever looking behind him, and many more. Nevertheless, the stars were the most striking example of order, the evidence of a supreme controller. No other ancient people was so deeply affected by the eternal circuit of the stars around a point in the northern sky. Here must be the node of the universe, the centre of regulation, able to be located but invisible — for in antiquity the Pole Star was not in its present position. The celestial pole is ‘that place’ or ‘the great city’. Sometimes the pole is regarded as a tree with the circumpolar stars — as souls — perching on its branches; at others, it is a tower or a pole with guide-ropes. The various designations show how deeply it impressed the Egyptian imagination. If God is the governor of the universe and it revolves around an axis, then God must preside over that axis:

‘I know his name. Eternity is his name,

“Eternity, the master of years” is his name, exalted over the vault of the sky, bringing the sun to life every day.’38

More explicitly, four Coffin Texts have incorporated an ancient statement:

59

The High God in the Old Kingdom ‘The Great God lives,

fixed in the middle of the sky upon his support; the guide-ropes are adjusted for that great hidden one, the dweller in the city.*39 ‘The Living One’ and ‘Eternity, the master of years’ are names for Ptah, the form in which the High God was worshipped at Memphis, the capital of the Old Kingdom. He is God as master of destiny, both cosmic and personal. The personal names of the time show how intimate was the relation felt between man and the ‘Living One’: Ny'ka'onkb — *1 belong to the grace of the Living One’; Onkb'baf— The Living One is all around him’; Meres'onkh — ‘She loves the Living One’;40 Onkb'kbui— The Living One is my protector’. God, the regulator of the circuit of the heavenly bodies is also the pro¬ tector and friend of individual men and women. But he is hidden, the invisible source of life and movement at the heart of the universe. A Pyramid Text calls him ‘the greatest of those who are in the northern sky’, while a Coffin Text lets him say:

‘I am that Creator who sits in the supreme place in the sky. Every god (i.e. star) who does not now come down beside me, I have put him off until later.’41

In the popular imagination the lord of destiny is ‘high above on his reed float, he who dwells apart’.42 He floats across the sky-ocean looking down upon his creation. Every now and then in the myths a mysterious voice calls out with authority, commanding things to be put right when the order of the world is threatened. This is the intervention of the commanding deity in the present world.

There is a gap in our knowledge of the creation legends. No Old Kingdom text reveals how God, when he rose out of the waters, removed himself to the heights of the sky where he now lives, far away from the earth he made. But

‘I am that living soul with outstretched face who pushed out its head, who freed itself, who brought itself away

60

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

when the doing of that which was to be done was [still] in confusion,

when the doing and the commanding of that which was to be done was [still] asleep.

I create and I command for him who commands the good; My lips are the Twin Companies,

I am the great Word,

I am a redeemer — so shall I be redeemed, and I shall be redeemed from all evil.’43

It is impossible to discover what was the exact image in the mind of the author of this fragment. The ‘living soul’ struggles to free itself from the sleep and retarding power of the primor/ dial chaos — the Primeval Waters are obviously meant but they have been reduced to abstractions. The myth is seen — more clearly than anywhere else in the Pyramid Texts — in the terms of its metaphysical basis. Strictly, this is a spell to identify one/ self with the Creator/spirit rather than a monody of the spirit itself. Hence the speaker says he will deliver the ‘good’ Word just as the Creator did. This is standard Egyptian theology; the Word is all that is good and fair (nofret), evil does not belong to creation at all. In raising itself from the sleep and chaos of inaction the spirit is the redeemer from evil, which belongs to the realm of non/being; so, in becoming one with that spirit the soul will be able to shed its earthly dross.

In the lips of the High God, Schott has recognized a reference to the Memphite Theology, perhaps the highest achievement of Egyptian thought. At some time during the Old Kingdom the theologians of Memphis produced a docu/ ment which ascribed the origin of things to their great god Ptah. Echoes of this doctrine can be traced in the texts of all periods, but fortunately what seems to be the original text was copied during the reign of Shabako (c. 700 B.c.). It accepts the gods of Heliopolis and Hermopolis but subordinates them to Ptah, of whom they are said to be forms. First is ‘Ptah who is upon the great (i.e. primeval) place’ — the original ultimate

61

The High God in the Old Kingdom

spirit. Then comes Ptah/Niu, as the waters, ‘who was the father of Atum’ and PtalvNaunet, the female counterpart of the spirit of the Abyss, ‘the Primeval Mother who gave birth to Atum*. This is followed by ‘Ptah, the very great [or ancient] one, who is the heart and tongue of the Divine Company.’ Instead of the anthropomorphic Shu and Tefnut the Creator brings forth ‘heart’ which was, for the Egyptians, the seat of the intelligence, and ‘tongue’, the organ of speech. In all, eight primitive forms of God were brought into the scheme but the names of the others, except the last, Nefertum, the lotus, have been lost. Thus all the major Egyptian myths of creation are brought together under the aegis of Ptah.

In the Heliopolitan myth the High God Atum was a human being, even if his sex was indeterminate. The Menv phite Theology rejects this crude anthropomorphism. Not only is God a spirit but the fundamental principles of the world’s organization seem to the author of this document to be ideas rather than persons.

‘In the form of Atum there came into being heart and there came into being tongue. But the supreme god is Ptah, who has endowed all the gods and their Ka’s through that heart [of his] which appeared in the form of Horus and through that tongue [of his] which appeared in the form of Thoth, both of which were forms of Ptah.’

This is, quite clearly, an attempt to impose Ptah over Atum as the highest god. Atum has become a mere symbol for the aspect of God as the begetter of the first pair. All the actors in the primeval drama are aspects of Ptah, the supreme power. He is not only the creator of the gods but the provider of their peculiar power to be divine and eternal — their Kas. The essence of Ptah is heart, the organ of thought and tongue, that of command. At this point there is an allusion to another old myth. At an early period the chief deity had been a mysterious hawk whose eyes were the sun and moon. Therefore, instead of Shu and Tefnut the original pair are first the organs of

62

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

command and intelligence and then Horns, the Sun God and personification of royal command, and Thoth, the Moon God and patron of learning and intelligence. Two older cosmo- gonies are reinterpreted in terms of a new concept of God as a pervading spirit whose creation is brought about by the exercise of mind and will.

The underlying thought is explained in purely mundane terms in another part of the text, which Spiegel44 has shown is to be taken as a development of the above section:

‘Now heart and tongue have power over all the limbs, because the former is to be found in every body and the latter is to be found in every mouth — in all gods, all men, all animals, all worms— in all that lives. The heart thinks what it will and the tongue commands what it will.’

We know from their medical treatises that the Egyptians understood how blood-vessels led out from the heart to all the limbs. From this they concluded that the limbs moved because the heart sent messages along the blood telling them to do so. Hence the heart was the organ of thought, the seat of the mind. The Memphite Theology shows that the same blood system had been observed in all mammals, so it was concluded that the world was arranged in the same way. Just as the heart and the voice-organ determine the actions of men and animals or, as the text says, ‘have primacy’ over them, so God is the heart and tongue of his Creation.

The section about the High God proceeds:

‘His Divine Company is part of him as his teeth and lips, which correspond to the seed and hands of Atum. [In that myth] the Divine Company arose through the action of his seed and fingers. But the Divine Company is [really] the teeth and lips in that great mouth which gave all things their names; [that mouth] from which Shu and Tefnut proceeded was [really] the creation of the Divine Company.’

The High God in the Old Kingdom <53

Further details of the doctrine of Heliopolis are explained as variants of the abstract concepts of Memphis. The real creator was the Word— the primeval speech which came from God wherein all things got their names. Since the name is also the nature of a thing, in the view of ancient man the naming of manifold creation means the demarcation of individual characteristics. This is the method related in the Bible, when God created the animals:

'And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatso/ ever Adam called every living thing, that was the name thereof.’46

Still more to the point are the opening lines of the Babylonian epic of Creation describing the state of affairs before the appearance of the positive gods:

‘When the heaven above had not yet been named and the earth below had not yet been called by a name . . . when none of the gods had yet been brought into being, when they had not yet been called by their names ... Lakhmy and Lakhamu came into being, they were called by their names.’

Atum has lost not only the primacy but his human character as well. He has become the intermediary between God’s thought and the multitude of created things. He only exists in the Memphite Theology to possess the organs which pre^ meditated and delivered the creative Word. In the older legend Shu and Tefnut had been spat forth as male and female to become the original parents. We are told that this crude anthropomorphism is merely a way of referring to a process which was really not to be comprehended in materialistic terms at all:

'And thus were all the gods made and the whole company created. And thus happens every word of God from what the heart has thought out and the tongue commanded.

64

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Just as all the gods were made and the whole Divine Company created, so happens every word of God from what the heart has thought out and the tongue commands. So were the Kas made and the Fates determined — which produce all food and nourishment through that same Word which also declares what is to be loved and what is to be hated. And so life is given to the peaceful and death to the criminal/

The world exists, at the beginning and always, as the mani- festation of God’s will. The events at the Creation were brought about in the same way as is every change in nature. The Ka’s and Fates ( Hemsut ) are here the genii of growth and repro- duction. Life proceeds according to God’s word. In consider.- ing how the will of the Creator/spirit could be translated into actuality the Memphite author has built his theory on the analogy of the mind controlling the motions of the body. This is the unique contribution of this text to cosmology. Whereas later philosophers — from the Ionians down to Hegel — retreated into tautologies before the problem of how the Word or the Idea actualized itself, the Egyptian constructed his theory on the model of mind and body, the closest analogy he knew. He specifically recognized that the problem of the origin of the world in the remote past is the same as, or is only part of, the problem of how life is sustained now.

Even this does not exhaust the originality of this text, for it goes on to declare that God’s word is not only concerned with the physical order but with human conduct as well. It is part of the great Word that life, God’s essential activity, is furthered by peacefulness and that all wrong-doing is ‘an abomination to the Ka\ hindering the flow of divine power and grace. The identi¬ fication of an ethical code with God’s purpose is the under¬ lying theme of the sages of the Old Kingdom. Ptah-hotep says:

‘Great is Mayet, lasting and penetrating, it has not been disturbed since the time of him who made it. He who transgresses its laws is to be punished. . . .

65

The High God in the Old Kingdom

That it should be lasting is the nature of Mayet. . . . What is truly effective is the command of God, hence it follows that life is to be lived in gentleness. . . .

Let not frivolity be repeated, for, as the common saying goes: "A great man of little matter is an abomination to the Ka!'

The great-hearted is one of God’s chosen but he who listens to his instincts is his own enemy.’46

The analogy between God’s action in creation and the working of the mind and senses is worked out in the Memphite Theo¬ logy in some detail:

‘The seeing of the eyes and the breathing of the nose bring messages to the heart. The seeing of the eyes, the hearing of the ears and the breathing of the nose bring messages to the heart. It is the latter which causes all decisions to be made, but it is the tongue which reports what the heart has thought out. Thus is all action, whether simple or complex, carried out — the manipulation of the hands, the movement of the legs and the functioning of every limb. All is in accord with the command which the heart has devised and which has appeared upon the tongue. Thus is determined the peculiar nature of everything.’

'Rightly or not, the Memphite thinker had arrived at an idealist metaphysic. The conclusion is inevitable:

‘And so the making of everything and the creation of the gods should be assigned to Ptah. He is Tatenen47 who produced the gods, from whom everything has come, whether food, divine sustenance or any other good thing. So it has been found and understood that his power is greater than that of the other gods.

And then Ptah rested48 after he had created every thing and every Divine Word.’

66

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Fig. io. The half-formed Self Creator and the Cosmic Flower (Abydos)

Tatenen is the Memphite name for the god of the Primeval Mound. We are therefore back to the original theme at Heliopolis but with much deeper understanding. Ptah, the great mind and word, is also the originator of the physical world. He is the same spirit through all his creative mani/ festations and in the world of men. When Kant looked upon the movements of the starry sky and then into the moral order within himself and recognized the two as the signs of one and the same God, he was closely following the thought of an anonymous Memphite more than four thousand years before.

In spite of the immense prestige of Atum and Ptah there are traces of other ideas, even during the Old Kingdom. Of these one of the most interesting is the cosmic lotus. In this myth, the waters do not extend in all directions but are to be imagined as

The High God in the Old Kingdom 67

a limitless dark sea. From the surface emerges an immense lotus bud. It is luminous even as it rises — as an early hieroglyph shows,49 but with the opening of the bud there emerges the light of the world and the sweet perfume of the morning air. This is ‘the redolent flower, the soul of Re’50 worshipped at Memphis as Nefertum, ‘the lotus at the nostril of Re. Strictly, the god is not the flower itself but ‘that great god who is within the lotus bud of gold’. Hence what rises from the opening flower is the world soul which is the light, life and air and sun. In the pyramid of Wenis what appears to be a bundle of flowers is offered to the High God:

‘and it is Wenis, the flowers that have sprung from the pure earth . . .

and it is Wenis at the nose of the Great and Mighty One.

Wenis gleams as Nefertum, as the lotus at the nostril of Re,

when he appears daily on the horizon and the gods are purified at his sight.’61

But a myth has been lost. In the Pyramid Text the king is said to have ‘put Order in the place of Chaos’ as his qualification for appearing as the lotus, and in the Coffin Texts (335) the redolent flower is the spirit who is in ‘the battle of the gods’. The lotus is thus the symbol for the final defeat of the powers of the Abyss. In the pictorial symbolism the flower opens to reveal the head of the emerging soul, the Divine Child (see p. 239) or, in the case of Nefertum, two feathers. In Buddhism the flower became the most pervasive symbol of all, but in Egypt it remained an attractive but minor thing, a poetical rather than a speculative mystery.

CHAPTER II

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

During the old kingdom the good and ordered had been aspects of the divine command. God’s creation was essentially good, the expression of his benevolent will in nature, the state and the mind of man. At the end of the Sixth Dynasty, however, about 22 50 B.C., the royal authority broke down and for some generations there was political confusion and great distress. The various districts became virtually independent princh palities, Asiatic invaders appeared in the Delta, and, perhaps most significant of all, the social tensions which had been checked during the Pyramid Age, now broke out into open violence between the people and the old aristocracy. The basic optimistic assumptions of the old order were shattered. Ipu, a prophet of the time, has graphically described the disillusion and despair:1

‘It used to be said that he was every man’s shepherd, that there was no evil in his heart, that however insignificant his flock he would spend the whole day in caring for them. . . . Ah! Had he understood the character of men in the first generation he would have launched his curse and raised his arm against them. He would have destroyed their heirs, although they were his own seed. But he wished that birth should continue ... it could not come to an end as long as these gods (the righteous kings of the past) were there. Progeny still comes forth from the wombs of the women of Egypt but one does not find it [playing 2] in the road. It is rapine and violence against the weak that these gods (the recent kings) have wrought.

68

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts 69

There has been no true pilot in their time. Where is he? Does he sleep perchance? Behold, one sees no sign of his almighty power!’

In his distress Ipu has no thought for minor deities, he even calls upon God by name. In the last resort the director of the universe is ‘he’, and it is just this that makes this outburst so moving. It reveals the underlying monotheism of the Egyptian mind and the tragic situation that results when this imposing conception has been shaken to the very roots. God as the loving shepherd of his flock has always been the most moving expression of the ultimate goodness of the world and its governance. But it seemed irrelevant in chaotic times when every man’s arm was raised against his neighbour. Seeking for a fitting metaphor to convey his ebbing faith in the divinely instituted kingship, Ipu has recourse to the picture of the sleeping helmsman on a stormy sea.

What is, in effect, a direct answer to this pessimistic outburst occurs in the Instructions of Kheti to Merikare:

‘A [whole] generation of men wilt pass by while God, who knows the real nature of things, [will seem] to have hidden himself. In that time there is no withstanding the man of violence and none but the evilly disposed can be seen with the eyes (i.e. wherever one looks). None the less God should be revered as upon his way. Whether [his image] be made of precious stone or cast in copper, these are like the mud banks which are continually shifting; the river will not allow itself to be hidden for ever but it breaks the dam which conceals it.*2

However chaotic the state of things may seem, God is still ‘on his way’ — active in the world — and will manifest himself again sooner or later. As in Job, the travails and disasters of human life are set in the framework of a God^appointed universe; expressly made for human needs and happiness.

‘Consider mankind as the flocks of God. He made the sky for the enjoyment of their hearts, he repelled the greed of

70

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

the waters, he created the breath of life for their noses; his images are they, the products of his flesh. He rises in the sky for their heart’s desire, for them he has made the plants, animals, birds and fish — all for their delight. He slew his enemies and destroyed his children when they were plotting to make rebellion. He makes the dawn for their delight, he sails above to look upon them, he raised a shelter around their heads. When they weep he listens to ^ them, he has made for them hereditary rulers (?) as supporters to support the backs of the weak. He made spells for them as weapons against accidents, and dreams by night and by day. How has he slain the froward- hearted? 3 Even as a man may smite his son for his brother’s sake. For God [alone] knows the nature of every man.4

The real subtlety of the last two sentences — or so it seems to the present writer — lies in their assumption that pessimism about the nature of man in dark and anarchic times may be a subjective judgment. Ipu, after all, was probably a dis¬ possessed and disgrunded nobleman caught up in a social up¬ heaval in which he had all to lose. God, however, ‘knows the nature of every man’. When he punishes the wicked they * remain his kinsfolk; he does not withhold himself completely from them but treats them as errant members of his family. Fundamentally God is wholly good, but he is also omniscient and his judgment is not that of frail and committed men.

The personal relation between man and God had been expressed during the days of old by the symbol of the divine shepherd, but in evil times the Egyptians found this a problem rather than a comfort. While still thinking within their tradidonal mythological framework they began to analyse and refine their notions of God and his ways with his creation. Otto has recently suggested that Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead contains a garbled quotation from a lost myth of the time:5

‘Understanding said of him (i.e. God), “He is like that which he creates.”’

71

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

God and man partake of the same nature; to cavil with the / basic disposition of men is to misunderstand the divine nature. But the new scepticism could not be quietened by bland assertions of the divine omnipotence. A new form of mythical literature began to be written, in which God is questioned or even reproached for the seeming unreasonableness or injustice of the world, or in which he seems to be anticipating such questions.6

As the sun, God sailed across the sky in his boat, governing the world as well as bringing it light and life. At death the Egyptian hoped, after many trials and mystic journeys, to reach the divine barque. This was the final beatitude, for it meant immortality in the eternal circuit of the heavenly bodies. In the new spirit of inquiry, however, being in the presence of God was reinterpreted:

‘Indeed he who is yonder will be a living god, punishing anyone who commits a sin.

Indeed he who is yonder will stand in the boat causing the choicest offerings in it to be given to the temples.

Indeed he who is yonder will become a sage who will not be hindered from appealing to God when/ ever he speaks.’7

When, at last, the soul reaches the solar barque, all its questions will be answered. The boat is the seat of judgment and the allocation of material prosperity. More important, the soul will be able to question God freely concerning the reasons for the / apparent disharmonies of existence.

It is in the light of the power of the soul to ask God the great and humanly insoluble questions that one can understand a speech of ‘the Universal Lord’ in another fragment which has been preserved in a magical work of the First Intermediate Period called ‘The Book of the Two Ways’.8

‘The Universal Lord spoke to the gods, now at rest after the tumult [of life?] in the voyage of the Divine Band:

72- Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

All is well, be of good cheer!

I will repeat to you the four good deeds which mine own heart contrived when I was. still in the midst of the serpent coils, in order that evil should be silenced;

I performed four good deeds within the portals of the Horizon.

I made the four winds that every man might breathe thereof, wherever he might be;

that was one deed.

I made the mighty inundation waters that the poor should have rights therein like the powerful;

that was one deed.

I made every man like his fellow — it was not my decree that they (i.e. men) should do evil, but it was their hearts which violated what I said;

that was one deed.

I made their hearts not to be forgetful of the West, that offerings should be made to the gods and their estates;

that was one deed.

The gods I created from my sweat, but mankind is from the tears of mine eye.’

The word ‘sep\ translated above as ‘deed’, was used by Ptah'hotep, a wise man of the Old Kingdom, to signify the teaching of the ancestors which was the guiding principle of generations to come. ‘If you take to heart what I have told you, your conduct will in all respects correspond to that of the ancestors. Their “sep” of righteousness was the best thing that they did, its memory is repeated in the mouths of men on account of the goodness of their teaching.’9 The idea, then, that guiding rules were laid down at the beginning is a general tradidon, but in the case of the fourfold law it is not the ancestors but God himself who is the author. To underline the importance of these principles as prior and basic to the whole creative scheme they are said to have been declared before God had arisen in visible form, when he was still a serpent in the

73

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

waters. ‘Within the portals of the Horizon’ means beyond the accessible world, in the place whence power and authority come. The law was delivered in sacred time and space.

These principles are like the programme of a revolutionary party, simple but far-reaching in their significance. The funda- mental needs of life and some mitigations of its worst hazards are, by God’s will, the right of every man. God made men, not equals in the modern democratic sense, but equal in value, as brothers and members of one family. The idea is allied to that in the passage from Merikare (p. 69); it emphasizes the close link between man and man and between man and God. But the blame for injustice is laid squarely on the shoulders of men. Their ‘hearts* are the cause of evil. This is the earliest unequi- vocal statement that wrong lies in the will (Egyptian ‘heart’) rather than in the deed itself.

The final command is concerned with religion. ‘To remem¬ ber the West’ has a wider meaning than the mere care for the tomb of the departed. The provision of offerings and the estates from which they came underlay the whole system of land tenure in Ancient Egypt. Moreover, whereas the temple ceremonies were the business of priests, everyone was under the obligation to care for the tombs of his parents; so the funerary cult meant the practice of religion for most people.

In the last two sentences two creation myths are juxtaposed. The gods are the exhalations of God himself or, as the text says, they come from his sweat, but mankind comes from the tears of his eye. This essential difference between the two kinds of beings, gods and men, is not mentioned elsewhere. The second myth, about the origin of mankind, is founded on assonance between the words for tears and mankind — * remeyet ’ and * romech ’.

If the universe is regarded as essentially visible, its origin can be described in terms of what the Egyptians called ‘the appearance’ — the first manifestation of the High God as light. They were not, however, satisfied with this but tried to pene¬ trate beneath the outward semblance of phenomena. At a simple level this took the form of a number of mythical events

74 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

before the establishment of the High God as supreme master. The texts of the Old Kingdom contain echoes of a mass slaughter of the denizens of the Abyss10 or of the defeat of a monster of chaos.11 The Memphite Theology hints at this problem by declaring that Ptah has undergone a series of avatars from the first spirit in the Primeval Waters to the emergent lotus bud. But in the Coffin Texts there are hints that during the Herakleopolitan Period the evolution of the divine spirit began to be considered in a more abstract way. The myth almost falls away to reveal the metaphysical assumptions that underly it. Thus, in Coffin Text 714 the High God says:

‘I was [the spirit in ?] the Primeval Waters, he who had no companion when my name came into existence.

The most ancient form in which I came into existence was as a drowned one.

I was [also] he who came into existence as a circle, he who was the dweller in his egg.

I was the one who began [everything], the dweller in the Primeval Waters.

First Hahu emerged for me and then I began to move.

I created my limbs in my “glory”.12 I was the maker of myself) in that I formed myself accord/ ing to my desire and in accord with my heart.'

The first form of God was as a spirit, alone and — so to speak — held in solution in the waters. Then, but still in the waters, God was ‘a circle’, which, in turn, was replaced by the symbol of the cosmic egg. These are primordial images expressing the evolution of the divine life before it became fully conscious and began to move. The second, dynamic stage is initiated by Hahu, which a late inscription defines as ‘the wind, which began the separation and raised the sky vault as its hall’. The act of Hahu is the separation of the waters, the creation of the space/bubble in the midst of the Abyss that is the theatre of

75

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

God’s development, the space in which he can ‘move’. Finally God creates his limbs in his ‘glory’, fully conscious at last. This is a variant of the theology of the Word, exemplified in the Hermopolitan and Memphite doctrines. The new precision is the division of the divine act into heart and will.

Heart and Will are replaced in another version of the same period by Command and Intelligence:13

‘I am he . . . whose speech was what had come forth from his heart.

His cycle with Shu was the circling of Command and Intelligence,

asking his (Intelligence’s) advice;

and Command and Intelligence said to him —

“Come, then, let us go and create the names of this coil14 according to what has come forth from his heart.”

And that was the cycle with Shu, the son whom he him/ self had borne.’

Shu, the son of the Creator in the old legend, is equated with Command and Intelligence who ‘go around’ the circle of total being, giving everything its name, i.e. its distinct characteristic. At the end there is a reaffirmation that this is the same episode which is connected with Shu. The writer of this difficult and subtle monologue understood that the creation legends were symbols and that divergent legends might be different ways of saying the same thing. The generation of Shu is the act which produced the multiplicity, the primary division of the original unity. Into this context is brought the giving of names. The cosmogony is basically idealist. In the earlier part (quoted on p. 51) it emphasizes that the thinking of the High God is the first reality and this can be divided at a later stage into Will, or Command, its expression, and Intelligence. The mytho/ logical framework is almost but not quite transcended.

The Creative Word could be understood in several ways. In one contemporary text it is ‘Command’ alone, without Intelligence.

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

‘An eye of Atum appeared on the Babet Tree, an eye of Atum appeared on the Date Palm (He gave Command to the Primeval Waters that he might have power thereby) and that was his appearance at the beginning.

A powerful one, whose might subdued the powers [of the Abyss],

it curbed die eye when it raged and burnt, it introduced the primeval gods, it was supreme over the deities, it created Time —

(Which was when Shu was there to raise the sky; it curbed the demon of darkness) that was Shu, that it might bring heart to the Tousled and cheer their bulls.

What it said, the same was performed, that it might cause a light, like the sun, in the night, (variant: that the gods should likewise have form by night)

Now I am Command,

what I said was good, and what came forth from my mouth was good,

and what I now say, the same shall be performed, for I am Command. . . ,’15

The opening lines refer to two mythical trees about which nothing is known. The text is distinctive by its allusions to the powers of chaos that threatened the rise of the ordered world. The chief of these was the eye of God himself which rebelled and had to be curbed by the Divine Command. The most inv portant clarification, however, is in the lines which say that the creation of time is the same thing as the raising of the sky and the coming of light. Before that the gods had been ‘tousled’, in a state of confusion and dismay. Now their males can take heart. Does this mean that the separation of earth and sky, the beginning of calendrical time, marks the transference to male

77

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

supremacy 5 The following phrases tell of the creation of the moon as the second great sign of Divine Command. But the variant text seems to refer to the stars in general as the forms of the gods during the night-time. This is related to the Egyptian concept of the soul as it developed during the Middle Kingdom. The stars were the ‘souls’ of the gods, their alter egos while darkness reigned on earth. In the last lines the soul of the deceased claims identity with the Command. There is an assurance that the good and the Command are the same — a doctrine which is affirmed still more strongly in another mono¬ logue of the time:16

‘I am the Eternal Spirit,

I am the sun that rose from the Primeval Waters.

My soul is God, I am the creator of the Word.

Evil is my abomination, I see it not.

I am the Creator of the Order wherein I live,

I am the Word, which will never be annihilated in this my name of “Soul”.*

To become one with the Word was, then, to be removed from all evil. The Word is good and is manifest in the Order of the world. God, as goodness, obeys his own laws, for the Order and the good are identical. We have seen that this optimistic theology was challenged at the breakdown of the old society of the Pyramid Age; it is reaffirmed here to help in the deification of the individual soul.

On its journey after death the soul reached the horizon, where dwelt the ‘ancestral gods’ — the beings who were superseded after the enthronement of Re in the sky. The soul claims to be Hike, the Divine Word as ‘Magic’:

‘Hail, O Noble Ones! O Predecessors of the Universal Master!

I am he who created for the One God

before the twin affairs appeared in the world

when he sent forth his single eye,

while he was still alone, at the enunciation of his mouth,

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

when his Ka became a millionfold to protect his subjects, when he spoke with Khopri, but was mightier than he, when he put Command upon his mouth.

Now I am indeed that son of the all/mother, born before any mother existed,

that I might be the safeguard of the Command of the One Master.

I am he who enlivened the companies of the gods,

I am he who did whatever he wished, the father of the gods. . . .

All things were mine, before you came into being, O Gods!

You only came afterwards, for I am Hike.*17

Once again, we learn about the time of the primal unity. While in the waters, God dispatched his single eye. This time the multiplicity is described, not as names but as Kas. In the early Heliopolitan cosmogony Atum had imparted his single Ka to Shu and Tefnut, but now the Ka has become a plura- lity. Each ‘subject’ of God is protected in that he shares in the divine essence. The theology is personalized, as might be expected when the aristocratic society of the Old Kingdom had disappeared and been replaced by one where everybody could claim direct relation with God. The appearance of the sun is a showing of the Word, but even the mighty light of the dawn is a lesser power than the all-pervading command of the High God. A double paradox is used to convey the mystery of the generation of the Word from the bisexual Atum. Hike is, like Shu, the son of Atum. In other words, Shu, Hike, Command and Intelligence are all really the same principle or god, the Demiurge, first-born child of the original spirit.

The most popular religious text in Ancient Egypt was Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead. It seems to have been written down at Herakleopolis during the Ninth Dynasty as a compendium of the stages through which the soul had to pass from the time it was liberated during the lustrations at the

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts 79

funeral to the time when it emerged from the Underworld to join the sun.18 It opens with a monologue by the High God which is quite distinct from the rest of the composition:

‘The Word came into being.

All things were mine when I was alone.

I was Re in [all] his first manifestations:

I was the great one who came into being of himself, who created all his names as the Companies of the [lesser] gods,

he who is irresistible among the gods.

The battleship19 of the gods was made according to what I said.

Now I know the name of the great god who was therein.

(An early gloss adds, ‘Perfume of Re is his name’.)

I was that great Phoenix who is in Heliopolis, who looks after the decision of all that is.’

(An early gloss adds, ‘That is Osiris, while as to all that is, that is eternity and everlastingness.’)

The Word is the beginning and, probably, the cause of every/ thing. In the primordial state all things were in God, who persists essentially the same throughout his ‘manifestations’. As the self/creator he pronounced the names — His names, or, as a later gloss explains, the names of his limbs. These are parts of him, but they are also the lesser divinities. Then comes a dark hint of lost legends about the defeat of cosmic enemies in the ages of strife and confusion. There follows the classic reference to the Phoenix, the bird who comes to Heliopolis to herald a new age and functions as a determiner of destiny. This is most likely to mean the institution of regulated time/cycles, with which event the evolution of the world was complete. The glosses show that some Egyptians were aware that really there was only one God — at least only one great positive figure — and that even Osiris was but a partial form of him. There is nothing here that is not already in the Memphite Theology, but it is explained in more cogent language. Perhaps it lacks the

80

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

metaphysical overtones of other statements of the period, but it is clear and unambiguous. It is a challenge thrown out to Egyptian polytheism. Unfortunately the challenge was taken up, for it serves as an introduction to the most bewildering polytheistic effusion in the whole of Egyptian literature.

One of the distinctive characteristics of Egyptian cosmogony is its feeling for space:

‘I am Atum, the creator of the Eldest Gods,20 I am he who gave birth to Shu,

I am that great He/She,

I am he who did what seemed good to him,

I took my space21 in the place of my will.

Mine is the space of those who move along like those two serpentine circles.’22

God needed space in the waters to carry out what seemed good to him; this is the meaning here of the creation of Shu. It is the space for the stars, those who move along the heavenly roads. This space is — at least pictorially — to be conceived as bounded above and below by two encircling serpents. This is not the usual idea. The Egyptians, like other early peoples, occasions ally thought of the world as surrounded by a serpent with its tail in its mouth, a symbol for the Cosmic Ocean.23 On the ins most shrine of Tutankhamun there is a strange mummyslike figure erect and ringed above and below by two encircling serpents. They must be the two serpentine circles of the Coffin Text, delimiters of space when it is imagined as extending upwards.

The bisexual nature of Atum is asserted, not only by railing him ‘that great HesShe’ but by saying that he ‘gave birth’ to Shu. A variant MS.24 has laid even greater stress on this by saying that Atum is ‘he who conceived Shu’, who is space personified.

The most advanced theological movement of the time was connected with Shu. It transcended local cosmogonies for it was philosophic rather than mythical. Most of the relevant

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

8l

Fig. ii. Two serpents enclose the Cosmic Form (the potential inert form occupying the whole Universe bounded by the serpents of Earth and Sky).

From the second shrine of Tutankhamun

texts were collected by de Buck and form Spells 75 to 8 1 in his edition of the Coffin Texts. In them Shu is the mediator between God — and these texts use the word God advisedly— and ‘his multiplicity*. He is also the breath of life, in fact life itself and the creator in detail, the Demiurge in the sense of Plato’s Timaeus. In order to clarify their ideas the authors of the Shu Texts create myths which are parables rather than relations of events. The general form is that of a dramatic monologue but dialogue is freely used.

82

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt Spell 75 begins:

‘I am the soul of Shu, the self-created,

I am the soul of Shu, the moulder of form,

I am coextensive with God,

I came into being with him.’

So, for the apologists of Shu, God is not removed from die universe. He is everywhere and Shu is everywhere with him. The temporal assumpdons of mythology are denied. In the older legends Shu came ‘after* his father Atum, but in this version they come into being together. Creadon is not a series of events in time but a speculation about the principles of life and the arrangement of the cosmos.

‘I am the announcer of him that comes forth from the horizon,

I am he that spreads respect for him in those who seek his name.

I am indwelling in the millions [of creatures], who is heard in a million words.

I am he who brings the words of the Self-Creator to his multiplicity.

I am the captain of his crew,

I am the strongest and most vigorous of the Divine Band.*

Shu is the dawn breeze which announces the coming of the sun. As breath he is the speech of all the worshippers of the High God when he is worshipped at the moment that the full light breaks upon the waiting world. As the sun rises into the sky, Shu as the wind takes command of the solar boat. In what follows there is a strange denigration of Nun, the Primeval Waters:

‘The ancestral gods (i.e. the crew of the boat) enquired about my form from Nun for they saw how strong and vigorous I was in the boat which conveys the Self- Creator,

I stood up among them that I might exercise power as

83

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

befitted my form, and when I spoke the company fell silent, the gods were afraid. I said:

“I will tell you, I came into existence in my own form.

Do not ask Nun about my form.

He [could only] look at me as I came into existence, but I knew his name and the place where I should come into being.

He could not see my form with his face for I came into being in the limbs of the Self-Creator, he formed me in his heart and created me in his glory.25 I am he who breathed out form. I stretched forth — this noble god who fills the sky with his beauty and whose name the gods do not know.” ’26

There is an echo of long/forgotten controversy in this passage. As on p. 72, the High God is the sun delivering his judgments from the divine sky/boat, the seat of ultimate authority from which he governs the world. It is used here to strengthen a controversial statement; any declaration which comes from the Sun God’s boat must be definitive. From the Old Kingdom there had been a tendency to personify Nun, the Primeval Waters, as ‘the Father of the Gods . In the produce tions of the Heracleopolitan period he becomes vocal as the oldest being and so tends to oust Re and Shu from their positions as primeval beings. This, however, was to forget that the waters are unconscious and pre/personal, and so incapable of any positive role. Shu, on the other hand, is consciousness itself, invisible and coextensive with the Creator, the active thought as distinct from the inert workUstuff. The creation of light makes forms visible and ‘fills the sky with beauty’— perhaps the earliest recognition that aesthetic values are an essential part of the world.

In Spell 76 the generation of Shu is told in careful but recondite terms:

‘I am Shu, whom Atum created on the day that he himself appeared.

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

He did not form me in a. womb nor shape me in an egg, I was not conceived by any manner of conception, but my father Atum spat me forth with the spittle of his mouth,

me and my sister Tefnut.

She emerged behind me27 when I was enveloped in the breath of life

that came from the throat of the Phoenix, on the day that Atum appeared in the infinity, the nothing, the darkness and shapelessness. I am Shu, Father of the gods —

which was when Atum sent out his single eye to seek me and my sister Tefnut.

I am he who made the darkness light for her when she found me as a man upholding.’

Shu belongs to the appearance; he is, in fact, the means of visibility, whereas Atum is the essential godhead persisting through all his forms. The old Heliopolitan cosmogony is not a myth here but a group of parallel symbols.

The appearance of the primary pair is equated with the call of the Phoenix who delivers the message of life. This is also the symbol of Atum breathing form from the chaos of the eternal Abyss. How, as appeared in Pyramid Text 1660 (see p. 37), the coming of the sacred bird upon the stone at Heliopolis is a symbol for the shining of the first light. When the Phoenix opens its beak and utters its call this

‘declares everything that is and is not yet’28

and is the call to life. In a Nile hymn the annual inundation of the Nile is said to be:

‘The flood of the eye of Atum when the water rises and the overflow appears,’29

from which it seems that the eye of Atum makes the waters active. After their mystic generation in the Abyss, Atum sent out Shu and Tefnut and then dispatched his eye into the

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts 85

waters to find them. The eye found Shu in his traditional shape as a man with his arms above his head, creating an empty space.

Orthodox Egyptian cosmology assigned four supports to the sky, but the Shu texts double this number. Eight ‘supporters’ — figures in the traditional role of Shu — hold the sky above them. They are part of the original scheme, for Shu says he

‘gave their names according to the words of creation of the Primeval Waters

with Atum, on the day that Atum arose within his limit,

before he saw Geb beneath his legs.

Shu was coextensive [with Atum?]

(variant: ‘Shu was still within the waters, nor had the earth been created)’

before the creation of the Heavenly Ocean for Atum

that he might float upon it.’30

The sky supports are part of the initial scheme of things, and their names, i.e. their nature and function, were involved in the Creative Word31 spoken by Atum in the midst of the waters. This, again, is an idealist trait. Only their ‘names’, not the supports themselves, existed in the Primeval Abyss. They were part of the original ‘Word’ which was enumerated, before the separation, when earth and sky were still together. There is a reminder that creation is a limited activity. Atum is ‘within his limit’ and Shu is ‘coextensive’ with him. This harks back to the old Heliopolitan idea that the High God in assuming his form gives the limits to the world. ‘He extended everywhere, in accordance with what was to come into existence.’ But where/ ever Atum is, there Shu is also. The two are aspects of the great power which creates and sustains the universe; both are involved in the Primeval Word and were so even when God was still ‘within the Waters’.

In another text Shu says:

‘I am Life, the Lord of years, living for ever, Lord of eternity,32

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

the eldest one that Atum made in his “glory”, in giving birth to Shu and Tefnut in Heliopolis, when he was one and became three, when he separated Geb from Nut, before the birth of the first corporation,33 before the coming of the twin companies.

They were with me in his nose, and he conceived me with his nose.

I emerged from his nostrils,

he put me on his neck and would not let me leave him.’

When Atum breathed forth Shu he sent forth not only the god but life itself and all the living things that were to come there' after. Shu — in becoming both life and eternity — has lost his individuality. The Demiurge has almost become identified with his creation; but not quite, for the Egyptians had a lively appreciation of the wonder of his light:

‘The Eldest Gods exult, the Ancestors are well pleased, the quarrelling and the fighting cease in Heliopolis when they behold Shu bearing the light.

He brings appearance to him who has willed [it], he gives happiness to the Double Company.

The gods come babbling to him

as he divides the hours with the twilight,

as he satisfies the sun with Mayet.

When Shu arises, Father of the Gods, the river around him is ablaze with light.

So may my strength be the strength of Shu

as I carry yonder sky that I may steady her brightness.

I have commanded males to forget females as Nut raises every god before me.

The multitudes are moved, the millions are well pleased as they give me full salutation.

I am Shu for all the gods, heaven and earth are mine, mine are all that are therein, mine are the ends of the earth, I am the Ruler as I am he in the midst of all.’34

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts 87

Shu is the dazzling light of an Oriental morning. But in this paean of joy there is a memory of the dawn of time. In classical mythology the Nereids and Tritons, who are creatures of the times before the rise of Zeus, gaze in rapture at the appearance of the sun as it rises from the baths of Ocean. Similarly in this old Egyptian song the gods of old are stupefied and ‘satisfied*. Night, the time of confusion and terror, is called the time of fighting in Heliopolis. Myth is here passing into metaphor. The age of myth is the time before the coming of the light of day. In terms of legend this means the essential period of con/ fusion when Horus and Seth were contending for the inheri/ tance of Osiris. Heliopolis is the scene of this epic contest, as is confirmed by the text quoted on p. no. The light reaching the upper sky is a repetition of the separation of earth and sky by Shu, for it was by this act that light was first brought into the world. Lovers must cease their caresses, wrapt in wonder at the glorious morning, whose light penetrates to the ends of the earth.

So far the High God and the Primeval Waters have been considered as masculine or bisexual. There was, however, another tradition, about a Mother Goddess, which was probably ignored or suppressed during the Old Kingdom but emerged in the Coffin Texts, when the weakening of the central control allowed provincial cults to appear in the texts. The heavenly ocean was imagined as a ‘great flood* — wor/ shipped in several places as a cow whose star/specked belly formed the sky. This strange and unlikely conjunction of ideas emerges from time to time in Egyptian symbolism, an intruder into the speculative theology of the priests from the world of popular devotion. Dendera, a town about forty miles north of Thebes, was the centre of the cult of Hathor, the most attrac/ tive form of the great goddess for the Egyptians. Hathor is the face of the sky, the deep and the lady who dwells in a grove at the end of the world. Her son is Ihy,35 the child who emerges from his mother every day at dawn as the new sun — in which case his mother is the sky — but who is also the Primeval Ocean as the all/mother, whether as Hathor, Nut, or

88

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Isis— the three great forms of the Mother Goddess. A creation myth has been preserved in a text from Gebelein:

‘My majesty precedes me as Ihy, the son of Hathor.

I am the male of masculinity,

I slid forth from the outflow between her thighs in this my name of Jackal of the Light.36 I broke forth from the egg, I oozed out of her essence,

I escaped in her blood. I am the master of the redness.

I am the Bull of the Confusion, my mother Isis generated me

though she was ignorant of herself beneath the fingers of the Lord of the gods.

I broke free from her on that day that the deep was uplifted as the . . .

for the Lord of the gods on the day of confusion;

[this happened] before necks had been fixed, before the heads of the gods had

been severed, before the disk had been fastened on the horns, before

the face of the Sistrum37 had been moulded —

I took shape, I grew, I crawled about, I crept around, I grew big,

I became tall like my father38 when he rose to his full height . . .

The flood it was that raised me up while the waters gave me . . .

My mother Isis suckled me, I tasted of her sweetness . . .

I am the babe in the Primeval Waters . . .

I sought an abiding place in this my name of Hahu39 and I found it in Punt. I built a house there on the hillside where my mother resides beneath her sycamores.’

Ihy is the lighochild, a symbol for the first emergence in its freshness and potentiality. He is ‘the bull of the confusion’, the first male to rise out of the chaos of the waters. Like Shu, he has only one progenitor, for he is the offspring of the primordial

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

89

Fig. 12. Forms of Hathoi Head

God, in his case the Mother Goddess. The rosy hue of the dawn sky, whether on the first morning or every day, is the blood emitted by Hathor or Isis — the names are interchangeable — when she bears her son. ‘The Lord of the gods’, although mentioned, does not have a place in this theology; it looks as if he is a polemical figure to be dismissed from consideration. Ihy is the master.

There is a list of mythical events about which nothing is known. Were the heads of the chaotic monsters of the deep cut off and then rearranged on more fitting bodies ! There must have been a legend relating how the sun’s disk came to be fixed between the horns of Hathor. The sistrum face is the flattened form of a female face with cow’s ears which, for some reason, symbolized the Mother Goddess Hathor as the sky. As Hahu the child claims identity with Shu, for the word means ‘the up/ holder’, i.e. the air/light god who supports the sky. Punt is the land far to the south of Egypt where the child goes to join his mother, who is the goddess of the distant regions of the world.40

The Bremner Rhind Papyrus is a document of the fourth century B.c. containing a long series of curses against Apopis, the cosmic dragon. Embedded in it are two versions of the

90 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Heliopolitan creation myth. The language is archaic for the age of the papyrus, and the prototype was probably a work in Middle Egyptian, dating from the period of most of the texts discussed in this chapter. Atum, while still formless in the waters, delivered an utterance and from this had come the ‘myriads of forms’; that is, the patterns of all that was to take shape in the visible world already existed in the mind of the Creator while he was still — as the Coffin Texts say— ‘a drowned one*. It is tempting to think that this basically idealist concept was borrowed from the Greeks — Plato died only a few years before the extant copy of the work was written — but on internal evidence the Bremner Rhind cosmogonies are purely Egyptian and a product of the speculations of the Middle Kingdom or earlier.

The masturbation and spitting motifs are combined into one act, the dispatch of Shu and Tefnut into the waters. God sent his single Eye to fetch them back. The return means a resump/ tion of the primordial unity of the divine power. Atum, over/ whelmed by joy at the reunion, put his arms around Shu and Tefnut, weeping tears which were to become the ancestors of mankind. Meanwhile the Eye had become enraged when it saw that Atum had put another eye in its place. According to the strange conventions of Egyptian symbolism the enraged Eye became a rearing cobra with swollen neck, the uraeus snake. Atum pacified the Eye by binding it — now a snake — around his forehead as the uraeus that guards the crown. Since as early as the Pyramid Texts the eye could represent the crown, this proceeding means that the pacification of the Eye is the establishment of monarchy. Finally— and the papyrus pur/ posely omits any reference to the times of Shu and Geb— earth and sky produce their five children — ‘the children of Nut’ — the deities of the Osirian cycle and the patrons of the five days which precede the New Year.41

‘The multitudes came from my utterance42 before the appearance of Heaven and Earth,

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts 91

before the snakes and worms had been moulded in that place,43

but I created some of them while I was still in the Primeval Waters in a state of inertness, without anywhere to stand. It occurred to my heart, I devised with my face (sic) that I should make every form, while I was still alone, before I had spat forth as Shu, before I had expectorated as Tefnut,

before another had come into being that he might create with me.

I devised in my own heart that myriads of forms should come into being

and the forms of their children and then theirs again.

I am he who rubbed with his fist, I emitted into my own hand and then

I spat forth from my own mouth.

I spat forth Shu, I expectorated Tefnut, while my father, the Primeval Waters, supported them. My Eye followed them for many ages, they departed from me — so that instead of my being one god, there were now three.

Then I appeared in the world and Shu and Tefnut rejoiced thereat

while they were still in a state of inertness, and they brought back my Eye with them.

Whereupon I rejoined my limbs. I wept over them — and thus mankind came into existence from the tears that sprang from my Eye.

Then it became enraged against me, when it returned and saw

that I had put another in its place, replacing it with a brighter one;44 so I promoted it to the front of my face so that it could rule the whole world.

Then their (sic) wrath died away in that I had replaced what had been taken away,

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

I emerged from the . . . and created all the serpents and every form of them.

Then Shu and Tefnut produced Geb and Nut, and these produced

Osiris, Horus the Sightless,45 Seth, Isis and Nephthys — all in one Company, one after the other, and they produced the myriads in the world.’

The second version gives further details about the creation within the waters:

‘I fulfilled all my desires when I was alone,

before there had appeared a second to be with me in this place;

I assumed form as that great soul wherein I started being creative

while still in the Primeval Waters in a state of inertness,

before I had found anywhere to stand.

I considered in my heart, I planned in my head how I should make every shape

— this was while I was still alone — I planned in my heart how I should create

other beings — the myriad forms of Khopri — and that there should come into being their children and theirs.

So it was I who spat forth Shu and expectorated Tefnut46

so that where there had been one god there were now three as well as myself47

and there were now a male and a female in the world.

Shu and Tefnut rejoiced thereat in the Primeval Waters in which they were.

After an age my Eye brought them to me and they approached me and joined my body, that they might issue from me.

When I rubbed with my fist my heart came into my mouth in that I spat forth Shu and expectorated Tefnut.

But, as my father was relaxed ... for ages . . . serpents . . .

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts

93

Fig. i j . The Eye as an independent god

I wept tears ... the form of my Eye; and that is how mankind came into existence.

I replaced it with a shining one (the sun) and it became enraged with me when it came back and found another growing in its place.’

Until the publication of the Coffin Texts this creation myth could reasonably be attributed to a very late period, but it must — in its general principles — be as early as the Middle Kingdom, for several mythical episodes in the Coffin Texts can be explained in the light of Bremner Rhind. Thus a ‘Chapter of becoming Hathor’ (Spell 331) describes how the High God dispatched his eye ‘before he had repeated himself\ The original procreation of Shu and Tefnut — here developed as a spitting— took place in the Primeval Waters. The first pair were not therefore really existent until the Eye could return them to their creator. The Eye is personified might, the essential violence that is used to protect the gods and kings against dis' integration in the waters or spirit enemies in the created world. Shu and Tefnut, as mere exhalations or even thoughts of the High God, were helpless in the waters; hence the Eye’s mission to defend them on their dark journey and to bring them back to their maker. Reunited with him they were safe in his embrace, in his original act of Kd'giving. The idealistic over-- tones of Bremner Rhind are absent from the Coffin Text, although the sending out of the Eye is equated with the Divine Word in the text quoted on p. 77 (Spell 261).

94

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt ‘...lam that Eye of Horus48

the messenger of the Lord, when he was alone, before he had repeated himself.

I am he that created his name, I grew a growing before the sky had been created that it might give me acclaim,

before the earth had been laid out that it might extol me, when I went seeking what you had spat out and what you had expectorated (that is, Shu and Tefhut).49 I went groping and I went seeking and behold I have brought [them] back!

[The High God says]

“Come, then, upon my forehead that you may exalt my beauty!

come, then, in front of me, that I have made you elevated!” ,6(>

In this version the Eye is elevated as the defensive cobra which — on the pattern of the earthly pharaohs — encircled the brows of the High God. For Bremner Rhind this motif is an act of amnesty on Res part, to soothe the anger of the Eye when it returned to its creator, only to find that another had taken its place in the god’s face. Here, however, the transformation of the Eye into a cobra is, apparently, a reward for its labours in seeking Shu and Tefnut in the waters. In either case the return of the Eye marks the assumption of kingship by the High God and the end of the age of inchoate chaos. The task of the first Eye was to rescue the formless, indeterminate creations of God from the sightless negativities of the Abyss. The eye is the power of life to defend itself inviolate against dissolution and the spirits of non-being.

What God said to the Eye when he installed it as the cobra on his brow has been preserved in a splendidly rhetorical piece from Siut:51

. of whom Re said:

“Great will be your majesty and mighty your influence.

The High God in the Age of the Coffin Texts 95

great will be your power and mighty your magic over the bodies of your enemies; they will fall howling on their faces, all mankind will be curbed beneath your power; fear will be yours when they behold you in this vigorous form

which the Lord of the Primeval Gods has given you.” Thus did he speak, the Lord of the Primeval Company, even to me.’

In his original condition the High God had one eye — that is clear although such a Polyphemus figure does not occur on the monuments.52 An eye of God was the medium of creation on two occasions: when he was alone in the waters he produced a brood of creatures from his eye and then, ‘ages after’, says Bremner Rhind, mankind sprang from his tears.

At first the primeval brood had the forms of serpents, but they were later transformed into the attendant deities of the Sun God. A messenger of Horus known as a ‘Divine Falcon’ relates:53

‘I am one of those whom Atum created, who came into being from the root of his eye, whom Atum formed and whom he glorified,54 whom he shaped and whose faces he distinguished, that they might be with him when he was alone in the Primeval Waters;

who [now] foretell his appearance on the horizon . . .

I am one of those serpents whom he made in his eye before Isis, the mother of Horus, came into being.’

So these original ‘worms’ or ‘serpents’ in the waters are also the original forms of the morning stars. Another text hints at a myth about their creation:

‘I [released?] the worms in the Eye of Atum, for I am the sun . . .

I have come to repeat his tears for him.

I am Re (or, the sun) who wept for himself in his single eye

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

that I might cool the flame in my eye, cooling the ways with my tears;

I am Re who wept for himself in his single eye to quench the flame in his eye.’66

The Eye must have begun to ‘burn’ and God cooled it with his tears. These tears flowed out into the Primeval Waters as worms or serpents. These might be the original forms of minor deities, but the imaginative author of another Coffin Text identifies them with the great principles. Command and Intelligence:

‘Verily I know the ways through the darkness [of the Primeval Waters]66

into which Command and Intelligence entered as worms with darkness behind them and the light before them;

I enter between them upon the invisible path within the forehead of Atum.’

To call Command and Intelligence ‘worms’ violates the modern Western feeling for symbolic propriety. It is, however, an attempt to reconcile the visually conceived symbolism of the Eye myth with a cosmogony in abstract terms. The under' lying idealism of Egyptian cosmogony has elevated ideas into mythical figures. The Primeval Waters are fundamental to all creation; so, too, are the principles of the divine mind. In the invisible path within the forehead of the High God there is an echo of the old sky/god whose eyes were sun and moon. It is a journey from sun to moon which is also a way through the dark waters of eternity and a way across the night sky. God in the Primeval Waters is half understood as a vast face — an idea difficult to realize but strangely powerful.

Bremner Rhind, therefore, with its assertions that God had thought out the ideas of all the creatures in the universe before creation began, when he was still motionless in the waters, fits naturally into the Egyptian tradition. Like the Memphite Theology it explicitly states the metaphysical ideas that are implicit in all the accounts of creation.

CHAPTER III

Osiris— Original Scheme

Osiris is the most vivid achievement of the Egyptian imagina^ tion. He is also the most complex. Although not the Lord of the universe, he is not therefore a subordinate deity. The High God, creator and determiner of fate, is a theological concept, the supreme personification of power, will and wisdom, eternal and ineffable— to some extent beyond the power of the imagination to understand, to be apprehended in symbolic terms. Osiris is quite different, he demands sympathy. He is the completely helpless one, the essential victim. Yet he is avenged and his passion has an end at last, when justice and order are re/established on earth. The other gods are transcendent, distinct from their worshippers. Osiris, however, is immanent. He is the sufferer with all mortality but at the same time he is all the power of revival and fertility in the world. He is the power of growth in plants and of reproduction in animals and human beings. He is both dead and the source of all living. Hence to become Osiris is to become one with the cosmic cycles of death and rebirth.

It is not to be expected that so universal and complicated a god would have remained absolutely unchanged throughout three thousand years of worship. Osiris is closely related to the dying and reborn divinities of the Near East, such as the Sumerian Dumuzi, the West Semitic Adonis, the Syrian Baal, the Hittite Telepinush or the Phrygian Attis. In Egypt, Osiris absorbed the nature or attributes of many cyclic or fertility figures such as Anedjety of the Eastern Delta (whose insignia he borrowed), Sokar of Giza, the ‘Lord of the Westerners’ at Abydos and others now forgotten. The exact parcelling'out of the various aspects which came from this place or that does not help to elucidate Osiris’ real nature, for he

97

98 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

transcends his origins. Once synthesized, he lived on for nearly three thousand years in the hearts of the people as the symbol of the great human drama, the union of nature with the hope for survival after death.

There is no definite evidence as yet that Osiris was wor- shipped in the prehistoric period. Even if he were, that would not imply that the primitive figure had much in common with the highly developed god we encounter in historical times. A symbol of Osiris has recently been found that dates from the beginning of historical times, about 3000 B.c.,1 otherwise there is no specific proof of his existence until he appears in the Pyramid Texts which were inscribed between 2400 and 2200 B.c. In these texts he is already fully developed, not only already provided with a complete mythology but a carefully thought-out theology as well. Moreover, the power and pre¬ tensions of the god increase as time goes on. Many have sup¬ posed that Osiris was the god of the common people as opposed to the more aristocratic Re, the Sun God of the pharaohs. This may be partially true, for there are signs of religious controversy between the devotees of the two gods. Theologians tried on several occasions to reconcile their claims but without complete success. During the New Kingdom, Amun — the successor of Re as the official High God — acquired an almost monotheistic character, rendering other gods un¬ necessary. This, however, failed to have lasting effect. During the last millennium b.c. the popularity of Osiris grew steadily until, under the Ptolemies who ruled Egypt from 323 b.c. to the Roman conquest, he became Serapis, the Lord of the universe in all its aspects.

Throughout Egyptian history, then, there was a con¬ troversy about the position of Osiris. There was no doubt about the existence of the god but his relative position in the pan¬ theon changed from time to time. There was always strong pressure to expand his worship at the expense of local or less attractive gods. No doubt, politics — the claims of rival temples or priesthoods and social pressure from the illiterate — had much

99

Osiris — Original Scheme

to do with it. Yet it would be wrong to see Osiris in this materialist light. Osiris appealed to the emotions; Re, Atum and the rest (except Amun) were there to account for the origin and maintenance of the world and to provide a rationale for political leadership.

The drama of Osiris may have begun as the theme of a cycle of fertility rites. It always retained agricultural traits but these were subordinated to the pathetic element, for the cult of Osiris was distinguished above all others in Ancient Egypt by its expenditure of emotion. At times the theme is more concerned with kingship than with the life of the fields, and the atmosphere is almost political. But here, too, the feeling is more important than the narrative content, which seems too trivial to sustain or justify the unrestrained outpouring of emotion. Fertility and the kingship are integral parts of the cycle but they are overshadowed by the pathos. The main problem is not to discover the origins of the drama’s meaning but to account for the profound sorrow and subsequent elation of the Osirian literature. This is as true of the hymns and litanies of the third millennium B.c. as it is of the late Ptolemaic texts from Dendera or Philae.

Oriental man, and the Egyptians and Sumerians in partis cular, experienced the climatic changes of the seasons in a more dramatic form than did the peoples of Western Europe. In the West one can speak of a ‘dead season* but with us the expression is a mild one, almost a harmless metaphor. The agricultural year is a round of tasks, each suitable in its proper season, and there is an unspoken confidence that there will be no absolute failure in the order of natural events. In the East, however, the heat and drought of summer reduce the country to something indistinguishable from the surrounding desert. The vegetation is almost completely burnt up, the animals grow listless from heat and lack of water. The desert has always been, to Eastern peasants, the place of death, the abode of wild animals, evil spirits, terror and chaos. During the high summer the difference between the valley lands of life and order, and the desert with

100

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

its terrors, has ceased to exist. It is what an inscription of c. 2100 b.c. calls ‘the carnage of the year’.2 Moreover, there was the constant fear that the river Hoods would not return at all, or in insufficient quantity, and the land would be faced with famine and the consequent social disintegration. Nor was this fear groundless. Throughout Egyptian history there are graphic references to famines which find an echo in the story of Joseph. On the causeway leading up to the pyramid of King Wenis at Sakkarah there is a particularly vivid scene in which the starving peasants are depicted with stark realism. These figures were obviously designed by artists who had had personal acquaintance with such things in all their horror. Such dis/ asters were not a remote possibility but an all too frequent occurrence. Consequendy there was none of the Western con/ fidence in the inevitable return of the seasons. ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind ?’ On the contrary, anxiety bit deep into the ancient mind. This is the reason for the extremely vivid imagery used to express the feeling when the flood waters return or the rain comes to the highlands:

‘Greetings to you, O Waters that Shu (i.e. the air) has brought

or the Twin Caverns have gushed forth in which the earth (Geb) will bathe his limbs!

Now hearts can lose their fear and bosoms their terror.’3

The coming of the new waters was more than a change of season, it meant the end of fear and terror, the rebirth of life in the hearts of men. Osiris is not the inundadon itself but the life/force in plants and the reproductive power in animals and human beings, which are stimulated when the waters come.

As a Coffin Text tersely explains:

‘Osiris appears whenever there is an outflow [of water].’4

When the waters pour out over the earth they cause the seed to grow in the soil and this sprouting of the vegetation is the uprising of Osiris’ soul. This is clearly seen in a relief from Philae.

Osiris — Original Scheme

IOI

Fig. 14. The Inundation makes the vegetation grow (Philae)

A cow-headed goddess pours water from a vase into what is the symbol for a black (i.e. earth/filled) irrigation channel. This is the sign for irrigated land in general. Out of the top of the channel corn is sprouting. Above the corn and obviously rising from it is a soul-bird with a human head. The cow- goddess is Isis-Hathor-Sothis — the great Mother Goddess in her star form as Sothis, the Dog Star, whose rising in the east just before dawn heralded the annual inundation. The water let loose by the coming of the flood fills the irrigation channels and so reaches the land where the corn has been sown. The moisture stimulates the growth of the seed into corn-stalks which rise up from the earth. It is this ‘rising up’ that is the liberation of the ‘souf-form of Osiris. In a Coffin Text the Nile Spirit says:

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Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

‘I am he who performs the service of gifts (i.e. the harvest) for Osiris at the great inundation,

I raise up my Divine Command at the rising of the Great God (i.e. Osiris),

I nourish the plants, I make green what was dried up.’5

The harvest is the peculiar property of Osiris. The Divine Command, the Logos which determines the life/principle in the world is reasserted annually in the flood. When Osiris rises in his ‘soul’/form the plants begin to grow. In fact, they are really the same thing.

The anxiety and fear of the people during the dry summer heat and the compensating joy when at last the river begins to rise are vividly portrayed in the Pyramid Texts where the Nile Spirit declares:6

‘I am the messenger of the year, for Osiris, here I come with the news of your father, Geb,7 The state of the year is good, how good it is!

The state of the year is fair, how fair it is!

I have come down with the Twin Companies of the gods upon the flood;8

I am the creator for the Twin Companies, provider of the fields with plenty;9 I have found the gods standing, clothed in their linen, their white sandals upon their feet.

They throw off their sandals upon the ground, they divest themselves of their fine linen;

“There was no happiness until you came down!” they say. “What is told you will abide with you!

Canal of happiness will be the name of this canal as it floods the fields with plenty.” *

The passage has been slightly altered by the editors of the Pyramid Texts to suit the requirements of a ferryman/spell for passing over to the next world. Ift however, men are under/ stood in the place of gods, we have a picture of the people hailing the arrival of the new Nile flood with its promise of

103

Osiris — Original Scheme

‘fields of plenty’, putting on their best raiment to greet the spirit of a year of prosperity and then stripping to bathe in the river — a custom we know, to have been common at flood/time.

Mythologically the main aspects of Osiris are as follows:

(1) He belonged to the fourth generation of gods. First, according to the doctrine of Heliopolis, was Atum or Re, the sun. He produced Shu, the air, and Tefnut, the moisture, or, as was later held, the world order. These were the primeval pair, who in turn brought forth Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. From them there came two males — Osiris and Seth, and two females — Isis and Nephthys. Isis became the wife of Osiris and Nephthys that of Seth.

(2) Osiris was a king who ruled over Egypt and who taught the arts of civilization to his subjects. As a New Kingdom hymn says:10

‘He . . . established justice throughout both banks [of the Nile],

he put the son in his father’s place . . . overthrowing the adversary with might and power . . . [Earth] saw how excellent he was and entrusted the kingship to him to lead the Two Lands into prosperity.’

In typical Oriental hyperbole the encomium ends with:

‘His crown clove the sky and consorted with the stars.’11

The reign of Osiris was, then, a golden age, the model for subsequent generations. Throughout their history the Egyptians believed in a time of perfection at the beginning of the world. Originally it was probably attributed to Re, but Osiris had become its patron by the Middle Kingdom.

(3) The idyllic ‘order’ of Osiris was destroyed by Seth, his younger brother. Plutarch, writing in the second century after Christ, tells how, during a feast, Seth tempted Osiris to he in a chest to see if it would fit him. Having Osiris temporarily at his mercy, Seth and his confederates (and Seth always has confederates) threw the chest into the Nile. In the early

104 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Pyramid Texts Osiris was killed at a place known either as Nedit (i.e. ‘where he was cast down’) or Gazelles’ Mountain, perhaps the modern Komir, in southern Egypt. It is wrong to seek for exactness of location in these ancient myths. Osiris was killed or cast down wherever his rites were performed. Plutarch’s version may be a memory of another tradition that Osiris was not killed but drowned. This motif is extremely ancient — it occurs in the so/called ‘Memphite Theology’, the earliest source for the cult of Osiris at Memphis, and can be compared with the fate of Tammuz, the Mesopotamian parallel to Osiris, who is also sometimes considered as ‘drowned’ in the waters of the river. The Memphite Theology describes the event in vivid terms:

‘Nephthys and Isis came straightway

for Osiris was drowning in the water.

Isis and Nephthys looked out, caught sight of him and were terrified for him.

Then Horus commanded Isis and Nephthys straightway to seize Osiris

and prevent him from being drowned.

Horus [said] to Isis and Nephthys: “Hasten, lay hold of him.”

Isis and Nephthys [cried] to Osiris: “We come to save you.”

They turned his head to the right, they brought him to land.’

There is a curious allusion in the Coffin Texts to a tradition that Seth changed himself into a ‘flea’ and crawled inside Osiris’ sandal, biting and poisoning him. This looks as if Osiris was the first victim of bilharzia, the scourge of modern Egypt. However, whatever the variations of traditions, Osiris was always reduced to impotence, if not killed, by his wicked brother.

(4) Plutarch says that Osiris’ body was washed up upon the Syrian shore at Byblos. The chest containing the body was cast

105

Osiris — Original Scheme

up into a tree which grew around it. The tree ultimately attained enormous size and attracted the notice of the king of that country, who had it felled to form the main column of his palace. Isis, meanwhile, had wandered everywhere seeking the body of her beloved. In some way Isis knew that Osiris’ body was hidden within the tree^trunk. She ingratiated herself with the king and queen of Byblos, obtained possession of the tree column, extracted Osiris’ body and brought it back to Egypt.

This episode seems to have been an attempt to reconcile the ritual and symbolic associations of Osiris with his legends. As a fertility god, Osiris— like Dionysos andTammuz — was some' times regarded as a tree or as imprisoned within one. His soul perched on a tree which grew by his tomb. He could also be symbolized by a column whose erection was the visible mark of his revival.

(5) Although the details differ, all sources agree that Seth tore up Osiris’ body and scattered the pieces. Plutarch believed that parts of the body had been flung all over Egypt. Some native sources, including the Pyramid Texts, localize the event the place of the ‘casting down in Nedit; others say that Seth threw the fragments of the body into the Nile. In every version, however, Isis is the seeker for her husband’s body — a trait she shares with the Mesopotamian Ishtar, who seeks her beloved Tammuz who has been reft from her and is held a prisoner in the Underworld. According to Plutarch, Isis found every part of Osiris’ body except the phallus, which had been swallowed by a fish. This is not attested by the native sources, although it is clear that the sexual organ is capable of revivification and is magically distinct from the other members. It is generally admitted that Isis, helped by Nephthys, collected the limbs together again, thus making die first and essenual mummy. As a hymn from the New Kingdom has it:12

‘Beneficent Isis, who protected her brother and sought for him, she would take no rest until she had found him.’

106 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

(Isis seems to have assumed the shape of a bird at this point.)

‘She shaded him with her feathers and gave him air with her wings.

She cried out for joy and brought her brother to land.’

(6) Isis was unable to bring her beloved back to life in the full sense, but she contrived to revive him sufficiendy to be able to conceive a son by him. This was Horus. In her fear of the vengeance of Seth the goddess hid in the swamps of the Delta, where she gave birth to Osiris’ heir and where she brought him up in secret. As the above-mentioned hymn tells:13

‘She revived the weariness of the Lisdess One and took his seed into her body,

[thus] giving him an heir.

She suckled the child in secret, the place where he was being unknown.’

A whole cycle of myths gathered around Isis in the Delta. These will be discussed later. They form a distinct group of their own and have little bearing on Osiris.

(7) In due time Horus grew up and, according to Plutarch, gathered together the supporters of his murdered father and, leaving his Delta fastness, attacked the usurper Seth. The civil war was suspended for a while by the attempted arbitration of Hermes (/.e. the Greek form of Thoth), but at last Horus took up the fight again and succeeded in finally overwhelming Seth and his confederates. The Egyptian sources do not so much contradict Plutarch as speak a different mythical language. For the native Egyptian Osiris was always helpless. He is never represented in movement, but as a swathed figure with black or green face — for he is both a mummy and the life-spirit of the earth and vegetation. He is, above all, passive, and only in the texts of the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties is he allowed to speak for himself. The texts assume that the murder has already taken place. Osiris is the spirit of the past; as Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead explicitly declares, ‘Osiris is yesterday and Re is today.’

Osiris — Original Scheme

107

Fig. ij. Isis suckles Horus in the Delta Swamps

When one compares all the references to the mythical events connected with Osiris one is struck by the absence of a canonical version of the legends. In fact there is no legend at all in the modern sense. Such may once have existed, for even the early texts are full of allusions to lost myths, but instead of written legends we have a number of motifs which conform to a pattern.

The kingship in Egypt, like all forms of property, consisted of a duality— it was based on a relationship between the living and the dead. The king exercised the supreme power in the world. He was the intermediary whereby the divine energies of the universe were made available for men. This power he derived from his ancestors, in particular from his father who for this reason was considered as himself divine. The deceased father in his tomb was the source of the power, called by the Egyptians the Ka, but he was in need of the care of his successor, his ‘beloved son, in order to achieve beatification and to function as a ‘spirit’. The living king was Horus, the son and heir of Osiris. The dead king was Osiris, the dweller in the West, or, as the Pyramid Texts have it, Ka hotep — ‘the Ka at rest’. If the king carried out the required rites for his father, the latter could then become ‘a soul’, which meant that the powers

108 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

of life and growth would begin again in nature. Osiris was nothing without Horus, just as the latter was no true king unless he was able to guarantee the fertility of his land. This mutual obligation between living son and dead father runs through Egyptian religion. It also exemplifies the essential difference between the cult of Osiris and that of the other fertility gods of the Ancient East. Tammuz is carried away to the Underworld by enemies and then brought back to earth and life by his consort/mother Ishtar. Osiris suffers death or discomfiture in the Underworld, but he is not brought back to life. It is Horus who fulfils the destiny for the present, under/ taking the role played in other religions by the resurrected god.

Osiris sojourns in the Underworld. This was interpreted in many ways. The ancients did not have our sense of definite exclusive topography— that if a god is in one place he cannot be in another. The Underworld could be thought of cosmo/ logically, as situated beneath the earth or beyond the western horizon or in the waters under the earth. In early times Osiris was worshipped in ‘tombs’ which consisted of a tumulus in the midst of a grove. They were chambers in these mounds reached by a winding passage.14 The memory of such sub/ terranean resting/places for Osiris lasted throughout Egyptian history. The Osireion, which Sethos I erected at Abydos about 1310 B.c., and the crypts of the Ptolemaic temples at Dendera and Diospolis Parva were, in essentials, the same as the mound at Medamud. The Underworld existed ritually in the sub/ terranean temple, but in imagination it was often a great palace or city with ramparts and a hall in which Osiris lay or, alter/ natively, presided over the court of the dead. This identification of the mythical and localized underworlds was deliberate, as it also was in Sumer, where Eridu, the sacred city ofEn/ki, the god of the lower world, was Ab/Zu — ‘the abyss of waters’. In Egypt the names of many of the major centres of Osiris worship were used for the Underworld; for example, Busiris (in Egyptian Djedu), the original city of his cult in the Delta; Rosetau, the modern Giza, the burial/place of Memphis and

109

Osiris — Original Scheme

the home of a form of Osiris known as Sokar; and Naref, the site of Osiris’ temple in Herakleopolis. During the time when the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead were being written Osiris could be put into a never/neverdand beyond human ken known as the Isle of Fire.

Although Seth had killed Osiris, this was not the end of his malevolence. He tore the body into pieces and left them lying on the ground or, in another version, threw them into the Nile. He remained a potential danger to Osiris until the latter was redeemed. Hence, in the rites Osiris had to be protected by Isis and her sister Nephthys until the coming of Horus. The god' desses found the fragments of his body either on the ground or fished them out of the Nile and then proceeded to put them together, mourning him all the while. They had to watch over him during the difficult time of his helplessness which was symbolized by the night watches. Isis and Nephthys fulfil a role rather than inspire a myth. They belong to the ritual. Meanwhile the events of the upper world are mythical.

The battle of Horus and Seth for the kingdom was a long and bitter business. Several texts hint that the other gods grew heartily tired of the disturbance which the two contestants made throughout the universe. Incidents connected with the quarrel were collected together some time during the New Kingdom to form a semi'humorous tale called (by modem scholars) The Contending of Horus and Seth.15 The ‘Two Fellows’, as they were called, remind us of the Lion and the Unicorn; their longstanding enmity became wearisome and everyone else longed for them to compose their differences. It was the time of ‘the confusion*, the symbol of the terror and strife that lay behind the order of the world. During the fight Horus wrenched out Seth’s testicles while Seth tore out Horus’ left eye. Finally, at least in the common recension, Thoth, as the personification of order, persuaded the two to submit their quarrel to arbitration before the great council of the gods at Heliopolis. The Book of the Dead makes the High God exclaim:16

no Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

‘O Thoth! What has come to pass with the children of Nut?

They have created strife, they have stirred up confusion, they have done evil, they have raised rebellion, they have indeed made the great into little and made a secret destruction in all that I have created.’

Both the contestants were descendants of Nut, the sky/goddess, for Seth was her younger son while Horus, as Osiris’ child, was her grandson. The council had, therefore, to decide the right of inheritance. The long'drawn'out strife had upset the happy age of the Creator. Hence, the fundamental order of the universe must be established by Thoth and the ‘Two Fellows’ brought to arbitration. This is one of the most profound elements of the legend and one whose importance the texts recognize quite clearly. Spell 37 of the Coffin Texts stresses the role of Thoth:

‘The earth was hacked up where the Two Fellows had fought,

their feet had taken possession of the whole field of the god at Heliopolis.

The Master AtunvRe had entrusted him with the great task that reposed upon him, and now the contest was at an end, the strife was over, the burning flame [of anger] was quenched, the smell of blood was swept away

before the Divine Court which sat down to judge in the presence of Geb.*

Reason and law have prevailed against the terrific forces of violence. Horus is adjudged the rightful heir of his father, the patrilineal principle is assured and peace is established with the enthronement of the new king. As soon as he has been in' stalled, Horus journeys down to visit his father in the Under' world or sends a representative to tell Osiris the glad news. This will enable Osiris to awake or ‘set his soul in motion. Osiris

Osiris — Original Scheme in

revives, to become the spirit of life and growth — the New Year has begun.

Meanwhile, Seth was reduced to a subordinate role. His confederates were slaughtered, but the great enemy himself was forced to become the bearer of Osiris. This was interpreted in the ritual as meaning that Seth was the boat which carried Osiris during the festal voyage on the Nile or temple lake. In mythological terms Seth’s fate was probably connected with his power over the winds, an aspect of the god which he retained from his prehistoric past.

One of the earliest hymns that have been preserved from the Osiris rituals occurs — only slightly altered for funerary pur/ poses — in the pyramid of Wenis:17

‘Hail to you, O Knowing One!

Geb has created you anew,

the Divine Company has brought you forth anew!

Horus is satisfied for his father,

Atum is satisfied for his offspring.

The gods of East and West are satisfied with this great event which has come to pass through the action of the Divine Progeny.

Ah! Osiris! See! Behold!

Osiris! Hear! Attend!

Ah! Osiris! Lift yourself upon your side! Carry out what I ordain!

O Hater of Sleep! O Torpid One!

Rise up, you that were cast down in Nedit!

Take your bread with happiness in Pe!

Receive your sceptre in Heliopolis!

This is Horus [speaking], he has ordained action for his father,

he has shown himself master of the storm,

he has countered the blustering of Seth,

so that he (Seth) must bear you —

for it is he that must carry him who is [again] complete.’

1 12 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

The Divine Company has given a verdict in favour of Horus; this is ‘the great event which has come to pass’. The forces of confusion— here represented as ‘the blustering of Seth’ — have been overcome in Horus’ victory. The new master of the universe visits his father where he lies sleeping in the Under' world. Horus has the power to revive Osiris or, at least, to rouse him from his state of unconsciousness. Osiris is to be revived — i.e. re/created — as a soul, in other words, is the reviving powers of the new year. Hence, Osiris has been reborn, not in his old form, but as the vegetation and reproductive activity of the ensuing period. This is described allusively in the present text: the earth (Geb) has remade Osiris, in that Osiris as the son of Geb is reborn as a soul. The Divine Court has remade Osiris by giving its verdict in favour of Horus. The High God Atum is ‘satisfied’ that his descendant has recovered from his ‘sleep’ and ‘torpidity’. The revival of Osiris affects all the powers of the earth, who are ‘satisfied’ by the new order instituted by Horus. Osiris is requested to accept the offerings which, now that Horus has reestablished ordered government, can be made him on the altars of the major temples. Seth has been made to subserve the new order; the unregulated powers of the universe are now mastered and made to help in sustaining the revived god. This hymn is distinctive in that the passion of Osiris is symbolized as unconsciousness. The revival of the god is therefore a reawakening, which is equated with death and living again. The fertility element is not explicitly mentioned although, of course, it would have been known to every Egyptian. It is perhaps significant that Osiris’ fate is already being interpreted in a psychological sense in this, which may well be the earliest hymn from the Osirian rituals to have survived.

Another fragment of an Osiris hymn occurs twice in the Pyramid Texts. The god is bewailed by his sisters Isis and Nephthys, whose voices summon a group of ecstatic dancers, known as the ‘souls’ or ‘gods’ of Pe, the ancient capital of the predynastic northern community. In the ritual we are to

I THE SPIRIT O F THE ETERNAL WATERS protects the eye of the High God (British Museum, Papyrus of Ani). See p. 230

2 semty and lector priests (Newberry, Betti Hassan I V, pi. XIV).

See p. 29

Osiris — Original Scheme 113

imagine a group of people who personify the spirits of long-' dead prehistoric chieftains. The text begins with the strange rubric18:

‘The gates of the sky are opened, the gates of the “Bows” are flung wide.’

This simply means that the sanctuary doors are opened. A rout of dancers comes in with wild demeanour:

‘The gods of Pe bestir themselves, they come to Osiris at the tearful voice of Isis, at the plaint of Nephthys, at the wailing of those two mighty spirits.

The souls of Pe dance for you,

they strike their flesh,

they agitate their hands,

they loosen their hair,

they crouch down upon their knees,

they say to you:

“Osiris! You went away, but you have returned, you fell asleep, but you have awakened, you died, but you live again.

Arise! Behold this! Arise! Hear this, what your son has done for you!

He has struck down him who struck you down, he has bound him who bound you, he has put him under [the care of] his great daughter, who dwells in Kedem.

Now is sorrow at an end in the Twin Sanctuaries.”’

Although the ‘souls’ lacerate themselves and adopt the gestures usually associated with mourning, they are in fact the bearers of the good tidings. They are visitors from another world, like the carnival revellers of Western Europe.

This text is singularly enlightening as to the fate of Osiris. The passion of the god is described as ‘he went away, he fell asleep, he died’, and his salvation in the complementary terms

1 14 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

— ‘he came back, he awakened, he lives again*. Used rationally these verbs are mutually exclusive, but that is to misunderstand the way the Egyptians thought. Departure, sleep and death are used metaphorically, but unlike a modern metaphor, they are all employed together to convey the feeling of the god’s plight. Osiris is nature itself or, to speak more accurately, nature as experienced by the farmers and stock/breeders of the Ancient Near East. During the summer heat the desolate condition of the world can be expressed as if either the spirit of life had departed, or was listless and asleep, or that life itself was dead. Any single metaphor would be insufficient to describe the dire calamity of the world. Similarly, the fate of Seth, the enemy, can be death, bonds or ignominious submission. He cannot be altogether annihilated, for he is a power that can be restrained or canalized, but not absolutely destroyed. Take away the pathos of the Osirian cycle, and the metaphors fall apart so that each can generate its own myth in narrative form. This is what happens in the myth of the contendings of Horus and Seth, in the saga of the Two Brothers and the other popular tales, which deal with mythical motives as connected stories. They arose on the periphery of Osiris worship, far away from the deep emotions displayed in the genuine cult. Even the simple statement that sorrow is at an end in the Twin Sanctuaries declares that the joy at the salvation of Osiris is universal, for the Twin Sanctuaries refer to the temples of the two divisions °f Egypt.

In the myth, Osiris did not realize the evil intentions of his brother and so fell unwittingly into the trap which his enemy had laid. That is implied in the texts of all periods. When Horus resuscitated his father, he gave him the power of ‘knowing’, which included comprehension of Seth’s real nature:19

‘Horus has seized Seth, he has put him beneath you so that he can lift you up. He will groan beneath you as an earthquake. . . .

Osiris — Original Scheme

US

B

Fig. 16. A. Forms of the Seth animal B. Seth animal determining illness (a), storms (b) and (c), confusion (d)

Horus has made you recognize him in his real nature, let him not escape you;

he has made you hold him by your hand, let him not get away from you.’

Seth is the essential enemy. He is the personification of blind force and unregulated violence. Another Pyramid Text alludes to a legend that he burst forth from his mother’s womb:20

‘You whom the pregnant goddess brought forth when you clove the night in twain —

you are invested with the form of Seth, who broke out in violence.’

Whenever there is a manifestation of blind force, Seth is in his element. Hence, his animal form is used in the script to deters mine the words for storm, sickness and quarrelling.

In Spell 356, quoted above, Seth is an earthquake. He is the god of storm and thunder. The lowering clouds are his, his voice is the thunderclap and all untoward events in nature belong to him. Hence he is the desert wind, dryness and death. The later Con tendings of Horus and Seth present him as a bluster^ ing bully. Usually the Osirian texts equate him with death and the dissolution of the body, but tradition ascribes to him a kind of low cunning. This must be why Osiris is warned to be on his guard against possible tricks.

ii6 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

Osiris’ passivity was unsatisfying to those who wanted their gods to be models of self/assertion. Some intriguing fragments of an old myth have survived in the Pyramid Texts which show that there were two trials: one when Seth was arraigned before the Court for the murder of Osiris and another when the gods had to decide between him and Horus. It is even suggested that Osiris should himself appear before the Court of the Gods and Seth’s intransigence is cited as an example. The scene begins with the description of a storm:21

‘The sky is darkened, the earth rocks,

Horus comes, Thoth appears.

They lift Osiris upon one side,

they make him appear before the Divine Company.

(Seth is now addressed):

“Remember, Seth, put in your heart the charge which Geb laid,

the accusation which the gods made against you, in the House of the Elder (/.£. Atum the Primeval High God) at Heliopolis,

that you had cast Osiris down upon the ground, and how you declared, O Seth — ‘On the contrary, it was he who provoked me.’

. . . when you declared, O Seth, ‘On the contrary, it was he who attacked me.’

. . . stretch out your leg[s], extend your paces to go beyond the Southern Land.”

Raise yourself, Osiris, even as Seth raised himself when he heard the accusation of the gods and the charge upon the god’s father.

Give one arm to Isis, Osiris, and one hand to Nephthys, come between them.’

The theologians of the Old Kingdom made grandiose claims for Osiris. In Spell 600 of the Pyramid Texts he is equated with the whole pyramid complex: