To put it briefly, then, I hold that the element of nature-worship is a late gloss or superadded factor in the Egyptian religion; that it is always rather mythological or explanatory than religious in the strict sense; and that it does {178}not in the least interfere with our general inference that the real Egyptian gods as a whole were either ancestral or totemistic in origin. From the evidence before us, broadly considered, we may fairly conclude, then, that the earliest cult of Egypt consisted of pure ancestor-worship, complicated by a doubtfully religious element of totemism, which afterwards by one means or another interwove itself closely with the whole ghostly worship of the country. The later gods were probably deified ancestors of the early tribal kings, sometimes directly worshipped as mummies, and sometimes perhaps represented by their totem-animals or later still by human figures with animal heads. Almost every one of these great gods is localised to a particular place--“Lord of Abydos,” “Mistress of Senem,” “President of Thebes,” “Dweller at Hermopolis,” as would naturally be the case if they were locally-deified princes, admitted at last into a national pantheon. In the earliest period of which any monuments remain to us, the ancestor-worship was purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism or from the cult of the great gods than at any later time. With the gradual evolution of the creed and the pantheon, however, legends and myths increased, the syncretic tendency manifested itself everywhere, identifications multiplied, mysticism grew rife, and an esoteric faith, with leanings towards a vague pantheistic monotheism, endeavoured to rationalise and to explain away the more gross and foolish portions of the original belief. It is the refinements and glosses of this final philosophical stage that pass current for the most part in systematic works as the true doctrines of Egyptian religion, and that so many modern enquirers have erroneously treated as equivalent to the earliest product of native thought. The ideas as to the unity of God, and the sun-myths of Horus, Isis, and Osiris, are clearly late developments or excrescences on the original creed, and betray throughout the esoteric spirit of priestly interpretation. To the very last, the Worship of the Dead, and the {179} crude polytheism based upon it, were the true religion of the ancient Egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the monuments. Such was the religious world into which, if we may believe the oldest Semitic traditions, the Sons of Israel brought their God Jahweh and their other deities from beyond the Euphrates at a very remote period of their national history. And such, in its fuller and more mystical form, was the religion practised and taught in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, at the moment when the Christian faith was just beginning to evolve itself round the historical nucleus of the man Christ Jesus, and him crucified. CHAPTER IX.--THE GODS OF ISRAEL.