The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia — John Shaqi
The religions of ancient Egypt and BabyloniaSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Religion
The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Assyro-Babylonian religion; Egypt -- Religion
But such consequences of the old Egyptian belief in the incarnation of the
deity in man are leading us away into a field of investigation which will
have to be traversed in a future lecture. For the present, it is
sufficient to keep two facts steadily before the mind: on the one side,
the old Egyptian belief in the divinity of the brute beast; on the other,
the equally old belief in the divinity of man. The two beliefs are not
really to be harmonised one with the other; they were, in fact, derived
from different elements in the Egyptian population; but, with his usual
conservative instinct and avoidance of abstract thought, the Egyptian of
later days co-ordinated them together, and closed his eyes to their actual
incompatibility.
Lecture III. The Imperishable Part Of Man And The Other World.
It has sometimes been asserted by travellers and ethnologists, that tribes
exist who are absolutely without any idea of God. It will usually be found
that such assertions mean little more than that they are without any idea
of what we mean by God: even the Zulus, who saw in a reed the creator of
the world,(17) nevertheless believed that the world had been created by a
power outside themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race of
man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in a power of the kind,
or in a world which is separate from the visible world around us;
statements to the contrary generally rest on ignorance or misconception.
The very fact that the savage dreams, and gives to his dreams the reality
of his waking moments, brings with it a belief in what, for the want of a
better term, I will call “another world.”
This other world, it must be remembered, is material, as material as the
“heavenly Jerusalem” to which so many good Christians have looked forward
even in our own day. The savage has no experience of anything else than
material existence, and he cannot, therefore, rise to the conception of
what we mean by the spiritual, even if he were capable of forming so
abstract an idea. His spiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not
only to be interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols, but
identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The Latin _anima_ meant
“breath” before it meant “the soul.”
This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual has lingered long
in the human mind; indeed, it is questionable whether, as long as we are
human, we shall ever shake ourselves wholly free from it. The greater is
naturally its dominance the further we recede in history. There is
“another world,” but it is a world strangely like our own.
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