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 the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine of the
trinity. Generation in the case of a god could not be the same as in the
case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless proved this. It was
inevitable, therefore, that it should come to be conceived of as
symbolical like the generation of thought, all the more since the deities
who had proceeded from Tum were all of them symbols representing the
phenomena of the visible world. Hence the idea of generation passed
naturally into that of emanation, one divine being emanating from another
as thought emanates from thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of
symbolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the expression of an
idea meant a concrete form. Seb and Nut were the divine ideas which
underlay the earth and the firmament and kept them in existence, but they
were at the same time the earth and the firmament themselves. They
represented thought in a concrete form, if we may borrow a phrase from the
Hegelian philosophy.
The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon by Greek thinkers in
the days when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the old world and the
new. It afforded an explanation not only of creation, but also of the
origin of evil, and had, moreover, behind it the venerable shadow of
Egyptian antiquity. It became the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the
Gnostic systems, and through them made its way into Christian thought.
From another point of view it may be regarded as an anticipation of the
doctrine of evolution.
The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was accomplished long
before the Pyramid texts were written under the kings of the Fifth and
Sixth Dynasties. The Ennead appears in them as a long established
doctrine, with all its consequences. The solar faith had laid firm hold of
Egyptian religion, and gained a position from which it was never to be
dislodged. Henceforward Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and
beliefs which flowed from it, and the gods and goddesses of the land
assumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not before, a new
view of the future life obtained official sanction, which substituted the
sun-god for Osiris and the solar bark for the Osirian paradise. But I must
leave an account of it to another occasion, and confine myself at present
to the last and most noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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