Religion and Egypt

I try to put myself in the skin of the people who make the artifacts and totems you find in the museums. "What would this look like to me if . . ." I don't always succeed, of course. With Egyptian relics I almost never succeed. The layers on layers of symbolism obscure any sense of the numinous. It seems like riddles, or one of those deliberately obscure gnostic texts. Rosicrucian-esque--if the common folk understand it, squeeze in an even deeper meaning for the adepts.

Maybe that's not fair. The exhibits represent nearly three thousand years of religious mixing.

I have a hypothesis . . . This must be the result of welding together local cults from up and down the Nile, shoehorning gods that look similar into single figures for national consumption. "All sky gods line up on the left, moon gods to the right, vegetation spirits over there. . ." The new sky god absorbs all the shrines and all the totems associated with the old ones. Some of the compromises are bound to look a little weird.

And if this welding happens more than once, the gods really get messy. Egypt had a number of periods of inter-dynastic chaos, so it seems plausible to me that the central worship would break down and local worship become the focus again. So if the powers-that-be try to re-unify the gods again, they might not pick the same local ones as before.

At any given time, no doubt the people had a moderately clear idea of which attributes and ceremonies were important, but from four thousand years away they all run together.

Some 25 years ago I read part of "The Book of the Dead," a translation of the common coffin texts. My memory is very sketchy on the details, but the overall impression was of a surprising lack of humility. These magic incantations even compelled the gods. Some inscriptions were petitions, but others were spells to secure safe passage or provisions from the gods.

I can't help but wonder how much popular worship partook of this same attitude--"I've given you this, now give me the good luck I want or I take my sacrifices down the road to another temple."