History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 15 - Vol. 01, Ch. 02: The Gods of Egypt, pt. 7

One division of the Heliopolitan school retained the use of traditional terms and images in reference to these Sun-gods.

To the first it left the human form, and the title of Râ, with the abstract sense of creator, deriving the name from the verb _râ_, which means to give.

For the second it kept the form of the sparrow-hawk and the name of Harma-khûîti--Horus in the two horizons--which clearly denoted his function;[*] and it summed up the idea of the sun as a whole in the single name of Râ-Harmakhûîti, and in a single image in which the hawk-head of Horus was grafted upon the human body of Râ.

The other divisions of the school invented new names for new conceptions.

The sun existing before the world they called Creator--_Tûmû, Atûmû_ [**]--and our earthly sun they called _Khopri_--He who is.

* Harmakhûîti is Horus, the sky of the two horizons; _i.

e. _ the sky of the daytime, and the night sky.

When the celestial Horus was confounded with Râ, and became the sun (cf.

p. 133), he naturally also became the sun of the two horizons, the sun by day, and the sun by night.

** E.

de Rouge, _Études sur le Rituel funéraire_, p. 76: "His name may be connected with two radicals.

Tem is a negation; it may be taken to mean _the Inapproachable One, the Unknown_ (as in Thebes, where _Aman_ means mystery).

Atûm is, in fact, described as 'existing alone in the abyss,' before the appearance of light.

It was in this time of darkness that Atûm performed the first act of creation, and this allows of our also connecting his name with the Coptic tamio, _creare_.

Atûm was also the prototype of man (in Coptic tme, _homo_), and becomes a perfect 'tûm' after his resurrection."

Rugsch would rather explain _Tûmû_ as meaning _the Perfect One, the Complete_.

E.

de Rougé's philological derivations are no longer admissible; but his explanation of the name corresponds so well with the part played by the god that I fail to see how that can be challenged.

Tûmû was a man crowned and clothed with the insignia of supreme power, a true king of gods, majestic and impassive as the Pharaohs who succeeded each other upon the throne of Egypt.

The conception of Khopri as a disk enclosing a scarabæus, or a man with a scarabous upon his head, or a scarabus-headed mummy, was suggested by the accidental alliteration of his name and that of Khopirrû, the scarabæus.

The difference between the possible forms of the god was so slight as to be eventually lost altogether.

His names were grouped by twos and threes in every conceivable way, and the scarabæus of Khopri took its place upon the head of Râ, while the hawk headpiece was transferred from the shoulders of Harmakhûîti to those of Tûmû.

The complex beings resulting from these combinations, Râ-Tûmû, Atûmû-Râ, Râ-Tûmû-Khopri, Râ-Harmakhûîti-Tûmû, Tûm-Harmakhûîti-Khopri, never attained to any pronounced individuality.

[Illustration: 198. jpg KHOPRI, IN HIS BARK] They were as a rule simple duplicates of the feudal god, names rather than persons, and though hardly taken for one another indiscriminately, the distinctions between them had reference to mere details of their functions and attributes.

Hence arose the idea of making these gods into embodiments of the main phases in the life of the sun during the day and throughout the year.

Râ symbolized the sun of springtime and before sunrise, Harmakhûîti the summer and the morning sun, Atûmû the sun of autumn and of afternoon, Khopri that of winter and of night.

The people of Heliopolis accepted the new names and the new forms presented for their worship, but always subordinated them to their beloved Râ.

For them Râ never ceased to be the god of the nome; while Atûmû remained the god of the theologians, and was invoked by them, the people preferred Râ.

At Thinis and at Sebennytos Anhûri incurred the same fate as befell Râ at Heliopolis.

After he had been identified with the sun, the similar identification of Shû inevitably followed.

Of old, Anhûri and Shû were twin gods, incarnations of sky and earth.

They were soon but one god in two persons--the god Anhûri-Shû, of which the one half under the title of Auhûri represented, like Atûmû, the primordial being; and Shû, the other half, became, as his name indicates, the creative sun-god who upholds (_shû_) the sky.

Tûrnû then, rather than Râ, was placed by the Heliopolitan priests at the head of their cosmogony as supreme creator and governor.

Several versions were current as to how he had passed from inertia into action, from the personage of Tûmû into that of Râ.

According to the version most widely received, he had suddenly cried across the waters, "Come unto me!"

[*] and immediately the mysterious lotus had unfolded its petals, and Râ had appeared at the edge of its open cup as a disk, a newborn child, or a disk-crowned sparrow-hawk; this was probably a refined form of a ruder and earlier tradition, according to which it was upon Râ himself that the office had devolved of separating Sibû from Nûît, for the purpose of constructing the heavens and the earth.

* It was on this account that the Egyptians named the first day of the year the _Day of Come-unto-me!

_ But it was doubtless felt that so unseemly an act of intervention was beneath the dignity even of an inferior form of the suzerain god; Shû was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhûri, and at Heliopolis, as at Sebennytos, the office was entrusted to him of seizing the sky-goddess and raising her with outstretched arms.

The violence suffered by Nûît at the hands of Shû led to a connexion of the Osirian dogma of Mendes with the solar dogma of Sebennytos, and thus the tradition describing the creation of the world was completed by another, explaining its division into deserts and fertile lands.

Sîbû, hitherto concealed beneath the body of his wife, was now exposed to the sun;

Osiris and Sit, Isis and Nephthys, were born, and, falling from the sky, their mother, on to the earth, their father, they shared the surface of the latter among themselves.

Thus the Heliopolitan doctrine recognized three principal events in the creation of the universe: the dualization of the supreme god and the breaking forth of light, the raising of the sky and the laying bare of the earth, the birth of the Nile and the allotment of the soil of Egypt, all expressed as the manifestations of successive deities.

Of these deities, the latter ones already constituted a family of father, mother, and children, like human families.

Learned theologians availed themselves of this example to effect analogous relationships between the rest of the gods, combining them all into one line of descent.

As Atûmû-Râ could have no fellow, he stood apart in the first rank, and it was decided that Shû should be his son, whom he had formed out of himself alone, on the first day of creation, by the simple intensity of his own virile energy.

Shû, reduced to the position of divine son, had in his turn begotten Sibû and Nûît, the two deities which he separated.

Until then he had not been supposed to have any wife, and he also might have himself brought his own progeny into being; but lest a power of spontaneous generation equal to that of the demiurge should be ascribed to him, he was married, and the wife found for him was Tafnûît, his twin sister, born in the same way as he was born.

This goddess, invented for the occasion, was never fully alive, and remained, like Nephthys, a theological entity rather than a real person.

The texts describe her as the pale reflex of her husband.

[Illustration: 201. jpg THE TWIN LIONS, SHÛ AND TAFNÛÎT. 1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a vignette in the papyrus of Ani in the British Museum, published by Lepage-Renouf in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. xi.

, 1889-90, pp. 26-28. The inscription above the lion on the right reads _safu_, "yesterday;" the other, _dûaû_, "this morning."

Together with him she upholds the sky, and every morning receives the newborn sun as it emerges from the mountain of the east; she is a lioness when Shû is a lion, a woman when he is a man, a lioness-headed woman if he is a lion-headed man; she is angry when he is angry, appeased when he is appeased; she has no sanctuary wherein he is not worshipped.

In short, the pair made one being in two bodies, or, to use the Egyptian expression, "one soul in its two twin bodies."

Hence we see that the Heliopolitans proclaimed the creation to be the work of the sun-god, Atûmû-Râ, and of the four pairs of deities who were descended from him.

It was really a learned variant of the old doctrine that the universe was composed of a sky-god, Horus, supported by his four children and their four pillars: in fact, the four sons of the Heliopolitan cosmogony, Shû and Sibû, Osiris and Sit, were occasionally substituted for the four older gods of the "houses" of the world.

This being premised, attention must be given to the important differences between the two systems.

At the outset, instead of appearing contemporaneously upon the scene, like the four children of Horus, the four Heliopolitan gods were deduced one from another, and succeeded each other in the order of their birth.

They had not that uniform attribute of supporter, associating them always with one definite function, but each of them felt himself endowed with faculties and armed with special powers required by his condition.

Ultimately they took to themselves goddesses, and thus the total number of beings working in different ways at the organization of the universe was brought up to nine.

Hence they were called by the collective name of the Ennead, the Nine gods--_paûit nûtîrû_,[*]--and the god at their head was entitled _Paûîti_, the god of the Ennead.

* The first Egyptologists confounded the sign used in writing _paûît_ with the sign _kh_, and the word _khet, other_.

E.

de Rougé was the first to determine its phonetic value: "it should be read Paû, and designates a body of gods."

Shortly afterwards Beugsch proved that "the group of gods invoked by E. de Rougé must have consisted of nine "-- of an Ennead.

This explanation was not at first admitted either by Lepsius or by Mariette, who had proposed a mystic interpretation of the word in his _Mémoire sur la mère d'Apis_, or by E. de Rougé, or by Chabas.

The interpretation a _Nine_, an _Ennead_, was not frankly adopted until later, and more especially after the discovery of the Pyramid texts; to-day, it is the only meaning admitted.

Of course the Egyptian Ennead has no other connection than that of name with the Enneads of the Neo-Platonists.

When creation was completed, its continued existence was ensured by countless agencies with whose operation the persons of the Ennead were not at leisure to concern themselves, but had ordained auxiliaries to preside over each of the functions essential to the regular and continued working of all things.

The theologians of Heliopolis selected eighteen from among the innumerable divinities of the feudal cults of Egypt, and of these they formed two secondary Enneads, who were regarded as the offspring of the Ennead of the creation.

The first of the two secondary Enneads, generally known as the Minor Ennead, recognized as chief Harsiesis, the son of Osiris.

Harsiesis was originally an earth-god who had avenged the assassination of his father and the banishment of his mother by Sit; that is, he had restored fulness to the Nile and fertility to the Delta.

When Harsiesis was incorporated into the solar religions of Heliopolis, his filiation was left undisturbed as being a natural link between the two Enneads, but his personality was brought into conformity with the new surroundings into which he was transplanted.

He was identified with Râ through the intervention of the older Horus, Haroêris-Harmakhis, and the Minor Ennead, like the Great Ennead, began with a sun-god.

This assimilation was not pushed so far as to invest the younger Horus with the same powers as his fictitious ancestor: he was the sun of earth, the everyday sun, while Atûmû-Râ was still the sun pre-mundane and eternal.

Our knowledge of the eight other deities of the Minor Ennead is very imperfect.

[Illustration: 204. jpg THE FOUR FUNERARY GENII, KHABSONÛF, TIÛMAÛTF, HAPI, AND AMSÎT.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Wilkinson's _Manners and Customs_, 2nd edit.

, vol. iii.

p. 221, pl.

xlviii.

We see only that these were the gods who chiefly protected the sun-god against its enemies and helped it to follow its regular course.

Thus Harhûditi, the Horus of Edfû, spear in hand, pursues the hippopotami or serpents which haunt the celestial waters and menace the god.

The progress of the Sun-bark is controlled by the incantations of Thot, while Uapûaîtû, the dual jackal-god of Siufc, guides, and occasionally tows it along the sky from south to north.

The third Ennead would seem to have included among its members Anubis the jackal, and the four funerary genii, the children of Horus--Hapi, Amsît, Tiûmaûtf, Kabhsonûf;

it further appears as though its office was the care and defence of the dead sun, the sun by night, as the second Ennead had charge of the living sun.

Its functions were so obscure and apparently so insignificant as compared with those exercised by the other Enneads, that the theologians did not take the trouble either to represent it or to enumerate its persons.

They invoked it as a whole, after the two others, in those formulas in which they called into play all the creative and preservative forces of the universe; but this was rather as a matter of conscience and from love of precision than out of any true deference.

At the initial impulse of the lord of Heliopolis, the three combined Enneads started the world and kept it going, and gods whom they had not incorporated were either enemies to be fought with, or mere attendants.

The doctrine of the Heliopolitan Ennead acquired an immediate and a lasting popularity.

It presented such a clear scheme of creation, and one whose organization was so thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of tradition, that the various sacerdotal colleges adopted it one after another, accommodating it to the exigencies of local patriotism.

Each placed its own nome-god at the head of the Ennead as "god of the Nine," "god of the first time," creator of heaven and earth, sovereign ruler of men, and lord of all action.

As there was the Ennead of Atûmû at Heliopolis, so there was that of Anhûri at Thinis and at Sebennytos;

that of Minû at Coptos and at Panopolis; that of Haroêris at Edfû; that of Sobkhû at Ombos; and, later, that of Phtah at Memphis and of Amon at Thebes.

Nomes which worshipped a goddess had no scruples whatever in ascribing to her the part played by Atûmû, and in crediting her with the spontaneous maternity of Shû and Tafnûît. Illustration: 206. jpg [PLAN OF THE RUINS OP HERMOPOLIS MAGNA.

1] 1 Plan drawn by Thuillier, from the _Description de l' Egypte_, Ant.

, vol. iv.

pl.

50. Nît was the source and ruler of the Ennead of Saïs, Isis of that of Bûto, and Hâthor of that of Denderah.

[**] Few of the sacerdotal colleges went beyond the substitution of their own feudal gods for Atûmû.

Provided that the god of each nome held the rank of supreme lord, the rest mattered little, and the local theologians made no change in the order of the other agents of creation, their vanity being unhurt even by the lower offices assigned by the Heliopolitan tradition to such powers as Osiris, Sibû, and Sit, who were known and worshipped throughout the whole country.

** On the Ennead of Hâthor at Denderah, see Mariette, Denderah, p. 80. , et seq.

, of the text.

The fact that Nît, Isis, and, generally speaking, all the feudal goddesses, were the chiefs of their local Enneads, is proved by the epithets applied to them, which represent them as having independent creative power by virtue of their own unaided force and energy, like the god at the head of the Heliopolitan Ennead.