I. Introduction: What is Henotheism?

Max Mller
Friedrich Schelling
Polytheism and monotheism are frequently regarded (along with agnosticism and
atheism) as the principal forms of religious belief. Henotheism (the term derives from a
Greek phrase meaning one god but implies that the principal god exists in a context of
other gods) actually describes better the practice that we find not only in ancient Egypt
but also in ancient India, ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Even the Christian Trinity
may be regarded as the worship of one God among several. So, by studying how
henotheism works in a system such as the ancient Egyptian religion (better,
religions), we gain a clearer understanding of how it is that many of the worlds
religious systems, past and present, operate.

My imaginative work, the cosmological or universal epic, Sentence of the Gods,
consists of 26 books grouped according to the first letters of their single-word titles in a
progression through the days of the week, which in most cultures follows the pattern of
seven gods, in my case: SOL, LUNA, ARES, HERMES, HERA, APHRODITE, EL. So
it might be said that my work is henotheistic, since each of these seven gods dominates
the other six while the books celebrating him or her are being read. It is a feature of
traditional henotheism that the principal god periodically changes, as we move from one
locale to another (even from one part of a single locale to another part), and through
history the principal god also changes.

Wikipedia tells us that the term henotheism was coined by Friedrich Schelling
(1775-1854) to depict the early stages of monotheism. Max Mller, another famous
German scholar, brought the term into common usage to describe the worship of a
single god while accepting the existence of other deities. Mller, Wiki continues,
made the term central to his criticism of western theological and religious
exceptionalism (relative to eastern religions), focusing on a cultural dogma that held
monotheism to be both better defined than and inherently superior to other, differing
conceptions of God. Given the havoc wreaked upon the world by Christians, Muslims
and other monotheists, perhaps it is time to reevaluate polytheism.

Henotheism is a form of polytheism, though polytheism need not be henotheistic.
Since so many great religions have been henotheistic we might do well to seek a
broader, fuller definition and grasp of the phenomenon. Presently we will turn to ancient
Egypt, but for the moment let us continue with terminology. Variations on the term
henotheism are inclusive monotheism and monarchical polytheism, designed to
differentiate two forms of the phenomenon. Related terms are monolatrism and
kathenotheism, understood as sub-types of henotheism. (Kathenotheism means
one god at a time.) Henotheism is similar to but less exclusive than monolatry,
because a monolator worships only one god.

The henotheist, according to Wiki, may worship any god in the pantheon, though
he usually will worship only one throughout his life (barring some sort of conversion).
In certain forms of henotheism the choice of the supreme deity may be determined by
geographical, historical, cultural or political reasons. These four determinants will
influence our discussion of ancient Egyptian religion. Henotheism, Wiki continues,
is based on the belief that a god may take any form at any time and still have the same
essential nature. One name for a god may be used when a particular aspect is being
represented or worshiped, whereas a different name may be given or used in describing
or worshiping a different aspect.

Not all these definitions apply with equal exactitude to the practice of the ancient
Egyptians, but all are useful in considering its parameters. So I will continue to cite
other definitions that apply to other henotheistic systems. The Neo-Platonist philosopher
Plotinus, Wiki tells us, taught that above the gods of traditional belief was The One.
In contemporary Hinduism, again according to Wiki, of its three major sects, Shaivism,
Vaishnavism and Shaktiism, each regards only one specific Indic deity as the principal
object of worship, whereas all others are considered merely as sub-gods or
manifestations of it. Another Indian sect singles out not one specific deity but a
pentad of gods. A renowned temple is dedicated to both Vishnu and Shiva.

The myriad deities, or Devas, in historical Vedic religion have a subordinate status
in relation to the One Supreme God, a status that some have even tried to express by
comparing it to that of western demigods or angels. Prakashanand Saraswati, in The
True History and Religion of India, prefers the term celestial gods. The Rig-Veda is
the basis for Max Mllers description of henotheism as a polytheistic tradition striving
towards a formulation of The One (ekam) Divinity aimed at by the worship of different
cosmic principles. From this mix of monism, monotheism and naturalist polytheism,
Max Mller decided to name the early Vedic relation henotheistic. Let us now turn to
the question of Greek henotheism.

One of the features of ancient Greece that brought about its unification relatively
early in antiquity was a pantheon of divinities. Decided upon, it synthesized practice
from various locales in which one or another, or several, of the twelve gods had been
worshiped. In all the ancient henotheistic systems geographical diversity usually
explains the original options (though they may not have seemed options to residents
of an individual locale). Just as Indic religion evolved from the worship of primitive
divinities, such as Indra and Varuna, so early Greek religion emphasized divinities such
as Ouranos and Ge, who were later relinquished or replaced by more anthropomorphic,
if less mysterious and powerful, gods.

Roman religion shared with Greek religion its henotheistic framework. Though
early Roman divinities included many specialized gods, certain gods came to primacy.
New World Encyclopedia: At the head of the earliest pantheon was the triad of Mars
(originally the Greek god Ares), Quirinus and Jupiter (originally the Greek god Zeus).
Quirinus is thought to have been the patron of the armed contingent in times of peace.
Jupiter, however, was clearly given primacy over all the others as ruler of the gods and
became the protector of the Romans in their military activities beyond the borders of
their own community. Roman henotheism was upheld until Christianity superseded the
native religions of the Roman Empire.

We think of Jews, Christians and Muslims as monotheists. Islam, however, arose
from a polytheistic environment. Some non-Trinitarian Christians, according to Wiki,
have also been labeled henotheistic. Isis, Osiris and Horus, an Egyptian Trinity, has
curious parallels with the Christian Maria, the Christ Child and the Resurrected King.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers the members of the Christian
Godhead as three distinct beings, or gods. Some readings of the Old Testament have
included other gods as co-existing (Baal, for example), since its teachings do not deny
other gods existence but instead teach not to worship them. It is todays synagogue
that makes us regard Judaism as monotheistic.

The historical religions of ancient Israel and Judah (10
th
and 7
th
centuries B.C.),
however, were henotheistic. (The Moabites worshiped the god Chemosh, the Edomites,
Qaus, both of whom were part of the greater Canaanite pantheon, headed by the chief
god El.) The Israelites were forbidden to worship other deities, but according to some
Biblical scholars, they were not fully monotheistic before the Babylonian Captivity.
Mark S. Smith calls this stage a form of monolatry, arguing that Yahweh gradually
merged with El, that acceptance of the cult of Asherah was common in the period of the
Judges. Even the First Commandment can be, and has been, read as henotheistic (Thou
shalt have no other gods before me).

This commandment, the first of the Ten, does not affirm or deny the existence of
other deities per se. Nevertheless, as recorded in the Tanakh (the Old Testament
Bible), in defiance of the Torahs teachings, the patron god YHWH was frequently
worshiped in conjunction with other gods such as Baal, Asherah and El. Over time,
this tribal god may have assumed all the appellations of the other gods in the eyes of the
people. There are also apparent elements of polytheism in other Biblical books.
Moreover, even the word for God, Elohim, in Hebrew, is a plural, meaning powerful
ones or rulers. Some consider that it is in Exodus 3:13-15 that YHWH first tells
Moses that he is the same god as El, the Supreme Being.

The pre-Islamic Arabs (whose religion Islam rejected and undertook to rectify) were
henotheists. The Quranic term for their religious doctrine is shirk (sharing); it
describes them as mushrikin (those who believe in God but share other gods in
divinity). Pre-Islamic Arabs believed in a supreme god, and the name that they used for
him (Allah) is the same name used in Islam today. But they did believe in lesser gods
as well. The univocal monotheism of Islam arose as a reaction to this belief system.
Islam, however, still teaches a belief in angels, most prominently Jibrail, Mikail, Israfil
and Azril. There also exists the belief in jinns, spiritual beings who can influence
humans, and who at rare times intervene in their lives.

Henotheism is related to monolatry, which is also the worship of one god among
many. The difference between the two systems is that henotheism is the worship of one
god, not precluding the existence of others who may also be worthy of praise, whereas
monolatry is the worship of one god who alone is worthy of worship, though other gods
may be known to exist. Henotheism is an important term of classification in religious
scholarship, since it nuances forms of worship that might otherwise be classified as
monotheism or polytheism. The concept behind the term helps us to understand
ancient religious and mythological systems based on narratives that serve to bring one
god into primacy among other gods.

II. Egyptian Henotheism as Grounded in Cosmotheism

II. Egyptian Henotheism as Grounded in Cosmotheism

Jan Assmann
To find our way through the maze of Egyptian Henotheism, with its geographical,
historical, cultural and political dimensions, I turn for help to the German Egyptologist,
Jan Assmann, professor at the University of Heidelberg, author of Moses the Egyptian:
The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New
Kingdom, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt and, preeminently, The Mind of Egypt:
History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, originally published in German
under the title egypten: Eine Sinnegeschichte (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1996) and
reissued in English translation (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 2003). I quote from his
chapter, Cosmotheism as a form of Knowledge.
Polytheistic religions worship not one single god but a world of gods. This divine world is
not merely a chaotic jumble of various deities but a specific structure. In Egyptian religion,
three structural parameters imposed order on this collectivity. First, language, through the
narrative structure of the myths, placed the gods in systems of kinship and related their
actions and destinies to each other. Second, the cosmos itself represented a model for the
collective agency of various powers. Third, the organization of the polity assigned the gods
divine rule in temples and cities and interpreted the human exercise of power as a form of
divine rule by proxy.
Wim van den Dungen, another student of Egyptian Henotheism, informs us that the
system understood existence as the result of the activity of a single creator together
with his company and that this underlined the phenomenon of intra-divine
participation, the cooperative effort of all the forces and elements of existence. He has
concluded that during its long history Egypt moved from a loose henotheism to a strict
henotheism, never relinquishing the pantheon, nor the sacred pictography of divine
words, nor the essential fact that divinities only interact with other divinities. Assmann,
however, goes further by defining henotheisms belief in the cosmos itself as the
Supreme Being, taking for his point of departure cosmotheism
as unifying the ancient, particularly the Stoic, worship of God as the universe. I adopt [he
says] Malesherbes term in a broader sense, one that encompasses polytheistic religions that
worship the cosmos as the collective manifestation of various deities. In the religious history
of the new Kingdom, [it] materialized in three different forms: traditional polytheism,
revolutionary monotheism (which acknowledged the sun and light as one sole divinity but in
doing so remained within the framework of cosmic worship), and finally pantheism, which
regarded the supreme god . . . as the embodiment of all other deities and as the oneness of
the universe.
Assmann notes that the gods had names, genealogies and a mythically revealed
spectrum of roles; they had a portfolio, a sphere of cosmic or cultural competencies;
and finally cult locations from which they exercised their earthly rule. Eventually I will
turn to individual gods but would first like to consider the triads and dyads among them.
Before I take up their genealogies, I will examine their portfolios. Before I take up
their competencies, I will summarize the principal Egyptian creation myths (as both a
significant diversity and a prolegomena to the triads). Finally I will touch upon the
cults and their locales. In other words, I will reverse the terms order to read political,
cultural, historical and geographical.
The sociologist Talcott Parsons [to resume Assmann] refers to these polytheistic
communities with the blanket term cosmological societies. A cosmological society lives
by a model of cosmic forms of order, which it transforms into political and social order by
means of meticulous observation and the performance of rituals [a kind of participatory
observation]. The Mesopotamian model (like the Roman and the Chinese) was divinatory;
the cosmos was observed for signs in which the will of the gods manifested itself. In
divinatory cultures, signs are exceptions to the rule. . . . In ancient Egypt such phenomena
were passed over in silence.
In this reverse order the second of our terms is cultural. Parsons the sociologist,
and Assmann the Egyptologist following him, are discussing cultural implications of
cosmotheism. The ritual enactment of the cosmic process, notes the latter, was
designed not only to adapt the order of the human [i.e., cultural] world to that of the
cosmos but also, and indeed primarily, to keep the cosmic process itself in good
working order. The cultural for the ancient Egyptian was inseparable not only from the
political but also from the cosmic order. Assmann now turns his attention to the
historical order, noting that the Egyptians regarded the cosmos less as a well-organized
space than as a functioning process, that is, one occurring within time.
Creation, however, was not over and done with on the seventh day but continued
indefinitely. Cosmogony began not so much with an intentional act of creation as with a
kind of initial ignition, a First Moment that the cosmic process everlastingly reiterates. The
First Moment separates preexistence from the cosmogonic process of cyclical time, not from
a perfect, complete cosmos. The cosmogonic process, though cyclical, must be constantly
reinforced by unremitting efforts that wrest the cosmos from its persistent gravitation toward
chaos. This is the task of the gods, above all of the sun god. The rites performed on earth
make their own contribution.
History for ancient Egyptians was not our secular, linear time but rather a sacred,
cyclical time. Each dynasty began afresh, renumbering itself as the year 1. Ian Shaw
makes an intriguing observation: The title nesu-bit has often been translated as King
of Upper and Lower Egypt, but it actually has a much more complex and significant
meaning. Nesu refers to the unchanging divine king (almost the kingship itself), while
the word bit describes the current ephemeral holder of the kingship: the one individual
king in power at a specific point in time. Each king was, therefore, a combination of the
divine and the mortal. A king also persists after his death, so the king lists were not
concerned so much with history as with ancestor worship.
[Assmann:] In Egypt there are no chronicles that detail or analyze consecutive history such
as we have, say, in Mesopotamia. The Egyptians had relatively little engagement with their
own past [despite monuments, annals and king-lists]. This is continuity and permanence as
constituted by the state. Historical awareness and an interest in the past, only manifest
themselves when continuity is disrupted and cracks and fissures become apparent. Examples
of such cracks are the significance for Mesopotamia of the conquest of the Sumerian realm
by the dynasty of Akkad and its ultimate demise, or the significance of Babylonian exile for
Israel.
[Assmann again:] Egyptian history is full of disruptions of this kind: the collapse of the Old
Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period, the Second Intermediate Period and the reign of
the Hyksos interlopers, the monotheistic revolution of the Amarna Period, the establishment
of a theocracy in the Twenty-first Dynasty. But in Egypt one searches for such a retrospect
in vain. The Egyptian state and the culture as a whole were manifestly not interested in
elevating such discontinuities to the level of general awareness, for to do so would have
been to admit the idea of a terminal point from which the past could be conceived in a
narrative form.

III. The Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths

III. The Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths
In the final paragraph of The Mind of Egypt Assmann says, Egyptology rests first
on the rejection of the biblical, Greek, Latin and other testimonies about ancient
Egyptian culture, whose value as sources was greatly diminished, first, by the discovery
of the abundance of Egyptian testimonies and, second, by an interpretative abstinence
that had already distinguished the antiquarianism of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
and was elevated to a principle by the positivism of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. We should heed this warning against finding Christian trinities and biblical
floods in Egypt and keep interpretation simple, as close as possible to the facts, however
meager they may be. Today we know infinitely more about Egypt than did the experts
of the eighteenth century, Assmann adds. (Unless one is willing to devote ones life to
Egypt, one also knows infinitely less than the Egyptologist.) But we are also infinitely
less sure, he says, of what to do with that knowledge. A useful caveat. One thing to
do is to present the evidence, as reliably reported by experts, and let the reader decide.

One such expert is Lucia Gahlin, a respected scholar in the field but also a popular
lecturer. Her two pages on the Creation Myths in Egypt: Gods, Myths and Religion, plus
her extended commentaries, will be our guide. My own amateurish remarks about what
she reports are not authoritative (how could they be from someone who, though he has
visited Egypt has not examined the texts in Elephantine, Memphis, Hermopolis Magna
or Heliopolis, and, if he had, could not read the hieroglyphs; whose grasp of the
pantheon is rudimentary and who, though he has read a bit of Egyptian history, still
struggles to keep the names of the Pharaohs straight?). This paragraph is a statement of
modesty and a confession of ignorance that applies to what follows, as we turn now to
the Creator Gods, to the Triads, the Dyads and the Singular Gods (first among them
Amun), to the foundation myth of Isis, Osiris and Horus, and to all other aspects of
ancient Egyptian religion, including the Cults, the Temples and the Tombs. Sometimes I
think that I should have become an Egyptologist, but unfortunately I did not.

According to Gahlin, Several explanations as to how the universe came into being
survive from ancient Egypt. Each major center of religious belief had its own version of
the myth of creation, with a different main creator deity who was self-engendered and
who went on to generate the other gods and goddesses before creating mankind. In
Elephantine he was called Khnum; in Memphis, Ptah; in Hermopolis there were eight
gods that we call the Ogdoad; in Heliopolis, nine engendered by Atum that we call the
Ennead. We note that Gahlins principal interpretation here is henotheistic: the self-
engendered god goes on to generate the other gods, remaining after them primus inter
pares. Geographically the myths were of different origins, though later they were
believed in various places another form of henotheism. It is impossible to say which
myth was the most widely accepted at any one time. Or which, we might add, was the
first, which the second. It is fashionable nowadays to say that they are all different
aspects of the same story, but I am dubious about any such Egyptian unanimity.

Khnum
I might review these various stories, placing them in an interesting, if not
necessarily historical, order so as to reflect what we know generally about how myths
develop. On the island of Elephantine, way up the Nile, opposite the town of Aswan
(which I have visited), Khnum, the god with a rams head and corkscrew horns, was
associated with the Inundation. In an early Triad, his wife was Satis, a fertility goddess,
their daughter, Anuket, a warrior goddess who had earlier been regarded as the daughter
of Ra, the sun god. Like the Hebrew Jehovah, who modeled Adam (= clay) from the
earth, Khnum created the universe by modeling the other gods, as well as humankind
(both Egyptians and those who spoke other languages), animals, birds, fish, reptiles and
plants, out of clay on his potters wheel. Shaw and Nicholson see his cosmogonic role
as one of the principal creator gods stemming inevitably from the combination of the
creative symbolism of molding pottery, the traditional potency of the ram and the fact
that the Egyptian word for ram, ba, also had the meaning of spiritual essence,
perhaps of Ra.

Ptah
Just south of Cairo, at Memphis (which means The House of Ptah) Ptah, the self-
engendered creator god, was referred to as the father of the gods from whom all life
emerged. Gahlin continues: He brought the universe into being by conceiving all
aspects of it in his heart, then speaking his thoughts out loud. Creation as the
Conception and Word of the creator we find in the New Testament (John 1:1), but here,
in Egypt, Ptah immediately created the other deities, and then towns with shrines to
house them. Thus he is more a philosophical god or administrative priest than Khnum.
He creates by naming. He provided . . . statues to act as bodies for the divine spirit or
power, ka, of the deities, and offerings to be made to them forever. Ptah later
assimilated the fertility god Sokar, the two joining in a Triad with Osiris (with whom
Sokar himself had been identified). Like a fertility god(dess), Ptah ensured the
continuation of the human race by watching over conception and labor. The Greeks
saw in him a Hephaistos. In Memphis he shared with Sokar as consort Sekhmet, the
lion-goddess.

The Ogdoad
At Hermopolis Magna, a third of the way up the Nile, the creation myth begins not
with a creator god but rather with the elements necessary for the creation to take
place, arranged in four male-female pairs: primordial water (Nun and Naunet), air
(Amun and Amaunet); darkness (Kuk and Kauket); and formlessness or infinity,
otherwise interpreted as the flood force (Huh and Hauhet). Thus the singular creator
god, Amun, whom we will take up in the next section, is mentioned, but has not yet
become singular. The eight gods were called the Ogdoad and took the form of four frog-
headed males and four snake-headed females, also suggesting a more primitive version
of the Amun myth. The myth had two versions. In one there arose from the primordial
waters a mound of earth, the Isle of Flame, upon which Thoth, as an ibis, placed a
cosmic egg; it hatched the sun, which ascended into the sky. In the other, a lotus flower
(personified as Nefertem) bobbing on the primordial waters, opened its petals and the
sun (personified as Horus) arose out of it. In the first, a god intervenes; in the second,
the sun is generated by Nature.

Nut above Geb
Just north of Cairo, at Heliopolis, we have the elements found in the monotheistic
creation myth of the Hebrews and in the polytheistic pantheons of the Greeks (and the
Indians). Before anything existed or creation had taken place, there was darkness and
endless, lifeless water, personified as Nun. A mound of fertile silt emerged from the
watery chaos (as in the Hermopolis myth). The self-engendered solar creator Atum
(the All, or the Complete One) appeared upon the mound. By masturbating (or, in
another version, sneezing) he was able to spit out Shu (the divine personification of air)
and Tefnut (of moisture). Now that a male-female pair existed, they were able to
procreate more conventionally. (Thus we see early Egyptian abstractions becoming
anthropomorphized.) The results of their sexual union were Geb (the earth) and Nut
(the sky). These two [as in Greek myth] were forcibly separated, by their father Shu,
who lifted Nut up to her place above earth. In a likely gloss on later theology, the
Ennead (or group of nine) emerged, by adding to these five gods, Osiris, Seth, Isis and
Nepthys.

Despite the variety of deities involved in these different narratives, however, the
Egyptians, we are told, by Wim van den Dungen, in his Internet presentation,
conceived the origin of the world as singular. Only one god (Atum) was responsible
for the emergence of the universe as a bubble of air in the vast, limitless, inert ocean and
everlasting darkness of the undifferentiated primordial waters (Nun) that existed before
creation. Even after creation these waters continued to exist, for they surrounded
creation in all directions and were characterized as an infinite flood. Egyptologists
such as Hornung and Allen have compared the schematics of the interrelated Egyptian
deities with our laws of modern physics. (Both try to explain what the world is like and
why it behaves the way it does.) In the historical development of monotheism,
moveover, we may see the same yearning as in the physicists search for a unified field
theory or in his efforts to reconcile Newton, Einstein, quantum mechanics and
superstring (or M) theory. Likewise the mythographer who seeks a unity among the
diversity of the creation accounts.

In the Old Kingdom the dominant view was developed by the priests of Heliopolis
and is therefore called the Heliopolitan creation account. It focused on the actual
process of creation. Whether this is earlier or later than the other, more mythological,
narratives is not known. It is, at any rate, says Wim van den Dungen, essential to
understand that the Egyptians did not adhere to a Biblical creation ex nihilo (out of
nothing) but to the doctrine ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing nothing comes).
Everything emerged [in the generalized myth to which the creation accounts are
tending] from a primordial, active singularity called Atum or finisher. He is also
called Lord of All and Lord to the Limit. But before Atum evolved himself, he pre-
existed within the primordial waters in a state of inert potentiality. He was alone with
Nun, but in his egg Atum, he explains, is Nun turned active (while Nuns inertia
remains). Nun is Atum dormant (while Atums potentiality remains). Both are father of
the gods. Diversity evolved from a single source. Thus several states in the emergence
of the deities are obvious:

Inert potentiality (in the following notes I modify quotations from Wim van den
Dungen)
Nun has a continual existence unaffected by mythology or events and plays no part in
religious ceremonies, has no temples or priesthood.
He is not subject to cosmic order (Maat), and his waters were considered beneficial
for ablution and rejuvenation (in the Sacred Lake).
In a Hymn to Khnum, humanity and the gods feast on the fishes of Nun. Atum
existed in this primordial state as the dormant potential to create.
Active aloneness
Atum subsequently evolved from such an inert potentiality (broke out of his shell)
into a singular (except for Nun) source of all creation.
His solitary act of self-creation initiated the generation of the deities.
The time of the gods
Atums first act of creation is his splitting into two complementary forces (he
himself seen as bisexual or androgynous):
His son Shu, a dry and empty space in the midst of the waters (the principle of life)
and his daughter Tefnut (moisture and the principle of order).
This void within the waters produced a bottom (Earth, Geb) and a top (Heaven, Nut).
Together they represent the physical structure and limits of the created world.
It produced a place within which life could exist: Osiris, Seth, Isis and Nepthys.
The Ennead represents the sum of all the elements and forces of the created world.
The time of the world
The created order (Maat) in general and the unity of the Two Lands in particular. The
birth of the Sun was the culmination of this generation, marking the end of creation
and the beginning of the eternal cycle of life, which the Sun, as king of Nature,
regulated and made possible through heat and light.
Re is the culmination of Atums evolution, the two syncretized in Re-Atum.
The development of the fundamental myths called hundreds of deities into being,
each representing the elements and forces and explaining the recognized activities
at hand.
The phrase Atum and his Ennead implies Pharaoh Horus and the power of
kingship. Indeed, in creation Pharaoh was the central figure, for he was a god alive on
Earth.
Although the evolution of Atum is explained in generational terms, creation in
fact happened all at once, namely, in the supreme moment when Atum evolved into
the world (broke out of the egg) and time and space began. [Cp. The timeless reality
preceding the creation of time and space in the contemporary physicists
cosmogony.]

Despite these generalizations, however, there is in the whole of Ancient Egyptian
literature, no theory, no definition, no abstract, discursive activity to be found.

Such an atomistic polytheism was not, moreover, the theology chosen by the
Heliopolitan priests of the 4
th
Dynasty. Indeed, it is likely that already in Predynastic
Egypt an underlying unity had been conceived of (cf. the role of the Great Goddess of
the Sky). Although Atum was the sole Lord of All (without a second, and alone in the
act of creating himself), his self-creation was simultaneous with the coming into being
of Shu and Tefnut (cf. the myth of the Single Eye, sent out because Atum had become
weary by being too alone). A notion like the Aten (the solitary physical disc of the Sun
as the only god worthy of veneration, a doctrine promulgated by Amenhotep IV
(Akhenaten) at el-Amarna (which he renamed Akhetaten, Horizon of the Aten) was
rejected by the Egyptian mind as heretical and blasphemous. God could be anywhere
and remain hidden. Egyptian syncretism and belief in one universal deity did not,
however, initiate a movement towards the centrality and numerical exclusivity of
monotheism. Divine unity was considered a matter of precreation, and the act of
creation, but not of creation itself.

IV. Amun
IV. Amun

Amun
None of the gods knows his true form. His image is not unfolded in the papyrus rolls;
nothing certain is testified about him.
Hymns to Amun, Papyrus Leiden I, 350, Chapter 200, ll. 22-24 [ca. 1213 B.C., during the
reign of Rameses II]
Absolute unity of Divinity outside continued existence, namely during the fugal transition
between non-existence and existence. (Hornung)

If Egypt is free of monotheism, what of the solitary Amun? In Ramessid theology:
Nobody knew the identity of Amun-Re; therefore, no revelation was possible; Amun-
Re was a part of the world but remained invisible; the world was a part of Amun-Re but
knew it not. Some of this may be explained by the gods abstract character (Rice: The
earliest divinities were abstractions, represented by objects that had acquired a special
sanctity), some by his indeterminacy (as in our first epigraph), some by ambiguity (as
in our second). Wim van den Dungen: We may conjecture that a tiny minority of
specialists of the mysteries or secrets of Amun-Re had an abstract (decontextualized)
concept of the unique, solitary & supreme god. This grew hand in hand with the
pantheon, understood as a theophany of the various aspects, forms, images,
manifestations & transformations of the One & Great God (mature, rational henotheism
instead of monotheism). Moreover, this theology expressed its views in an iconical,
pictorial & contextual language and God remained accessible to commoners and
popular polytheism.

Amun, then, depending upon the historical and the localized cult context, was a
personal god as well as an austere, remote, cosmological creator. Our Dutch scholar
locates him, for a moment, in the workmens village at Deir el-Medina, whose votive
stelae are inscribed with penitential hymns, in which hymn and prayer merge, for the
deity is praised in the traditional manner (hymn) but also prayed to in personal terms
(his emphasis): You are Amun, the Lord of the silent, / Who comes at the cry of the
poor, / When I call to you in my distress, / You come to rescue me. / Give breath to him
who is wretched, / Rescue me from bondage. At the same time, he is, with Re and
Ptah, one of the self-created creators, the first cause or first number (with its Ogdoadic
inertness rooted in Nun. . . . Hence the oneness of Amun-Re covers precreation, the
creator and creation. It is an all-encompassing oneness, also to be found in the
Memphite theology of the period. Oneness, according to Hornung, is the condition
of Amun before creation, and the millions is the polytheistic world of reality after the
creation. Thus, in a sophisticated henotheism, Amun is both singularity and
multiplicity, both One and Many.

He is the many in that mysterious way, adds Assmann, at once hidden and
present, which this theology . . . grasps . . . through the ba concept. . . . By linking [it]
with the theology of the hidden, we understand how this formula goes beyond the
traditional creation theology of . . . unity and plurality. Wim van den Dungen: Amun-
Re, by creating the world, transforms himself into a totality of gods and goddesses,
which operate creation and maintain the world. The complete pantheon is thus
comprised in the One! Amun is the precreation, the creator and the creation. He is
also something to be kept secret. Our Dutch interpreter: The Egyptians did not
conceptualize the pre-creation as a passive nothingness but rather as an absolute,
unlimited, pre-creational, pre-existent inertia in which the dramatical self-creative
activity takes shape for the first time, namely the first occasion of the god of creation
himself (Atum, as father of the gods rising from the Nun). . . . Amun, then, is
unbegotten pre-existence, doubly concealed in (1) transcendence and (2) immanence,
i.e., unknown to the other gods and unknown to man.

Let us shift to a more pedestrian view by taking a walk through history with Shaw
and Nicholson. Far from having nothing certain . . . testified about him, Amun is
first mentioned in the 5
th
Dynasty Pyramid Texts, but the earliest temples dedicated
solely to him appear to have been in Thebes again, where he was worshiped as a local
deity as early as the 11
th
Dynasty. In the jubilee chapel of Senesrut I (1965-1920 B.C.)
at Karnak he is described as the king of the gods. Amun Kamatef was part of the
Ogdoad. He was a creator god capable, in the form of a snake, of renewing himself by
shedding his skin. He also took the form of an ithyphallic god. As Amun-Ra he
presided over the expansion of the Egyptian empire, under Thebes. Finally, the
worship of Amun was renewed under the 25
th
Dynasty Nubians. The broad outline is
of a primordial god existing before existence, a creator transforming a primeval world
into the cosmos, himself elaborated in cult, magnified as the god hidden behind all other
deities, replaced by Akhenatens Aten, and thereafter reinvested with a post-Amarna,
Amun-Re theology.

To return to a generalized set of attributes: Atum is secret, inaccessible, difficult,
secluded, august, noble and hidden (all translations of Egyptian terms). In precreation,
according to Wim van den Dungen, he is a passive nothingness (the Nun, zero) in
which the active potential or principle of creation (Atum, the empty set of all
possibilities) creates itself ex nihilo. Hence in negative existence, the principle of
creation only creates itself established in a permanent first occurrence out of
which positive existence emerges during the split of the creation into Shu (sky) and
Tefnut (moisture) and through them into a multiplicity (of deities), out of which emerge
in turn the life and the order of the pantheon, nature and human beings. . . . By making
the god stand before the space-time of creating, creation itself is superseded and made
dependent on the creative command, which initiates a new creation. In mythical
thought precreation was segregated from creation. It has been said of the deity that he is
secluded or segregated. Amun, however, no less than other gods, must also be viewed
historically.

So in Ramessid theology, according to Assmann (1998), the sacredness of Amun is
no longer realized by this spatio-temporal segregation (his essence being precreational),
thus temporal beyond. Instead, Amun-Re as creator is the summum bonum and the
summum ens (first cause), dwelling everywhere in his creation behind the screen of
an infinite number of forms. All deities are subsequently thought to be the offspring of
this original godhead, hidden, veiled and withdrawn. Hence henotheism has left behind
an earlier polytheism, which invokes entities as idols, but it does not move towards
monotheism (the exclusion of all deities but one). Egyptian henotheism had a lot in
common with the Christian notion of the Trinity. . . . In Amun, our Dutch scholar sees
(1) a hidden hypostasis of the primordial deities unity, (2) the primordial hill (ta-
tenen) emerging from Nun and (3) a god separated from those who came forth from
him. In Egypt, van den Dungen concludes, instead of one trinity, there follows a
cascading manifold of such triads, as in Gnostic Christianity of the 2
nd
century A.D.

Q.: Why is Amum represented as an animal (a primeval goose, a ram-headed
serpent, a ram, a ram-headed sphinx)?
A.: See Frankfort on the Egyptian devotion to animals:

It would seem that animals as such possessed religious significance for the
Egyptians. We assume, then, that the Egyptian interpreted the nonhuman as
superhuman, in particular when he saw it in animals in their inarticulate wisdom, in
their certainty, in their unhesitating achievement, and above all in their static reality.
With animals the continual succession of generations brought no change.

Q.: What do we mean by religion?
A.: See Burkerts 1981 definition (as cited by a contributor to Contemporary
Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, ed. Michael Stausberg):

That which cannot be verified empirically, being manifest in actions and attitudes
that do not fulfill immediate practical functions, but which nevertheless manifests
itself through interaction and communication in two directions: toward the unseen and
toward the contemporary social situation. Religion involves a claim for priority and
seriousness, a characteristic that makes it vulnerable to laughter and derision. In the
end, religion is to be understood as a hybrid between biology and culture, developing
through adaptation to the landscape provided by the evolutionary process. . . .

Q.: What do we mean by ritual?
A.: See Rappaports 1999 definition (as cited by another contributor to
Stausberg):

Ritual not only can claim to be socially or materially consequential but to possess
logical entailments as well. [Rappaport:] I will argue that the performance of more or
less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the
performers logically entails the establishment of convention, the sealing of social
contract, the construction of the integrated conventional orders that we shall call Logoi .
. . ; the investment of whatever it encodes with morality; the construction of time and
eternity; the representation of a paradigm of creation; the generation of the concept of
the sacred and the sanctification of [secular] order; the generation of theories of the
occult, the evocation of numinous experience, the awareness of the divine, and the grasp
of the holy; and the construction of orders of meaning transcending the semantic.

V. Osiris, Isis and Horus


V. Osiris, Isis and Horus

Horus, Osiris and Isis
A preliminary bibliographical note
We have reached a happy moment in the Egyptology of the gods. The great scholars
of the past (mostly German, French and British) have had their say, bequeathing us a
virtual library of archaeology, decipherment and explication. Theories about the nature
of the gods have been proposed, elaborated and adopted or dismissed. Ambition has
been chastened and unsupportable ideas chastised. Along comes another generation of
consummate scholars, German, Dutch, American, Egyptian: the groundbreaking Erik
Hornung (whose Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt sets out a new orthodoxy
regarding all questions); the wide-ranging Jan Assmann (whose Mind of Egypt in
particular places the gods in relation to all the history, culture and civilization of Egypt);
Ian Shaw, who has assembled essays by other learned historians to produce for Oxford
an intelligent, dry but readable, account (the History of Ancient Egypt, which places the
gods in their various contexts) and, with Paul Nicholson, a readers companion (The
British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, which gives scholarly but enlivening
definitions).

Erik Hornung
In addition to these we have Lucia Gahlin for the general reader (see again her
Egypt: Gods Myths and Religion) and the graceful but profoundly summative work of
Geraldine Pinch, whose full descriptive title I cite here: Egyptian Mythology: A Guide
to the Gods, Goddesses and Traditions of Ancient Egypt). To the books on the gods I
might add a recent study of the Pharaohs, brief and accessible (Peter A. Claytons
Chronicle of the Pharaohs: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of
Ancient Egypt) but withal comprehensive enough, as supplemented by Hornungs and
Pinchs general introductions, by Shaws comments (in his Oxford History) and, with
Nicholson, by their dictionary entries, to give us help with the question of the pharaohs
divinity. On the Internet I have found information on the Cults and their Locations. As
for the Temples and Tombs, an enormous subject, though Wilkinson (The Complete
Temples and, with Reeves, The Complete Valley of the Kings) might have served, I will
instead excerpt passages from Kent R. Weeks (his and his colleagues Valley of the
Kings).


It is especially appropriate as we turn to the myth of Osiris that we be eclectic. (In
what follows I will quote the scholars mentioned above, citing them by their last names
only and putting their words in quotation marks, often without attribution, to distinguish
theirs from mine; in lieu of a scholarly apparatus I intend a pastiche useful to the
curious.) Osiris himself is eclectic and the longest lived of all Egyptian gods, along with
Isis even exceeding for a few centuries the temporal and geographical boundaries of
ancient Egypt. Osiris and Isis are, as well as being brother and sister, man and wife,
similar in their bewildering diversity, so different from one another en masse as almost
not to belong together in the same story. Likewise Horus, their son, and to some degree
Seth, the brother of Osiris and Isis. Nepthys, their other sibling, is by contrast a
relatively uncomplicated figure. In one sense the story of Osiris and his family is
simple, certainly the genealogy. He was the eldest son of the earth god Geb and the sky
goddess Nut (Pinch). He and his sister-consort, Isis, ruled Egypt together, until Seth
came along.

Osiris
Osiris died and became the Inert One (cp. Amun). The gods eventually decreed
that he should be resurrected as the king and the judge of the dead and that his
posthumous son Horus should be made king of the living. There is much history that
Pinch subliminally summarizes here. Assmann is more explicit: With the so-called
democratization of the afterlife that took place during the First Intermediate Period
(2494-2345) the dead king was identified with Osiris, while the living ruler was equated
with his son Horus. But it appears to have become possible for any deceased person to
be resurrected in the person of Osiris. As Wilkinson succinctly notes, Osiris figures
prominently in both monarchical ideology and popular religion, as a god of death,
resurrection and fertility, he adds. As for history: Assmann speaks of The Egyptian
ritual of historical renewal and of geography both local and general. For each Egyptian
temple, he notes, was a cosmos in its own right, each represented the totality of
Egypt. Osiris stands for one part of Egypt, Seth for the other. Isis in restoring Osiris,
restores Egyptian unity.

Assmann sees in the myth of Osiris dismemberment and the reconstitution of the
42 severed parts a response to Persian, Greek and Roman unification in the Ptolemaic
period. He also regards it as a reflection of the unity of the Ogdoad and the unity of the
Ennead. Shaw and Nicholson see in his combined fertility and funerary aspects the
natural transformation of Osiris into the quintessential god of resurrection.
According to Wilkinson, Osiris was originally a fertility god with chthonic connections
based in his identification with the earth, and he was associated at some point with the
Niles inundation, perhaps through its resultant alluvium and fertility. His body is
represented as either white (the color of the mummys bindings), black (the color of the
rich alluvium) or green (the color of the new vegetation). As time progressed, as his
cult spread throughout Egypt, Wilkinson says, the god assimilated many other deities
and rapidly assumed their attributes and characteristics. His name, wennefer, probably
means something like he who is in everlastingly good condition.

Osiris and Seth
In other words, Osiris was a god of immortality, one of the few Egyptian deities
who died and the only to be reborn. An important development, however, Wilkinson
adds, which went beyond his basic identity as a resurrected god and ruler of the
underworld, was the role that he played as judge of the dead. Early on Osiris is
represented as being judged; by the end of his 2000-year rule, he is the Judge. Osiris is a
comprehensive god, the result of his assimilation of various functions. The Osirid
legends thus incorporate Osiris siblings Isis, Nephyths and Seth as well as his son
Horus, all whom equally represent allegorical, mythic, historical and political values,
and with them constitute the most extensive mythic cycle in ancient Egyptian culture.
The political theme was first spelled out by Plutarch (in De Iside et Osiride): The god
once ruled Egypt, in Wilkinsons summary, as a king, until he was murdered and
cruelly dismembered and scattered by his jealous brother Seth. Due to the loyalty and
dedication of his wife Isis . . . Osiris was found and revivified and became the god of
the netherworld.

Let us briefly interrupt our commentators and attend to a simpler, more coherent
telling of the tale, by the lecturer Lucia Gahlin: During a time beset by turmoil, the
birth of the god Osiris was heralded by an array of good omens and signs. Before his
appearance, war and cannibalism appear to have been the order of the day the people
were said to be barbarians. Osiris became king of the Delta town Busiris, but it was not
long before he was made king of all Egypt. His skill was in teaching how to farm and to
lead law-abiding lives and worship the gods. When Osiris had restored order to the
country, he went on a journey. His wicked brother Seth seized the opportunity to gather
together 72 conspirators. They hatched a plot. On Osiris return they threw a party.
Following an enormous banquet, Seth suggested that the revelers should play a game
(devised by himself of course). A chest was laid out in the great hall and the game was
to see who could fit inside it. When Osiris turn came, he climbed into the chest and
not surprisingly it was the perfect-sized coffin for him. A conspirator slammed the
lid shut.

Isis
Osiris died and thus became ruler of the dead in the Afterlife. This, however, is by
no means the end of the myth, because Osiris dead body, still inside the chest, was
disposed of in the Tanitic branch of the Nile. Its journey had just begun, for instead of
sinking to the murky depths, as Seth had hoped, it floated with the current northwards
towards the coast, and then out into the Mediterranean Sea. Proceeding to bob all the
way to the busy Lebanese port of Byblos, it finally came to rest in the entangled roots of
a tree. Engulfed by the tree, the chest became part of its trunk, later a pillar in a temple.
Meanwhile, Osiriss sister and consort Isis had set her heart on retrieving the body of
her husband. . . . Isis followed a tip-off to Byblos, where she gained access to the tree-
pillar by turning herself into a swallow and performing rituals to make the dead Osiris
immortal. . . . Once in possession of the chest, she returned with it to Egypt and hid it in
the marshy Delta while she went to collect her son. During her absence, Seth happened
by and cut Osiriss body into fourteen pieces. Isis then began her laborious search for
the pieces . . . .

The genius of this telling is that it masquerades as a human tale all the while that it
speaks the most mythic and disguises the most literal, historical meanings. To revert to
Wilkinsons interpretive account of the storys continuation: Horus, the posthumously
conceived son of Osiris and Isis, avenged his fathers death by defeating Seth and in
time became the king of all Egypt as the rightful heir of Osiris. Thus the myth
legitimizes male succession in Egypt, which bore matrilineal traces. This story had
great appeal both as a theological rationale for the Egyptian monarchial system in which
the deceased king was elevated with Osiris and was followed to the throne by his
Horus successor, and also as a story that proffered the hope of immortality through
resurrection which had a universal appeal and was claimed at first by kings and
eventually by nobles and commoners also. Thus the myth reinforces the claims of
immortality on behalf of both the king and the individual soul. Unlike most other gods,
Osiris is seen as benevolent, a benign deity who represented the clearest idea of
physical salvation.

On the so-called human level (or even the level of mythic narration), the
relationship between Osiris and Isis could hardly be more intimate: brother and sister,
husband and wife. Before Maria, Isis is the most tangible symbol of motherly sympathy,
before Christ, Osiris the most plangent example of death and rebirth. In other words, the
two figures reinforce one another and bind themselves into a dyad. On the allegorical,
political and historical levels, however, they diverge at almost every point of contact.
According to Pinch, Isis was most commonly shown as a woman wearing the throne
symbol that helps to write her name. As the throne goddess, she was the mother of
each Egyptian king. Thus her universal role as mother creates a tension with her
nurturing role for any single king and overrides her sisterly and wifely relationships
with Osiris. Her maternal tenderness eventually included all humanity. Like Maria,
she transcends the family and history. Moreover, she is a late-comer to the Osiris story.
It is not clear whether Isis featured in the earliest myths about Osiris and Horus.

Horus
One way of figuring her single status, like that of Maria, is to call her the Virgin.
Another is to see her as self-propagating. Like the creator deity Atum, according to
Pinch, she is able to produce life without an active partner. She does not require
Osiris. She is also magical, which sets her apart from many female divinities. When
Horus cuts his mothers head off, the gods give her a new head, sometimes, according
to Pinch, that of a cow. There is a myth that when the Divine Tribunal finally made
Horus king, he repaid his mother by raping her. Domestically, this would put Osiris in
an awkward position. Pinch explains the motif by saying that each king had to take
possession of the throne goddess and beget a repeat of himself. Unlike Osiris, she is
truly metamorphic: She could be shown as a cobra suckling kings. In The
Contendings of Horus and Seth she transforms herself into an old woman to fool the
divine ferryman and into a young girl to trick Seth into making damaging admissions.
She is able to turn the sun gods own power against him to get what she wants. Isis is
sometimes represented as goddess of the sea.

Osiris and Isis
Her different identities and mythic functions make it difficult to align her with
Osiris, in fact impossible to do so consistently. Unlike him, in The New Kingdom she is
a creation goddess and a form of all goddesses, who became merely the names of
Isis. Osiris is likewise multifarious. It has been claimed, says Pinch, that Osiris was
originally a deified Predynastic king, a primitive vegetation spirit, a jackal god of the
royal necropolis, or a mother goddess. Like Isis, he gradually takes over the attributes
of other deities, such as the funerary god Andjety at Busiris and Khentamentiu at
Abydos. He was born wearing a crown and was chosen to succeed his father Geb, by
the sun god himself. Thus Osiris and Isis compete with one another for a special
solar status. As for their sexual relations, Osiriss potency seems almost to increase
after death, for only then does he make Isis pregnant. Whereas Isis rules in this world,
Osiris rules in the underworld. His body, as we have seen, at Byblos was regenerated
within a tree, thus giving him Druidical powers that Isis lacks. Finally, he is a just judge
and savior.

Since Osiris and Isis compose not merely a dyad but also, with Horus, a triad, we
must give some attention to Horus, who completes this nuclear family but also
transcends it. Horus is many different gods in different periods. According to Pinch, he
begins as a sky god. (The Egyptian word her from which the gods name is derived
means the one on high, in reference to the soaring flight of the hunting falcon, if not a
reference to the solar aspect of the god). He then becomes a sun god. (As Behdety or
he of the behdef, Horus was the hawk-winged sun disc that seems to incorporate the
idea of the passage of the sun through the sky.) His form can also be leonine (By New
Kingdom times, the Great Sphinx, originally a representation of the 4
th
Dynasty king
Khafre, was interpreted as an image of Hor-em-akhet). He is a god of kingship. As the
hawk-winged Behdety, Horus became one of the most widespread images in Egyptian
art and rivaled the fame of his mother Isis and his father Osiris. In southern Egypt he
enjoyed the attentions of his own cult along with his consort Hathor and their son
Harsomptus.

Horus as child
Unlike Isis and Osiris, he is known not only as a powerful deity in his own right but
also as a charming child. A parallel may be drawn between Aphrodite (Isis), Hermes
(Osiris) and Eros (Horus). Each, we note, is an intensification of other gods, which
perhaps explains their volatility and fame. As a child, Horus is innocent (cp. Isiss
beauty and Osiriss immortality as their leading charismatic attributes). In this avatar,
the older hawkish sky god is subordinated to the later anthropomorphic Osiris.
Harsiese, Horus-son-of-Isis, and Harpokrates, Horus-the-child, become separate
forms for the youthful Horus whom Isis has borne and reared, says Hornung. There is
no other Egyptian narrative of the birth, growth and youth of a deity that is as extensive
or dwells with such delight on concrete details. Like the infant Hercules, Horus is
represented as a child, say Shaw and Nicholson, with the power to overcome harmful
forces. They illustrate the point with a sculpture of Horus the child standing atop a
crocodile beneath the head of the benevolent god Bes. At the other end of the scale,
Horus is cosmological.

Hornung: Apart from the goddesses who bore other specific deities in myth, there
is the idea of a mother of the gods who bears all the gods. In the New Kingdom and
late period the sky goddess Nut, who bore the sun and the moon, often has the epithet
she who bore the gods. This epithet refers to the heavenly bodies, whom the sky
goddess daily bears and again swallows an idea that leads to the depiction of Nut
as a sow. Isis, the mother of Horus, is called the mother of the god, elsewhere, in the
New Kingdom, the mother of all gods. . . . Corresponding to the idea of a universal
mother of the gods is that of a father of the gods, to whom all other deities owe their
origin. At first Amun and a little later other gods such as Ptah and Horus acquire an
epithet, which seems to have been coined in the New Kingdom, father of the fathers of
all gods. Horus, then, is a primitive creator, the lord of the sky, the son of Isis, a god
of order dispelling chaos. He is the god who, from the moment of his conception, was
destined to be king. As the devoted son of Osiris he is also the prototype of all priests.

VI. Cascading Triads

VI. Cascading Triads

The three Giza pyramids
Groups of seven gods (the hebdomads), groups of six (the hexads), groups of five
(the pentads) are not unknown to ancient Egypt (we will take up the ogdoads, the
groups of eight, and the enneads, the groups of nine, presently). Erik Hornung, in his
Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, says, in commenting on
the standard triads, Beside tripartite forms such as Ptah-Sokar-Osiris there are
quadripartite forms such as Amun-Re-Harakhte-Atum or Hamarchis-Khepry-Re-Atum,
adding that the Egyptians place the tensions and contradictions of the world beside one
another and then live with them. Amun-Re, he goes on to explain, is not the synthesis
of Amun and Re but a new form that exists along with the two older gods. The
Egyptian gods are in many ways multiple, as opposed to singular.

In the New Kingdom Hornung finds a trinity, or tri-unity not of God but of the
gods and their cult places. The classical formulation of this specifically Egyptian
trinity, he says, was achieved at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty in the Leiden
hymn to Atum: All gods are three: Amun, Re, Ptah; they have no equal; his name is
hidden as Atum, he is perceived as Re [literally, he is Re before men], and his body is
Ptah. Their cities on earth remain forever: Thebes, Heliopolis and Memphis, for all
time. This trinity of Amun / Re / Ptah is also found elsewhere; its earliest attestation is
not Ramessid, as Eberhard Otto states, but dates to the Pharaoh Tutankhamun (1347-
1338 B.C.), the successor to Akhenaten. One could argue, says Hornung again, for
an equalization required by Egypts religious politics.

Khepry
Re-Harakhte
Atum
But what could be the purpose of equalizing Horus and Sothis or Hamarchis,
Khepry, Re and Atum? In the last example the three daily forms of the sun god are
evidently present together in the Great Sphinx (Hamarchis): the sun is Khepry in the
morning, Re or Harakhte in the middle of the day, and Atum in the evening. Thus the
Sphinx is the sun god, and his three forms. The Egyptian gods are not, however, like
the Biblical divisions of the Godhead, arranged in theological trinities. Hornung is also
quite adamant in making the case against arguments for an ancient Egyptian
monotheism. It is clear, he says, that syncretism does not contain any
monotheistic tendency but rather forms a strong counter-current to monotheism
so long as it is kept within bounds. Syncretism softens henotheism in the Egyptian
system.

To distinguish between the Greeks and the Egyptians he writes, We shall find
repeatedly that Egyptian deities do not present themselves to us with as clear and well
defined a nature as that of the gods of Greece. The conception of god which we
encounter here is [instead] fluid, unfinished, changeable. But we should not impute to
the Egyptians confused conceptions of their own gods; such an idea is contradicted by
numerous specific details. Henotheism, the ability to move from one god to another or
to emphasize one avatar of a single god after another, does concentrate worship upon a
single god (and so prevents Egyptian religion from devolving into mere polytheism or
pantheism), but it also stops it from turning into monotheism, for syncretism means
that a single god is not isolated from all the others.

David P. Silverman (Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt, in Byron E. Shafer,
ed., Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice) complements
Hornung:

Nefertem, Sekhmet and Ptah
Egyptians envisioned their divinities in small groups. They could be paired, as they
were in some regional cosmogonies. More often they belonged to family groupings,
which consisted of father, mother and child. At Abydos it was Osiris, Isis and Horus. At
Thebes the sacred triad was Amun, Mut and Khonsu; at Memphis, Ptah, Sekmet and
Neterem. Such groupings, extremely common, often linked gods and goddesses from
different precincts and with varying significance. Hathor of Dendera, for example, was
linked to Horus of Edfu. The temple at Edfu was dedicated to Horus and only he was in
residence. Horus was often portrayed with his consort, Hathor of Dendera. She,
however, together with her sons Ihy and Horus-Sematawy, was in residence at the new
temple dedicated to her at Dendera.

Silverman here is contravening the earlier view of Egyptologists that only local gods
were worshiped in specific locales, one evidence of so-called henotheism; in other
words, henotheism was tempered by a flexibility that enabled gods to move from one
region to another and by the prevalence of certain universal gods. Even the primeval
deities, according to Hornung, who express the chaotic world before creation, are
conceived of as a triad: Nun, the weary or inert, primeval flood, Huh, endlessness,
Kuk, darkness. Atum, the earliest creator god for whom we have evidence, has a self-
explanatory name which is more difficult to interpret. It can mean not to be or to be
complete. Khnum, Anukis and Satis, Hornung adds, represent a nonce triad.
Khnum is the local god of Elephantine.

Anukis, Satis and Khnum
Here the goddesses Anukis and Satis were worshiped along with him. These triads
were not conceived as theological trinities till much later. When after the Amarna
period, says Hornung, the tri-unity of god is postulated for the first time in the Leiden
hymn to Amun, the text does not say god reveals himself in three forms; [instead] the
plural form is used: All gods are three. Amun, Re and Ptah. His name is hidden as
Amun, he is perceived as Re, his body is Ptah, a plural that is taken up again by a
singular suffix [my emphases]. Anthes interprets Amuns name as he who is an
entirety, Bonnet as he who is not yet complete; Kees as he who is not yet present. I
myself, says Hornung, believe that the undifferentiated one is a more apt rendering,
because it includes both aspects [of his existence].

Elsewhere Hornung shows how the triads emerged. When a child [was] added to a
divine couple, the result [was] a triad, the preferred and most frequently encountered
grouping of Egyptian deities. . . . But we should follow Eberhard Otto in assuming that
the idiom of kinship in which triads are presented is secondary in comparison with the
important symbolism of the number three. Three is the simplest and hence the
preferred way of expressing many or the plural, which is indicated in the Egyptian
script by three strokes or by writing signs three times; some texts equate three quite
explicitly with the plural. The existence of a large number of deities and the preferred
articulation of them into triads comes quite late. Hornung also helps us understand the
emergence of the ogdoad and the ennead:

The Ogdoad
The succeeding period, the Ramessid, brings a true renaissance of Amun as king of
the gods, while the god Seth is added as a fourth to the triad Amun, Re, Ptah, although
the triad survives as well. . . . Four occurs doubled as the ogdoad of Hermopolis, and
the name eight-city was given to their cult center, Hermopolis, as early as the Old
Kingdom. Thus the ogdoad and related ideas about creation may be posited for the
central Old Kingdom even though the names of the four pairs of primeval deities are not
attested until the late period. The names themselves vary but always add up to eight, or
rather to four couples of gods/goddesses. The most important classificatory scheme is
the ennead. Though the ogdoad, then, dominated the early Egyptian periods, the
ennead arose to complete the pantheon.

The Ennead
It too is an intensified form of the plural (three times three) and is first attested in
the ennead of Heliopolis, which served as the model for further enneads in the
pantheon; a complete listing of the nine gods occurs as early as the Pyramid Texts . . .
Nor is the number of members of the ennead canonically fixed at nine, even though
the genealogy usually ends with Osiris and Isis, and because of that number omits their
son Horus. . . . The later enneads, which were devised throughout the country on the
model of the ennead of Heliopolis, sometimes have only seven members, as at Abydos,
but in other cases fifteen, as at Thebes. The ranking of cult places automatically
results in a hierarchy of their deities. The reader may study illustrations of the Egyptian
gods and further apply these observations to them.
Another note on the animal form of the ancient Egyptian gods

Ammit
In section IV ("Amun") I had quoted the great French Egyptologist, Henri Frankfort,
on why the Egyptians give to their gods animal forms. The matter is more complicated
than I had (deliberately) represented it. Let us begin with Hornung's paraphrases of
Frankfort on similar questions: Henri Frankfort proposed much more aptly [than those
who suggest that the theriomorphic form of Egyptian gods are pictures of them] that
they should be taken as ideograms or as pictorial signs that convey meaning in a
metalanguage.
The gods may indeed inhabit their representations as they may inhabit any image,
but their true form is hidden and mysterious, as Egyptian texts emphasize. Hathor
and her iconography appear still richer when one recalls that she is also imagined as a
lioness, a snake, a hippopotamus, and a tree nymph. Although the various forms are not
equally old, we are not observing a historical development in which one form replaced
another; at all periods different ways of depicting the goddess simply existed side by
side.
Men of the period c. 3000 B.C. felt themselves defenseless without an animal
disguise. Animals appeared to be the most powerful and efficacious beings, far superior
to men in all [sic] their capacities. This probably explains why in late predynastic times
the powers that determine the course of events were mostly conceived in animal form. .
. . By 2800 B.C. animal names for the gods at last disappeared for good. The
extraordinary evolution from dynamism to personalism (Bertholet) occurred between
3000 and 2800 B.C. . . .

VII. The Dyads and Individual Gods

VII. The Dyads and Individual Gods
It has become a clich to speak of the double nature of Egypt or at least of the
double view of all things held by ancient Egyptians: heaven and earth, upper and lower
Egypt, day and night, male and female. The representation of two gods, such as Nut and
Shu, as a dyad is perhaps related to this propensity, as is the embodiment of an
ambiguity within the One God, such as Amun. According to Hornung, the original dyad
is the existent and the non-existent. Moreover, the greatest totality conceivable is the
existent and the nonexistent, and in these dualistic terms the divine is evidently both
one and many, the subtitle and principal thesis of his study of ancient Egyptian
religion. God, he observes, is a unity in worship and revelation and is multiple in
nature and manifestation. Truth values are not mutually exclusive.

Thus, for the Egyptian, being and nothingness are identical. The phenomenon of
death is a concomitant of creation. Primeval flood and darkness constitute the pre-
creation. For the Egyptian the entire extent of the existent, both in space and in time, is
embedded in the limited expanses of the nonexistent. The nonexistent does not even
stop short at the boundaries of the existent but penetrates all creation. No wonder we
encounter the nonexistent everywhere. It is a fetchingly sophisticated philosophy (for a
non-philosophical culture), one sympathetic to our modern sensibility. There is also
the other side of nonexistence, its potential for fertility, renewal and rejuvenation.
Anything that exists becomes exhausted and needs regeneration, which can be achieved
only through the temporary removal and negation of existence.

Thus what some see as the ancient Egyptian obsession with death, as expressed in
its funerary culture, is viewed by Hornung positively. This necessity [for
regeneration] becomes the basis for the positive, indeed absolutely essential,
significance of what the Egyptians call the nonexistent, which is anything but negative.
Death is the gateway to enhanced life in the next world, which explains the brio with
which the passage to the next world is celebrated and the philosophical insouciance with
which it is contemplated. Egyptians remain detached and balanced, and avoid falling
into any nihilism or abrogating the self by surrendering to an unlimited state of
nonexistence in which everything is possible; both these attitudes would constitute a
devaluation of the existent and a fixation with the nonexistent.

The Egyptians never succumbed to the temptation to live in the transcendence of
the existent release from imperfection, from dissolution of the self, or from immersion
in and union with the universe. As well as the duality of the universe the Egyptian gods
for Hornung also express its diversity. The limits to the gods nature in time, space,
power and knowledge are part of the more general phenomenon, he says, of their
diversity. This fundamental characteristic of everything that exists, this diversity
renders it impossible to credit the gods with absolute qualities or absolute existence.
The large number of the gods is itself an aspect of their diversity. The essence of the
primeval god is that at first he is one and then, with creation's diversity, many. It has
been estimated that there were 2000 ancient Egyptian gods.

Millions enormous and unfathomable but not infinite multiplicity are the
reality of . . . creation, of all that exists. The 2000 gods likewise represent an enormous
and unfathomable but not infinite multiplicity. Likewise the multiplicity of the One
God. The Graeco-Roman period applies new formulations of the old epithet to Amun:
He is a million millions in his name, and the city Thebes can be called the container
of a million, that is, the vessel of the richly diverse Amun. There is also the difference
of sex, which distinguishes the Egyptian, say, from the monotheistic religions of Israel
and Islam. Here again the dyad figures; but also the creator is often seen as
androgynous, not a feature of most other western religions. For Hornung The nude but
sexless colossi from Karnak are evidence too of this ambiguity.

Nekhbet and Wadjet
On a less theoretical plane, Gahlin lists for us the most prominent dyads: Geb, the
Earth god and Nut, the goddess of Heaven; Horus and Seth, two brothers who are
sometimes allegorized as Good and Evil, Order and Chaos; Isis and Osiris, originally
paired without their offspring Horus; the fecundating Shu and Tefnut; Wadjet and
Nekhbet (cobra and vulture). Wilkinson extends the list and offers useful
generalizations: Egyptian thought usually stressed the complementary nature [of the
two gods] as a way of expressing the essential unity of existence. The endless duality
found throughout the cosmic, geographic and temporal aspects of the universe is found
in pairs of gods and goddesses, which represented the binary aspect of the world.
Some gods, he notes, were created as counterparts to established gods and
goddesses.

Almost invariably, he continues, dyads are composed of male and female
elements, paired as lovers, or man and wife, though there are a few examples of
sibling dyads of the same sex such as the brothers Horus and Seth and the sisters Isis
and Nephthys. Sometimes too, deities may be mentioned together in pairs when their
roles or areas of influence are clearly related. This adumbrates the more modern
allegorical traditions that manifest in Greece, Rome and Renaissance Europe. Another
way in which Egyptian religion formed groups of two deities is when two gods are
utilized to represent a larger group. This may be seen in the examples of Thoth and
Horus, who are sometimes depicted together as representing the four gods of ritual
lustration, Horus, Seth, Thoth and Nemty. The dyad is not always exclusive.

At an even more empirical or practical level Shaw and Nicholson, in their
Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, list under dyads pairs of statues, often carved from the
same block of material, either representing a man and his wife or depicting two versions
of the same person, the former a common, the latter not a common, practice in other
civilizations. There are also occasional groups of two identical funerary statues
portraying a single individual; the intention, it has been suggested, of such pseudo-
groups may have been to represent the body and the spiritual manifestations of the
deceased. They add: It is possible that royal dyads, such as the granite double statue
of Amenemhat III from Tanis may portray both the mortal and deified aspect of the
pharaoh. We note that these examples too reflect a philosophical disposition.
*
Hornung: The anthropomorphization of powers produced the first gods in human
form, but other methods of depicting this phenomenon appear at the same time. The
cow heads that crown the Narmer palette contain a human face; the land of papyrus
has a human head, and so on. . . . During the first two dynasties the group of purely
anthropomorphic deities appears in addition to the gods in purely animal form, who are
still predominant. . . . What is lacking at the beginning of the early dynastic period is the
mixed form of gods, combining human and animal elements, which is so characteristic
of Egypt. Toward the end of the Second Dynasty the first gods in human form with
animal heads appear on cylinder seal impressions.

In the iconography of other religions we find many ways of linking a deity
pictorially with an attribute. The Greeks and Romans tended to put the attribute in the
deitys hand, while the Hittites placed deities on animals that relate to their nature and
manifestation a tradition that can be traced back through the decoration of seals of
the Akkad dynasty to the beginnings of Sumerian civilization. Mesopotamian deities
can have a human head that sits on an animal body. In all these cultures the gods appear
in the human form after the anthropomorphization of the powers. But none of these
animals, plants and objects related to the manifestation of deities offers any information
about the true form of the ancient Egyptian deity.

The Great Sphinx
A combination of a human body with an attribute for head may be Egyptian, but it
is not the only alternative and should not be equated with the Egyptian image of gods.
The opposite solution, elaborated more thoroughly in Mesopotamia, is best known from
the Egyptian sphinx; here the animal body is crowned with a human head, which may in
extreme cases have the ears and mane of the animal, so that only the face remains
human. . . . Whatever combination the Egyptians chose, the mixed form of their gods is
nothing other than a hieroglyph, a way of writing not the name but the nature and
function of the deity in question. [I]t is quite in keeping with their views to see images
of the gods as signs in a metalanguage.

Anubis
"Every image can constitute a powerful but, in the last analysis, limited and
imperfect expression of the nature of the deity. This imperfection is the root of the
multiple forms of Egyptian gods, which is analogous to the multiplicity of their names.
It often renders their iconography difficult and confusing. The canine Anubis and the
mixed crocodile, lion and hippopotamus of Theoris are relatively fixed, but the rest of
the major deities are true to their common epithet rich in manifestations and behave, to
quote another epithet, as lord of manifestations; the word lord here means that they
have power over something. The greater the god, the more attributes; the greatest, Re,
has the most associations.

Finally Hornung says: Monotheism does not arise within polytheism by way of a
slow accumulation of monotheistic tendencies but requires instead a complete
transformation through patterns. Tendencies to classify the pantheon should not be
equated with an inclination toward the development of monotheism. Was the ancient
Egyptian view of reality less, or more, sophisticated than ours? It may take modern man
some time to realize that the ancient conception of the universe was more nuanced and
comprehensive than the modern conception.

Note: The individual gods are best referenced in Wilkinsons Complete Gods and
Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003) or by Googling their
names.

VIII. The Divine Pharaohs

VIII. The Divine Pharaohs

Djedre
Djoser
Khafre
Popular lecturer and scholar, Peter A. Clayton begins his Chronicle of the
Pharaohs: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt
with a Preface called God-Kings of the Nile. The Egyptian pharaohs, he says, were
god kings on earth who became gods in their own right at their deaths. Thus several
subjects of scholarly controversy are swept up and presented in a sensible way. Indeed
the Pharaohs to some degree were regarded as gods during their reigns; because they
undoubtedly became, in the Egyptian identification of them with Osiris himself, gods
after death, sequentially they represent another form of henotheism, we might say. As
such these human divinities live on in a historical chronology.

Khufu
Menkaure
Teti
A more sobering view of the subject is taken by Georges Posener, who, Wilkinson
tells us, in his Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, showed that the image
of the living pharaoh as a god-king is perhaps exaggerated by the royal and religious
sources which aim to heighten the divine aspect of kingship. In popular literature and
texts the Egyptian king is hardly portrayed as a god. He cannot work the miracles of the
wise men and is certainly neither omniscient nor invulnerable as we would expect, if he
were regarded as truly divine. From this perspective it would seem that it was not the
king who was honored as a god but the incarnate power of the gods that was honored in
the king. Still these figures commanded god-like power.

Amenophis III
Rameses II
Under the heading, Deified in life, Wilkinson in turn further qualifies the view of
Posener. Despite the human-divine duality inherent in the reign of most Egyptian
pharaohs, he writes, there were instances when living kings do seem to have been
declared fully divine within their lifetimes. . . . [T]he living deification of Amenophis
III and Rameses II are relatively well attested. In the case of Amenophis III we find that
the king began the increasing solarization of Egypts major cults and of his own
kingship. According to Raymond Johnson the king declared himself deified and
merged with the solar disc, the Aten. According to Shaw, monuments dating from his
reign name Rameses himself as the god.

Ptah, Re-Horakhte, Osiris (himself) and Amun-Re
From this time, Wilkinson continues, we find the king taking divine prerogatives
in his representations, such as those showing him with the curved beard of the gods,
with the horns of Amun and wearing the lunar crescent and sun disc or presenting an
offering before a statue of himself. In the inner shrine of the great rock cut temples of
Abu Simbel, Rameses III was to do likewise. . . . [Rameses II] had four statues cut to
represent Ptah, Re-Horakhte, Oriris (himself) and Amun-Re, seated side by side. That
the king is not simply depicted in the company of the gods is clear, since the figures are
shown as incontrovertible equals. It has even been suggested that in this group the king
might be represented as an embodiment of all these national gods. . . .

Of great interest for our understanding of ancient Egyptian theology are scenes that
survive of kings presenting sacrifices of themselves. Such depictions are based upon the
concept of dual (earthly and heavenly) roles played by the gods themselves. Wilkinson:
While what we might call full deification occurred for some monarchs within their
lifetimes, it was usually in death that this state, however, was reached and a good deal
of evidence seems to show that the deceased Egyptian king was venerated as a full
god.. . . The idea of the kings deified afterlife was certainly established by Old
Kingdom times, though, and the same types of textual evidence are found in royal
mortuary contexts throughout subsequent periods of history.
*
In his treatment of the question David P. Silverman has this to say about
terminology: From early times the epithet netjer (ntr) referred directly to the king as a
god. Sometimes the term occurred alone; at other times it appeared with modifying or
descriptive words. Another epithet from early times referred to the king as a descendant
of a god s R, son of Re. Later the Egyptians developed other terms such as tjt,
image of a god and pr. This latter, an expression meaning great house and referring
to the palace, was an abstraction that attributed a corporate nature to the king. . . .
Sometimes the king was also referred to as like (mj) a deity. Ordinarily all these royal
epithets were used in specific types of documents.

Unlike traditional deities, the earthly ruler observed jubilees of revivification in
order to ensure the lands fertility. Like a private person, the king required a tomb to
ensure his afterlife. Ordinarily gods did not have tombs. Gods could age, but their actual
death was rarely recorded. Adding to the complexity of the concept of divine kingship
was the development of the cult of the living king, which essentially treated the king
like a god while he was still alive. Whereas the gods behavior and activities tended to
be humanized, they underwent no metamorphosis from one sphere to another,
remaining instead constantly divine. The king, by contrast, possessed aspects of the
human at some times and of the divine at others.

Senwosret I
He clearly originated in the world of the human, but he could function in both
worlds. The gods belonged to an invisible world inhabited only by the divine. They did
not ordinarily appear on earth, except in their representations as two- or three-
dimensional figures in reliefs or statues. The king operated on earth as an individual
active among humanity. . . . Throughout the Old Kingdom the king was said to have the
powers of the gods: Hu (divine utterance), Sia (divine knowledge) and Heka (divine
energy and knowledge of magic). Later Middle Kingdom representations of the
pharaoh, however, often did not display the imperious, detached demeanor that royal
images had in the Old Kingdom. The kings expression was more human.

Tutmose III
During the New Kingdom came an effort to equate the king with the powers of the
divine world. Whether the proper description is identification, incarnation or
manifestation,' it is clear that the king had a mortal aspect. . . . The divinity of the dead
king is a much less controversial concept than the divinity of the living king, for he was
clearly identified in his mortuary image with the god Osiris. During his lifetime,
according to Hornung, the god who is chiefly recognized in the appearance of the king
is Re, the creator and preserver of the world. You are Re, high officials of the New
Kingdom cry out to the king; earlier, in the Middle Kingdom, Amenemhat III is said to
be Re, who is seen in his rays.

IX. Cults, Temples and Tombs
IX. Cults, Temples and Tombs
We continue with Hornung on the divinity of the Pharaoh: The king, like the cult
image of a god, is normally hidden, being separated from the people in his palace. But
when he steps outside and is manifest to his subjects, surrounded by symbols of power
and protection, he becomes the deus praesens for the adulating and rejoicing people,
allowing them to feel the presence of the creator god whose deeds he accomplishes
again. What he does is not the work of men; his words are godly. . . . They are the
utterances of god himself. Rameses II is the likeness of Re, illuminating the world like
the sun disc. The king himself is not a manifestation of the sun god, even though he
may be an image of him.

In their constantly changing nature and manifestations, the Egyptian gods resemble
the countrys temples, which were never complete but always under construction.
Their axial form is clearly ordered and yet never prevents continual extension and
alteration; every king can add new cult chambers, halls, courtyards and pylons without
affecting the underlying form of the temple. In this, Egypt differs markedly from
Greece, where both temple and gods are relatively complete. However much
information we assemble about Egyptian gods, and however receptive we become to
their reality, we will never be able to see them as the clear figures that Walter F. Otto
perceived in the gods of Greece. The Egyptian gods are formulas, not forms.
*
If one wishes to study the cult sites within a reasonable amount of time, rather than
visiting the actual places, one may consult Lucia Gahlin, who has a map of their
principal locations along the Nile and in the Delta. One may then Google their names
and download from Wikipedia two or three pages of essential information about each.
On a boat trip along the Nile I visited a number of the more famous. In addition to my
hundred pages of Wiki materials, I have individual pamphlets about those temples that I
had visited and more information about them in general guides to Egypt. One could
spend a week on every temple in Egypt. The visits are pleasant, but here perhaps it is
more important to get a grasp of what the local cults were all about.

We turn again to the revisionary Hornung. Many gods who later became universal
were regarded by earlier scholars as having roots in local divinities. During the Theban
Eleventh Dynasty, which united the country a second time, Hornung tells us, Mont
(Montu) occupied the leading position among all the deities until he was displaced
by Amun. The rise of Re, Osiris and Amun to a dominant position in Egyptian religion
was as sudden as that of Mont, but I think it is meaningless to interpret these universal
deities as originally having been local. The emphasis on local cults, which has prevailed
since Lepsius [the great German scholar who led the Prussian expedition to Egypt in
1842-1845], is too one-sided and needs correcting.

Karnak
The temples, the monuments associated with them (notably the obelisks, so many of
which have been displaced to modern western sites), the tombs (including those in the
pyramids) and fragmentary remains are all that we have, aside from a modest harvest of
texts in the form of papyrus scrolls and stone inscriptions, to study the ancient
Egyptians. Naturally, then, we visit the temples and attend to all that we can learn from
them, including their wall reliefs, their architectural plans, their other decorations, their
locations, their interrelations. Unfortunately, most of the temples that still survive date
from the Ptolemaic period. Accordingly, we must also make some effort to learn of the
temples that have not survived.
Jason Thompson, A History of Egypt: From Earliest Times to the Present
Under the Romans, Oxyrhynchus [pop. 40,000] contained three temples to Zeus-
Amun, Hera-Isis and Arargaris-Bethynnis, a large Serapeum, two temples to Isis, one to
Osiris, four to Thoeris, plus cult centers for Demeter, Kore, the Dioscuroi, Dionysos,
Hermes, Apollo, Agathos, Daimon, Neotera, Tyche, Jupiter Capitolinis and Mars,
Thompson tells us in his recent sweeping history. Egypt supplied the grain for Rome;
income from its imperial estates; and its stone adorned many buildings. No fewer than
three 1
st
century emperors Caligula, Claudius and Nero were directly descended
from Marcus Antonius (through Octavia, not Cleopatra), so the Egyptian associations of
their ancestor came readily to their minds.

St. Peter's


Place de la Concorde
San Govanni in Laterano
Rome, beginning with Augustus, was fascinated with Egyptian obelisks. Caligula
constructed a special ship to transport an obelisk that weighed five hundred tons, and
which now stands at the center of St. Peters Square. Over 300 years later, Constantinus
had another erected in the Circus Maximus (later moved to the Church of San Giovanni
in Laterano (Divine). Several more obelisks were transplanted from the banks of the
Nile to the imperial city, or were custom-made in Italy, so that Rome has more Egyptian
obelisks than Egypt does. Egyptian Roman decorative art can be viewed (see Divine
again) in Hadrians Villa at Tivoli and in the Palestrina mosaic for Fortuna Primigenia
[cp. Isis], at modern Praeneste.
Robert G. Morkot, The Egyptians: An Introduction

Luxor / Thebes / Waset
Most people arriving in Egypt before the advent of air travel came by sea or across
the Sinai land bridge. They therefore arrived at one of the mouths of the Nile or, later, at
Alexandria, before traveling upstream. The Delta and its cities were the first places
encountered.

Viewing Egypt this way helps us appreciate that despite its many surviving
monuments, Thebes was actually quite remote from the ancient centers of population
and production. We must rethink Thebes as a capital and question our emphasis upon
its monuments.

Thebes was no better placed to serve as capital than any other towns in Upper
Egypt. Koptos and Edfu had better connections with the Eastern Desert routes and the
Red Sea. Tjeny was better placed for access to the western Oases, Abydos had religious
significance.

Ancient Egypt had no myth recording the origin of the population or the foundation
of the state dependent upon one people as, for example. Rome and the Israelites had.
Egyptian origins of both the people and the state are attributed to the creation of the
gods.

At Thebes, for which we have most archaeological and textual evidence, there were
processions at the end of every ten-day week, when the statue of Amun was taken to
Djeme (Medinu Habu) and back to Luxor (or Karnak). Amun sailed from Karnak across
the river.

There he stayed overnight at the temples of Deir el-Bahri. The people of Thebes
visited their family tomb chapels to celebrate rites of rebirth. At Opet the statues of
Amun, Mut and Khonsu traveled from Karnak to the temple of Luxor to celebrate
Amuns marriage.
Individual gods as cult figures (Hornung in conclusion)
By becoming existent, the divine loses the absolute, exclusive unity of the
beginning of things. But wherever one turns to the divine in worship, addresses it and
tends it in the cult, it appears as a single, well-defined figure that can for the moment
unite all divinity within itself.

It does not share divinity with any other god. And the human being who encounters
god becomes a single person who has no other beside him and embodies all humanity.
This divine and human unity is, however, always relative and never excludes a
fundamental plurality.
Kent R. Weeks, ed. Valley of the Kings: The Tombs and Funerary Temples of
Thebes West

Valley of the Kings
The living temples of Egypt, like its gods and pharaohs, are too numerous to survey.
Christian Leblanc, former director of the French Archaeological Mission in Thebes, has
contributed to the Weeks anthology an interesting piece on The Temple of Rameses
II, christened The Ramesseum by Champollion, the decoder of the hieroglyphs.

An immense plot on the west bank of the Nile opposite modern Luxor, during
Rameses IIs lifetime, the temple served as a large religious and economic center.
Offerings were made daily to Amen-Ra and the other divinities who resided in the
Castle of Usermaatra Setepenra that Joins Thebes-City, in the Domain of Amen, as the
Egyptians called it.

Especially noteworthy in the vast pantheon venerated at the sanctuary were Mut
and Khonsu, Ra-Horakhte, Isis, Ptah, Sekhmet, Osiris, Hathor, Amun, as well as King
Rameses, the great god, and Ahmose-Nefertari, the mother of Amenhotep I, who was
deified after her death and venerated at least up to the 21st dynasty. Originally the
Ramesseum also included secondary chapels, crypts, a chthonian as well as a solar
complex and a library. To the south of the first courtyard are located the remains of the
royal palace that was used during certain important Theban liturgies. The temple today
lies in almost total ruin.

Built just after Rameses IIs coronation, the Ramesseum is a Temple of Millions
of Years, the first thought to have been built at the end of the Middle Kingdom. It is
not strictly a funerary temple, but more of a memorial glorifying the monarchy in the
person of the king. The important events of his reign, such as his victories, are
masterfully depicted on the remaining walls and perpetuate his peaceful symbiosis with
Maat, the entity that incarnates harmony, or rather universal cosmic balance. The
pharaoh who reached the divine sphere here, received a cult through the petrified
hypostases in the form of statues and colossi.
T. G. Henry James, Tutankhamun: The Eternal Splendor of the Boy Pharaoh

Tutankhamun's gold coffin
The Innermost Coffin. The excavators were much puzzled by the great weight of
the coffins, once removed from the sarcophagus. The mystery was solved when the lid
of the middle coffin was raised and they found a third coffin made of solid gold. After
the removal of its contents and cleaning, it was found to weigh 110.4 kg. It is quite the
most impressive coffin ever found, but apart from its bullion value it is an outstanding
piece of craftsmanship; the head is particularly well done, its features distinctly those of
the young king. Again he is shown with the uraeus and vulture on his brow, and holding
the crook and flail, symbols of royalty. Around the neck are necklaces of disc beads of
gold and colored glass.

When the coffin was placed in the middle coffin, large quantities of bituminous
resin were poured over it, which in time fixed it firmly in place. It took Carter and his
assistants much time to soften and chip away this material, in order to separate the two
coffins. The hot bitumen had damaged some of the inlays and caused deterioration in
some elements of decoration, including the calcite whites of the eyes. The decoration of
the main body of the coffin is again rishi-work, but here in the form of chasing rather
than inlay. Splendid figures of the cobra Wadjet and the vulture Nekhbet with
outstretched protective wings are shown on the chest, and farther down on the side of
the legs are delicate reliefs.

These represent Isis and Nephthys, traditional guardians and mourners of the dead,
also with protecting wings. On the foot of the coffin is another figure of the goddess Isis
with outstretched wings, beautifully designed to fit the available space. She is shown
kneeling on the sign for gold, and she is described as Great Isis, mother of the god.
Valley of the Kings: The Tombs and the Funerary Temples of Thebes West
The ancient Egyptian Progress toward The Next World as Fashion Show (MM)
The Tombs of the Queens. In their eternal residences, queens and princesses pose
in attitudes that vary only slightly. They are most frequently standing, sometimes seated
before a table of offerings or, even more rarely, kneeling. The wives or daughters of the
king are frequently dressed in a long, flowing robe of fine pleated white material, tied at
the waist with a belt that falls forward in two or four embossed sections. In most cases,
they wear the traditional vulture skin on their heads, over a simple cap or one adorned
with cobras (uraei).

Over this headdress there are sometimes two long straight feathers, at the bottom of
which is the disc of the sun. These feathers, as some examples show, could be replaced
by lotus fruits whose flexible stalks spring out of the cap. In the tomb of Isis we see
another variant of this theme in at least two places. The queens headdress is
surmounted by a kind of diadem made up of rearing and circling snakes. Two other
designs show the sovereign with a modius on which there are circling cobras, rearing
snakes and a vulture wearing an atef-crown.

Pectorals or necklaces with several rows of beads, bracelets, armlets are the
essential items in the jewelry shown in the paintings of queens and princesses in these
tombs. Sometimes they also wear earrings. Most models take the form of small floral
motifs, rings, studs, rosettes or, most frequently, snakes in the tombs of Nefertari,
Meryetamun and Nebetauy. In the tomb of Nefertari, on the northeast wall of the
western side room of the sarcophagus room, the queen appears in the form of Osiris.
This is the only confirmed example of the avatar.

Standing, the sovereign is wound in a shroud from which there emerges only the
head, wearing a classical three-part wig covered in the vulture skin and cap. By way of
finery, the wife of Rameses II wears a pectoral with a series of bands falling to the level
of her breasts. Also in this tomb, on the southwest wall of the antechamber, is the only
image of the queen in the form of a bird spirit. Perched on a niche that is a simplified
reproduction of the tomb, the bird is shown with a human head, that of Nefertari,
wearing the vulture skin and cap.

Hatshepsut and Tiy are shown in the form of sphinxes, the notion not abandoned
with the queens of the Ramessid period. This is confirmed by an image of Tiy on the
northwest wall of an annex chamber of her tomb. The great wife of Seti I here takes the
form of a lion with human head, wearing the vulture skin surmounted by a cap and two
long, straight feathers. The sovereign offers balsam to a god whose face has
disappeared. In the tomb of Bentanat, two sphinxes adorn the opening of the door that
gives access to an antechamber.

Lying in a chapel with a door, the oldest daughter of Rameses II is also shown with
a human head, but this time she wears a wig in long sections that partly conceal the
vulture skin on which is laid a cap without feathers. These original paintings of
Bentanat are placed on a high frieze made up of two djed-pillars and a knot of Isis. . . .
At several places in the tomb of Tiy the great wife of the king takes on the features of a
girl, while at certain other places she is shown as a woman in a flowing, pleated robe
and fine sandals with up-turned toes.

The princess-queen wears a short wig with a cobra on the front. The typical plait of
childhood falls to the longer side, at the back. In two cases the headdress is dominated
by a cap with two tall feathers, in front of which is represented the solar disc. The theme
of the queen in the company of her daughter is exceptional, as it only appears in one
tomb of the necropolis, that of Bentanat. It appears on the east wall of the sarcophagus
room. Her mother stands behind her in a posture of adoration, this daughter of the king
engendered by him.

She is clearly distinguished from Bentanat by her youthful appearance, the
youthful curl falling over her shoulder, and a lotus flower whose umbel falls slightly to
her forehead. She wears a ring in her ear that partly conceals the wig. Unique in such a
burial situation, the painting also confirms that the marriage of the king with his
daughter, Bentanat, the oldest daughter of Rameses II and Isis-Nofret, who later became
a great royal wife, really was consummated. The anonymous princess in the tomb is
clearly the result of a special union.

Thus the idea that such sacred marriages between father and daughter were merely
symbolic has now been abandoned. Another view of this young girl, before the goddess
Nephthys, shows her with a straight plait that falls to one side of her face.