Religion of the Egyptians
In Egypt, life was the thing sacred. Hence all that had life, all that produced and all that ended life, was in a way divine. Hence death, too, was sacred. The Egyptian lived in the contemplation of death. His coffin was made in his lifetime; his ancestors were embalmed. The sovereign’s tomb was built to last for, not centuries, but thousands of years.
The highest form of the religious belief of the Egyptians included the idea that the soul was immortal. In the religion of Egypt were united the worship of Nature, and of the spirit which underlies and animates Nature.
The Egyptian Gods.—Having depended on the Nile and the Sun for the vegetation needed for their food, the people conceived human forms for them, and for the prolific Earth, as deities; namely, Osiris as the Nile and the Sun, and Isis as the Earth. These were the only divinities that were worshiped throughout Egypt. In later times they came to be regarded as divinities of the sun and the moon.
Another god, Anubis, worshiped in the form of a human being with the head of a dog, is represented as an Egyptian Hermes.
Whatever higher religious ideas may have been held by learned priests, the worship of the common people was chiefly adoration of [349] animals. The sacred bull, called Apis, was worshiped at Memphis with the highest honors. All Egypt rejoiced on his annual birthday festival, and there was a public mourning when he died. The dog, the hawk, the white ibis, and the cat, were also specially revered. The sparrow-hawk, with human head and outspread wings, denoted the soul flying through space, to animate a new body. Thus we find mingled, in the religion of Egypt, gross superstition in the masses of the people, along with the spiritual conceptions of cultivated minds.
The Future Life.—In a papyrus-book, discovered in the royal tombs of Thebes, called the Book of the Dead, we read in pictured writing of a second life, and of a Hall of Judgment, where the god Osiris sits, provided with a balance, a secretary, and forty-two attendant-judges. In the balance the soul is weighed against a statue of divine justice, placed in the other scale, which is guarded by the god Anubis. The assistant-judges give separate decisions, after the person on trial has pleaded his cause before them. The soul rejected as unworthy of the Egyptian heaven was believed to be driven off to some dark realm, to assume the form of a beast, in accordance with a low character and sensual nature. An acquitted soul joined the throng of the blest.
Embalming.—The religion of the people was connected with the practice of embalming the bodies of the dead. This art seems to have derived its origin from the idea that the preservation of the body was necessary for the return of the soul to the human form after it had completed its cycle of existence of three or ten thousand years. The art appears as old as 4000 B. C., at least, for the bodies of Cheops, Mycerinus, and others of the age of the fourth dynasty, were embalmed.