Lecture V. Animal Worship. 113
conception of the soul there accordingly gathered associations
with the light, and more especially with the light of the sun.
The sun-god, too, had a double and a soul; what could be more
fitting, therefore, than that they should be represented by the
crested ibis? It was but a step farther to see in the bird an
incarnation of the sun-god himself.
The subsequent development of the myth was due to the fact
that the god of Heliopolis continued to be depicted as a man. His
human form was too stereotyped in religious art to be changed,
and the phœnix consequently was never actually identified with
him. It was his soul, but it was not Ra himself. The combination
of the man and the beast could be tolerated only when both were
co-ordinate survivals from a distant past. The inner contradiction
between the human and the bestial god was then obscured or
ignored.
With the human god was closely connected the ancestor
worship, which was quite as much a characteristic of Egypt
as the worship of animals. It was due in the first instance,
perhaps, to the belief that theKaof the dead man needed food
and nourishment, and that if he did not receive them the hungry
double would revenge himself on the living. To this day the
Egyptian fellahin, both Moslem and Copt, visit the tombs of
their forefathers at certain times in the year, and, after eating
and drinking beside them, place a few grains of wheat or some
similar offering on a shelf in front of a window-like opening into
the tomb. But the belief in the material needs of theKawould
not of itself have sufficed to support the long lines of priests who
were attached to the cult of the dead, or the prayers that were [123]
addressed to them. It was the deification of the Pharaoh which
caused“prophets”of Khufu and Khafra to be still consecrated in
the days of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty,^85 and prevented the forms
(^85) On a stela in the Louvre a certain Psamtik, son of Uza-Hor, calls himself
prophet of Khufu, Khaf-Ra, and Dadef-Ra, as well as of Tanen, Isis, and
Harmakhis.