Lecture II. Egyptian Religion. 33
scheme which placed the Ennead or group of nine at the head
of the Pantheon had been accepted throughout the country. It
was the beginning of an inevitable process of thought, which
ended by resolving the deities of the official cult into forms or
manifestations one of the other, and by landing its adherents in
pantheism.
To a certain extent, therefore, the general incapacity for
abstract thought which distinguished the Egyptians did not
hold good of the priestly colleges. But even among the
priests the abstract was never entirely dissociated from the [034]
symbol. Symbolism still dominates the profoundest thoughts
and expressions of the later inscriptions; the writer cannot free
himself from the sensuous image, except perhaps in a few
individual cases. At the most, Egyptian thought cannot rise
further than the conception of“the god who has no form”—a
confession in itself of inability to conceive of what is formless.
It is true that after the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty the deity
is addressed asKheper zes-ef,“that which is self-grown,” “the
self-existent”; but when we find the same epithet applied also
to plants like the balsam and minerals like saltpetre, it is clear
that it does not possess the abstract significance we should read
into it to-day. It simply expresses the conviction that the god
to whom the prayer is offered is a god who was never born in
human fashion, but who grew up of himself, like the mineral
which effloresces from the ground, or the plant which is not
grown from seed. Similarly, when it is said of him that he
is“existent from the beginning,”—kheper em%at,—or, as it is
otherwise expressed, that he is“the father of the beginning,”the
phrase is less abstract than it seems at first sight to be. The very
wordkheperor“existent”denotes the visible universe, while
%ator“beginning”is the hinder extremity. The phrase can be
pressed just as little as the epithet“lord of eternity,”applied
to deities whose birth and death are nevertheless asserted in
the same breath. Perhaps the most abstract conception of the