Lecture II. Egyptian Religion. 41
a similar belief in Peru shows how easy it was for such a belief
to grow up in regard to the leader of a conquering people who
brought with them a higher culture and the arts of life. But it
presupposes religious conceptions which, though characteristic
of Babylonia, are directly contrary to those which seem to
underlie the religion of Egypt. Among the Babylonians the gods
assumed human forms; man had been made in the likeness of
the gods, and the gods therefore were of human shape. The
converse, however, was the case in Egypt. Here the gods, with
few exceptions, were conceived of as brute beasts. Horus was
the hawk, Nekheb the vulture, Uazit of Buto the deadly uræus
snake.
There is only one way of explaining the anomaly. The [043]
conception of the gods which made them men must have come
from outside, and been imposed upon a people whose gods were
the brute beasts. It must have been the Pharaonic invaders from
Asia to whom the leader they followed was an incarnate god.
Hence it was just this leader and no other who was clothed with
divinity. Hence, too, it was that the older worship of animals
was never really harmonised with the worship of the Pharaoh.
The inner contradiction which existed between the new religious
conceptions remained to the end, in spite of all the efforts of
the priestly colleges to make them agree. Religious art might
represent the god with the head of a beast or bird and the body of
a man, the sacred books might teach that the deity is unconfined
by form, and so could pass at will from the body of a man into
that of a beast; but all such makeshifts could not hide the actual
fact. Between the deity who is human and the deity who is bestial
no true reconciliation is possible.
We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh back
to Asia, and the Asiatic element in the Egyptian population.
The Pharaonic conquerors of the valley of the Nile were those
“followers of Horus”who worshipped their leader as a god. It
was a god in human form who had led them to victory, and Horus