Lecture IV. The Sun-God And The Ennead.
In my last lecture, when speaking of the form under which the
soul of man was pictured by the Egyptians, I mentioned that
it was often represented by a hawk, the symbol of the sun-
god. Why the hawk should have thus symbolised the sun is
a question that has often been asked. The Egyptians did not
know themselves; and Porphyry, in the dying days of the old
Egyptian faith, gravely declares that it was because the hawk
was a compound of blood and breath! One explanation has been
that it was because the hawk pounces down from the sky like
the rays of the sun, which, like the eagle, he can gaze at without
blinking; and a passage in theOdysseyof Homer (xv. 525) has
been invoked in favour of this view, where the hawk is called
“the swift messenger of Apollo.”But if there is any connection
between the Homeric passage and the Egyptian symbol, it would
show only that the symbol had been borrowed by the Greek poet.
Originally, moreover, it was only the sun-god of Upper Egypt
who was represented even by the Egyptians under the form of a
hawk.
This was Horus, often called in the later texts“Horus the elder”
(Hor-ur, the Greek Aroêris), in order to distinguish him from a
wholly different god, Horus the younger, the son of Isis. His
symbol, the hawk, is found on the early Pharaonic monuments
which recent excavations have brought to light. Sometimes the
hawk stands on the so-called standard, which is really a perch, [072]
sometimes on the crenelated circle, which denoted a city in
those primitive days. The standard is borne before the Pharaoh,
representing at once his own title and the nome or principality
over which he held rule; and its resemblance to the stone birds
perched on similar supports, which Mr. Bent found in the ruins of
Zimbabwe, suggests a connection between the prehistoric gold
miners of Central Africa and the early inhabitants of Southern
Egypt. On one of the early Egyptian monuments discovered at