The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

94 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

A Roman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was torn
to pieces by the mob before the eyes of Diodorus, although the
Romans were at the time masters of the country, and the reigning
Ptolemy did his utmost to save the offender.^66 For the majority
of the people the cat was an incarnate god.
This worship of animals was a grievous puzzle to the
philosophers of the classical age. The venerable antiquity of
Egypt, the high level of its moral code, and, above all, the
spiritual and exalted character of so much of its religion, had
deeply impressed the thinking world of the Roman Empire. That
world had found, in a blending of Egyptian religious ideas with
Greek metaphysics, a key to the mysteries of life and death;
in the so-called Hermetic books the old beliefs and religious
conceptions of Egypt were reduced to a system and interpreted
from a Greek point of view, while the Neo-Platonic philosophy
was an avowed attempt to combine the symbolism of Egypt with
the subtleties of Greek thought. But the animal worship was hard
to reconcile with philosophy; even symbolism failed to explain
it away, or to satisfy the mind of the inquirer. Plutarch had
boldly denied that the worship of an animal was in any way more
absurd than that of an image; the deity, if so he chose, could
[102] manifest himself in either equally well. Porphyry had recourse
to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If the soul migrated
after death into the body of some lower animal, he urged, it
would communicate to the latter a portion of the divine essence.
But after all this was no explanation of the worship paid to the
animal; the soul had not been worshipped while it was still in the
body of its original possessor, and there was therefore no reason
why it should be worshipped when it was embodied in another
form. Moreover, metempsychosis in the Greek sense was never
an Egyptian doctrine. All the Egyptian held was that the soul,
after it had been justified and admitted to a state of blessedness,

(^66) Diod. Sic. i. 83.