The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

114 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

of the sacred animals from being pictured on the temple walls.
As long as there was a human god on earth, there could also be
a human god in heaven; and in the Pyramid texts of the Sixth
Dynasty the dead Pepi or Teta is as much a god as any deity in
the pantheon.
When the Osirian faith had spread throughout Egypt, and the
pious Egyptian looked forward after death to becoming himself
an“Osiris,”there was still greater reason for the divine honours
that were paid to the ancestor. In paying them to him the
worshipper was paying them to the god of the dead. And the
god of the dead was himself one of the ancestors of the Egyptian
people. He was a human god who had once ruled on earth,
and he still governed as a Pharaoh in the world beyond the
grave. As the Pharaoh was a theomorphic man, so Osiris was an
anthropomorphic god. In him the cult of the ancestor reached its
fullest development.
It was natural that Pharaonic Egypt should have been, so far
as we know, the birthplace of euhemerism. Where the gods had
human forms, and the men were gods, it was inevitable that it
should arise. The deification of the Pharaoh prevented any line
being drawn between the living man and the deity he worshipped.
As the man could be a god, so too could the god be a man. The
gods of Egypt were accordingly transformed into Pharaohs, who
lived and conquered and died like the Pharaohs of history. They
[124] differed from the men of to-day only in having lived long ago,
and on that account being possessed of powers which are now
lost. That they should have died did not make them less divine
and immortal. The Pharaoh also died like the ancestors who were
worshipped at the tombs, but death meant nothing more than
passing into another form of existence. It was merely a re-birth
under new conditions. TheKacontinued as before; there was no
change in outward shape or in the moral and intellectual powers.
In fact, the death of the god was a necessary accompaniment of
an anthropomorphic form of religion. In Babylonia the temples