The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

12 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

in the right.”
There is yet another danger against which we must guard when
dealing with the religions of the past; it is that of confusing the
thoughts and utterances of individuals with the common religious
beliefs of the communities in which they lived. We are for the
most part dependent on literary materials for our knowledge of
the faiths of the ancient world, and consequently the danger
of which I speak is one to which the historian of religion is
particularly exposed. But it must be remembered that a literary
writer is, by the very fact of his literary activity, different from
the majority of his contemporaries, and that this difference in
the ages before the invention of printing was greater than it is
to-day. He was not only an educated man; he was also a man of
exceptional culture. He was a man whose thoughts and sayings
were considered worthy of being remembered, who could think
for himself, and whose thoughts were listened to by others. His
abilities or genius raised him above the ordinary level; his ideas,
accordingly, could not be the ideas of the multitude about him,
nor could he, from the nature of the case, express them in the
same way. The poets or theologians of Egypt and Babylonia were
necessarily original thinkers, and we cannot, therefore, expect
to find in their writings merely a reflection of the beliefs or
superstitions of those among whom they lived.
To reconstruct the religion of Egypt from the literary works
of which a few fragments have come down to us, would be like
[011] reconstructing the religion of this country in the last century from
a few tattered pages of Hume or Burns, of Dugald Stewart or Sir
Walter Scott. The attempts to show that ancient Egyptian religion
was a sublime monotheism, or an enlightened pantheism which
disguised itself in allegories and metaphors, have their origin
in a confusion between the aspirations of individual thinkers
and the actual religion of their time. There are indeed literary
monuments rescued from the wreck of ancient Egyptian culture
which embody the highest and most spiritual conceptions of the