186 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and BabyloniaA sorrowful place for the dead.
They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken.”It was better, indeed, that it should be so than that they should
awaken only to lead the existence which the Book of Am Duat
describes.
How far the doctrines of the solar theology extended beyond
the narrow circle in which they originated, it is difficult to say.
In the nature of the case they could not become popular, as
they started from an assumption of esoteric knowledge. We
know that the majority of the Egyptians continued to hold to
the Osirian creed up to the last days of paganism—or at all
events they professed to do so—and as long as the Osirian creed
was retained the moral element in religion was recognised. In
one respect, however, the solar theology triumphed. The gods of
Egypt, including Osiris himself, were identified with the sun-god,
and became forms or manifestations of Ra. Egyptian religion
became pantheistic; the divinity was discovered everywhere, and
the shadowy and impersonal forms of the ancient deities were
mingled together in hopeless confusion. It seemed hardly to
matter which was invoked, for each was all and all were each.
Gnosticism was the natural daughter of the solar theology.
[203] The doctrine that knowledge is salvation and that the gods of the
popular cult are manifestations of the sun-god, was applied to
explain the origin of evil. Evil became the result of imperfection
and ignorance, necessarily inherent in matter, and arising from
the fact that the creation is due to the last of a long series of æons
or emanations from the supreme God. The æons are the legitimate
descendants of the manifold deities whom the Egyptian priests
had resolved into forms of Ra, while the identification of evil
with the necessary imperfection of matter deprives it of a moral
element, and finds a remedy for it in thegnosisor“knowledge”
of the real nature of things. Even the strange monsters and
symbolic figures which play so large a part in the solar revelation