Lecture IX. The Popular Religion Of Egypt. 189
A considerable portion of the fellahin were descended from
the earlier neolithic population of Egypt, whom the Pharaonic
Egyptians found already settled in the country. In a former lecture
I have endeavoured to show that they were fetish-worshippers,
and that among their fetishes animals were especially prominent.
They had no priests, for fetishism is incompatible with a
priesthood in the proper sense of the term. Neither did they
embalm their dead; all those beliefs and ideas, therefore, which
were connected with a priesthood and the practice of embalming
must have come to them from without; the gods and sacerdotal
colleges of the State religion, the Osirian creed, and the belief
in the resurrection, must have been for them of foreign origin.
And of foreign origin they doubtless remained to the bulk of the
nation down to the last days of paganism.
Amon and Ra and Osiris were indeed familiar names, the
temple festivals were duly observed, and the processions in
honour of the State gods duly attended; and after the age of
the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the fusion between the different
elements in the population was completed, the practice of
mummification became general; but the names of the State
gods were names only, to which the peasant attached a very
different meaning from that which official orthodoxy demanded.
He still worshipped the tree whose shady branches arose on the [206]
edge of the desert or at the corner of his field, or brought his
offerings to some animal, in which he saw not a symbol or an
incarnation of Horus and Sekhet, but an actual hawk and cat.
How deeply rooted this belief in the divinity of animals was
in the minds of the people, is shown by the fact that the State
religion had to recognise it just as Mohammed had perforce to
recognise the sanctity of the“Black Stone”of the Kaaba. As
we have seen, the second king of the Second Thinite Dynasty is
said to have legalised the worship of the bull Apis of Memphis,
Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the ram of Mendes; and though the
official explanation was that these animals were but incarnations