Lecture IX. The Popular Religion Of Egypt. 209
The amulets buried with the dead, the relics preserved in the
temples, had originally been the fetishes of the earlier population
of Egypt. They hardly changed their character when they became
symbols endowed with mysterious properties, or relics of the
State gods which still possessed miraculous powers. The peasant
might be told in the ritual of Amon: in“the sanctuary of the
god clamour is an abomination to him: pray for thyself with a
loving heart, in which the words remain hidden; that he may
supply thy need, hear thy words and accept thine offering”;^182
but it was a teaching that was far above him. When he entered [228]
the sanctuary it was to see the processions of the priests and
the relics preserved in it, and it was in these relics that he
still put his trust. It was not only in Ethiopia that there were
moving and speaking statues which elected the king by taking
him by the hand; in Thebes itself, under the priestly kings of
the Twentieth Dynasty, we find wonder-working statues whose
reality was guaranteed by the priesthood. One of them, it was
said, was sent to Asia, where it delivered a king's daughter
from the demon that possessed her, and afterwards returned in
a moment to Thebes of its own accord; while others answered
the questions addressed to them by nodding the head, or even
pronounced prophecies regarding the future.^183 Indeed, as we
have seen, the old theory of the ka implied that the statue of
the dead man could be reanimated in a sense by his spirit; and
a text at Dendera speaks of the soul of Hathor descending from
heaven as a human-headed hawk of lapis-lazuli, and uniting itself
with her image. The peasant, therefore, might be excused if he
remained true to the superstitions and traditions of his ancestors,
and left the official religion, with its one ineffable god, to those
who were cultured enough to understand it. Like the peasant of
modern Italy, he was content with a divinity that he could see
(^182) Erman,Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 273.
(^183) See Maspero,Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie égyptiennes, i. pp.
82-89.