212 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniathe old Egyptian faith. And what was true of the philosophy
of Philo was still more true of the philosophy of Alexandrine
Christianity.
You cannot but have been struck by the similarity of the
ancient Egyptian theory of the spiritual part of man to that which
underlies so much Christian speculation on the subject, and
which still pervades the popular theology of to-day. There is the
same distinction between soul and spirit, the same belief in the
resurrection of a material body, and in a heaven which is but a
glorified counterpart of our own earth. Perhaps, however, the
indebtedness of Christian theological theory to ancient Egyptian
dogma is nowhere more striking than in the doctrine of the
Trinity. The very terms used of it by Christian theologians meet
us again in the inscriptions and papyri of Egypt.
Professor Maspero has attempted to show that the Egyptian
doctrine of the Trinity was posterior to that of the Ennead.^184
Whether this were so or not, it makes its appearance at an early
date in Egyptian theology, and was already recognised in the
Pyramid texts. Originally the trinity was a triad like those we
find in Babylonian mythology. Here and there the primitive triads
[231] survived into historical times, like that of Khnum and the two
goddesses of the Cataract. But more frequently the trinity was
an artificial creation, the formation of which can still be traced.
Thus at Thebes the female element in it was found in Mut,“the
mother”goddess, a title of the supreme goddess of Upper Egypt;
while Khonsu, the moon-god, or Mentu, the old god of the nome,
became the divine son, and so took a place subordinate to that of
the local god Amon. Sometimes recourse was had to grammar,
and the second person in the trinity was obtained by attaching the
feminine suffix to the name of the chief god. In this way Amon-t
was grammatically evolved from Amon, and even Ra-t from Ra.
Elsewhere an epithet of the god was transformed into his son;
(^184) See above, p. 90.