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at Memphis, for example, Imhotep,“he who comes in peace,”a
title of Pta%, became his son and the second person in the trinity.
Other members of the trinity were fetched from neighbouring
cities and nomes; Nit of Sais had Osiris as a husband, and Sekhet
of Letopolis and Bast of Bubastis were successively regarded as
the wives of Pta%.
The triad consisted of a divine father, wife, and son. It was
thus a counterpart of the human family, and belonged to the same
order of ideas as that which explained the creation of the world by
a process of generation. This was the cosmology of Heliopolis,
and it is probable that to Heliopolis also we must ascribe the
doctrine of the Trinity. At any rate the doctrine seems to have
been solar in its origin. As Tum, the god of sunset, was identical
with Khepera, the sun of the morning, and Ra, the sun of the
noonday,—all three being but one god under diverse forms,—so
the divine father was believed to engender himself in the person
of the divine son, and the divine mother to be one with the
divine father and son. The divine essence remained necessarily
the same, whatever might be the forms or names under which it
displayed itself; and the name, it must be remembered, had for [232]
the Egyptian a separate and real existence. The father became
the son and the son the father through all time, and of both alike
the mother was but another form. It was eternal fatherhood,
eternal motherhood, and eternal generation. The development of
the doctrine was assisted by that identification of the Egyptian
deities with the sun-god which ended in solar pantheism, as well
as by the old theory of the ka, of a personality distinguishable
from that to which it belonged, identical with that of which it was
the double, and yet at the same time enjoying an independent
existence of its own.
With the spread of the Osirian form of faith the doctrine of
the Trinity became universal throughout Egypt. The organisation
of the faith had included the reduction of the cycle of divinities
connected with Osiris into a trinity. Thoth and Anubis, Nebhât