222 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia[241] was also characterised by a spirit of creativeness; the Egyptian
created new religious conceptions because he was not afraid to
follow his premisses to their end.
But he was intensely practical. Abstractions as such had little
attraction for him, and he translated them into material form.
The symbolism of his system of writing favoured the process:
even such an abstract idea as that of“becoming”became for
him a“transformation”or“change of outward shape.”In spite,
therefore, of the spirituality and profundity of much of his
theology, his religion remained essentially materialistic. The
gods might indeed pass one into the other and be but the
manifold forms under which the ever-changing divine essence
manifested itself, but this was because it was one with nature and
the infinite variety which nature displays. Even the supreme god
of Khu-n-Aten incorporated himself at it were in the visible orb
of the sun.
The incarnation of the deity accordingly presented no difficulty
to the Egyptian mind. It followed necessarily from the
fundamental principles of his creed. The divinity which
permeated the whole of nature revealed itself more clearly
than elsewhere in that which possessed life. Egyptian religious
thought never quite shook itself free from the influences of the
primitive belief that life and motion were the same. Whatever
moves possesses life, whatever lives must move;—such was,
and still is, one of the axioms of primitive man. And since the
deity manifested itself in movement, it could be recognised in
whatever was alive. Man on the one side became a god in the
person of the Pharaoh, the gods on the other side became men
who had lived and died like Osiris, or had ruled over Egypt in
the days of old. Even the ordinary man contained within him
a particle or effluence of the divine essence which could never
die; and the bodily husk in which it was incarnated could, under
[242] certain conditions, acquire the properties of that divinity to
which it had afforded a home. That the divine essence could thus