The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

224 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

This very fact assisted in spiritualising Egyptian religion.
Ideas and their symbols interchange one with the other; the ideas,
moreover, develop and pass out of one form into another. The
identification, therefore, of the abstract and the concrete, of ideas
and substantial existence, made a pantheistic conception of the
universe easy. The divinity clothed itself in as many forms as
there were symbols to express it, and these forms passed one
into the other like phases of thought. The Egyptian was the first
discoverer of the term“becoming,”and the keynote of his creed
was the doctrine of transformation.
Transformation, it must be remembered, is not transmigration.
There was no passage of an individual soul from body to body,
from form to form; the divine essence permeated all bodies
and forms alike, though it manifested itself at a given moment
only under certain ones. It was in this power of manifestation
that the transformation consisted. Had the Egyptian not been
fettered by his materialistic symbolism, he would doubtless have
gone further and concluded that the various manifestations of the
divinity were subjective only—existing, that is to say, only in the
mind of the observer; as it was, he held them to be objective, and
to possess the same substantial reality as the symbolic pictures
by which they were denoted.
With all this, however, there was no severe literalism in
the interpretation of the symbol. Whatever may have been the
case at the outset, the symbol was as much a metaphor in the
historical ages of Egyptian history as are the metaphors of our
[244] own language. When the Egyptian spoke of“eating”his god,
he meant no more than we do when we speak of“absorbing”a
subject.^198 The Pyramid texts are full of such faded and forgotten
metaphors; the Egyptian was conservative above all other men,
and the language of religion is conservative above all others.
Doubtless, in some cases, he was the victim of the symbols and

(^198) Thus in the Pyramid texts (Unas518) Unas is described as“eating”the
crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.