Lecture IV. The Sun-God And The Ennead. 85
be conceived of as symbolical like the generation of thought, all
the more since the deities who had proceeded from Tum were
all of them symbols representing the phenomena of the visible
world. Hence the idea of generation passed naturally into that of
emanation, one divine being emanating from another as thought
emanates from thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of
symbolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the expression
of an idea meant a concrete form. Seb and Nut were the divine
ideas which underlay the earth and the firmament and kept them
in existence, but they were at the same time the earth and the
firmament themselves. They represented thought in a concrete
form, if we may borrow a phrase from the Hegelian philosophy.
The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon by Greek
thinkers in the days when Alexandria was the meeting-place of
the old world and the new. It afforded an explanation not only
of creation, but also of the origin of evil, and had, moreover,
behind it the venerable shadow of Egyptian antiquity. It became
the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the Gnostic systems, and
through them made its way into Christian thought. From another
point of view it may be regarded as an anticipation of the doctrine
of evolution.
The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was [092]
accomplished long before the Pyramid texts were written under
the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. The Ennead appears
in them as a long established doctrine, with all its consequences.
The solar faith had laid firm hold of Egyptian religion, and
gained a position from which it was never to be dislodged.
Henceforward Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and
beliefs which flowed from it, and the gods and goddesses of the
land assumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not
before, a new view of the future life obtained official sanction,
which substituted the sun-god for Osiris and the solar bark for
the Osirian paradise. But I must leave an account of it to another
occasion, and confine myself at present to the last and most