Ten Great Religions by James Freeman Clarke

J >> James Freeman Clarke >> Ten Great Religions

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45

The oldest mural paintings disclose a state of the arts of civilization so
advanced as to surprise even those who have made archaeology a study, and
who consequently know how few new things there are under the sun. It is
_not_ astonishing to find houses with doors and windows, with verandas,
with barns for grain, vineyards, gardens, fruit-trees, etc. We might also
expect, since man is a fighting animal, to see, as we do, pictures of
marching troops, armed with spears and shields, bows, slings, daggers,
axes, maces, and the boomerang; or to notice coats of mail, standards,
war-chariots; or to find the assault of forts by means of scaling-ladders.
But these ancient tombs also exhibit to us scenes of domestic life and
manners which would seem to belong to the nineteenth century after our
era, rather than to the fifteenth century before it. Thus we see monkeys
trained to gather fruit from the trees in an orchard; houses furnished
with a great variety of chairs, tables, ottomans, carpets, couches, as
elegant and elaborate as any used now. There are comic and _genre_
pictures of parties, where the gentlemen and ladies are sometimes
represented as being the worse for wine; of dances where ballet-girls in
short dresses perform very modern-looking pirouettes; of exercises in
wrestling, games of ball, games of chance like chess or checkers, of
throwing knives at a mark, of the modern thimblerig, wooden dolls for
children, curiously carved wooden boxes, dice, and toy-balls. There are
men and women playing on harps, flutes, pipes, cymbals, trumpets, drums,
guitars, and tambourines. Glass was, till recently, believed to be a
modern invention, unknown to the ancients. But we find it commonly used as
early as the age of Osertasen I., more than three thousand eight hundred
years ago; and we have pictures of glass-blowing and of glass bottles as
far back as the fourth dynasty. The best Venetian glass-workers are unable
to rival some of the old Egyptian work; for the Egyptians could combine
all colors in one cup, introduce gold between two surfaces of glass, and
finish in glass details of feathers, etc., which it now requires a
microscope to make out. It is evident, therefore, that they understood the
use of the magnifying-glass. The Egyptians also imitated successfully the
colors of precious stones, and could even make statues thirteen feet high,
closely resembling an emerald. They also made mosaics in glass, of
wonderfully brilliant colors. They could cut glass, at the most remote
periods. Chinese bottles have also been found in previously unopened tombs
of the eighteenth dynasty, indicating commercial intercourse reaching as
far back as that epoch. They were able to spin and weave, and color cloth;
and were acquainted with the use of mordants, the wonder in modern
calico-printing. Pliny describes this process as used in Egypt, but
evidently without understanding its nature. Writing-paper made of the
papyrus is as old as the Pyramids. The Egyptians tanned leather and made
shoes; and the shoemakers on their benches are represented working exactly
like ours. Their carpenters used axes, saws, chisels, drills, planes,
rulers, plummets, squares, hammers, nails, and hones for sharpening. They
also understood the use of glue in cabinet-making, and there are paintings
of veneering, in which a piece of thin dark wood is fastened by glue to a
coarser piece of light wood. Their boats were propelled by sails on yards
and masts, as well as by oars. They used the blow-pipe in the manufacture
of gold chains and other ornaments. They had rings of gold and silver for
money, and weighed it in scales of a careful construction. Their
hieroglyphics are carved on the hardest granite with a delicacy and
accuracy which indicates the use of some metallic cutting instrument,
probably harder than our best steel. The siphon was known in the fifteenth
century before Christ. The most singular part of their costume was the
wig, worn by all the higher classes, who constantly shaved their heads, as
well as their chins,--which shaving of the head is supposed by Herodotus
to be the reason of the thickness of the Egyptian skull. They frequently
wore false beards. Sandals, shoes, and low boots, some very elegant, are
found in the tombs. Women wore loose robes, ear-rings, finger-rings,
bracelets, armlets, anklets, gold necklaces. In the tombs are found vases
for ointment, mirrors, combs, needles. Doctors and drugs were not unknown
to them; and the passport system is no modern invention, for their deeds
contain careful descriptions of the person, exactly in the style with
which European travellers are familiar. We have only mentioned a small
part of the customs and arts with which the tombs of the Egyptians show
them to have been familiar. These instances are mostly taken from
Wilkinson, whose works contain numerous engravings from the monuments
which more than verify all we have said.

The celebrated French Egyptologist, M. Mariette, has very much enlarged
our knowledge of the more ancient dynasties, by his explorations, first
under a mission from the French government, and afterward from that of
Egypt. The immense temples and palaces of Thebes are all of a date at
least B.C. 1000. We know the history of Egypt very well as far back as the
time of the Hyksos, or to the eighteenth dynasty. M. Mariette has
discovered statues and Sphinxes which he believes to have been the work of
the Hyksos, the features being wholly different from that of the typical
Egyptian. Four of these Sphinxes, found by Mariette on the site of the old
Tanis, have the regular body of a lion, according to the canon of Egyptian
art, but the human heads are wholly un-Egyptian. Mariette, in describing
them, says that in the true Egyptian Sphinx there is always a quiet
majesty, the eye calm and wide open, a smile on the lips, a round face,
and a peculiar coiffure with wide open wings. Nothing of this is to be
found in these Sphinxes. Their eyes are small, the nose aquiline, the
cheeks hard, the mouth drawn down with a grave expression.

These Shepherd Kings, the Hyksos, ruled Lower Egypt, according to Manetho,
five hundred and eleven years, which, according to Renan,[150] brings the
preceding dynasty (the fourteenth of Manetho) as early as B.C. 2000.
Monuments of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties are common. The oldest
obelisk dates B.C. 2800. Thanks to the excavations of M. Mariette, we now
have a large quantity of sculptures and statues of a still earlier epoch.
M. Renan describes[151] tombs visited by himself, which he considers to be
the oldest known, and which he regards as being B.C. 4000,[152] where were
represented all the details of domestic life. The tone of these pictures
was glad and gay; and, what is remarkable, they had no trace of the
funeral ritual or the god Osiris. These were not like tombs, but rather
like homes. To secure the body from all profanation, it was concealed in a
pit, carefully hidden in the solid masonry. These tombs belong to the six
first dynasties.

The great antiquity of Egyptian civilization is universally admitted; but
to fix its chronology and precise age becomes very difficult, from the
fact that the Egyptians had no era from which to date forward or backward.
This question we shall return to in a subsequent section of this chapter.

Sec. 2. Religious Character of the Egyptians. Their Ritual.

But, wonderful as was the civilization of Egypt, it is not this which now
chiefly interests us. They were prominent among all ancient nations for
their interest in religion, especially of the ceremonial part of religion,
or worship. Herodotus says: "They are of all men the most excessively
attentive to the worship of the gods." And beside his statement to that
effect, there is evidence that the origin of much of the theology,
mythology, and ceremonies of the Hebrews and Greeks was in Egypt. "The
names of almost all the gods," says Herodotus, "came from Egypt into
Greece" (Euterpe, 50). The Greek oracles, especially that of Dodona, he
also states to have been brought from Egypt (II. 54-57), and adds,
moreover, that the Egyptians were the first who introduced public
festivals, processions, and solemn supplications, which the Greeks learned
from them. "The Egyptians, then," says he, "are beyond measure scrupulous
in matters of religion (Sec. 64). They invented the calendar, and connected
astrology therewith." "Each month and day," says Herodotus (II. 82), "is
assigned to some particular god, and each person's birthday determines his
fate." He testifies (II. 123) that "the Egyptians were also the first to
say that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body perishes it
transmigrates through every variety of animal." It seems apparent, also,
that the Greek mysteries of Eleusis were taken from those of Isis; the
story of the wanderings of Ceres in pursuit of Proserpine being manifestly
borrowed from those of Isis in search of the body of Osiris. With this
testimony of Herodotus modern writers agree. "The Egyptians," says
Wilkinson, "were unquestionably the most pious nation of all antiquity.
The oldest monuments show their belief in a future life. And Osiris, the
Judge, is mentioned in tombs erected two thousand years before Christ."
Bunsen tells us that "it has at last been ascertained that all the great
gods of Egypt are on the oldest monuments," and says: "It is a great and
astounding fact, established beyond the possibility of doubt, that the
empire of Menes on its first appearance in history possessed an
established mythology, that is, a series of gods. Before the empire of
Menes, the separate Egyptian states had their temple worship regularly
organized."

Everything among the Egyptians, says M. Maury,[153] took the stamp of
religion. Their writing was so full of sacred symbols that it could
scarcely be used for any purely secular purpose. Literature and science
were only branches of theology. Art labored only in the service of worship
and to glorify the gods. Religious observances were so numerous and so
imperative, that the most common labors of daily life could not be
performed without a perpetual reference to some priestly regulation. The
Egyptian only lived to worship. His fate in the future life was constantly
present to him. The sun, when it set, seemed to him to die; and when it
rose the next morning, and tricking its beams flamed once more in the
forehead of the sky, it was a perpetual symbol of a future resurrection.
Religion penetrated so deeply into the habits of the land, that it almost
made a part of the intellectual and physical organization of its
inhabitants. Habits continued during many generations at last become
instincts, and are transmitted with the blood.[154] So religion in Egypt
became an instinct. Unaltered by the dominion of the Persians, the
Ptolemies, and Romans, it was, of all polytheisms, the most obstinate in
its resistance to Christianity, and retained its devotees down to the
sixth century of our era.[155]

There were more festivals in Egypt than among any other ancient people,
the Greeks not excepted. Every month and day was governed by a god. There
were two feasts of the New-Year, twelve of the first days of the months,
one of the rising of the dog-star (Sirius, called Sothis), and others to
the great gods, to seed-time and harvest, to the rise and fall of the
Nile. The feast of lamps at Sais was in honor of Neith, and was kept
throughout Egypt.[156] The feast of the death of Osiris; the feast of his
resurrection (when people called out, "We have found him! Good luck!");
feasts of Isis (one of which lasted four days); the great feast at
Bubastis, greatest of all,--these were festivals belonging to all Egypt.
On one of them as many as seven hundred thousand persons sailed on the
Nile with music. At another, the image of the god was carried to the
temple by armed men, who were resisted by armed priests in a battle in
which many were often killed.

The history of the gods was embodied in the daily life of the people. In
an old papyrus described by De Rouge,[157] it is said: "On the twelfth of
Chorak no one is to go out of doors, for on that day the transformation
of Osiris into the bird Wennu took place; on the fourteenth of Toby no
voluptuous songs must be listened to, for Isis and Nepthys bewail Osiris
on that day. On the third of Mechir no one can go on a journey, because
Set then began a war." On another day no one must go out. Another was
lucky, because on it the gods conquered Set; and a child born on that day
was supposed to live to a great age.

Every temple had its own body of priests. They did not constitute an
exclusive caste, though they were continued in families. Priests might be
military commanders, governors of provinces, judges, and architects.
Soldiers had priests for sons, and the daughters of priests married
soldiers. Of three brothers, one was a priest, another a soldier, and a
third held a civil employment.[158] Joseph, a stranger, though naturalized
in the country, received as a wife the daughter of the High-Priest of On,
or Heliopolis.

The priests in Egypt were of various grades, as the chief priests or
pontiffs, prophets, judges, scribes, those who examined the victims,
keepers of the robes, of the sacred animals, etc.

Women also held offices in the temple and performed duties there, though
not as priestesses.

The priests were exempt from taxes, and were provided for out of the
public stores. They superintended sacrifices, processions, funerals, and
were initiated into the greater and lesser mysteries; they were also
instructed in surveying. They were particular in diet, both as to quantity
and quality. Flesh of swine was particularly forbidden, and also that of
fish. Beans were held in utter abhorrence, also peas, onions, and garlic,
which, however, were offered on the altar. They bathed twice a day and
twice in the night, and shaved the head and body every three days. A great
purification took place before their fasts, which lasted from seven to
forty-two days.

They offered prayers for the dead.

The dress of the priests was simple, chiefly of linen, consisting of an
under-garment and a loose upper robe, with full sleeves, and the
leopard-skin above; sometimes one or two feathers in the head.

Chaplets and flowers were laid upon the altars, such as the lotus and
papyrus, also grapes and figs in baskets, and ointment in alabaster vases.
Also necklaces, bracelets, and jewelry, were offered as thanksgivings and
invocations.

Oxen and other animals were sacrificed, and the blood allowed to flow over
the altar. Libations of wine were poured on the altar. Incense was offered
to all the gods in censers.

Processions were usual with the Egyptians; in one, shrines were carried on
the shoulders by long staves passed through rings. In others the statues
of the gods were carried, and arks like those of the Jews, overshadowed by
the wings of the goddess of truth spread above the sacred beetle.

The prophets were the most highly honored of the priestly order. They
studied the ten hieratical books. The business of the stolists[159] was to
dress and undress the images, to attend to the vestments of the priests,
and to mark the beasts selected for sacrifice. The scribes were to search
for the Apis, or sacred bull, and were required to possess great learning.

The priests had no sinecure; their life was full of minute duties and
restrictions. They seldom appeared in public, were married to one wife,
were circumcised like other Egyptians, and their whole time was occupied
either in study or the service of their gods. There was a gloomy tone to
the religion of Egypt, which struck the Greeks, whose worship was usually
cheerful. Apuleius says "the gods of Egypt rejoice in lamentations, those
of Greece in dances." Another Greek writer says, "The Egyptians offer
their gods tears."

Until Swedenborg[160] arrived, and gave his disciples the precise measure
and form of the life to come, no religion has ever taught an immortality
as distinct in its outline and as solid in its substance as that of the
Egyptians. The Greek and Roman hereafter was shadowy and vague; that of
Buddhism remote; and the Hebrew Beyond was wholly eclipsed and overborne
by the sense of a Divine presence and power immanent in space and time. To
the Egyptian, this life was but the first step, and a very short one, of
an immense career. The sun (Ra) alternately setting and rising, was the
perpetually present type of the progress of the soul, and the Sothiac
period (symbolized by the Phoenix) of 1421 years from one heliacal rising
of Sirius at the beginning of the fixed Egyptian year to the next, was
also made to define the cycle of human transmigrations. Two Sothiac
periods correspond nearly to the three thousand years spoken of by
Herodotus, during which the soul transmigrates through animal forms before
returning to its human body. Then, to use the Egyptian language, the soul
arrived at the ship of the sun and was received by Ra into his solar
splendor. On some sarcophagi the soul is symbolized by a hawk with a human
head, carrying in his claws two rings, which probably signify the two
Sothiac cycles of its transmigrations.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,[161] is as
old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain
extracts from the Ritual of the Dead. One hundred and forty-six chapters
of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the
Turin papyrus, the most complete in Europe. Chapters of it are found on
mummy-cases, on the wraps of mummies, on the walls of tombs, and within
the coffins on papyri. This Ritual is all that remains of the Hermetic
Books which constituted the library of the priesthood. Two antagonist
classes of deities appear in this liturgy as contending for the soul of
the deceased,--Osiris and his triad, Set and his devils. The Sun-God,
source of life, is also present.

An interesting chapter of the Ritual is the one hundred and twenty-fifth,
called the Hall of the Two Truths. It is the process of "separating a
person from his sins," not by confession and repentance, as is usual in
other religions, but by denying them. Forty-two deities are said to be
present to feed on the blood of the wicked. The soul addresses the Lords
of Truth, and declares that it has not done evil privily, and proceeds to
specifications. He says: "I have not afflicted any. I have not told
falsehoods. I have not made the laboring man do more than his task. I have
not been idle. I have not murdered. I have not committed fraud. I have not
injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of
the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not cheated by false
weights. I have not kept milk from sucklings. I have not caught the sacred
birds." Then, addressing each god by name, he declares: "I have not been
idle. I have not boasted. I have not stolen. I have not counterfeited, nor
killed sacred beasts, nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor
despised God in my heart." According to some texts, he declares,
positively, that he has loved God, that he has given bread to the hungry,
water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and an asylum to the
abandoned.

Funeral ceremonies among the Egyptians were often very imposing. The cost
of embalming, and the size and strength of the tomb, varied with the
position of the deceased. When the seventy days of mourning had elapsed,
the body in its case was ferried across the lake in front of the temple,
which represented the passage of the soul over the infernal stream. Then
came a dramatic representation of the trial of the soul before Osiris. The
priests, in masks, represented the gods of the underworld. Typhon accuses
the dead man, and demands his punishment. The intercessors plead for him.
A large pair of scales is set up, and in one scale his conduct is placed
in a bottle, and in the other an image of truth. These proceedings are
represented on the funeral papyri. One of these, twenty-two feet in
length, is in Dr. Abbott's collection of Egyptian antiquities, in New
York. It is beautifully written, and illustrated with careful drawings.
One represents the Hall of the Two Truths, and Osiris sitting in
judgment, with the scales of judgment before him.[162]

Many of the virtues which we are apt to suppose a monopoly of Christian
culture appear as the ideal of these old Egyptians. Brugsch says a
thousand voices from the tombs of Egypt declare this. One inscription in
Upper Egypt says: "He loved his father, he honored his mother, he loved
his brethren, and never went from his home in bad-temper. He never
preferred the great man to the low one." Another says: "I was a wise man,
my soul loved God. I was a brother to the great men and a father to the
humble ones, and never was a mischief-maker." An inscription at Sais, on a
priest who lived in the sad days of Cambyses, says: "I honored my father,
I esteemed my mother, I loved my brothers. I found graves for the unburied
dead. I instructed little children. I took care of orphans as though they
were my own children. For great misfortunes were on Egypt in my time, and
on this city of Sais."

Some of these declarations, in their "self-pleasing pride" of virtue,
remind one of the noble justification of himself by the Patriarch
Job.[163] Here is one of them, from the tombs of Ben-Hassan, over a Nomad
Prince:--

"What I have done I will say. My goodness and my kindness were ample. I
never oppressed the fatherless nor the widow. I did not treat cruelly the
fishermen, the shepherds, or the poor laborers. There was nowhere in my
time hunger or want. For I cultivated all my fields, far and near, in
order that their inhabitants might have food. I never preferred the great
and powerful to the humble and poor, but did equal justice to all."

A king's tomb at Thebes gives us in few words the religious creed of a
Pharaoh:--

"I lived in truth, and fed my soul with justice. What I did to men was
done in peace, and how I loved God, God and my heart well know. I have
given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked,
and a shelter to the stranger. I honored the gods with sacrifices, and the
dead with offerings."

A rock at Lycopolis pleads for an ancient ruler thus: "I never took the
child from its mother's bosom, nor the poor man from the side of his
wife." Hundreds of stones in Egypt announce as the best gifts which the
gods can bestow on their favorites, "the respect of men, and the love of
women."[164] Religion, therefore, in Egypt, connected itself with morality
and the duties of daily life. But kings and conquerors were not above the
laws of their religion. They were obliged to recognize their power and
triumphs as not their own work, but that of the great gods of their
country. Thus, on a monumental stele discovered at Karnak by M. Mariette,
and translated by De Rouge,[165] is an inscription recording the triumphs
of Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty (about B.C. 1600), which
sounds like the song of Miriam or the Hymn of Deborah. We give some
stanzas in which the god Amun addresses Thothmes:--

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Syrian princes;
Under thy feet they lie throughout the breadth of their country,
Like to the Lord of Light, I made them see thy glory,
Blinding their eyes with light, O earthly image of Amun!

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Asian peoples;
Captive now thou hast led the proud Assyrian chieftains;
Decked in royal robes, I made them see thy glory;
In glittering arms and fighting, high in thy lofty chariot.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down western nations;
Cyprus and the Ases have both heard thy name with terror;
Like a strong-horned bull I made them see thy glory;
Strong with piercing horns, so that none can stand before him.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down Lybian archers;
All the isles of the Greeks submit to the force of thy spirit;
Like a regal lion, I made them see thy glory;
Couched by the corpse he has made, down in the rocky valley.

"I am come: to thee have I given to strike down the ends of the ocean.
In the grasp of thy hand is the circling zone of the waters;
Like the soaring eagle, I have made them see thy glory,
Whose far-seeing eye there is none can hope to escape from."

A similar strain of religious poetry is in the Papyrus of Sallier, in the
British Museum.[166] This is an epic by an Egyptian poet named Pentaour,
celebrating the campaigns of Ramses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, of
the nineteenth dynasty. This great king had been called into Syria to put
down a formidable revolt of the Kheta (the Hittites of the Old Testament).
The poem seems to have been a famous one, for it had the honor of being
carved in full on the walls at Karnak, a kind of immortality which no
other epic poet has ever attained. It particularly describes an incident
in the war, when, by a stratagem of the enemy, King Ramses found himself
separated from the main body of his army and attacked by the enemy in full
force. Pentaour describes him in this situation as calling on Amun, God of
Thebes, for help, recounting the sacrifices he had offered to him, and
asking whether he would let him die in this extremity by the ignoble hands
of these Syrian tribes. "Have I not erected to thee great temples? Have I
not sacrificed to thee thirty thousand oxen? I have brought from
Elephantina obelisks to set up to thy name. I invoke thee, O my father,
Amun. I am in the midst of a throng of unknown tribes, and alone. But Amun
is better to me than thousands of archers and millions of horsemen. Amun
will prevail over the enemy." And, after defeating his foes, in his song
of triumph, the king says, "Amun-Ra has been at my right and my left in
the battles; his mind has inspired my own, and has prepared the downfall
of my enemies. Amun-Ra, my father, has brought the whole world to my
feet."[167]