For the most part, the king is satistied with one god as his father; but at times a step further is taken, and the Pharaoh claims a plurality of heavenly fathers. Thus Ramses II. makes. the gods of Egypt declare that they had generated him as their son and heir, while the goddesses tell how they nursed and brought him up, so that in a sense at least they performed maternal functions for the monarch,
(3) In all the forms of creation hitherto dis- cussed, some act of a deity is required in order to call something new into being; it may be an act of violence, or a procreative act, or a shedding of tears, etc. But, side by side with these, there was a, considerable series of myths which did not regard any active exertion on the part of the creator as necessary, but attributed the result simply to speech, the uttering of words.
The Egyptian assumed—and this is a very im-
RELIGION OF EGYPT
portant notion from the point of view of the history of religion—that an inward and indis- soluble connexion subsists between an object and its name (cf. Wiedemann in L’ Egypte, i. 573 ff., and in the Muséon, xv. 49ff.). Every thing has a name; without name is no thing, and without thing no name is conceivable. Thus the name becomes an Bee eile component of the Ego, on a footing of equality with soul, form, heart, etc., and its continued existence is indispensable if the whole man is to enter upon immortality. Any one who utters the name of a god correctly is sure of his favour. When the goddess Isis suc- ceeded by her wiles in inducing the sun-god Ra to whisper to her his real name, she thereby obtained the power of this god and became the supreme goddess. Any one who in the under world was able to call a demon by name was safe from any further harm at his hands ; a gate must open its leaves to any one who named it correctly.
As acquaintance with the name of a god gave power over the god, so did acquaintance with a man’s name give power over him. Hence it was very dangerous to one to have his name known to an enemy, who could make use of it in connexion with magic, and only required to introduce it into a formula to bring disease and death upon its bearer. The anxiety to escape such a result was sometimes so keen that the Egyptian bore two names—one civilian, by which he was called in his ordinary life, and one sacred, which was introduced only into religious texts, in the hope that its holy environment would avail to save its bearer from destruction. We meet with analogous notions among various peoples, it being sometimes the case that even the man himself does not know his real name, for fear of his inadvertently betraying it. The ancient Egyptians did not go so far as this, but the true name was uttered only in the narrowest possible circles. In the above-mentioned myth of the sun-god Ra, the god himself is made to say, ‘My name was uttered by my father and my mother, and then was it concealed in me by my parent that no spell might be formed to bewitch me.’ For these reasons it is often said of the great gods that their name is hidden, and from the second millennium B.c. downwards the Divine name Amon was explained to mean ‘the hidden one,’ as if the word had been derived from the root @men=‘to be hidden,’ which indeed is not true to fact.
The theory of the connexion between name and thing gave rise to quite a number of creation myths, which all go back to the same fundamental idea, however they may differ in details. The moment the deity in the exhilaration of his creative activity utters a word, the object desig- nated by that word springs into being, even if it should happen that the word in the particular instance has quite a different meaning. The word had sounded so or so, and thereupon the notion inherent in it made its appearance, the word had assumed the form corresponding to it, and co- existed now with its notion to all eternity. Some examples taken from the presently to be described epon. of the destruction of the human race, will best show how the Egyptians record the process of creation in such instances as we have in view. There the god says, ‘I give thee authority to send forth thy messenger (Aa6), then originated the ibis (habi), or ‘I let thee turn (ddan) to the peoples of the north, then originated the cynocephalus (anan).’? Sometimes the word uttered is not even the exact name of the object, in which case a resemblance of sound sufficed to bring the latter into being. Thus in one text it is said, ‘I let thee comprehend (anh) both heavens, then origin- ated the moon (aah).’
0 ae Se i a rr cr
RELIGION OF EGYPT 181
Especially in the later periods of Egyptian his- tory, from the 17th cent. downwards, such theories of creation, which in the earlier literature occur only sporadically, find favour, until in the Ptole- maic era a perfect passion for them sets in. Long, fantastic, occasionally unconnected, etiological myths bring the god into the most diverse situa- tions, in order to cause him to utter the word that shall bring into being one or another portion of the materia sacra of a particular sanctuary. And in such myths as little concern is displayed for logical connexion as for grammatically correct derivations (cf. ¢.g. the legend of the winged solar dise at Edfu, tr. by Brugsch in Abhandlungen der Géttinger Akad. xiv.).