When in invocations a god appears with different by-names, as for instance Amon-Ra the king of the gods, side by side with Amon-Ra the lord of the throne of the world, our first impulse is to find here two titles of one and the same god, and we shall thus do justice upon the whole to the notion of the worshipper. But when in pictorial represen- tations we see a number of forms seated together who all represent the same god, but with the addition in each instance of a different by-name, and who are worshipped together, the Egyptians held in such cases that each of the pictures had also a special divine personality corresponding to it. Thus Thutmosis Il. appears at Karnak (Leps. Denkm. iii. 36c, d) in the act of worshipping ten gods who are seated side by side and who are all called Amon, but one is Amon the lord of the throne of the world, another Amon-Ra the lord of heaven, another Amon of western Thebes; and these are followed by Amon the bull of his mother, Amon-Ra the great in love, ete. Sometimes the texts in such instances indicate that one is to address the god by his names. But in Egypt to name any one must not be understood in our weakened sense ; the name is an independent part of the Ego, the different names have different in- dependent forms corresponding to them. This occurrence of different forms of one and the same primeval god, if one might use the expression, explains how it is that upon certain steles the same god is portrayed in a variety of embodiments. Thus a stele now at Berlin (No. 7295, publ. by Wiedemann in Mélanges déd. & Harlez, p. 372 ff.) re- presents one of the king’s shoemakers, Amen-em- apt (about the 20th dynasty), engaged in worship- ping the following forms: (1) the human-formed Amon-Ra in the valley, the lord of heaven; (2) the goose-formed Amon-Ra, the lion of valour, the
RELIGION OF EGYPT
ereat god; (3) the ram-formed Amon-Ra of Surerii, 2.¢. probably the deity who lived in animal form in a shrine erected by Surerii.
It will scarcely be safe to assume that in such instances as the above there has been uniformly a partition, due to local conditions, of the god into a number of individualities. Rather may we find in not a few of these forms originally independent deities, whose old names afterwards became by- names of a greater divinity, without the memory of their original independence being thereby per- manently lost. Many indications in the texts suggest that there was once a god known as ‘lord of heaven,’ another as ‘lord of the All,’ a third as ‘great in love,’ etc., and that these titles were gradually drawn into the sphere of Osiris, Amon, etc., just as happened, for instance, in Greece with deities like Hygieia, Eubuleus, Basileia, and others (cf. Usener, Gétternamen, 216 ff.). But the old deities never became completely absorbed in the new form, but always detached themselves from it afresh, as may be seen from the variety of their embodiments. To each particular form of the deity a special form of embodiment must corre- spond, for the Egyptians recognized no gods but such as were conceived of personally, whether as man or beast or any other perceptible object. Thus there could be in the same place different embodi- ments of the same great god, the latter being only apparently a unity, but in reality composed of a long series of Divine individualities independent of one another.
(a) The Divine forms for heaven and earth are sup- plied, in the Egyptian mythology known to us, by personal forms that animate these concepts, namely, the goddess of heaven, Nut, and the earth-god, Seb, to whom we have referred already in dealing with the creation myths. So is it also with the heavenly bodies. Here, again, there is in general no mention of the worship of the natural body but of that of a deity animating it. For the most part, it is true, these remained special gods; it is only in a few instances that we have to do with great gods whose functions extended beyond giving its proper movement to the heavenly body. Occasionally, however, the attempt was made to combine the special god with a great god, in the same way as at Thebes the special gods were readily brought into relation to Amon-Ra (see above, p. 185). We thus hear of Isis-Sothis instead of Sothis alone as goddess of the dog-star, or of Bennu-Osiris in- stead of Bennu (Phenix). The combination of Horus with the planet-gods also belongs to this category. The old month-gods were almost wholly replaced by great gods, to whom the months were dedicated ; the lists of later times have preserved of the old deities, properly speaking, only ‘the great heat’ and ‘ the little heat’ for the two prin- cipal summer months (see, for lists of such divini- ties, Leps. Denkm. iii. 170f.). The gods of the particular days of the week were also combined with great gods, whereas the goddesses of the hours of day and night were able to preserve their independence down to the latest times. It is only rarely then that we find an invocation of the stars themselves, or that a particular star is mentioned as a god except in star catalogues.