The object of all these acts was to clothe and to purify the god. The latter point was considered important, because the Egyptians in all matters of religion laid special stress upon bodily cleanness. Washings of every kind were required before any sacred transaction; even the gods must wash them- selves repeatedly if they desire to consult the sacred books. Fumigating and rubbing with ointment also come under the category of purification, it being the custom in the Nile valley to perfume oneself before important transactions of a civil as well as a religious character. The man who above all had to wash himself was the priest, who was accordingly designated ‘the clean’ (ad, wab), the ideogram for which is a man over whom water is poured or who finds himself beside water, in allusion to these frequent washings.
In addition to the purifying, the supplying of food and drink to the god or to the sacred animal played a part in the cultus; but here we have no extensive books of ritual to tell us in detail, for instance, about the prayers to be uttered in con- nexion with the performance of the various acts. No doubt, all this was regulated by as exact a code of ceremonial as the actions and prayers connected with the clothing and the purifying of the god. In regard also to other religious ceremonies we are without the prescriptions as to the occasions and the ordering of processions, burnt - offerings, and various consecrations. There are merely allusions in the inscriptions, but these show that here too everything was fixed by a hard-and-fast rule instead of being left to the discretion of the individual worshipper or the temple college.
iv. CONCEPTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE.—(1) The notions as to a world beyond (cf. Wiedemann, The Realms of the Egyptian Dead, London, 1901),
RELIGION OF EGYPT
where gods and the dead have their home, are primarily connected in the Nile valley with the sun and his 24-hours’ course. The sun rises in the east in the morning, and sails in his bark to the west ; for the motion of the sun, like that of all the heavenly bodies, is conceived of by the Egyptians as effected by a vessel, the waters on which it sails being sometimes viewed as a heavenly ocean, and sometimes as a Nile that flows through the brazen heaven. The sun-bark is generally supposed to be carried along by the stream, re- quiring merely to be steered ; it is only exception- ally that it is represented as drawn by jackals which run on both banks of the heavenly stream. In the cabin of the bark sits the sun-god, while other gods man the vessel. The day voyage lasts 12 hours, that is to say, the Egyptians divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 equal parts, these being consequently, as a matter of course, longer in summer than in winter.
The sun sets in the west, and commences now upon a subterranean stream its night voyage, which also lasts 12 hours. The whole voyage of the sun is compared by the Egyptians to the life of man. The god is born in the morning, grows old during his course, sinks in the evening, as an old man, into the night, to rise again as a new god the following morning. Usually the whole process is accomplished, as indicated above, within four and twenty hours; more rarely, instead of this, it is spread over a whole year or over longer periods of 365 and more years. Wherever the sun comes, he finds gods and spirits, but the distribution of these beings over heaven, earth, and the under world is variously conceived of at different times.
(2) As to the dwelling-place of the gods them- selves we have only meagre data. In the matter of the cultus, apart from the offerings which were daily offered to the sun upon open-air altars, the whole concern was with the embodiments of the gods that dwelt in the temples. If Doppelgdngers who did not dwell on earth were postulated for these, they were spoken of without any precise localizing of them, or they were called by such general titles as ‘lord of heaven or earth or Egypt,’ ete. In later times, in addition to this, the various gods are frequently conceived of pantheistically as inhabit- ing the whole world. Thus it is said (Horrack, Lamentations d’ Isis, pl. 5, 1, 2) of Osiris: ‘The heaven contains thy soul, the earth contains thy forms, the under world (Dwat) contains thy secrets.’ A dwelling-place of the gods in the sense of the Greek Olympus is unknown to the Egyptians.
(3) Far more numerous than the statements regarding the abodes of gods are those about the region which was believed to be the place of so- journ of dead men when they were awakened to new life. This region is variously placed— _
(a) Above the earth, in heaven.—Different views prevailed as to how the soul succeeded in gaining admittance into the sun-bark among the stars or into the spreading Plain of the Blessed. According to some, the soul, immediately upon a man’s death, hastened to the west to the spot where the sun sank through a narrow opening into the deep, and there clambered into the solar bark. On board of the latter it passed through the under world, and the following morning rose to heaven. Others believed in a ladder, by whose aid the soul could climb to heaven. Another set of notions attached themselves to the cremation of the dead; the soul was supposed to ascend with the smoke from the burning corpse. But the most widely diffused view was that the soul had the form of a bird, that of kings being in the form of a hawk, that of other men in that of a bird with a human head. In this