is suggestive of Asiatic relations. It is the On of the Old Testament, and was called On of the north to distinguish it from another On, the modern Erment, in the south. It was symbolised by a fluted and painted column of wood,58 in which some have seen an emblem of the sun-god, like the sun-pillars of Semitic faith. But the name of On was not confined to Egypt. There was another Heliopolis in Syria, called On of the Beka'a by Amos (i. 5), where the sun-god was worshipped under the form of a stone. And in Palestine itself Beth-el, “the house of [pg 087] God,” was known in earlier ages as Beth-On. It is true that the name of On may have been carried into Asia in the days when the Hyksos dynasties ruled over Egypt, but it is more probable that both Beth-On and the On near Damascus go back to an older date. In any case they testify to some kind of contact between the sun-worship of Heliopolis in Egypt and that of Syria and Palestine.59
Between Tum, the sun-god of Northern Egypt, and Horus, the sun-god of the South, there was one notable difference. While Horus was a hawk, Tum was a man. In this respect, again, he resembled the gods of Babylonia, who are always depicted in human form. It is difficult to find any other Egyptian deity who was similarly fortunate. Osiris, indeed, was originally a man, but at an early date he became confounded with his symbol, the ram, in his title of “lord of Daddu.” Professor Maspero thinks that Khnum at the Cataract may also have been originally a man; but if so, he too became a ram before the beginning of history. Ptaḥ of Memphis and Anher of This are the only other gods who appear consistently in human shape, and Ptaḥ is a mummy, while Anher, like Tum, was the sun.60
With the adoption of the Ennead and the cosmological ideas it embodied, a new element entered into the theology of the Egyptian temples. This was the identification of one god with another, or, to speak more exactly, the loss of their individuality on the part of the gods. The [pg 088] process was begun when the priests of Heliopolis took such of the divinities as were recognised throughout Egypt, and transmuted them into successive phases in the creative action of their local god. It was completed when other religious centres followed the example of Heliopolis, and formed Enneads of their own. In each case the local god stood of necessity at the head of the Ennead, and in each case also he was assimilated to Tum. Whatever may have previously been his attributes, he thus became a form of the sun-god. A dual personality was created, which soon melted into one.
But it was not as Tum that the sun-god of Heliopolis thus made his way victoriously through the land of Egypt. It was under the more general and undefined name of Ra that he was accepted in the Egyptian sanctuaries. Tum remained the local god of Heliopolis, or else formed part of a solar trinity in which he represented the setting sun. But Ra became a divine Pharaoh, in whom the world of the gods was unified.
The kings of the Fifth Dynasty called themselves his sons. Hitherto the Pharaohs had been incarnations of the sun-god, like the earlier monarchs of Babylonia; henceforward the title of Horus was restricted to their doubles in the other world, while that of “Son of the Sun” was prefixed to the birth-name which they bore on earth. The same change took place also in Babylonia. There it was due to the invasion of foreign barbarians, and the establishment of a foreign dynasty at Babylon, where the priests refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of a king who had not been adopted as son by the sun-god Bel-Merodach. Perhaps a similar cause was at work in Egypt. The Fifth Dynasty came from Elephantinê, an island which was not only on the extreme frontier of Egypt, but was inhabited then as now by a non-Egyptian race; it may be that the price of [pg 089] their acknowledgment by the priests and princes of Memphis was their acceptance of the title of “Son of Ra.” It narrowed their pretensions to divinity, and at the same time implied their submission to the god of the great sanctuary which stood in such close relations with Memphis. As we have seen, the first monument on which the winged solar disc is found is that of a king of the Fifth Dynasty; it there overshadows his figure and his two names; but though the hawk of Horus stands above the name of his double, his birth-name is without the title of “Son of Ra.”
When once the principle had been adopted that the leading gods of Egypt were but varying forms of the sun-god, it was easy to construct Enneads, whatever might be the number of the deities it was wished to bring into them. Thus at Heliopolis itself Horus the son of Isis was introduced, his confusion with the sun-god Horus facilitating the process. At This, Anher was identified with Shu; at Thebes, Amon was made one with Tum and Ra, with Mentu and Mut. Where a goddess was at the head of the local Pantheon the process was the same; she interchanged with the other goddesses of the country, and even with Tum himself. At all events, Horapollo (i. 12) states that Nit of Sais was at once male and female.
One result of all this kaleidoscopic interchange was the growth of trinities in which the same god appears under three separate forms. At Heliopolis, for example, Harmakhis became identified with Tum, and the trinity of Tum, Ra, and Harmakhis grew up, in which Harmakhis was the sun of the morning and Tum of the evening, while Ra embodied them both. From one point of view, in fact, Harmakhis and Tum were but different aspects under which Ra could be envisaged; from another point, Ra, Tum, and Harmakhis were three persons in one god.
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I believe that Professor Maspero is right in holding that the Egyptian trinity is of comparatively late origin and of artificial character.61 He points out that it presupposes the Ennead, and in some cases, at least, can be shown to have been formed by the union of foreign elements. Thus at Memphis the triad was created by borrowing Nefer-Tum from Heliopolis and Sekhet from Latopolis, and making the one the son of the local god Ptaḥ, and the other his wife. The famous trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, which became a pattern for the rest of Egypt, was formed by transferring Nebhât and Anubis, the allies of Osiris, to his enemy Set, and so throwing the whole of the Osirian legend into confusion. The trinity of Thebes is confessedly modern; it owed its origin to the rise of the Theban dynasties, when Thebes became the capital of Egypt, and its god Amon necessarily followed the fortunes of the local prince. Mut, “the mother,” a mere title of the goddess of Southern Egypt, was associated with him, and the triad was completed by embodying in it Ptaḥ of Memphis, who had been the chief god of Egypt when Thebes was still a small provincial town. At a subsequent date, Khonsu, the moon-god, took the place of Ptaḥ.62
We can thus trace the growth of the Egyptian trinity and the ideas and tendencies which lay behind it. It was the culminating stage in the evolution of the religious system which took its first start among the priests of Heliopolis. First creation by means of generation, then the Ennead, and lastly the triad and the trinity—such were the stages in the gradual process [pg 091] of development. And the doctrine of the trinity itself reached its highest point of perfection in that worship of Osiris of which I shall speak in a future lecture.
But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine of the trinity. Generation in the case of a god could not be the same as in the case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless proved this. It was inevitable, therefore, that it should come to 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 [pg 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