The worship and priests of Isis
The worship of Isis at Philae was the culmination of
the religion of Ancient Egypt . Two thousand years earlier the Ancient Egyptian
believed that in the beginning there was nothing but a waste of darkness and
chaos . From this, emerged the sun-god Atum, who came into existence by himself
and produced a god, Shu, and a goddess, Tefnut ( Tefnet or Tfenet ) .
Shu
provided the air upon which all breathing creatures depend . Tefnut provided
the water which surrounded the earth and upon which it floated . These two
deities bore Geb, the god of the earth, and Nut, the god of the sky . Geb and Nut
finally produced Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys . The gods so created formed
the divine group of nine, The Ennead which in later texts was regarded as a
single divine entity . From this, the Ancient Egyptians conceived the universe
as represented by the figure of the air-god Shu standing and supporting with
his hands the outstretched body of the sky-goddess Nut, with Geb the earth-god
lying at his feet .
The religion of Ancient Egypt is extremely complex and
our knowledge of it comparatively slight . It is probable that the earliest
inhabitants were fetishists, worshippers of objects considered to have special
properties – the stone or stick with which a dangerous animal had been killed,
a tree that had given shelter, and so on . Historic religion starts with
ancient hieroglyphs and inscriptions, statues, carvings and wall paintings
which reveal the sun-god Atum and many local deities, who like the Christian
saints, were especially popular in their own areas . In addition to the Ennead,
there were in earliest times universal deities subordinate to the sun-god but
of considerable importance throughout all parts of the country . Among these
were Hapi, god of the inundation, and Nun, god of the ocean .
Although the Nile was the obvious giver of life to the
early men of Egypt it was not the great river and its precious waters that
first stirred thoughts of worship in their primitive minds . It was the sun,
relentless bearer of death, that they supplicated . Life and death were
constantly in the thoughts of these pre-dynastic people and there were plenty
of grim reminders . The all-pervading dryness preserved every dead creature
until the living devoured it . The yellow sand of the desert swept relentlessly
against the thin line of green pasture watered by the Nile and swept over it
the moment the river subsided . Of the two elements the sun was the more
powerful, and man bowed before it . Sun worship was not confined to Ancient
Egypt ; the early Britons practised it at Stonehenge, and Incas and Aztecs ( an
Ancient Empires in South America and central Mexico ) made bloodthirsty
sacrifices to propitiate their sun-god . The life-loving Ancient Egyptians
omitted human sacrifice but worshipped the sun above all other gods . Each day
it rose in the east, heralded by the chattering of dog-faced baboons, sacred
watchers for the dawn, who from their treetop vantage points were first to see
its glorious majesty rise above the horizon and announce to the world that all
was well . Overhead the god rode in splendour across the clear Egyptian sky to
vanish in a blaze of glory in the sunset of the western desert . At night it
entered the underworld where all mankind go after death . Here it was carried
in a heavenly boat through the waters of the underworld until it rose once more
at dawn to make another triumphant voyage across the heavens . The sun and the
moon were regarded as the eyes of Atum, creator of the world . In addition men
worshipped living things . Animals, birds and reptiles were elevated to the
position of gods, possibly because they had abilities that man had not . The
bull was worshipped for its strength and the ram for its virility . Gazelles
could outstrip man, and birds could escape from him through the air . Crocodiles,
hippopotamuses and snakes all had their special virtues .
The priests were also shrewd politicians and gained
positions of enormous power by declaring the Pharaohs to be god-kings, which
meant that the Pharaoh had to co-operate with the priests to rule the country .
The only revolt against this supremacy of the priests occurred when Pharaoh
Akhenaten rejected the idea of the multiplicity of gods and goddesses and
decreed that there was only one god, manifested in the sun's disc, and that no
other god should be worshipped . Akhenaten and his beautiful wife Nefertiti had
a brief success with the new faith and even built a new city to their god, the
" City of the Horizon of the Sun's Disc " at El-Amarna . Here for
some twelve years the new religion prospered, but after the death of Akhenaten
the priests regained the upper hand . The court returned to Thebes and the new
city decayed never to be reoccupied . The power of the priests was paramount .
Man had begun by worshipping the sun ; later he grew
to worship creatures which possessed qualities he could not match . But then he
learnt fresh skills and with his bow and arrow, spears and throwing sticks,
gained control over the animals, which he could kill or tame, and also over the
birds, which he could bring down with his arrows . Yet the Ancient Egyptians
were a thrifty people, and gods, whether bulls, birds, crocodiles or cats, were
not to be wasted . The priests united man and beast, a marriage of human
intellect with animal capabilities . The form usually taken was to place the
animal head on the human body . This was done so artistically that even today
the composite result seems both natural and attractive . Sometimes various
aspects of the god or goddess are depicted . Hathor, the goddess of love, drinking
and all the delights of the senses, is shown as a beautiful woman with the ears
of a cow or, again, with the horns of a cow holding the sun's disc between them
. She is a special goddess in the temple of Philae where she is identified with
Isis . The god frequently had a wife and child, forming a triad which was
worshipped in the same temple . The most famous of such trinities is the family
formed by Osiris, Isis and their son Horus . Philae was one of their temples .
An inscription on the island of Siheil is of the
Ptolemaic period but describes a seven-year famine that occurred during the
reign of Djoser, the king who built the Step Pyramid, circa 2670 B.C. The king
complains that " the Nile has not risen for seven years and that there is
a scarcity of corn . There are no vegetables and no food of any kind, every man
is stealing from his neighbour . Counsellors have no advice to give and when
the granaries are opened nothing but air issues from them " . The king in
great distress asks the chief lector-priest of Imhotep : " In what place
does the Nile rise ? What god dwells there, that I may enlist his help ? "
The priest replies that he will consult the sacred writings in the temple of
Thoth at Hermopolis . In due course he returns to the Pharaoh and tells him
that there is a city in the middle of the Nile called Elephantine, which is the
seat from which Re despatches life to everyone . It is the source of life, the
place from which the Nile leaps forth in its flood to impregnate the lands of
Egypt . On the east side of the city are great mountains containing hard stone
which is used in the temples of Upper and Lower Egypt . The priest continues
that the god of the place is Khnum, who allots the lands of Egypt to each god
and controls the grain, the birds, the fish and everything on which they live .
Some days later, King Djoser had a dream in which the great god Khnum appears .
The king does everything he can to render the god favourable, but Khnum replies
: " I am Khnum your maker ; with my arms I protect you and help you . You
should be building temples and restoring my statues and those buildings that
have fallen into ruin ; I am Nun who has existed from earliest times ; I am the
Nile flood who runs at will ; my sanctuary has two gates from which I let out
the water for the flood " . Khnum continues that he will make the flood
rise for the king, that want will cease and the granaries be filled . When the
king awoke he remembered the dream and set about restoring the damage that had
been done . He decreed that large tracts of land on both sides of the river
stretching from Elephantine south should be given to the temple of Khnum . In
addition one-tenth of all produce and livestock raised was to be given to the
temple, and also taxes on caravans and gold mining . " Such are the terms
of my decree ", said King Djoser, " and I order that it be inscribed
on a stone set up in a sacred place, and I also order that the priests shall
make my name live eternally in the temple of Khnum, Lord of Elephantine "
. An identical decree is to be found in the temple of Philae, so it seems that
the priests of Philae continued to maintain parity with their rivals .
Though Philae thus does not come into the Ancient
Egyptian picture until nearly the end of Egypt's long day, the priests of Isis,
once established on the island, at once endeavoured to make up for lost time .
We have already seen the inscription at Siheil which claims that King Zoser
endowed the god Khnum with the Dodekaschoinoi ; but the priests of
Isis at Philae were not content to see this claim going unquestioned, and
presented their own claim to the territory in question on precisely the same
grounds – namely, a gift of Zoser as a reward for their goddess having averted
the famine which had been raging for seven years . What was the issue of the
struggle between the two sets of priests, we only partly know ; but while the
priests of Khnum were probably so far in the right, since the worship of Khnum
was of much earlier date locally than that of Isis, it is more than likely that
right prevailed nothing against might, for Isis was much more popular than
Khnum in the later days of Ancient Egypt .
Late though temple-building at Philae may have
started, it proceeded with considerable vigour when once begun, and practically
the whole surface of the island was covered with structures dating from the
time of Nectanebos I to that of the Emperor Hadrian . The worship of Isis,
which made the island celebrated in Ptolemaic and Roman days, was a
comparatively late growth here, and has no roots earlier than the Ptolemaic
time ; but the priests of the great goddess Isis speedily succeeded in making
their cult the most powerful in Upper Egypt . In the reign of Ptolemy VI,
Philometor, the Dodekaschoinoi, that bone of
contention between them and the priests of Khnum, was handed over by that king
to the Isis priesthood to be administered ; and this meant that a territory of
ninety miles or so in length was subject to them ; though it must be admitted
that the quality of the land was not equal to its quantity . Indeed it appears
that somewhat later the Isis priesthood was in possession of the whole of Lower
Nubia as far as the Second Cataract . The strange popularity which the cult of
Isis achieved in the Roman Empire did not fail the Philae priesthood . Long
after the decrees of Theodosius the worship of Isis continued to be kept up at
Philae, whose remoteness made such a defiance practicable, and it was not until
the time of Justinian ( A.D. 527 – 565 ) that the temples of Philae were
closed, and not until 577 that the temple of Isis was converted by Bishop
Theodorus into a Christian church . The mud-brick remains of the Coptic town
which grew up subsequent to this date around the former pagan shrine, excavated
and planned in 1895, are now of the past in more senses than one .
The myth of Isis and Osiris
The story of Osiris is the most important myth of
Ancient Egypt . Even today fishing boats in the Nile and Mediterranean, carry
the eyes of his son Horus on their bows . In Malta, that most Christian of
countries, the fishing boats wear them for protection against the dangers of
the sea .
The myth of Osiris is, according to Sir Alan Gardiner,
" too remarkable and occurs in too many divergent forms not to contain a
considerable element of historic truth, though we must be on our guard against
over-speculative reconstruction of details . Of the three chief actors involved
the one whose nature and origin are least open to dispute is the god Seth ( the
brother of Osiris ), whom Greeks identified with their Typhon on account of his
turbulent character " .
One popular version held that in antiquity Osiris
ruled as King of Egypt in a humane manner, teaching men the rudiments of
civilization and bringing prosperity to the country . His brother Seth was
jealous of him and conspired to kill him . At a banquet he persuaded Osiris to
enter a cunningly elaborate chest made to fit Osiris's exact measurements,
which Seth and his accomplices then closed and threw into the Nile . The river
carried the chest down to the sea where it was washed ashore near the
Phoenician city of Byblos . Meanwhile Isis, the distraught wife of Osiris,
searched everywhere for her lost husband . Eventually, she succeeded in
discovering the chest which she took back to Egypt, and there mourned over her
husband in solitude . She then buried the body and went to see her son Horus,
who was being brought up at Buto on the Nile ( Buto is a city that was a
capital of Lower Egypt ) . During her absence, and while Seth was involved in a
boar hunting, he found the body and cut it up into forty-two pieces which he
scattered throughout Egypt provinces . Immediately, Isis heard what had
happened, so she set out to find the pieces . This she succeeded in doing, and
Re the sun-god sent down his son Anubis to wrap the body in bandages like those
of a mummy . Isis beat her wings and tried hard to make breath enter the mummy and
Osiris miraculously lived and moved again . Re do that for a short time ( some
stories tell us that maybe was for only one day ) to give birth from Osiris her
son Horus .
Osiris, unable to return as an earthly king, reigned
in the spirit world as god of the dead . In this capacity he did not conflict
with any of the established gods and no Egyptian, whatever his local god or
goddess might be, had any difficulty in also adopting Osiris and his creed .
This was essentially that man, after death, lived again in the underworld,
provided the proper rites had been observed . Every Egyptian finally believed
that because Osiris died and rose again to live in eternal blessedness he too
could obtain the same destiny provided that the requirements of religion had
been duly satisfied and that he became one with Osiris . Osiris was also
regarded as being embodied in other roles . He was one of the Nile gods and
with each inundation of the river he was believed to have risen again . He was
also a god of fertility .
Isis was regarded as being the divine symbol of
motherhood ; she was also a mourning goddess, one of the four goddesses who
protected the dead body . During the last centuries of antiquity her great cult
centre was her temple of Philae, where she was worshipped with her husband
Osiris and their son Horus . Horus when he grew up was transformed into the
falcon-headed god of the heavens and received the name of Re-Harakhty, "
the sun, the Horus who is on the horizon ", in which form he was
worshipped at Abu Simbel . Horus now set out to avenge his father's death, and
after many terrible contests with Seth was at last victorious . Gods, however,
could not be killed, so Seth was able to continue his existence in much the
same way as Satan does .
Just as Osiris, after his death and revival, was
judged to see if he were a fit person to receive eternal life so too would
anyone be who wished to share his immortal state . In the great Hall of Justice
the dead person had to appear before forty-two terrible beings ( forty-two
judges ) . These were the assessors of Osiris, who had become the supreme judge
.
In the Hall of Justice stood a large balance to weigh
the heart of the deceased against truth, which was represented by a feather,
the symbol of Maet, the goddess of truth . Sometimes a statuette of the goddess
herself, wearing an ostrich feather in her hair, was placed in the scale . The
ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result . If the weighing go
against the deceased, a terrible creature, goddess Amemit ( also called Ammit
" Devourer of the Dead " ), composed of a crocodile, a lion, and a
hippopotamus, waited to devour him . The two scales of the balance are always
shown in equilibrium, which is presumably the most favourable position for the
dead person – the weight of the heart, the instigator of man's actions, being
exactly equal to truth . Before each of these assessors the deceased had to
state that he had not committed the sin for which that assessor had authority
to punish . This statement is the famous " Negative Confession "
which embodies the moral code of the Ancient Egyptians . It consists of a
series of denials such as : I have not killed ; I have not spoken falsely ; I
have not given short measure ; and so on . The deceased is finally led by Horus
before his father Osiris .
Although there was a great multiplicity of gods and
goddesses in Ancient Egypt and a considerable diversity of doctrine, there was
one belief that the whole population held in common, the firm conviction that
the life of man did not end with death . Men, they were convinced, continued to
live as they had on earth provided that the necessities for their existence
were assured to them . It was, therefore, essential that the body should be
carefully housed and protected from decay . There was a divine spark in men –
they had been fashioned by the ram-god Khnum from clay, and life had been given
to them by the god . It was unthinkable for these people with their intense
enjoyment of living that all these pleasurable experiences should vanish with
the advent of death . The preservation of the body was essential for eternal
life . This was the most important consideration, for without a body there
could be no survival after death .
In addition to the body, men were considered to have a
" Ba " and a " Ka " . The " Ba " resembled the
western idea of a soul which lived on after death . It was originally conceived
as a bird and later as a bird with a human head . It was believed that the
spirit left the body at death and flew freely about, but could return to the
body at will provided that it did not decay . The " Ka " was presumed
to be a kind of guardian double of the body which was born with it and which
accompanied it through life to protect it . The " Ka " did not expire
with the body at death but continued to live and care for the deceased in the
future world .
To be
continued ....
Part ( 4 ) .. Coming SoOoOon .....
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