and Isis is often called ‘the royal consort of Ra.’ ”[1] That Ra was both the physical sun and the sun-god is of course undisputed; but with every deference for the authority of so great a scholar as Lepsius, it may be doubted whether such identification can be taken as evidence of the original character of Osiris. For the religion of ancient Egypt[2] may be described as a confederacy of local cults which, while maintaining against each other a certain measure of jealous and even hostile independence, were yet constantly subjected to the fusing and amalgamating action of political centralisation and philosophical reflection. The history of the religion appears to have largely consisted of a struggle between these opposite forces or tendencies. On the one side there was the conservative tendency to preserve the local cults with all their distinctive features, fresh, sharp, and crisp, as they had been handed down from an immemorial past. On the other side there was the progressive tendency, favoured by the gradual fusion of the people under a powerful central government, first to dull the edge of these provincial distinctions, and finally to break them down completely and merge them in a single national religion. The conservative party probably mustered in its ranks the great bulk of the people, their prejudices and affections being warmly enlisted in favour of the local deity, with whose temple and rites they had been familiar from childhood; and the popular aversion to change, based on the endearing effect of old association, must
- ↑ Lepsius, “Ueber den ersten aegyptischen Götterkreis und seine geschichtlich-mythologische Entstehung,” in Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1851, p. 194 sq.
- ↑ The view here taken of the history of Egyptian religion is based on the sketch in Erman’s Aegypten und aegyptisches Leben im Altertum, p. 351 sqq.
