A handbook of Egyptian religion

[wedjat]

One of the first books I read about Egypt, and one of the ones I found the most difficult to finish. Even now, when comparing the book to others on religion that I've read, such as Rosalie David's Religion and magic in Ancient Egypt, and Stephen Quirke's Ancient Egyptian religion, I find that this text is slightly lacking; it jumps around all over the place, introducing deities of a variety of eras and regions in seemingly no logical order — the chapter headings include such terms as the "early period", "the New Kingdom", "of the Early Period and of the New Kingdom'", and then finally the "Late Period", "Hellenistic" and "European".

This, however, is not a fault of the author or indeed, even of the translator. The confusion itself stems from the fact, an oft-repeated one, that Egyptian religion was itself confusing and difficult to properly classify and describe in a coherent, cohesive manner.

Looking back at the text now, with another two years worth of research under my belt, I find that it is much easier to understand, much easier to follow. Just as I found it easier to know exactly what authors were referring to when they mentioned stories and literature in an off-hand way, after having slogged through The Literature of Ancient Egypt, I now find the off-hand references and comments that underpin Erman's work to be informative rather than infuriating.

The chapter titled "Magic" starts with a fascinating paragraph:

Magic is a barbarous offshoot of religion, and is an attempt to influence the powers that preside over the destiny of mankind. It is not difficult to see how the belief in such a possibility could arise. On one occasion it appears that a prayer has been heard by the deity, on another it is apparently ignored; thus the idea naturally arises that the words which the prayer was uttered on the first occasion mus have been specially acceptable to the god.

The rest of the chapter is filled with Erman's own, clouded opinion of magic:

[...] by the side of the noble plant of religion there flourishes this fantastic weed of magic. With nations of limited understanding it completely stifles religion and there ensues a barbarism, where the magical fetish is the supreme object, and where the sorcerer with his hocus-pocus takes the place of the priest.

Erman is thus prejudiced by his own beliefs. He personally feels that magic is a useless thing. In contrast to religion, which has a "noble" purpose, magic is the selfish desire to modify one's world without the assistance of the divine.

I think Barbara Mertz best summed this up in her own book, "Red Land, Black Land", which has an extremely insightful section on magic and religion. It certainly changed the way I thought about it, and it certainly changed the way I read other people's thoughts about it:

The sophisticated reader may think he accepts man’s faith in magic. He probably does not. This is one of the great problems facing historians, archaeologists, and ethnologists—the difficulty of really accepting a theorem which is, we like to think, so alien to our own point of view. Of course, it is impossible to get inside another man or woman’s skin and think the way they do. When we interpret a culture as different from our own as that of ancient Egypt, we are translating. We cannot even break down the facets of culture into chapters suitable for a book without violating the essential unity of the lives of these other people; and everything we say about them is said in our words, each of which has a backlog of associations and meanings which are not those of the culture in question. We cannot solve this problem, we can only remember, constantly, that we are translating, and that something is always lost in translation.
I have accused my sophisticated reader of not really believing that which he thinks he does believe. I will prove my point by citing an example.

There once appeared, in a learned Egyptological journal, an article by a learned Egyptologist on the harem conspiracy under Ramses III of the Nineteenth Dynasty. The plot itself was the sort of thing one expects from an irregular institution like a harem: one of the ladies had decided that her son ought to be the next king instead of the legitimate heir. In order to insure this desirable goal it was necessary for the old king, Ramses III, to be sent to join his father the Sun somewhat ahead of schedule. The lady succeeded in interesting a number of important officials in her project, but it failed in at least one of its aims. Owing to the ambiguity of the official record, we do not know whether Ramses III actually was murdered by the conspirators or not; but the legitimate crown prince, later Ramses IV, discovered the plot in time to save his throne and his own neck. The plotters were tried and executed, except for a few who were only deprived of their ears and noses, and a few others—perhaps the most highly placed—who were "allowed" to commit suicide.

One passage in the text is particularly interesting. In order to seize power and reach the inner precincts of the palace, the conspirators had made writings 'for enchanting and for confusing…and [they] began to make people of wax so that they could be taken inside" (the palace or the harem itself).

The most reasonable interpretation of this passage is that the plotters used magic. The waxen images are magicians' props, known from all over the world. The written spells controlled the will of the loyal guards and courtiers who protected the king.

This is the accepted explanation. However, the author of the article I mentioned does not believe that the plotters used magic at all. His counterarguments deal with the passage I have quoted, and necessitate new and hitherto unknown translations of such words as "enchanting" and "gods." Egyptian is a good language for this sort of argument, because its vocabulary is still not completely fixed; new meanings do turn up, now and then, for known words. As for the significant phrase “made out of wax,” the author wants to make it a figure of speech, not a figure of magic. Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language has probably noticed the infuriating propensity of prepositions in other tongues to mean almost anything. The preposition we translate "out of" can, by some stretching, be made to mean "into"! Things which are made "into wax" are made malleable, susceptible to influence.

These arguments are plausible, although the figure of speech is an English idiom rather than one the Egyptians would have used. But the philologist who tampers with established vocabulary must have motives purer than Caesar’s wife. He cannot invent new meanings in order to support a preconceived theory. The author of the article states his theory quite candidly: "The conspirators were in too risky a situation to entrust the outcome of their plot to magical procedures."

The reader can see, I am sure, the point of this discussion. The author of the article on the harem conspiracy does not "believe" that the Egyptians believed in magic. He "knows" that they did; Egyptian culture is full of examples. But when he comes right down to a specific case, one in which he would certainly not have trusted to magic, he wants to give his friends the Egyptians credit for an equally practical (another loaded word) approach.

I have gone into this at some length, not to pick the bones of Scholar X, but to show that if he can commit such a basic blunder, the rest of us had better beware of complacency. Of course, it was in just such a risky situation that the Egyptians would have used magic.

Magic was not a game, or the last resort of the incompetent. It was a tool—possibly the most important tool of all.

The emphasis in this quote is mine. I think it adequately and expertly sums up what Erman's problem is: he thinks magic is a cheap, abhorrent, prone to failure — any of these things, or perhaps all of these things — and thus cannot objectively talk about it without feeling the need to justify it, and himself, before doing so. He creates an artificial dichotomy between magic and religion, implying that the former grew out of the latter, then later, grew to eclipse it:

Here, we have further proof that at this period of the New Kingdom superstition grew and flourished; it is no wonder that eventually everything in Egypt was overshadowed by its luxuriant growth.

This is certainly a failing. Egyptian religion, culture, history, science, art, and, yes, magic, needs to be treated in a "holistic" manner. Each influenced the other. Each was intricately involved in the growth of the other; without religion, there would be no magic, but indeed, without magic, there would be no religion. Likewise, without religion, Egyptian culture would be nothing like what we think we know of it now.

That isn't to say that Erman's book isn't interesting. It gives a unique perspective on Egyptian culture and religion: the perspective of people who lived in the early 20th century, the Egyptologists who formed the basis of modern Egyptology and archaeology. However, the works themselves, as seminal and important as they once were, should be treated with some caution — the same caution that any modern text should be treated with, be it an untested or unverified report, or something lauded by all.

Erman adequately describes the state of modern Egyptology by quoting Asclepius:

But even the mystics could not deceive themselves into thinking that any power in the world could re-establish the supremacy of these gods. They knew that they were the last of the pagans, and also that sacred Egypt itself, the copy of the heavens . . . the temple of the assembled universe, henceforth belonged to the Christians.

It is not without sympathy that we read the mournful prophecy which echoes down to us from among their company. A time will come when it will appear as though it were for naught that the Egyptians piously and sedulously worshipped the godhead . . . for the godhead will return from earth to heaven, and Egypt will be left desolate, and the land which was the abode of religion will no longer shelter the gods . . . Oh Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion only fables will survive, which will appear incredible to later races, and words only will remain upon the stones which record thy pious deeds.

Yes, only fables survive. But which fable to believe?