Egyptian Mythologies 


Egyptian mythology and religion were intimately tied to the land of Egypt itself, and could not have arisen anywhere else. Egypt was, and is, a land shaped by exceptionally dramatic natural forces. One was the seemingly endless desert so barren and sterile that it consisted of virtually nothing but quietly shifting, brown sand dunes. Right in the middle of this desert, however, was one of the world’s great rivers: the Nile, which originated in the distant lands south of Egypt and ran through the country’s entire length before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea in the intricate lattice of the marshy Delta. The Nile and its annual floods created a lush oasis along its banks whose contrast with the surrounding desert was so stark as to be just shy of absurd. This was what enabled a civilization – and, for that matter, human life itself – to flourish in an area otherwise so desolate and hostile.

The landscape of Egypt was also characterized by a great array of impressive animals: crocodiles haunted the Nile, threatening death from the very source of the life of the land at any moment. Cobras, vipers, and scorpions patrolled the ground, ready to strike if not respected. Lions prowled in the high grasses. Ibises, falcons, and other great birds transited between water and sky. Hippopotami wallowed in the mud. Jackals crept at the edge of the desert.

Unsurprisingly, all of these wondrous and/or terrifying phenomena found their way into the ancient Egyptians’ mythology and religion.

For example, the awesome, virtually unchecked power wielded by the pharaoh, who in theory used his abilities for the good of his people, was a common metaphor for divinity. The gods, for their part, had given humankind the “gift” of pharaohs so that all of the parts of the cosmos could be kept in harmony, and so that the human world could be good, prosperous, and beautiful like the world of the gods.

And just as the ancient Egyptians were a highly social people who saw their identities as being defined by the degree and kind of their relations with others, so too were their gods. This is one of the reasons why the ancient Egyptians worshiped such a great number of gods, whose personalities were bound up with the rich and nuanced relationships they had with the other deities.

There was a give-and-take here; the institutions and mores of society were patterned upon their mythical models, and the mythical models grew out of the Egyptians’ lived experience of the world, which included the institutions and mores of society. Myth reinforced custom, and custom reinforced myth.

 http://egyptianmythology.org/

(Note: this is a very New Age source, but it provides the slanted coverage to make several of my points clear.)

For a consideration of this, think of Captain America.  He acted, acts as a symbol of the USA, the staunch, totally committed USA of the WWII era, willing to try anything in the defense of democracy and willing to give all in that act.  Now the more conflicted USA, facing forces that seem to have taken over the government and Shield who he must fight.  Joining the commonly held notion that whoever is in charge is part of the system, not the solution.  Impatient with the reality of the rule of law, of the tortoise like pace of change in a government, angry that obstructionism has become the rule of thumb, that children seem to be running the government.  That sums up this election year and the film Civil War.  Cap is also defined by his relationships with Iron Man, Black Widow, Falcon, all the other Avengers and with his relationship to the government program, SHIELD.  but still a guy with human failings, with a desire for his old girlfriend's descendant.  

That gives you an idea of how  mythologies reach the public and are used to either inflame or calm the crowd. 

To continue with the article:

The articles on this site highlight the meaning that the various gods, stories, and concepts held for the ancient Egyptians themselves during the more than 4000 years in which they were living traditions. No account of the facts of ancient Egyptian mythology and religion is complete without addressing this core aspect of it.

CREATION

In the earliest days of the cosmos, when the world as the ancient Egyptians knew it was still taking shape, the gods lived on the earth with humans. Ra, the king of the gods, was the king of humans as well. There was no need for an intermediary human ruler. But humankind rebelled against Ra and the perfect justice of his rule, and, as a result, the gods removed themselves to the sky. From then on, the celestial realm would be their home, and they would only manifest themselves on earth in particular phenomena and at particular times. (See the story of The Fall of Humankind.)

As this myth shows, the ancient Egyptians experienced their deities as fundamentally transcendent powers who were remote from, and inaccessible to, their human worshipers. A formidable gulf separated humanity from the divine.

However, the Egyptians thought of the self – whether divine or human – as being comprised of a number of largely distinct elements that could detach themselves from the whole and act more or less autonomously. One of these separable elements was the ba, a mostly incorporeal part that had a particular propensity to wander from its “owner” and take up residence elsewhere. (See The Ka, the Ba, and the Parts of the Self.) While the gods’ ultimate essences remained in their ethereal home, their bas could nevertheless manifest themselves on earth.[3]

Today this concept finds it expression in Japan's Shinto where spirits inhabit everything.

There doesn’t seem to have ever been a doctrine of the entirety of the visible world embodying divinity,[4] but particular things and occurrences could serve as conduits of divine power.

For example, the gods installed themselves in and inhabited their statues and other icons, as well as various ritual items that were consecrated for this purpose. The symbol of a deity became an extension of that which it symbolized. The symbol did not merely point back to something; it enabled that something to come up through the symbol and to interact with those who interacted with the symbol.[5]

Each god and goddess was associated with particular forces within what we today would call “nature” – the sun, the Nile, the air, the soil, etc. – which were also manifestations of the deity’s ba. Again, not everything in “nature” was divine; only those forces that upheld and sustained the regular cosmic rhythms were.[6]

Nothing could be assumed to take place mechanically, without the intervention of some active force, because the most basic elements of the world consisted of active forces. Thus, something that modern people would consider as mundane and predictable as a sunrise was cause for ecstatic celebration amongst the ancient Egyptians. If the gods were to leave the world entirely, its underlying structures would be thrown into chaos, and everything that depended on those structures would perish.[7]

(Revelation tells us that the Antichrist, the beast at the end times, will worship a god of forces.  This 

stay in Egypt acquainted the Hebrews with this notion and especially Moses who would have been 

educated in that notion. W,)

Since the Egyptian deities had no absolute, fixed, individual essence, they readily merged with other deities according to the demands of narrative and practice. This tendency toward syncretism took a number of different shapes depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, two gods were identified with each other on a provisional and transitory basis, such as when Ra, the sun god, united with Osiris, the god of the underworld, when the sun slipped below the horizon in the evening. At other times, two deities were fused together to form a new, composite deity, as happened with Amun-Ra. And in other cases, two or more deities were thought to represent different aspects of a common underlying power, such as in the sun god triad of Khepri, Ra, and Atum.[11]

This did not mean that all deities could be reduced to a single one. Quite the contrary – it showed how the Egyptians thought of divinity as being inherently fluid, amorphous, and riotously diverse to the point that a final reduction to any one static identity was impossible.

When we hear the notion that everything is linked and feeds into every other thing, we are hearing the following to this idea. There are certain connections in nature that can be traced, but we need to realize the idea was forged into a religious force rather than a scientific one. Now science accepts a multiple  linked environment as fact without ever wondering why there is  interdependence.  The usual reason is evolution, which is always the reason, again a god of forces.  Randomness as a mass of genetic material will mesh and form an animal and it will either succeed as part of the environment or disappear because it can't adapt.  The successful mutation becomes the norm.  No design is seen even as the "scientists"  literally stare at the results of the design.  It never occurs as an idea that God may have induced every mutation to get where we are today. 

That ending notion of a fluid divinity of course goes against the notion of a God we can know personally.  One Abraham knew.  One talked of endlessly by the Hebrews.  One who would talk for himself later from a burning bush.  One reaching for humanity ion it's Fallen Flesh, reahcing to cure it's eternally doomed spirit. 

However, the creation mythology has a slightly different slant:

Polytheism and Monotheism

And yet – to add another level of dynamism to this already boisterous state of affairs – ancient Egyptian religion accommodated a kind of monotheism, or at least henotheism (the view that one god is incomparably greater than any of the others, while nevertheless acknowledging the legitimacy of the others) of its own.

While the Egyptian gods were extraordinarily powerful beings, none were truly omnipotent. The fact that the identity of each deity was determined by his or her role in the grand cosmic drama placed constraints – both social and “natural” – on his or her ability to act.[12]

However, the gods possessed varying degrees of potency and agency depending on their rank in the divine hierarchy. There were “great” and “small” gods, and one god was typically singled out as being the “king of the gods.” Different gods occupied this especially exalted position in different times and places, but it was often Horus, Osiris, Ra, Amun, or Ptah.[13]

In virtually all surviving ancient Egyptian creation narratives, there was at first only a single being who emerged from the primordial waters of chaos, one of the powers who would later become the king of the gods. This first god set the entire process of creation in motion, typically by giving birth to a pair of deities, who in turn gave birth to other deities, etc.

The relationship between this original creator god and his creation was expressed by a concise liturgical formula: “the one, from whom came millions.”[14] Even though he had been alone amidst the formless waters at the moment creation first began, his being was so fecund that he was unable to remain alone for long, and was ever after bound up in, and defined by, webs of relationships with the “millions” who sprang from him.

In later periods of Egyptian civilization, the sun god was identified as both the king of the gods and the creator of the cosmos. A theology gradually developed around him that made him into something of a supreme being: the sole creator and sustainer of the world, and one who encompassed divinity in its totality.[15] All of the other gods were thought to be only provisionally distinct extensions of his own being.[16]

Nevertheless, even in this new theology, the sun god’s identity was relational and fluid.

For one thing, which gods comprised this sun god varied. Sometimes he was hailed as Amun alone, at other times as the composite Amun-Ra, and at other times as a “trinity” of Amun, Ra, and Ptah, all of whom were thought, in this conception, to express different aspects of the same ultimate god.[17]

Furthermore, the character of this god was established not by excluding the characters of the other gods, but rather by absorbing them. Anything that could have been said about any other Egyptian deity could have been said about this new solar god, because, at bottom, they were all him. And where can one draw a meaningful line between this “additive” process and the more general practice of syncretism among the deities?[18]

The formula of “the one, from whom came millions” was still very much in effect. While the theological literature of the period describes the sun god in remarkably non-constellative terms – he is portrayed as making his daily round across the sky alone, for example, whereas in earlier times this was a process in which many deities played a role[19] – this remained a second-order theology that was subsumed by the same principles that had always prevailed in ancient Egypt. The view that divinity was “one” and the view that divinity was “millions” sat comfortably side by side, and both were considered equally valid descriptions.

To be sure, there was one brief interval, during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten, when a different sort of monotheism prevailed in ancient Egypt. Akhenaten subscribed to the view – then unprecedented in all of human history, as far as we know – that there was only one true god, beside whom there were only false gods. 

(Note: as we saw last time, this was AFTER Moses and Joshua.  The quoted  article being  New Age,  the author mistakenly says this was the FIRST time the idea arrived of a single god.  Preposterous when hyou read that Abraham had the idea of one God, When we read that God destroyed the Tower of Babel and realize that was an idolatrous worship site.  Idol worshipers will do anything to give their idols some factual notion even if they have to purposely red the facts incorrectly.)  

For Akhenaten, zeal for his patron deity Aten meant destroying the cults of all of the other gods, especially Amun. The pharaoh even went so far as to scratch away Amun’s name wherever it was written in his temples. But Akhenaten’s “counter-religion” lasted no more than twenty years, and his cult ended with his reign. When the next pharaoh took power, Akhenaten’s revolution was dissolved into nothing more than the memory of a nightmare in the minds and hearts of the Egyptians.

(It is always interesting to see a polytheist call the notion of monotheism a "nightmare."  This calls itself  a "thoroughly researched" paper, thorough research of thoroughly prejudiced sources.)

So Egypt created two monotheisms, one of which was inclusive, and the other of which was exclusive. The inclusive, “additive” cult of the sun god could be snugly accommodated within the larger framework of Egyptian polytheism. The exclusive “counter-religion” of Akhenaten, based as it was on simplistic, binary true-false distinctions, with no regard for paradox nor the nuance of context, could not be accommodated within that framework – and, tellingly, it was vomited out and forgotten as soon as the Egyptians were able to do so.[21

Read that last sentence again.  Mull over the sheer bigotry f that statement by someone professing to be objective and "inclusive," I include so much of this because I want ou to see the attitude Moses had all around him all the time.  Every truth is valid except one that professes to be THE Truth.  Which, of  course, invalidates the very idea of truth. 

Christians would say that Akhenten's only mistake was worshiping the wrong god and that the overreaction of his enemies who refused to accept the Pharaoh's one god prove the invalidity of the idea of acceptance in the worshipers of many gods.  One thing they can't accept is just one god.  Certainly not one True God.  

John MacArthur touches on true faith in the face of falsehood while writing about Moses' childhood and his Hebrew parents.

"Moses' mother, Jochebed, not only nursed him, but also taught him the Lord's promises to Israel-that the chosen people would inherit the Promised Land and become a great nation through which God would bless all peoples (Gen. 12:1-3).  She also imparted to him the messianic hope that originated in Genesis 3:5 and that Noah and Abraham had looked toward.  Those promises and other great truths of God instilled in Moses the strong faith that would characterize his entire life.

"What Moses' parents did for him required much confidence in God by them, especially that he would ultimately be reared according to God's will and not in the pagan religious teachings of Egypt.  they did not fully understand why God had allowed Moses to be taken to the very royal household that wanted all Israelite baby boys killed, but they faithfully trusted God for the results because they were convinced God is sovereign over all of life's events.

"...(Moses) chose to reject the world's influences and instead by faith allowed the Lord to mold him into a godly leader who could guide the Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan."

Which gives us the intro to our next two post.