Benson, Margaret; Gourlay, Janet: The temple of Mut in Asher: an account of the excavation of the temple and of the religious representations and objects found therein, as illustrating the history of Egypt and the main religious ideas of the Egyptians (London, 1899)

CHAP. VI.]

MULTITUDE OF GODS.

Si

studied the appearance of a dozen important divini-
ties he is paralysed to find that the gods are
reckoned by hundreds, and that the temple walls
are crowded with unknown representations; he
reads that one goddess has fifty-one forms, and is
in the habit of going about in the character of
seven identically similar personalities; that new
deities are formed by joining old ones together ;
finally, he discovers that the theory of the immor-
tality of the soul, which seemed to make Egypt
so modern and so comprehensible, implies intricate
and dissimilar schemes of the nature of the soul
and the universe ; and that these schemes are
placed side by side without annulling and without
adjustment.

In reality the difficulty of comprehension arises
greatly from attempting to explain too much ; from
attempting to unify what to the Egyptian himself
was never really unified. The first impression of
the religion of Egypt is in some sense a true one ;
it is a collection of theologies rather than a system
of theology—a collection without assimilation ; the
rank of its deities varied with time and place, as one
tribe or another carried forward the worship of its
own god, married him to local goddesses, identified
him with the new gods of friendly places, and exalted
him as father or creator over gods of subject tribes.
We are not at fault in finding a want of system in
Egyptian mythology ; we err rather in imagining
that this want of unity must have been as un-

G